Radio Free Heaven

I've become addicted to fundamentalist christian radio. It's both hilarious and disturbing. T'other day on the way from the airport I learned that boys like science while girls like kissing, and that Jesus made the lesser weasel to keep mice from eating our grain. No word on why he made mice.

The most horrific thing was a kiddie show wherein "Hassan," a "Gibeonite" with a strong Arab accent, told a story about how his people had tricked Joshua into disobeying the Lord and not committing genocide against them. God loves genocide, apparently. I just can't wait until He tells Bushua to wipe out the Amalekites, man woman and child. At least the kids raised on these radio lessons won't object.

Why talk we of fathers when there is such a town as Orlando?

Some days I don't feel like a pro-fessor so much as a shamefully amateur fessor. But last weekend I had a marvellous extravaganza of professionalism. I saw papers on Jonson and space theory, made plans (while in a hot tub at 3:00 am) with a guy at Stanford to work with me on dredging up my editing project, and came home with lots of receipts and lots of e-mail addresses.

Without question, however, the highlight of the weekend was that the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies shared a hotel with a celebrity impersonators convention. It was hilarious. I looked more like Ozzy Osbourne than that guy, or at least I would've in his wig and sunglasses. There's something that heightens even the absurd surreality of Disneyworld about being on a dance floor where Jack Nicholson is dancing with Carrie-Anne Moss to the tune of "Yoda," the Star Wars parody of "Lola," sung by the fattest Weird Al you're ever likely to see.

Makin' me Disney, my head is spinnin'

I'm at the annual GroupForEarlyModernCulturalStudies conference this weekend, which is at Walt Disney World for some reason. I'm staying in a spa and resort, which means I could get a much needed haircut on my arrival (the back of my head looked like an exploding chicken) and eat lunch by a pool in weather so nice that it's almost terrifying to the pale-assed northerner that I've become.

A completely unrelated thought: why does every flight attendant on every anglophone airline not only use an inordinate number of unnecessary auxiliary verbs, but actually emphasize them? I think it can only be a conscious attempt to drive me to murder. "At this time we do ask that you do make sure your seatbelts are securely fastened until the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign..."

Ahem. What this weekend really means, however, is that I get an intellectual spa treatment. Hot rocks on my brain with deep penetrating heat, taking me away from the semester, from my students, from my plagiarism cases, from my tiny world where no one thinks about the stuff I think about. I have papers on Jonson and rogue pamphlets to listen to today. I have friends I haven't seen for months to drink and dance and talk with. I have professional contacts to make and new books to flip through. I get to be Professor Me for the first time in public. It's very cool.

Thanks to several previous-conference-acquired friends, I have a nice solid base of "good-lord-I-haven't-seen-you-in-ages" people to catch up with, and we're already starting to accrete more to the collective social conference entity. I have inserted my Wisconsin grad school roommate into the hive mind already. Saturday night should be fun.

Okay, back to watching the sunrise over the horizon of Mickey Tack. Tonight, again, we'll hear the fireworks from Pleasure Island, where every night is New Year's Eve.

Some reasons to love teaching

Teaching Doctor Faustus today offered me the opportunity to:

1. Make sleepy 19-year-olds perform as the Seven Deadly Sins. Lechery was particularly entertaining.
2. Do an aikido roll in the middle of class (to illustrate the way in which Jude Law was forcibly shat out of Gluttony's body in the 2002 Young Vic production).
3. Scream at my students in indignance and horror when it became clear that none of them has seen "Monty Python's Meaning of Life": "GET SOME CULTURAL LITERACY, PEOPLE!!! READ!!! SEE MOVIES!!! LISTEN TO MUSIC!!! EXPAND YOUR HORIZONS SO I CAN ALLUDE TO THINGS IN CLASS!"

Screaming notwithstanding, it was an enjoyable class for everybody. It's a good job, this.

Little bird paintings

I remember from my undergraduate Asian art class that when one Chinese dynasty (whose dates and name I can't remember, but it probably rhymed with "in") was conquered by the Mongols, their art turned from huge bold scrolls of mountains and landscapes and armies to still lifes and portraits of little birds. Apparently that's what we do when we can't stand to think about the horrors of the world. We turn to small, seemingly insignificant things.

So with that in mind, and in the spirit of fiddling as Rome becomes ashes, anybody want to hear about the minor weirdnesses of my love life?

Inasmuch as it consists of meeting people online (who occasionally turn out to be artificial identities and in any case always live hundreds of miles away), and depending on my friends to set me up, it really isn't much of a love life, per se. Not seeing anybody. My shrink would be so proud. But still.

Here, for example, is how not to set your friends up with each other:

1. Do not set up your friend in Wisconsin with your friend who lives in Hertfordshire.
2. If you choose to ignore rule 1, don't introduce them on the night before the English one flies back to England.
3. If you determine that you wish to ignore rules 1 and 2 and set these people up on a blind date, don't come along.
4. If you do in fact, make the tremendous mistake of setting up your friends from different continents on the last night that this is possible and on accompanying them on this blind date, do not ask the gentleman to go to the toilet so that you may discuss how it is going behind his back.

This advice comes to you at no charge.

The Morons Rule the World

I could hardly see to teach Doctor Faustus through my angry tears on Wednesday, and Thursday my mother called me in the office.

"How are you doing, son?"

"Oh, pretty angry and depressed, Mom."

"Really? Why?"

There followed more, but all I can remember is red starbursts behind my eyes and a moronic bleating sound.

And now for my semi-regular dose of unforgivable solipsism: it struck me today that even though 2004 is the year I finished my degree and got a job, I'm going to look back on it as the most depressing and agonizing year of my life. Even the misery factor of my having broken up with J.--I'm getting better, really, and she's most likely loads happier without me than she was with me--won't even wobble the needle of the pain meter compared to the planet-bursting agony that four more years of Bush will cause.

And to top it all off, I have to read sentences like "Shakespear is a unique, yet very smart man."

Nevermind

I know that you're all sick of reading things like this, but:

The only thing giving me hope for the past four years, the only thing keeping me from putting out my eyes and throwing myself off a cliff was the knowledge that last time they stole the election. That this monstrosity was not really elected at all.

Last time we knew nothing about Bush (unless we listened to Texans, but who listens to Texans?). We thought he was a "compassionate conservative." He promised to be responsible with money, to steward our natural resources, to enact moderate, bipartisan policies and a humble foreign policy. We're stupid of course; we're Americans. But given what he promised to be, you could see him fooling a fair number of intelligent people.

But now we've had four years of this environment-raping, poor-people-hating, retard-executing, empire-building, reality-challenged, war-profiteering, lying, thieving, megalomaniac ass wart. And it looks as though more than half of us are willing to shout "Yippee! More of the same! Roll me up to that pile of dung and hand me a spoon, baby!"

So what I'm asking of my friends lucky enough to live abroad is: Send the bombs now. Please, for the good of the planet, exterminate us. We are too stupid and evil a nation to live, and our continued existence threatens all of you in the "reality-based community." Sanction us, starve us out, attack us, maybe send in pudding cups on parachutes as a humanitarian effort. But whatever you do, do it quickly. We, as a nation, must be destroyed.

Election day hope

Here in the alleged birthplace of the Republican party, where those of us still pushing for a blue Wisconsin tend to cringe and tiptoe around homegrown political rhetoric coming from our local shopkeeps and small business owners, charming and cheerful as they can often be. So when I went to buy socks at the shop around the corner just now (how's that for an all-american lunch-hour thing to do?), and walked in on raised voices and phrases like "this joker" and "U.N. involvement," I set my teeth and said to myself, "Socks. I'm here for socks."

But soon it became apparent that the septuagenarian behind the counter was actually that rarest of beasts in Nowhere, WI, a thoughtful, if exceedingly vociferous, progressive! After browbeating her interlocutor out of the building by loudly demanding some evidence for her Fox News-based assertions about the war, my new favorite sock merchant and I had a vigorous chit chat about the abuses of the local Assembly of God pulpit, various arguments for and against the reinstitution of the draft, and her grandchildren.

I was nearly skipping about, I was so happy to meet her. I have new faith in the town's political heteroglossia, and I have three pairs of socks, for $10.47.