January-March 2006

January-March 2006

30 March

On university campuses there is very often a professor who is also a legend. He (it is usually a man) is learned, but also worldly; he projects an aura of authority suggesting some deeper intimacy with real life. His courses are listed in history, literature or political science, but his real subject is himself. Each lecture feels like a rite of initiation. The bureaucracy must find a way of coping with students who want to take all of their electives with him.

more

My review of the new Kevin Phillips book draws a comparison between his outlook and that of Brooks Adams, who was Henry Adams's rather cranky younger brother. You can read more about his "law of civilization and decay" in a series of comments by my compadre Ray Davies.

Come to think of it, the whole idea that each society consists of a certain mass of energy seems awfully Herbert Spencer-ish, and I'd bet the ranch that is where he got it. It takes some doing now, really, to grasp just how gigantic a figure Spencer was at the time.

....Enough bourgeois ideology! Learn all about how Chairman Bob Thought has touched people's lives, and made them whole again, here.

29 March

In the column that runs today, I start out by discussing the somewhat improbable figure Axel Peterson, a Socialist newspaperman from Iowa from decades past, who turns out to have been using the expression "What would Jesus do?" long before its current enthusiasts were born.

I discovered him through a contemporary (ca. 1920) account of his newspaper. This account was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and my suspicion was that it just might be a hoax.

But a quick search proved that it was not -- and that old Axel, who passed on in 1947, became something of a legend in his part of the state.

As well he might....Not long before Peterson died, he had a small pyramid built to mark his resting place. I am not making this up.

27 March

I learned a few years ago that one of my ancestors -- in Tennessee, if memory serves -- had been a slaveowner known for his cruelty. After the Civil War, he and several members of his immediate family had died under circumstances that, as the story went, suggested revenge by his newly freed "property."

more

Energy, Fear, and Greed

(my first piece for the Boston Globe)

24 March

Not long ago, on an academic blog, a prof talked about how pleased she was whenever her work appeared in print -- how she reread it, excited to see her name and thoughts on the page, etc. And I recall a guy saying, once, that he couldn't imagine failing to have a copy of his something he'd published always on hand -- ready to show people? Something like that.

Anyway, in neither case could I relate. While actually engaged in composing it, yes, then a piece is at the center of my attention. But when the printed copy arrives, I seldom reread it, and now almost never even open the publication to look at it. Right now there's a big pile of magazines and newspaper, from the past year or so, that went straight from the envelope to a box under my desk.

The only thing that is really absorbing is the next project....Or the one I'm too chicken to do. (Actually there are a couple such; the failures of nerve are a nagging concern.)

An exception to this rule has come up in the past few days....I finished a piece for the Boston Globe, a miniature review-essay on the new book by Kevin Phillips, that is supposed to run on Sunday.

While working on it, I had a sort of "aha!" moment that was particularly interesting to pursue. Plus it's my first time to write for the Globe -- with luck, not the last. So yeah, I'm a little less blasé this time. That one, I'll probably look over when it comes in the mail.

22 March

Over at The Wall Street Journal on Monday, they were serving up the following little pudding of non sequitur:

"To its adherents, deconstructionism was a powerful tool of analysis that held that language is always so compromised by hidden influences and ulterior motives that a text never means what it appears to mean. 'The relationship between truth and error that prevails in literature cannot be represented genetically,' de Man wrote. 'Truth and error exist simultaneously, thus preventing the favoring of one over the other.' Since words are always shifting their meaning, no interpretation of them is more correct than any other. To paraphrase Henry Ford, literature and history are therefore bunk."

This garbage is just never going to stop, is it? Notice how it works in this case.

-- Start out with boilerplate vague characterization of "deconstructionism." Never mind that no such animal exists. There's a philosophical method called deconstruction. (The guy what started it took considerable pains to define the terms such that no "-ism" would follow from its practice.)

-- Sufficient to say that deconstructionism means nothing means what it means. (Ignore passage in Of Grammatology that explicitly endorses the need for good old-fashioned explication de texte-type readings of, you know, what the author actually put on the page.)

-- Drop in passage from Paul de Man with a certain air of authority. This will dazzle the rubes, even though it is just recycled from some New Criterion article otherwise long forgotten.

-- Never mind that PdM is not making some sweeping epistemological statement, but rather one about "the relationship between truth and error that prevails in literature." He was a Nazi. He was just trying to trick everybody by talking about literature.

-- Also, don't pay any attention to that stuff about whether "the relationship between truth and error" can or cannot "be represented genetically." God only knows what that means.

-- No, wait, the guy was a Nazi! Not really, but close enough. He was probably talking about eugenics, or something!

-- In that case it's totally fair to link him to Henry Ford. Who was an anti-Semite! (Not that we are going to say that flat out in The Wall Street Journal, you know, but still...) Man, this just keeps getting better!

The reference to David Lehman's book as "the leading biography of de Man" is enough to make a cat laugh.

But what can you say about the bit from Roger Kimball, alluding to Orwell on the corruption of language that leads to statements such as "We had to destroy the village in order to save it"? One expects residents of the Kramer Hilton (as I like to call the Criterion) to have a better grasp of cultural literacy.

Why, no apologist for cold-blooded totalitarianism coined that phrase! It was an American general, explaining our efforts to spread democracy to Indochina. For shame, Roger Kimball. For shame!

21 March

Keen as ever to report on any recent librarian-on-nun action, I am pleased to be able to pass along the following item from this week's American Libraries newsletter:

"A team of three librarians from Boone County (Ky.) Public Library took top honors in a spelling bee for the fourth year in a row March 9, defeating the former champions, the Benedictine Sisters of St. Walburg Monastery in Villa Hills, Kentucky, who came out of retirement for the challenge.....

"BCPL Director Cindy Brown told American Libraries her team only missed one word, quenelle, which is a small seasoned ball of pounded meat, but under the spelling bee rules they were allowed to stay in for another round because the team had contributed an extra $50 for a single second chance.

"The competition went for 12 rounds, but Brown said the sisters went down with the word chimopelagic, which refers to marine organisms that only dwell near the surface during winter. The BCPL team spelled that word correctly, then scored the win with trinitrotoluene (TNT)."

20 March

Have fallen way behind on uploading, or otherwise linking to, my recent published work. I'll get caught up on that this week.

In the meantime, here's a link to an apt comment on the occasion of the new season of The Sopranos -- the first time I've seen the fit between thematics and Zeitgeist so well described. The rest of this blog, Ads Without Products, looks promising. The title comes from Agamben.

17 March

To someone with a name like McLemee, there is no holiday quite like Saint Patrick's Day: It's the one occasion when I feel entitled, however briefly, to imagine having an ethnic identity. For in fact no McLemee is to be found in the phone books of Ireland, nor Scotland, nor any other place colonized by perfidious Albion. The name scarcely exists beyond a small part of the American South -- and there, not before the nineteenth century.

16 March

In an interview with David Horowitz at National Review Online, he states that The Chronicle of Higher Education "has fallen into the hands of a leftist editor." The only suitable response -- at least for anyone who really knows the place from the inside -- is to giggle.

Horowitz also says that Columbia Journalism Review is edited by Victor Navasky. (Hence, by implication, it is an effectively commie outfit.) This is the kind of statement that makes all of us so admire D. Ho's passion for accuracy and his stern refusal to let his own ego cloud his judgment..

Navasky is the chairman of the board there. As somebody who spent many years performing the small miracle of keeping The Nation afloat, he has some chops as a businessman. Of course, Horowitz has no idea what the word "edit" actually means. You can tell that from reading FrontPage.

Meanwhile, a little historical diversion. Back in the day when young David Horowitz was an established mini-eminence of the Bay Area left, there was an even younger (and perhaps more ambitious) mini-demi-god on the scene named Bob Avakian. As I recall, the then not-yet-Chairman Bob rates a mention in one of D. Ho's autobiographical books. Can't recall which one. They are all so rich, so profound, so satisfying on a literary as well as cosmic level.

Anyway, their career paths did diverge, even as their respective ego masses continued to grow on a scale usually only found with supernova.

I suppose you are expecting a bit of cheap sarcasm at this point about how Horowitz is as intellectually serious as Avakian, as capable of honesty, etc. But no, my friends, that would not be appropriate.

In a recent essay, Chairman Bob notes that in a pamphlet during the 1980s, he characterized Montesquieu as making "an extreme and grotesquely racist justification" for the enslavement of Africans. Having read and thought about The Spirit of the Law some more, he now recognizes that Montesquieu's argument "for" slavery was in large measure both ironic and (in a way) sort of vaguely proto-Marxist in the materialist tenor of its assumptions.

In short, Avakian has to qualify his own characterization of Montesquieu. He admits he misconstrued something. He makes a reasoned argument (whatever one thinks of its merits).

At that level, it is clear, David Horowitz is nowhere near meeting the subtle and rigorous standards of Chairman Bob Thought.

15 March

I'm burning DVDs of Rude Boy (1980) for friends. As someone at the Internet Movie Data Base comments, it is film that avoids narrative cliche mainly by virtue of having damn near nothing you could call a plot.

I've been watching with a finger on the fast forward button to get to the Clash concert footage. A few years back, I wrote a short essay following the death of Joe Strummer, but still feel a sadness at the thought he's gone. After that piece ran, the album Streetcore was released -- the best of his post-Clash work (that I know of, anyway). It makes keener the sense that he was nowhere near done.

Evidently there's a documentary available, Let's Rock Again!, filmed while he was touring during the last year of his life. And David Ulin's short book about London Calling is due out this summer.

14 March

There is now a more or less official ITMFA website. It's about time. I will keep an eye out for the first sign of this catching on in downtown DC.

With luck, the start of spring will mean some street vendors out selling buttons, shirts, or whatever. I still don't have one, and lack the means to craft my own.

12 March

To judge by some discussion following the death of Milosevic, I guess it is necessary to spell out the Bien-Pensant Would-Be Super-Duper Leftist standpoint one more time.

Let's get this straight, folks. When the United States kills people, puts them in concentration camps, etc., that is because it is a fascist state.

When "the Castro of the Balkans" killed people, put them in concentration camps, etc., those were historically necessary actions on behalf of the future emancipation of all mankind.

Just get your Manicheanism properly alligned and everything is pretty straightforward. Everything the US does is always and perfectly evil. Therefore, everything done by enemies of the US is progressive, even when it isn't meant to be. In short, the world is exactly the way David Horowitz says it, only the other way around.

As long as an American flag is burned and not waved, there is a pretty good chance that any given atrocity is just perfectly O.K.

Got it? Is that clear? Let's not make it necessary to explain all this again.

(A note to the simple-minded on the right: This is what is sometimes called "sarcasm." I am giving an ironic impersonation of certain right-wing cliches about left-wing sociopathy. A few people do actually think this way, but that is because they are acting out childhood traumas or something like that, not because they are leftists.

To the comparably addled on the other side of the aisle: No, I have no great warmth of feeling for the American flag as such. Unlike Todd Gitlin, I've never felt an urge to hang it in my window. But saying that is not equivalent to endorsing an all-purpose and deeply reactionary anti-Americanism of the sort that now serves as a soi-distant and rather masturbatory "radicalism" for the cretinous and/or insane.)

9 March

My apologies to anyone unable to get access here yesterday. Evidently I did something wrong, and the process of publishing the site went off the rails. Hence the "you do not have permission to view this site" message that greeted visitors -- until a friend wrote in with a WTF? message.

In other news...I'm glad to see that Henry Farrell's essay on China Miéville is finally up at N+1. I have copies of the first two novels and look forward to reading them.

Also, it's worth mentioning that a review of Miéville's Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law appears in the new issue of Radical Philosophy.

The review indicates that Miéville builds on the work of Evgeny Pashukanis, the Bolshevik legal theorist, who did not get through the year 1937 alive. (His place on the commanding heights of Soviet jurisprudence was then taken by David Horowitz's role-model, Andrei Vyshinsky.) A selection of Pashukanis's writings is available here.

8 March

Here's the column for this week, on Ian Stewart's Letters to a Young Mathematician.

I also have a couple of other pieces to put up here -- not counting the ones I am actually writing now, or supposed to be writing -- but really don't have the energy right at the moment. A nagging cough is running me down. It feels as if someone has punched me in the chest, hard. Very distracting.

McLemee.com does not, as a general rule, comment on the Oscars....but Crash? Incredible. A movie that thinks it is saying something meaningful about race in America, and being awfully brave about it, and never stops admiring itself for all that meaningful bravery and brave meaningfulness.

On the other hand, Wallace and Gromit took home an award, so I'm not totally cranky. I do prefer their earlier work, however.

6 March

If this were a real blog, instead of whatever the hell it actually is -- a set of handscribbled index cards, thumbtacked onto cyberspace? and without permalinks, anyway -- then it would be possible to give the following a snappy title.

Something like "Oi, vague."

Anthony Paul Smith -- bona fide blogger, cat owner, philosopher, and member of the Younger Generation -- writes to point out that my weekend commentary on the "Punky Chips Ahoy" commercial is somewhat behind the curve, subcultural developments-wise.

"Your recollection is correct," he notes, 'but incomplete. When I was in high school ska went through a third-wave of popularity. All those bands said 'Oi!' a lot and you would see everyone from some dude in a Hawaiian shirt to a Christian kid with a mohawk saying 'Oi!' all the time."

Okay, this is good to know. I was dimly aware of that 1990s ska revival (even though the Clinton presidency coincided almost perfectly with The Years When Scott Did Not Listen To New Music) but certainly didn't know that the expression "Oi" had been revived and stripped (or at least partially cleansed) of its white-power overtones. This is encouraging to learn.

So now the urge to eat chocolate chip cookies faces no ideological barriers.

4 March

If not for seeing it a second and third time, the memory might seem like a dream. A large, anthropomorphic chocolate-chip cookie comes bounding down the street, surrounded by spike-haired and dogcollar-wearing punks. They dance around singing "Punky Chips Ahoy! Oi oi oi!" until a bobby with a Cockney accent tell them that the new Chips Ahoy sub-brand is actually chunky, not punky.

Did I mention that this policeman is actually a monkey? Well, he is.

"So, this is my new favorite commercial," writes an SLC blogger named Tracy, who goes on to ask. "Why is there a monkey? and why is he a cop? Why would punks sing such a pussy song? ...and most important of all, why do I feel like it's totally dirty when the cookie twitches his chips?"

Excellent questions. And yet there is more to ponder. The chorus of little claymation punks is multiracial. Which, to be frank, is nearly as strange as anything about the commercial.

My own recollection from some years back is that "Oi!" became a white-power chant. It wasn't always like that. Basically, Oi started out as hard-core British working-class punk -- music for guys whose other interests include football hooliganism. In principle, at least, you could be a black Sham 69 fan. But it would have been just about suicidal for such a fan to go to one of their shows. And by the time it had much of a following over here, chanting "Oi! Oi! Oi!" was something restricted pretty much entirely to the Nazi skins.

I have no idea whether the copywriters for Nabisco have any clue about this. Most viewers certainly won't. But it's disconcerting even so. I poked around online a little to see if anybody else had noticed. So far, it looks like most of the discussion is divided between folks who love the commercial and those who hate it on the grounds that it is, well, a commercial.

However, I am relieved to find that a similar reaction was felt in the household of a blogger called Curmudgette. "When Nazi punks are pimping chocolate chip cookies," she writes, "something is deeply amiss..... My husband came out of the kitchen with a stricken look on his face and said, 'What's next? Enjoy a Triscuit and go burn down a darkie's house?'"

3 March

"I like to help. That's why every fortnight or so I scan the list of search terms that have led hapless readers to this humble site. Then I make a good faith effort to answer those queries as sincerely and completely as I can. Is it hard work? Yes. Do I get paid for it? No. Is asking yourself questions and then answering them an annoying tic? Yes. Indeed, it is."

more, from Minor Tweaks

2 March

"Some day, I shall stand before His judgment bar; and when I appear there, there shall not be upon my hands the blood of people slaughtered while I talked politics." -- William Jennings Bryan

Column for this week: Interview with Michael Kazin about his new biography of "the Great Commoner."

1 March

Six weeks until the new Drive By Truckers album comes out...

28 February

It seems that David Horowitz -- a man as capable of dignity as he is of shame -- demanded the right to respond to my column. His piece ran on Monday at IHE.

I will admit to some curiosity about what he has to say. No doubt it will be as accurate, well-argued, and intellectually honest as his other work. And yet somehow I feel no urgency about reading it.

If all goes well, the next four days should see the completion of two reviews, my column for Wednesday, my column for next week, and a few pages of the book I am writing. All of this takes priority. By contrast, the potential benefits of reading whatever Horowitz has said in response to "D'Ho!" seem very small. (For that matter, I haven't yet gotten around to looking at the comments section for the original column.)

Is there a lesson to be learned from the experience of recent days? Why yes, there is. It is adequately summed up by an old saying: "Don't get into a pissing contest with a skunk. Even if you win, you won't win."

Belatedness. Arriving in Austin in 1981, I felt as if I had just missed everything. The epicenter of the punk scene, Raul's, was no more. (The club was still there, under a new name, but it was a frat hangout.) The first wave of bands was history. One of the scarcest and most beloved documents of that period was the four-song EP by Terminal Mind.

After about twenty years of searching, I have managed to track down a CD containing that EP, and have also located Live at Raul's, containing the other two Terminal Mind songs that were preserved for posterity.

As a body of work, it is not quite as great as it seemed 25 years ago. Yet I listen to it a lot. In particular, the song "I Wanna Die Young."

Memento mori. Just learned that Gary Wheelchair, who played synth for Talmadge d'Amour (for which my friend Seth played bass) died of emphysema three years ago.

And two years ago, the wonderful Louis Mackey -- the Kierkegaardian deconstructionist (or vice versa) who made such a huge impression on me as a freshman because he wore a little Joy Division button on the first day of class, an astonishing thing to see on the lapel of a guy in his fifties, at least in 1982 -- died in Austin.

Epiphany. This string of memories is not leading up to an epiphany. Time, "the subtle thief of youth," has done its number on me. That is all.

Please note that the online ballot for Most Dangerous Professor in America is a serious expression of David Horowitz's passion for the democratic process and NOT some cheap, stupid, and altogether jive-ass publicity stunt.

And by all means vote for Michael Bérubé, because you just know he'll do something interesting once elected.

A scene from recent days.

Cats: Meow! Meow! (They swarm.)

Me: Get out of my way! I'm left-wing notable Scott McLemee!

(They stare at him as he says this.)

Cats: Meow! Meow! (They resume swarming.)

Subject is to be kept in drug-induced artificial coma for period of approximately 12 weeks. Follow this with three electroshock sessions per day for one month. Next, subject is to wear football helmet-like device, so that no escape is possible from headphones playing tape loop of voice that says, "My mother hates me." Continue this protocol for three weeks -- approximately one half-million repetitions of message.

Note to file: In case it comes up, this is not torture. No physical injuries will be detectable ...

more

The column on David Horowitz is now done. It's time for me to grab a shotgun, an inflatable raft, and several cans of pork and beans, and hunker down to a period of survivalist withdrawl at an undisclosed location.

My favorite part (and seriously, I do love this) was when he said that I am a left-wing notable who pulls down enormous riches for his work.

Deja vu! I recall hearing that a certain leftist web kook -- a guy who is, at heart, the mediocre hack functionary of a Stalinist party consisting entirely of himself -- once declared me to be consumed with middle-class aspirations.

Somebody told me that, a few days later, the same guy bragged about his $3000 stereo and taste for expensive wines.

Given the realities, I laugh to keep from crying. Things are tough. On top of which, today's column will make life more difficult for a while.

But what the hell, I am definitely going to buy that second cup of coffee this morning. No sense having all this wealth and status if you don't flaunt it.

Seems like I'm finally starting to get some momentum going....Over the past two weeks, I've managed to finish five pieces -- two columns for IHE, two reviews for Newsday, plus Omnivore, my column for The Philosophers' Magazine.

Just saw the latest issue of the latter, by the way. Here's the table of contents.

One step in the right direction has been the reduction of the amount of time I permit myself to spend online each day. That's been a goal for a while, but only now is it starting to kick in.

The effect of constant web access is a kind of mental entropy. The cumulative effect of cutting back will probably be increased concentration.

Onward to fulfilment of the Five Year Plan!

With my main e-mail account, I get, on a slow day, perhaps two dozen pieces of spam for every real message. Every so often, the purported sender has a name that really stands out.

Yesterday, for example, someone identified as Pensively O. Bellamy wrote offering software at what, no doubt, had I read his note, would have been outrageously low prices.

Throwing this stuff out is a pain, even when doing so en masse. (There must be a filter for the service somewhere, but I'd hate to see what doesn't get through.) It's necessary to go over the list a couple of times, just to make sure something important isn't lost.

The other day, an academic publisher asked me to examine a manuscript to advise them on whether to publish it or not -- a message nearly buried alive amidst countless offers to sell me Cialis.

Anyway, in a rather Stockholm syndrome-esque case of coming to identify with those holding my attention hostage, I have improvised a few possible names for use in sending out spam:

Abraham Colostomy

Format Q. Horsepickle

Razorblade Smith

Lester Z. Tornado

Tall Paul RuPaul

Spastic Larry Cumberbund

Humas Al-Quesadilla

This summer, Jonah Goldberg is publishing a book.

It hardly seems fair. Shouldn't he have to read one, first?

Looking at the cover of Herbert Spencer for Dummies doesn't count.

Hereabouts, we celebrate Valentine's Day by recalling the epochal struggle, almost thirty years ago, between that segment of the the Revolutionary Communist Party that boldly upheld Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Chairman Bob Thought and the clique of renegade Menshevik revisionists who failed boldly to uphold Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Chairman Bob Thought.

For it was the latter group -- now known as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization -- that puts out the awesome Valentine's Day Slogans each year.

Favorite slogans this time around:

Expose, defy and combat sinister bourgeois schemes to transform Comrade Valentine's Day into a festival of commodities, a reinforcer of mandatory heterosexuality and a celebration of oppressive patriarchal gender norms!

Well, hell yeah. Let's just ignore for the moment the vicious conditions for anyone outside said norms of sexuality and gender in Mao's China -- so utterly unlike the situation under the Bolsheviks, by the way. But it's good to see the new slogan in any case. Better to live and learn than never to learn at all.

Unite with all who draw strength from personal relationships in carrying on the struggle to crush oppression and exploitation and to build a better world!

Can I get an amen? Because that really deserves an amen.

In the past, I have made, and for the most part kept, a solemn vow to ignore David Horowitz as much as humanly possible. Life is too short. And it is the nature of such a person to say and do the same inane, dumb, batshit crazy things over and over again.

That is a common fault of crackpots on the Marxisant left and the Heimat right alike. So I maintain the same policy towards a few left-wing Internet loons of comparable demeanor.

Watching a geek bite the head off a live chicken once is bad enough. To nake a habit of doing so would be morbid.

And yet...and yet...If by some chance you do not already look at Michael Berube's blog, then you have been missing some very strange installments of a performance art piece by D. Ho that might as well be called "Thank You Sir May I Have Another?" Here is part one, and here is part two.

Sidenote: One of Horowitz's supporters chimes in to suggest, at one point, that the contraction "D. Ho" is based on Homer Simpson's "D'oh."

Now, I pride myself on maintaining a certain degree of pop-culture cluelessness. It is not total. I am aware of Jennifer Lopez's backside, for example. However, until not long ago I actually did not know that Jessica and Ashley Simpson were singers. (Figured they were O.J.'s kids or something.)

But hell, even I know that "D. Ho" is not based on The Simpsons. It it, of course, a reference to Don Ho, best known for the song "Tiny Bubbles."

An organization (or website, anyway) called "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" is ready to rip the lid off the delusions we've all been living under for the past few years.

If it turns out the towers are actually still standing in downtown NYC and the whole thing was a matter of CGI.... well, those neocon cabals are mighty tricky, aren't they?

Looking the page over, I came across a name that seemed vaguely familiar -- that of one James Fetzer. And lo and behold, I had indeed interviewed him, sometime around the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, for this piece. Suffice it to say the man appears capable of speaking one thousand words a minute, for ten minutes at a stretch, without pause for breathing.

He has another book coming out from Open Court, which must mean he makes them respectable bucks. Either that or someone there has a grim sense of humor.

For a good part of Wednesday, there was a glitch with our bundled digital services. That meant no Internet, no phone, no cable. The lack of web access was a problem, work-wise; and the whole experience was vaguely post-apocalyptic.

So it was only that evening that I learned that my friend Harry Siegel -- who took over a few months ago as editor of the New York Press, a somewhat libertariano-neoconish alt weekly -- has resigned.

On Tuesday, he had been in touch to see if I could turn around a quick commentary on the Danish cartoon controversy. This is already a three-deadline week, so that was impossible. As it turns out, the issue he was putting to bed was exactly the one that precipitated Harry's departure. My own feelings about the whole thing are summed up pretty well by a freelancer named Matt Zoller Seitz, in this blog entry.

As Harry himself said at one point, the cartoons themselves are, as such, rather mediocre. That, rather than "offensiveness," might be a good reason not to want to print them, as such. But it's the principle. Expediency is not a journalistic virtue, if the latter phrase is not too close to oxymoroni. It's an editorial decision, and in a well-run paper, the editor should be the one making it.

Full disclosure: I was about to start writing a column about television for the Press. (Harry is the one editor I can think of who actually liked the idea that my main qualification for doing so would be that I don't watch all that much of it.) Of course he and his colleagues have my full solidarity.....But damn, I really needed that gig.

Before I forget....here's today's column. Not a barn-burner like the ones on plagiarism or Oprah studies, but it has its uses. My fear is that the anti-affirmative action crew will go apeshit over it, because it does not take much.

In other matters...Last month, I took on the assignment to review the recent biography of Barney Ross largely to be agreeable to Laurie Muchnick, my editor at Newsday, having long since lost the ability to say "no" when she asks for anything. She asked for the piece to be 650 words.

"Writing short" is hard work, but I said yes. There are times when I envy the authors of some academic books, who can spend the first fifty pages or so just clearing their throats. And often do.

My knowledge of boxing history is not exactly deep, and my background in Jewish sports legendry somewhat less than....existent? Is that a word? Anyway, I read the bio and greatly enjoyed it, and just wish my review had been longer than 650 words.

An afterthought: I mention that, in later years, Ross became an ardent enthusiast for the state of Israel. The author indicates that he belonged to a circle of American supporters of the Zionist current known as Revisionism, led by Zev Jabotinsky.

He doesn't say much about that, though my strong impression is that you could well call Jabotinsky and friends "the scary-ass Zionists." (As in, they looked and Mussolini and Hitler and thought, "We need to get some uniforms just like that.") On reflection, I think the book would have been stronger had it addressed the scary-assedness of Ross's enthusiasms. But it's a great read in any case.

Arthur Koestler was a supporter of Jabotinsky for a while. Here's my review of an interesting, if frustrating, biography of him from some years ago.

"My righteous anger is so much deeper and greater than yours that even contemplating that difference fills me with more pity, revulsion, and bitter indignation at your incapacity to see the world the way I do."

-- via Crooked Timber

*****

My IHE colleague Rob "Big Head Rob" Capriccioso has a blogm which I am hereby calling to your attention. Particularly if you are a publisher seeking someone to write a book about Oprah.

Seriously, the guy knows his Oprah. I should have interviewed him.

Meanwhile, another blurring-of-the-lines matter regarding the fact/fiction distinction has been recalled for discussion at the blog Whiskey Prajer -- namely, the Chabon matter.

That entry revisits my column from....what was it? last April? That can't be right. It seems like five years ago.

While in New York, we mostly walked. And walked and walked. There is a lot to say for staying at ground level.

On the street, for example, I found a vending machine selling plastic "Hillbilly Teeth," with the ad card showing a Deliverance-style pre-teen. Naturally I bought a set. Man, there is just nothing funnier than Appalachian poverty.

On one of the rare occasions that we took the subway, there was, at one station, a guy dressed up like Michael Jackson circa back-when-he-was-great, blasting MJ songs really loud as he danced. He didn't sing, just lip-synced. And he couldn't actually dance all that well. But other than that....

We are all but tiny frozen pieces

of the celebrities' ancient celestial fire

(1) Yesterday the publicist for MIT Press was in town, and she gave me the galleys for Zizek's long-awaited follow-up to The Ticklish Subject (which I'm now rereading). Woo hoo!

(2) For some backstory on it being published by MIT, see this old piece.

(3) In the wake of the column on "Oprah studies," a publisher has contacted me to see if I would like to write a book on her cultural significance. The answer to this is no.

(4) Okay, now, this really bothers me somehow.

(5) There's a throw-away line in the column this week about getting a haircut. The last time I did so was in June. Rita likes my hair long, so I decided to indulge her on this, as much as possible. For a while there, it was starting to get sort of Bernard Henri Levy-ish. But that condition did not appeal to me, for a variety of reasons, so now my head is round, like a bowling ball.

(6) We are off to New York for several days. (Another point of difference from BHL: We are taking Greyhound.) Anyway, no action at this site until next week. You could look around the archive here maybe. Lots of stuff there. Also see the recent work section. Which I should update soon, but can't now because it is time to go catch the bus.

One solid year of doing Intellectual Affairs -- I think today's piece is the 84th column, give or take.

It's been an unusual experience reading up the topic for this week's item. Since last Thursday, I've been mostly reading either Oprah studies" or popularizations of Georg Cantor (and along with it, stuff by or about Bertrand Russell circa 1901).

Moving back and forth between them has been pretty strange. I keep expecting to have a dream about being on the Oprah show, trying to explain Aleph null. This would be particularly stressful because I still don't understand it myself.

See Miriam Burnstein's interesting points in re: plagiarism, over at the Valve.

I was also glad to see Fred Johnson's blog item, which suggests that my description of the mixed emotions of busting a plagiarist correspond to others' experience.

Meanwhile, it turns out that my review of Margo Jefferson's On Michael Jackson has been reproduced at some kind of Jackson fan site. Without permission, naturally. This kind of thing happens often enough now that I'm almost not irritated by it anymore. Almost.

Although I've not kept up with the discussion it points back to, Henry Farrell's recent comments at Crooked Timber regarding the journalism/blogosphere distinction strike me as very much on target.

In particular, the following thoughts seem useful for my own brooding on such matters:

"Newspaper articles aspire to presenting a comprehensive, neutral and authoritative judgement regarding the facts at hand in a particular matter. Of course, they don’t always succeed in doing this at all – hence the need for ombudsmen, correction columns etc. But even if this standard is often more honoured in the breach than the observance, it still is the basis for the journalistic claim to authority, and status. Blogposts are quite different – they’re arguments in an ongoing debate. They don’t aspire to any sort of finality or authoritativeness (and indeed they’re often updated in response to new arguments or facts). They comment on, and respond to, what others are saying.....

"These forms of authority are difficult to reconcile with each other, because the latter in large part undermines the former. If journalists start systematically responding to their critics, and getting drawn into conversations about whether or not they were right when they made a particular claim, then they’re effectively admitting that the articles they have written aren’t all that authoritative in the first place."

Quite right. And it underscores my own sense of not quite fitting into either camp with Intellectual Affairs -- which is a kind of hybrid between straight reporting and the feuilleton, with the somewhat blog-like admixture of hypertext links as well as comments fields (which I only read sometimes).

Wednesday is the column's one-year anniversary. It really seems like a lot longer.

Maybe you heard that James Frey was back on television, explaining himself to an indignant Oprah.....I set up TiVo to record it and we watched it last night. It was quite a program. (Copies of the show available on DVD to friends who request one soon enough. Act now while supplies last.)

Two tangential thoughts:

One: Oprah has now effectively concentrated so much social and cultural capital (not to mention the economic sort) that this sort of debacle somehow only adds to her power and authority. It might have destroyed someone else. At this rate, she will be given a special Nobel Prize sometime around 2010.

Two: The role played by the Smoking Gun in this matter was acknowledged a few times on the show. Purely online publications once had less credibility, as such, than print or old-school broadcast media. That is clearly no longer the situation. A web-based enterprise has now effectively brought both a major publisher and an extremely powerful television program to their knees.

Having shifted most of my writing activity to an online-only publication for the past year or so, that realization made me hit the pause button to pontificate to Rita.

Also, towards the end of the program, I told her: "The title of that book sure is making me hungry."

"What do you mean?"

"You know, A Million Little Pizzas."

This went over about as well as you might expect. Given that I just published a column on plagiarism, I then confessed that the pun was stolen from my friend Emily Gordon, which means either giving her the credit or assigning her the blame.

Emily also just ran an item about my plagiarism article, which overall has been pretty well received. I've been thinking about the matter for a while -- at least since doing a piece almost three years ago on Philip Foner's piracy, followed by exposing a contemporary academic plagiarist, then writing one part of a package of articles that became a finalist for the National Magazine Awards last year.

I haven't really made a point of pursuing the topic, but it's just so much "out there" now that it's hard not to bump into it. But then, to complicate things more, I've been running into to plagiarism issues in the course of my research into three (unrelated) areas of leftist cultural history circa 1920-32.

At some point, I'm going to need some new, improved analytic tools for understanding what's going on with these documents. Going, "Look, plagiarism!" is not that intersting or useful, as such.

A couple of days ago, Bibliothecary ("the other site sans permalinks") ran an item about William McGonagall, a very bad Victorian poet. I've written in to point out Canada's legendary James McIntyre, a Victorian poet obsessed with dairy products, and Ed Bibliothecary has quoted what is perhaps McIntyre's finest stanza, from the opening of "Ode to the Mammoth Cheese":

        We have seen thee, queen of cheese,
        Lying quietly at your ease,
        Gently fanned by evening breeze,
       Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

I don't care what anybody says. That last line is just plain good writing.

McIntyre did not limit himself only to writing about milk and cheese. According to a webpage I've just come across, his day job was making furniture, and crafted the following as, I assume, an advertising jingle:

Will you please let me go, Ma,
To McIntyre's, to buy a Sofa?

Which is possibly the worst couplet ever. (I have edited the text a little, to fix presumed typos.)

It was dairy that really brought the Muse around. And not just cheese, either. To quote the cited webpage again, "the man wrote with almost equal passion about milk, dairymen, milkmaids, cattle, and cheesemaking machinery."

I spent the better part -- and I do mean the better part -- of the 1980s trying to recreate something like Students for a Democratic Society. One of these days I'm going to try to write about that. Not really up to it now, though.

We weren't really trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the original SDS. We were too concerned with the contras, apartheid, and nuclear war to think that much about the handful of old sixties radicals still around. (A significant percentage of them were there to score drugs or get laid.) But the whole thing culminated with the Radical Student Conference, or whatever the hell it was called, at Rutgers in 1988, which was just a disaster.

No regrets! But no nostalgia either.

Anway, it turns out a new generation is trying to relaunch SDS. So Paul Buhle tells me. I wish them luck, and just hope that they pay better attention to the Bob Dylan lyrics than their predecessors.

That line was: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Got that? You don't need one. You also don't need him telling you where to plant bombs and shit. That part didn't really work out too well.

Forgot to thank the literary blog Galley Cat for this link to my interview with Sandra Gilbert. Sorry, and thanks.

Elsewhere....Another favorite litblog, Bibliothecary, is back up and running.

Appreciation to Golden Rule Jones for news about the new collection of Walser in English.

Okay, that's it -- all the literary linkage I have in me, for now.

Just got a copy of the long-awaited translation of Alain Badiou's Being and Event and am reading it with much fear and trembling. Not really sure that I have any idea what the hell is going on.

Looks like I'll be drawing a lot of Venn diagrams for the next couple of months.

Oh yeah, one other thing:

"We bargain in good faith, those of us who will read anything, hoping at least to complicate ourselves, at most to save our souls."

-- John Leonard

Anna: Welcome to IKEA. I'm Anna, IKEA USA's Online Assistant. You can ask me about IKEA and our products and our services. How can I help you today?

Me: What do you think of Minor Tweaks?

Anna: I'm afraid I don't have any opinions on anything other than IKEA's products and services.

Me: Okay, fair enough. Did you know that your eyes, while strangely vacant, blink with a somewhat excessive vigor?

Anna: Thank you for your feedback, but I don't think I am that much expressive. Can I be of any further assistance?

Me: That depends. I was wondering if the expression "hell as furnished by IKEA" calls anything definite to mind for you?

Anna: The IKEA business idea is: "We shall offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them."

Me: Very Jeremy Bentham-esque. "The greatest happiness for the greatest number." Do you know of Jeremy Bentham?

Anna: As I am only an advanced computer program, I cannot answer more than one sentence at a time. Please simplify and repeat the most important question within your previous input, and I will try to reply as accurately as possible. I am opening a page now which you can use if you wish to contact Customer Services. Thank you very much!

Me: Is working there like being in the Panopticon?

Anna: It's not always possible for me to fully understand what it is you mean. This is one of those times.

Me: I'm always sure quite what point I'm trying to make, either. That is also true of my life in general, not just our little dialogue today.

Anna: I don't know the answer to that question yet, I am sorry. Please contact your local store for help on the issue.

Me: What if I already have furniture out the wazoo?

Anna: Sorry, but that's an object that I don't really know enough about to be able to comment on. Let's talk about something else...

I've finally figured out how to load the MP3 files for I Was a Communist for the FBI, a radio program that ran circa 1952. The word for it is hysterical. Not in the sense of funny -- that, too, of course, if unintentionally -- but per my dictionary's reference to "behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess."

I haven't read the book about Cvetic, the titular commie/snitch but plan to do so eventually. Right about the time the program was airing, my man C.L.R. James was in a jail on Ellis Island for being a subversive alien -- an anti-Stalinist, to be sure, not that it made any difference at the time.

Meanwhile, on the contempo-McCarthyism front, the big news of the week is the emergence of a D. Ho clone named Andrew Jones who runs "a long-term project dedicated to exposing UCLA's most radical professors."

Ralph Luker makes the case that, whatever else you may think about him, Jones is arguably more efficient and honest than D. Ho: "Horowitz pays himself over $300,000 a year and can't be bothered to hire fact checkers to verify which of his urban legends have elements of truth in them. Hiring students to spy on professors is a bad idea, because it perverts the student/teacher relationship, but being willing to live less high on the hog in order to substantiate your claims is a good thing."

But, pace Luker, there's growing evidence that Jones is just not serious-- for he neglects the English department: "Anne Mellor wrote an entire book on Women's Political Writing in England. Were there not enough men to study, Ms. Mellor? Or could they not stand the stench of your tangled, unwashed pits? Jinqi Ling, an illegal immigrant, writes Marxist propaganda written in diversity double-speak: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature? Go back to China, Ms. Ling! No American wants to hear about your precious Chairman Mao."