Jeff Sees a Legend

Tonight, I went to OCU and heard a lecture by Edward Albee. For those of you lug-heads who don't know who Edward Albee is, here's his Wikipedia entry. Mr Albee is the winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, two Tony awards, and was one of two playwrites ever to receive a special lifetime achievement Tony (the other was Arthur Miller). Tonights lecture was suppoed to be comething about the Creative Proces and Imagination or something but he never got to any of that. The lecture was brilliant any way, and I thought you might like to hear some of the nuggets of wisdom from one of our greatest writers.

Albee on his background:
He said that he began writing poetry when he was eight and never got good at it. He wrote two novels as a teenager that he said, "I like to think that these are the worst novels a teenager cold have written." He also tried his hand at the short story. He wrote a first line which he thinks os w wonderful line. It was, "Everything in Rome is uphill." He then said that, unfortunately, everything after that in the story went downhill.

Mr. Albee told us that he had written a sex farce at thirteen which his adopted mother had thrown away. He called her, "my first critic." About his ineffectiveness in writing the poem he said:

"My knowledge of farce was academic; my knowledge of sex, singular."

He told us, and I had not known this before, that "Zoo Story," his first sucessful play, had its world premier in Berlin and it was performed in German. He went to Germany to see it and, though he couldn't even understand it, he watched the audience react and knew that he was a playwrite.

About the power of theatre in society he said:

Theatre is and always has been an active aggression against the status quo...If
you don't like what you see, change.

And further:

In a democracy, we can have anything we want but, in a democracy, we get exactly
what we deserve.

I have very few answers about anything, but I have a great many questions about
many things.

Creativity is merely the need to do something about the experience

And this is my favorite 1) because it's great and 2) because Edward Albee autographed the page of my notes on which it is written:

I like to go to universities because there are young people there, and I
like to corrupt the young.

Revision Problem of the Day

This is the first sentence of a news story from TMZ.com:

"Just last week Marie Osmond infamously fainted during a live broadcast last month..."

Freaky Smart People

So, I'm writing this from Murfreesboro, TN where I am sitting in my room at the Double Tree full of knowledge and free wine. All this is because I am at the Conference on John Milton where I got to present a paper on Wycliffe's possible influence on the prose writing of John Milton.

What's really cool about conferences like these are that you are sitting around with all the people you reference in your own papers. I got to speak to Michael Lieb about my paper, who told me that I was "on solid theoretical ground," which made me feel good for a second. I met John Shawcross, a seventeenth-century scholar whose work I very much admire. Then when I ran into him in the hallway this morning, he said, "Good morning Jeff," and I thought, holy-cow, John Shawcross knows my name. He's a tiny old man who is still completely brilliant and who walks around during a party because he doesn't want to sit. All these people are extremely generous people who really want to bring young scholars along in the field.

But alas, Sunday night I will be home which, on one hand is really good because I miss my wife, but I am also terrified because I have to go back to my own desk where I have a two foot stack of student papers to grade.

The Writer and Their Only Gender Neutral Option

A contemporary trend in composition textbooks is the view that academic writers should be on guard against the accidentally sexist use of pronouns. By this I am referring to sentences such as, "the writer should pay attention to the pronouns he chooses to use." The use of the pronoun, while not necessarily sexist, is certainly sexually exclusive. This presents a problem in modern English, a language that must now accommodate a more egalitarian concept of readerly/writerly identity. While English is fortunate not to have gender specific adjectives like those of the Latinate languages, English, like so many languages that derived their system of logic from Latin, has no gender neutral pronouns. While I am not concerned with political correctness, actual correctness should be something for which we strive, should it not? And if we are to be factually correct in our use of language, we must address the gendered pronoun issue. Of course, the long accepted solution has been to use the phrase, "he or she" but any reader will tell you, this device becomes very monotonous, very quickly. The style problem caused by this phrase is compounded by the fact that there is also no gender neutral possessive. Thus he or she must own his or her whatever he or she owns. Clearly an alternate solution is needed. Here are my solutions. They're actually solutions arrived at by writers struggling with the issue who have un-dogmatically invented solutions as needed. I am simply setting them forth in attempt to codify them.

1) Assign gender based on the writer's identity. It seems to me that when a writer is referring to an unspecific subject, the writer is generally and unconsciously being autobiographical. That is to say that when the writer of a composition textbook says, "the writer should never assume that his audience will naturalize his assumptions," the ambiguous "he" to which the writer refers is the writer himself. This is true because what the writer is giving you as a lesson in how to write is a rule that has worked for him. He is therefore thinking of himself as the writer and bidding the reader to do what he does. Therefore, I propose that the writer use his or her own sex, as I have done here.

2) Accept "They" and "their" as gender neutral pronouns. "They" and its possessive "their" are English's only gender neutral pronouns. The problem is, of course, that they are plural. It is therefore technically incorrect to say, "the writer [singular] must sharpen their [plural] pencil." The use of they and their as singular pronoun is already in common practice, yet if any student uses the word in this way, he or she is likely to have it graded as "wrong." There is, on one hand, a fallacy in grading here. Since language is based on common use, the fact that using "their" as a gender neutral pronoun has been in common use for some time makes it correct, whether English departments want to accept it or not. Plus, with the absense of better gender neutral words, these are our language's only single word alternatives. I have already committed to myself not to judge these pronouns as incorrect in my own students' papers, though I will need to remind them that others will.

My personal preference is for the first choice. I like it better for stylistic reasons; "they" and "their" still sound incorrect. I also like the ethos that is added by the linguistic reminder that the writer is present. If the reader knew that the writer would be sexing his argument based on his own identity, every time the reader came across a gendered word, it would remind the reader that the writer is indeed real. In this way, the writer is constantly reasserting his humanity; the speaker is a person, not a system of scribbles on a page.

Champs!

I know I never write on here anymore but school keeps me so busy. I'm on here now just to celebrate the Red Sox first division championship in 12 years after nine years of Yankee dominance in the AL East. The tyrant is deposed!!!

Beat Picture of the Week

A vandalized car with a punched column...but not reported stolen.

Our Final Baseball Trip (for the year)

When we went to Texas for the Sox series, the first game was delayed one hour for rain. For our inconvenience, we were given two free tickets for upper-deck seats. On game three, we were given four vouchers for seats of @25 or less as part of a giveaway. We redeemed all these tickets over the past weekend in what turned out to be a trip of ups and downs.

We left on Thursday and hit Fort Worth just in time for rush hour traffic. It took us two and a half hours to get from OKC to Forth Worth then one hour to get from Fort Worth to our motel in Arlington.

We had a room in the Days Inn on Collins in Arlington. I knew we were in for a treat when we pulled in to the lot and found that the motel shares a lot with the Afrika Food Mart and a loud Mexican bar. Butting up to the lot was what we cops commonly refer to as a "turd complex" which is an apartment complex that accepts Section 8. The employees of the hotel were unfriendly and the room was lousy. The coffee maker sit in the bathroom (it can't be moved because it's tied to the wall). The bed was extremely small and low to the ground and the bed spread looked faded with age. To top it all off, the entire place was full of teenagers. We usually pamper ourselves on this trip by staying in the Wyndam hotel, which we planned on staying at Sunday and Monday nights. While traveling to the park from the motel, we learned that out hotel had been sold to Sheraton. We kept our reservations but lost all our free stuff that we get there for being part of Wyndam's rewards program. But more on that later.

Game one was against the Indians, a great ball club, who had C.C. Sabathia on the hill. It was a great game but we were surrounded by weird people. Don't ever eat the pizza in Rangers Ballpark. It's just frozen pizza like you can get at Walmart.

After the first game, we drove down to Rockdale to stay with Charissa's parents. It's a great community and a cute little town but it's far away and really boring and I'm glad they're moving to the Tulsa area so we don't have to drive to Rockdale anymore. While in Rockdale, we drove to Round Rock to catch a minor league game between the Express and our own Oklahoma Redhawks. The Redhawks lost but we did get to see Freddy Guzman (my favorite minor leaguer) steal home on Round Rock's pitcher.

Sunday night we went back to Dallas, this time with Bill and Saphronia, and stayed in the newly renamed Sheraton, where we learned that the Seattle Mariners were also staying. We had rooms on the fourteenth (thirteenth) floor overlooking the ballpark. I LOVE this hotel and was so glad to be back in it after staying at the crappy Days Inn and the comfortable but boring spare bedroom of my in-laws house. We had a great omelet man who Bill has become friends with.

On game day II, we took a tour of the ballpark and ate in the restaurant attached to the park. At the game, we got to see a Sammy Sosa home run in an explosive fifth inning which saw five runs on five hits (two were home runs: Sosa and Wilkerson). The Rangers took an 8-7 victory and have taken the first three in their four game series against the strong Mariners lineup.

The final down came when we arrived home and learned that our friend who we had left to watch our animals had forgotten completely and our dog and cat had been five days without food or water. Both of them were okay but Cooper (the dog) had an abrasion on his nose where it looks like he kept trying to get the door of his house open. Chloe (the cat) had found a box of dog biscuits and was keeping herself fed on those. We took the dog to the vet just to be sure and he was given a clean bill of health. I felt horrible all day over it.

Thus rounds up our final baseball trip of the summer.

Go Sox!

Caroline's Lucky Night

Oklahoma is a state of thieves. We steal. It's what we do. The Sooners were a group of criminals that sneaked over the lines early before the land-runs, essentially stealing lands. The Myriad Gardens, designed in the 60's but not built until 1988 (just in time for the land-run centennial), was copied from the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark. When the city wanted to revitalize Bricktown, they copied San Antonio's river walk, creating a river flowing through Bricktown. We tried to steal the Hornets from New Orleans and will very likely steal the Supersonics from Seattle.

But now we've gone too far. This season, OKC's triple-A baseball team, the Redhawks, has been stealing the dubious Red Sox tradition of playing (and singing supposedly) Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline." This Thursday, the organization will make the theft complete when they hold "Neil Diamond Night" at the park, during which any person named "Caroline" will get in for free.

Perhaps this wouldn't seem so ridiculous if the song, or Neil Diamond, had anything to do with baseball. What makes it silly is the fact that the Red Sox tradition of singing the song (which they do before the 8th inning) is something of a fluke. The park started playing the song, the fans started singing along, the tradition stuck. No one really seems to know how it happened or why New England even tolerates Neil Diamond being played in their most holy sanctuary of Fenway Park (in fact, many die-hard fans simply refuse to sing along...But I kinda like it). The tradition belongs exclusively to Boston and no other Major League city. But that won't stop OKC from stealing it, just like they stole the Fenway Dog (which isn't even very good).

Oklahoma, when will we get our own traditions? When will we, a city larger than Cleveland, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Kansas City MO, Oakland, and Miami become a major league city in our own right?

Attention Hackers!

Please do something about these guys.

Reflecting on "Falling Man"

I'm reading the novel "Falling Man," which is the new novel by Don DeLillo, who is one of my favorite authors. The book follows the life of a 9/11 survivor and his family just after the attacks. I read a scene this evening which I found particularly poignant. In this scene, Keith, the main character is watching the news with his wife as they play the World Trade Center videos.

He said, "It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this
distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I'm standing here thinking
it's an accident."Because it has to be.""It has to be," he said."The way the
camera sort of shows surprise.""But only the first one.""Only the first," she
said."The second plane, by the time the second plane appears," he said, "we're
all a little older and wiser." (135)

This scene is so profound because it is so ubiquitous. This is exactly everybody's experience. Perhaps you remember and it felt the same for you. You were sitting in a student center on a college campus and the first tower was burning and you thought, it's an accident. It's happened before. A B-17 hit the Empire State building. This is the same type of thing. And you wondered how, with our modern technology, an accident like this could happen. But it's an accident of course. It has to be. But then you see the second plane, and it happens so fast but you are thinking fast too, so before you even see the planes you think, Oh God, it's not an accident. And as you see the flames you know that every thing has changed forever. And isn't it fitting that in the twenty-first century we should die in real time on cable news.

Isn't this your experience too? Isn't this the cultural work of great literature, to put into words our collective experience. This book isn't as well done as some of DeLillo's others but this is where it is successful. You read the book and you feel...consoled somehow, because you're glad to know that you're not the only one.

The Writing on the Wall

Because I am unrealistically optimistic about the state of education in our universities, I am always amazed and saddened by the fact that adult men in a university setting scratch crap in bathroom stalls. But since they do, I might as well read and criticize them. I went into a stall today and did some leisurely reading and now I ma going to give both my readers my favorite messages from today. Remember, these were written on the walls of a bathroom stall in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Oklahoma...the ivory halls of academia.

"Collage is for the week"
-It's true, only pansies would cut pictures and glue them together to create art.

"Today's poop is brought to you by the leter H."

"Writing on the walls is for dumb ass's"
-Speaking of...

What Time Is It?

Not 4:30 (Spin Doctors Fans) but...

Dice-K, Make My Day, or How Sweep it Is

So Charissa has been going to the wall on the third base side for the last three days trying to get autographs. We got Kyle Snyder on Friday but no luck yesterday. Today we get there at noon and go in as soon as the gates open. Charissa goes down to the wall in one of the aisles and she is a little back in line. The pitchers are playing catch along the third base line in shallow outfield. They finish up and I realize that Daisuke Matsuzaka is walking towards Charissa's line. He begins signing and she is getting closer and closer. I think that she had looked pretty close to the front but now she seems miles away from Dice-K as people push and shove to get to the front. Then he takes Charissa's ball. He signs it (or as she says it, "his $103 million hand touched me) and she says thank you. He bows to her and she bows back; then she turns to walk away. as she goes up the aisle past the people who are still in line and I'm thinking, 'stop talking to people. Look disappointed,' because I can just see someone snatching the ball out of her hands and running. I come towards her and I can see that her hands are trembling. She hands me the ball and there it is, a big "D' with some scribbly crap after it and the number 18.

Tavarez and Loe are the Sox and Rangers number five pitchers, respectively. Both of them had fairly good outings. Tavarez: 5.2 IP, 4R 4ER, 6H, 1BB, 1HB, 6k. Loe 6IP, 3R, 3ER, 7H, 1BB, 0HB, 2K.

Varitek hit a three run home run in the fourth in support of Tavarez but Tavarez got no decision after giving up a three run upper-decker to Teixeira and an RBI single to Ian Kinsler. Piniero got the win for the Sox after Otsuka blew the save for the Rangers, allowing two runs on three hits in the eighth and Gagne gave up a lead off homer to Pedroia.

Okajima came in to save the game for Piniero and had to make it close for us. He gave up one run on an RBI single by Teixeira (who wouldn't go away) allowing the Rangers to come withing one. Then, Sammy Sosa came up to bat. He hit a long two-strike fly ball which Crisp caught, ending the game and securing the sweep.

In the Wake of our Curse; Curse No More

We thought we were bad luck. Every time we have come to Arlington, we have scene Wakefield pitch. Every time, the Sox have lost. In fact, it was our Wakefield woes that convinced us that we needed to come to a whole series instead of just one game. Our luck has changed.

Before the game, we took a tour of the park. We got to go into the Rangers' dugout and ride the bench and stand on the top step. Then the Allen's came to have dinner with us and watch the game.

Wakefield pitched seven innings, allowing four tuns on four hits. He struck out four while walking only one. The fifth inning was a little scary, as it looked like Wake was going to let us down again but Sox hitters supported him with a huge sixth inning which saw five runs on four hits. Two pitchers had to pitch to ELEVEN Red Sox batters to get the three outs in the sixth.

Manny seems to be coming out of his slump. He was four for four and lacked only a home run to bat the cycle.

Sox win 7-4 and climb to 11.5 ahead of the Yankees, who are now in fourth place in the east! We are trying to decide whether or not to bring brooms to tomorrow's game in preparation for a sweep.

Dispatch from the 16th Floor

I write to you now from the sixteenth floor of the Arlington Wyndham Hotel where we are staying in a Suite after getting a free upgrade. We have a kitchenette and a living area with a sofa; all so we can relax between baseball games.

We walked to the park extremely early today so that we could go to the Legends museum. The picture above is of a jersey and a bat that belonged to Ted Williams. Unfortunately, his head is still in a freezer. That's what I'd really like to see. So, to the game.

The game didn't begin until 9:00 due to a rain delay. By that time, we'd been at the park almost six hours. The good part of all this time is that Charissa was able to get an autograph from Sox reliever Kyle Snyder (who would pitch an entire two thirds of an inning: .2 1 0 0 0 1). Rangers starter Brandon McCarthy went only two innings allowing four runs on only one hit with four walks. Matsuzaka cruised for the first three innings but then he began feeling nauseous and allowed five runs in the fourth inning (he had allowed five runs in his last three starts...combined). He left after a strong fifth, just long enough to get the win after the Sox scored two more in the fifth. The Sox then t-ed off on Frank Francisco who allowed four more runs on four hits in one third of an inning. Sox win 10-6, incidentally, the same score that the Yankees lost to the Angels with which moves the Sox to 10.5 ahead of the second place Yankees in the AL East.

By the way, I gave Sammy Sosa an error in the second allowing Lugo to reach. Sosa then through Pedroia out who had remained close to first so that he could tag. The home town score keeper saw it differently and spared Sosa the error, calling the play a fielder's choice. It remains an error on my score card and I refuse to change it.

All Set

We leave for four days in Dallas tomorrow to see a full series of the Red Sox at the Rangers. Here's how it looks:

Friday:
Matsuzaka (6-2, 4.06) vs. McCarthy (4-4, 5.82)

Saturday:
Wakefield (4-5, 3.14) vs. Padilla (2-5, 5.52)

Sunday:
Tavarez (3-4, 5.27) vs. Loe (1-4, 6.38)

The matchups promise a good series. With Tavarez pitching on Sunday, I have chosen that as the day I will wear a Rangers hat, especially since I like Kameron Loe. I will give dispatches from D-Town and pictures when I return.

GO SOX!

Beat Picture of the Week

A Picture from my beat:
In case you cannot tell what this is, this is a glass door at a "church" which awaits the overthrow of white people. This door lists the 12 tribes of Israel with their modern descendants.

1) Judah: The Negroes
2) Benjamin: West Indians
3) Levi [the Priestly tribe, I'd like to point out]: Haitians
4) Simeon: Dominicans
5) Zebulun: Guatemala to Panama
6) Ephriam: Puerto Ricans
7) Manasseh: Cubans
8) Gad: Amer. Indians
9) Rueben: Seminole Indians [which are apparently different than American Indians]
10) Nephtali: Argentine to Chile
11) Asher: Colombia to Uruguay
12) Issachar: Mexicans

Still Going Strong

My grades for Spring:

Writing the Short Story A
Restoration and 18th Century A
American Lit 1800-1865 A

It Would Bee My Luck

I woke up this afternoon and went outside to see several bees hanging around the front of the house. I though, "yikes. The bees like my house. I might have to get some poison." Charissa came home and we went out to eat with her parents, which kept us away from the house for about an hour and a half. When we returned, the several bees had turned into a bee hive full of thousands of bees hanging below the overhang between out first and second floor, about six feet from our front door. Now we have to use the back door and I'm desperately afraid that the bees will find a way into the house. I guy from a bee farm is supposed to come in the morning "about seven or maybe a couple hours later." Please, please, be there at 7:00. In the meantime, Charissa has gone to stay with the Landrums, just in case, and I have gone home a couple times just to check out the situation.

Update:
The bee farm guy is hindered from coming by the torrential downpour outside. Apparently, they can do nothing in the rain so he can't come out until it stops. Plus, there's no way to get around town without coming across roads closed by water. After a three year drought. Mother Nature is attacking me.

Congrats to My Old Man

Lat night I got to watch my dad accept a Medal for Meritorious Service for his work in solving two cold case homicides in smaller jurisdictions at the request of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations. Congratulations to my daddy on an award that he has deserved for a long time. My old man is truly one of the best officers on our police department.

On the Legality of the Iraq War

There has been a murmuring among Bush critics (of whom I am occasionally a part)
that the Iraq was must end because it is an illegal war. I have been having to look at the bumper stickers saying "impeach Bush" and "Bush is a war criminal" so long and so often that I could gag. Their line of reasoning is that Congress has never declared war on Iraq (not withstandign the 2002 Resolution authorizing the use of Military force) and therefore Bush has no legal authority to remain there. Not one to trust the media who makes things up or party pundits who spin for their own agenda, I decided to do the unthinkable among the hoi polloi: I actually looked the laws up myself!

The real question is: is the formal declaration of war an antiquated concept? Legally, it would seem so. Congress's "vote of confidence" in the form of it's 2002 Joint Resolution for the Use of Military force in Iraq" is legal authority enough under the War Powers Act of 1973. Don't believe me? Here is a portion if the text:

Section 5: (b) Within sixty calendar days after a report is submitted or is
required to be submitted pursuant to section 4(a)(1), whichever is earlier, the
President shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces with respect to
which such report was submitted (or required to be submitted), unless the
Congress (1) has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization [italics mine]for such use of United States Armed Forces

It goes on to say:

Notwithstanding subsection (b), at any time that United States Armed Forces are
engaged in hostilities outside the territory of the United States, its
possessions and territories without [italics mine] a
declaration of war or specific statutory authorization, such forces shall be
removed by the President if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution.

The "without" is the important word, as Congess did in fact give the President authorization to go to war. Furthermore, The law gives congress no authority to revoke its authorization once it has given it. The preseident is therefore not obligated to remove troops at the behest of the whims of a majority changing Congress. Please, look it up for yourself. The truth is, whether you like it or not, the President is the Constitutionally authorized and he may commit troops wherever in the world he wants to. Take it up with the Founding Fathers. That being said, whether you agree with the war or not, Bush is not a war criminal so put up the bumper stickers, unless you like driving around advertising your failure to research the topic you pretend to care about.

Proud Owner

I like to collect old books in the areas of my interests. I already own a couple really good ones including: The Study of Aesthetics published in 1856 and A History of English Dramatic Literature, published in 1899. I tried to get a first edition British copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin from 1851 but, alas, it went for almost $300 while I was at a ball game. I did manage to pick up Abraham Lincoln: His Life and Public Service by Mrs. P.A. Hanaford, the author of Our Martyred President. The "record of his stainless life and martyr's death" is inscribed to "The Loyal Men and Women, North and South, East and West; the the Union Army and Navy; and especially to the Long-Oppressed Race for whom President Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation" I can't wait to read and digest this account from just after his death from an obviously sympathetic New England writer!

Another Graduate Bibliography

The first version was annotated!

Works Cited:
Aristotle. “Poetics.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed.
David Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1998. 42-64.
Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland, or the Transformation. New York: Prometheus
Books, 1997.
---. “Wieland, or the Transformation. An American Tale.” The American
Review and Literary Journal 1 (1801): 333-37.
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New
York: Oxford UP, 1986.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Goddu, Teresa A. Approaches to Teaching Gothis Fiction: the British and American
Traditions. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003.
Harris, Jennifer. “At One with the Land: The Domestic Remove-Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Matters of National Belonging.” Canadian Review of
American Studies 33.3 (2003): 189-210.
Kramnick, Isaac, ed. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. New York: Penguin Books,
1995.
Kutchen, Larry. “The ‘Vulgar Thread of Canvass’ Revoluction and the Picturesque in
Ann Eliza Bleeker, Crevecoeur, and Charles Brockden Brown.” Early American Literature 63.3 (2001): 395-425.
Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government. Ed. Thomas P Pearson. New York:
The Liberal Arts Press, 1952.
---. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Vol I. Ed. Alexander Cambell Fraser.
New York: Dover Publications, 1959.
Schneck, Peter. “Wieland’s Testimony; Charles Brockden Brown and the Rhetoric of
Evidence.” The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 18 (2002): 167-213.
Sutherland, Helen. “Varieties of Protestant Experience: Religion and the Doppelganger in Hogg, Brown, and Hawthorne.” Studies in Hogg and His World 16 (2005): 71-85
Tomkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 40-61.

Works Consulted:
Amfreville, Marc. “Charles Brockden Brown’s Cultural Paradox.” Letterature d’America
24 (2004): 5-21.
Basu, Biman. “Reading the Techno-Ethnic Other in DeLillo’s White Noise.” Arizona Quarterly 61.2 (2005): 87-111
Bradshaw, Charles C. “New England Illuminati: Conspiracy and Causality in Charles
Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” The New England Quarterly 76 (Sept 2003): 356- 77.
Dill, Elizabeth. “The Republican Stepmother: Revolution and Sensibility in Charles
Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” The Eighteenth Century Novel 2 (2002): 273-303.

Grabo, Norman. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill, NC: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 3-29.
Hsu, Hsuan L. “Democratic Expansionism is ‘Memoirs of Carwin’.” Early American
Literature 35 (2000):137-156.
Norwood, Lisa West. “‘I may be a Stranger to the Ground of Your Belief’ Constructing
Sense of Place in Wieland.” Early American Literature 38.1 (2003): 89-122.
Williams, Daniel E. “Writing under the Influence: An Examination of Wieland’s ‘Well
Authenticated Facts’ and the Depiction of Murderous Fathers in Post- Revolutionary Print Culture.” Eighteenth Century Fiction 15 (2003): 643-68

Don't Blame Us if We Evah' Doubt Ya'

After a sweep of the Yankees capped off by this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAGTfFJFsfA the picture looks like this:


Boston 12 5 .706 -
Baltimore 11 7 .611 1.5
New York 8 9 .471 4.0
Toronto 8 10 .444 4.5
Tampa Bay 7 11 .389 5.5

Goodbye Hornets, Goodbye Kurt Vonnegut, Goodbye Don Imus

Everything about this Friday the Thirteenth lived up to the reputation. It was rainy and cold, which delayed the Redhawks home opener (to which we had tickets). we had thunder, while the panhandle is getting snow, possibly up to nine inches by tomorrow.

In the midst of all of it, the Hornets played their final game in Oklahoma City. They will now go back to New Orleans where they will have decidedly less fan support. The lost in heart breaking fashion to the Denver Nuggets in the very last seconds. Just like that, we're a minor league town again.

Kurt Vonnegut, one of the finest author's of the last generation, died Wednesday night after struggling with a brain injury caused when he fell down. He was the Author of "The Slaughterhouse-Five" "Cat's Cradle" and most recently "The Man Without a Country." He was one of the few anti-war activists who had ethos, having seen war himself. I had a self-revelatory moment when it occurred to me that some people get upset when Anna Nichole Smith died. I got upset to hear about Kurt Vonnegut. Jeez, I'm a nerd.

Goodbye Don Imus. I never liked you. I'm glad you're gone. The only thing is, will we as a society now censure those in pop culture who make millions by denigrating women and projecting racial stereotypes (is rappers)? My fear is that we will not. In fact, I'm almost positive we will not. America has proven again and again that it tolerates double standard.

And back on the subject of my rained out ball game, we will be taking in a double header on Sunday.

When Work Intrudes Into Your Personal Life

I would just like to thank the Tuttle officer that gave my personal cell phone number out so that someone has called to ask about her stolen car when I was 1) sleeping and 2) in Tulsa with the kids that I coached. I appreciate it, buddy.

Robyn Can't Get Service...

But Dunkin' Donuts need not fear.

My partners ensure that Dunkin' is the safest place in earth and that the stereotype lives.

I am a god (little g) of Research

I have to take a break from the paper I'm working on before I proof it, print it, and turn it in. I think that you should have to feel my pain and here's how I'll try to make you. Remember your bibliographies in college (or high school for that matter)? Here's what one looks like in Grad school. This is actually a shorter one for me with it's twelve entries (I'm still missing one; a video of which I can't find the info). This is for my paper "Order and Disorder in Dryden's Conquest of Granada."

Armistead, Jack M. “The Higher Magic in Dryden’s Conquest of Granada.” Papers on
Language and Literature 26.4 (1990): 478-88.

Brockett, Oscar. History of the Theatre. 8th ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon,
1999

Coltharp, Duane. “Radical Royalism: Strategy and Ambivalence in Dryden’s
Tragicomedies.” Philological Quarterly 78.4 (1999): 417-37.

Davis, Paul. “Dryden and the Invention of Augustan Culture.” He Cambridge Companion
to John Dryden. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 75-91.

Dryden, John. The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 11. Ed. H. T. Swedenberg jr. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978

Ebbs, John Dale. The Principle of Poetic Justice Illustrated in Restoration Tragedy.
Saltzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1973.

Kropf, C.R. “Political Theory and Dryden’s Heroic Tragedies.” Essays in Theatre 3.2
(1985): 125-138.

Mathew, George. “Sexism in Dryden’s Criticism; From Text to Context.” CIEFL Bulletin
14.1-2 (2004): 93-112.

Reinert, Thomas. “Theatre and Civility in Dryden’s ‘Essay’.” ELH 65.4 (1998): 857-76.

Thompson, James. “Dryden’s Conquest of Granada and the Dutch Wars.” Eighteenth
Century: Theory and Interpretation 31.3 (1990): 211-26).

Warren, Victoria. “From Restoration to Hollywood: John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada
and James Cameron’s Terminator Films.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary
Culture, 1660-1700 27.2 (2003): 17-40.

Welcome Freshmen

I learned today that I will have been given a teaching assistantship for next year. I will be teaching a section of Freshman English Composition. So if you know any high school seniors who will be coming to UCO next year, warn them now.

Entertainer Number XII

I am giving you some more of my entertaining primary research of eighteenth-century junk. The following appeared in the 12th issue of "The Entertainer" on January 22, 1718. It is purportedly a letter form the President of a Mug House in the city [of London] to the President of the Constitution Club at Oxford. It is obviously a fake made to demonize a certain class of people but it is fun to read, nonetheless.

Sir,
As we are embark'd in one common design, I thought I could do
no less than congratulate you upon your late advancement. And, believe me,
that
the majority of voices you gain'd it by, is a greater honour that all the
Liberal Sciences in that place [Oxford] can confer. THere seems to be in this
distinction between your CLUB and ours; yours is a constitution of CAPS, and
ours is a constitution of CLUBS. I am order'd by our society to propose to you a conprehension; that the
same rights, priviliges, and immunities may be in common to
either society; and that a coalition may be more confirm'd, we demand the
privilege of being admitted ad eundem.

We doubt not but we cab
pass our examinations, and shan't disgrace your
society; we love mischief
for mischief's sake, and can bend like a blade, can
swear and forswear to
every point of the compass, insult magistracy, drink
damnation on
Alphabetically, break windows, demolish lanterns, knock down old
women,
purloin swords, steal hats, and MOHOCK the Tories.

We are as great
heroes in evil as your selves; like masked miffes [misses?: f and s
were used interchangeably in
18th century], we
own our selves children of darkness.
When danger is remote, we are commonly
boldest.

I, and four more of our gang bravely beat a boy of seven
years old, and our
Vice President held a quarter of an hour's skirmish with
a blind basket-woman of threescore and
ten [seventy years], and had like
to come off victorious.

Litany of Woe

I am a veritable collection of complaints! And I know that neither of my readers is interested n my problems but it makes me feel better and it fills copy space to get it all out there. Yesterday I went to my doctor to have a sebacious cyst removed from my shoulder. It was not a big deal at all but it was unsightly and can become infected so is is best to have them removed. Since a three cm in diameter chunk of my body was removed, I was stitched up and placed on Amoxicillin to prevent infection to the wound. It might help to not that I NEVER go to the doctor so I NEVER take prescription medication. That means that my body is totally unprepared and so I get to suffer side effects. So I have spent the last 24 hours with my stomach tied in knots and a splitting headache (headache is not listed as side affect so apparently it is just bad timing.)

Oh yeah, and I am spending my spring break writing a paper and catching up on reading... while all the under-grads are in Florida spending their parents' money.

The Dog Days of March

The season hasn't even started, but Gary Sheffield (formerly of the Yankees, now of the Tigers) is already clearing benches. Well actually, it was Todd Jones and Sox third base coach DeMarlo Hale. But it all started from Sheffield.

GO SOX!

The Fable of the Cannibal Moraliz'd

One of the most tedious and most rewarding things about graduate school is Primary Research. That means pouring over rare books on microfilm. That's what I spent an entire day doing today. I found an 1801 article probably by Charles Brockden Brown reviewing his own book Wieland, as well as his critique of a sermon given by William Brown over the evils of the whims of French enlightenment thinking, a tabloid from 1718, and a literary periodical from 1756 with review of an article about venereal disease where the writers say, "We may without ceremony venture to pronounce this performance a nauseous composition of most wretched trash, wrapt in the vilest language imaginable."

Also of note was something I found with no use to me but to entertain, which I thought I would share with my reader. It is entitled "The Fable of the Cannibal Moraliz'd" and was printed in the magazine Memoirs for the Curious in 1701. I'm giving it to you in its entirety with emphasis and spelling intact, exceot where I have substituted the modern "s" where the text had "f."

THE fable is this. A certain English ship, passing by the
coast of Madagascar, toward the end of last summer; some of the Ships
Crew, taht were sent on Shoar to take in Fresh Water, make Report of a man of a
Prodigious Size, and all over hairy like to a Satyr, which they saw upon the
Land coming to Drink. THe Name of the Vessal must be called the Tempest, and the master of it is Mr. Goodman: But as for the
Man-Monster, because no Name could fit him, he must be Content to pass without
one. However to distinguish him, the Crew do call him the CANNIBAL; for
Reasons that are pretty Obvious. They say, he Lives by Blood.: and that
his greatest Delicacy to Feed , is Human Flesh. Now, there was no
Attempting to Seize on Him by main Strength; his Force being almost as
Prodigious, as was his Bulk; which was so great, that Goliah was hardly
Worthy to be his Squire: Wherefore, Circumventing him by a Stratagem, they left
him a Strong and Sweet Spanish Potion to swallow, by which means, both his Head
and Heels turn'd Giddy. And thus was he Bound, by the Direction of Mr. Goodman, and by his Crew, led in Chains Triumphantly. So he that
appear'd before as a Mighty walking Oak, is himself now tied to the Mast of a
Ship: And is a spectacle as much of Horrour, as he was before of
Admiration. So for the Fable: being Believ'd by many Thousands, about the
end of this last Month for a Reality.

The MORAL

Success often makes men Drunk. And Policy, is to be Preferr'd before all the Strength in the
World, be it never to Prodigious.

The Eighteenth-Century has Created a Dramaturgical Nightmare!

It's paper time again, people. This stack of books is about half (maybe a third) of the sources I will use for one of my three major papers this semester. For this paper, which I am writing for my Restoration and Eighteenth Century class, I am writing on the tragedies of John Dryden. The reason I chose this study is because the study of Restoration Tragedy is sorely neglected. The truth is, there was so much bawdy sex humor being written that the more "serious" dramatic works have been overlooked.

Interestingly, the comic works aren't very strong dramatically speaking (though they are awful funny). For this reason, theatre schools consider very few plays of the period to be canonized. In fact, the term "Restoration Drama" as it is termed in theatre departments is a misnomer, since the primary works given this label are those by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, both of whom wrote a full one hundred years after the Restoration of the British Monarchy.

That being said, the actual plays of the Restoration have largely been overlooked, save for endless anthologizing (it seems that archiving and anthologizing are favorite British pastimes). This is evidenced by the fact that a few of the book in the above pictured stack have not been checked out of UCO's library since 1978. Those that have have still only been checked out a few times since their printings, years and years ago.

Also in the works is a paper/presentation on Samuel Johnson's Dictionary and something on Gothicism.

Just When You Thought Spring Was Coming

Cooper sure is loving it. He thinks I am going to come out and play with him. He is mistaken.

At least though, this is little snow that falls for a little while and melts. Plus, it's so cold that the snow can't stick to the concrete so it just blows around. That's the kind of snow I like.

Star Struck

My dad called me this morning to tell me that he had recieved a surprise visitor in hid office last light. Holly Hunter, star of stage and screen, came into his office to view a presentation he gives when he teaches. She is researching for a role in TNT's upcoming series "Grace" in which she plays an Oklahoma City Police detective who kills someone in a car wreck. She has been spending her time with Detective Chris Cunningham, one of our very outstanding female detectives who brought her on a crime scene then to my old man's office. She interviewed him about all things police such as office pranks, women in police work, etc and watched about 3/4 of his presentation "Waking the Dead," a gruesome and gory presentation that she handles well "for a civilian."

It will be interesting to see what they do to my department on TNT.

Thawing...For Now

As you can see by the signs of water moving, we are beginning to thaw. But not so fast Evel Knievel. The three inches of ice on everything is melting slowly, which means that it's going to refreeze tonight. Plus, there is a 100% chance of snow on Saturday, with some snow possible Friday evening. Round three. Plus more may be on the way next weekend! Will it ever end?

Cops in a Snow Storm II

If you drink and drive and try to do donuts around a snow plow, you may end up like this... in a very deep ditch with no hope of rescuse until firemen come to lift you out with a rope.

And then you'll end up with a line of policemen who have come to laugh at you. And with slurred speech you'll ask, "okay, who's supposed to arrest me?"

Frozen Armeggedon

Ice isn't like snow. I think in places where it snows, they don't understand this. I think this because they're always saying stupid crap like, "we get 7,000 feet of snow a year. You guys get one inch and it shuts your whole state down."

In an ice storm, no inch is left untouched. All the rock salt in the world does nothing because the ice just melts only to instantly refreeze. And the ground isn't covered with a soft, pure white blanket, but rather a close, hard layer of gray. Ice makes everything the same color. The ground is gray, the trees are gray, the sky is gray. And at night, the lights of civilization bounce back and forth between the clouds and the ice, making the nighttime the same color as the day. Last night brought to mind a scene from Beckett's Endgame.

C: Never seen anything like that.
H: What? A sail, a fin? Smoke?
C: The light is sunk.
H: Pah! We all knew that.
C: There was a little bit left.
H: The base?
C: Yes.
H: And now?
C: All gone.
...
H: And the sun?
C: Zero.
H:But it should be sinking. Look again.
C: Damn the sun!
H: Is it night already then?
C: No.
H: Well what is it?
C: Gray.

Stay With Chicken Little. We'll Keep You Advised

Mention Ice and this is what Walmart looks like. It's time to run out and horde people! Charissa took this picture with her cell phone. She said that there was no milk, juice, apples, sandwich bread, lunch meat, or twinkies! Oh Help us! No Twinkies!!!

Murder-Rapture: A Play Written in Four Days

As a writing experiment, I have cloistered myself in my house for the better part of four days to see if I could compose a full length play by January 15th. It is of note that I have written many many plays but have yet to actually complete a full one (a play is considered full length at 90-110 pages).

This was a two part experiment 1) To see if the shirt time span would make it easier to actually complete the thing without running out of gas and 2) To see what the shirt time span would do with the stream of conscience within the play itself. These two things are difficult to analyze because in the case of the first, I don't really know if the time span had anything to do with being able to complete the play, or if I finally found the right combination of plot elements to keep a play alive for two hours. The second is difficult because a writer must be removed from a play before he can objectively analyze it or he must have a trusted person who knows what they are talking about analyze it for him.

Since you don't care about the logistics of playwriting, I'll just tell you what it's about. Two men stumble into becoming the most prolific serial killers in history. Then one of them falls in love. Dark hilarity ensues. By the final scene, there are so many bodies stashed in the basement of this house that they are overflowing onto the stage floor and the audience learns that there is no life left in the whole town where the play takes place.

I am going to enter the play into Jewel Box's play contest, even if it is still need of revision by the 15th... just to see what happens. I desperately want to accept the award at their banquet and say, "thank you so much. I wrote this in four days." The prize money would also pay for nearly half a semester's tuition.

I am the Biggest Nerd Ever!

My nerdiness is clear in the marvelous Christmas I had this year. Among my gifts were the entire Beckett in Film series (the nineteen plays of Samuel Beckett all on film), An Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, An Interlinear Greek/Hebrew/English Bible, and a seemingly endless supply of Barnes and Noble gift cards. One present, however, didn't arrive in time for Christmas so I got only a picture of it wrapped in a box. Today, finally, I received via US Postal Service, the Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology.

It's nerdy enough that I know what the word "Etymology" means. It's even more nerdy that I can spell it without looking it up. But what's nerdiest of all was the excitement I expressed when I finally got it in the mail. Knowing what it was, I tore it open with no regard for the box in which it came. I threw the packing peanuts all over the house, took the book out, and ran through the living room shouting, "Woo Hoo!"

I then hung my head in shame. How have I come to this? I watch baseball and lift weights. I am a tough, mean cop. How can I be such an awful nerd. Oh well, the shame has passed, I will now sit down and enjoy my 916 pages of the origins of American English.