College Football Dream Conference Alignment

Anyone who follows college football knows that there are some serious shake-ups in the offing. In this case, it's not necessarily a good thing because television and money is trumping play-style, old alliances, and geographical concerns. So, here's my dream conference alignment that will never ever happen. (Automatic BCS qualifiers are marked with an asterisk, and note that there are fewer now--only 4, which leaves more chances for other conferences.)

ACC-North

• Boston College
• Georgia Tech
• Maryland
• Navy
• North Carolina
• NC State

ACC-South

• Duke
• Miami (FL)
• South Carolina
• South Florida
• Virginia
• Wake Forest

Big East

• Army
• Connecticut
• East Carolina
• Memphis
• Pitt
• Rutgers
• Syracuse
• West Va

Big XII-North*

• Arkansas
• Colorado
• Oklahoma
• Oklahoma State
• Texas Christian
• Texas Tech

Big XII-South*

• Arizona
• Arizona State
• Houston
• Mississippi State
• Texas
• Texas A&M

CSA (Conference of Student Athletics)

• Baylor
• Northwestern
• Rice
• SMU
• Temple
• Tulane
• Vanderbilt

C-USA-East

• Alabama-Birmingham
• Central Florida
• Florida Atlantic
• Marshall
• Middle Tennessee State
• Troy
• Western Kentucky

C-USA-West

• Arkansas State
• Louisiana-Lafayette
• Louisiana-Monroe
• La Tech
• Kansas State
• North Texas
• UT-El Paso

Heartland Conference (Formerly the Big 1Ten1)-Great Lakes*

• Illinois
• Indiana
• Michigan
• Michigan State
• Minnesota
• Purdue
• Wisconsin

Heartland Conference-Great Plains*

• Cincinnati
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Mizzou
• Nebraska
• Notre Dame
• Ohio State

MAC-East

• Akron
• Bowling Green
• Buffalo
• Kent State
• Miami (OH)
• Ohio
• Toledo

MAC-West

• Ball State
• Central Michigan
• Eastern Michigan
• Iowa State
• Northern Illinois
• Western Michigan

M-WAC (Formerly MWC and WAC)

• Colorado State
• Hawaii
• Idaho
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New Mexico State
• San Jose State
• UNLV
• Utah
• Utah State
• Wyoming

MWC (Dissolved)

Pac-12 (Formerly Pac-10)-Emerald*

• Boise State
• BYU
• Oregon
• Oregon State
• Washington
• Wazzu

Pac-12-Golden*

• Cal
• Fresno State
• San Diego State
• Stanford
• UCLA
• USC

SEC-East*

• Florida
• Florida State
• Clemson
• Georgia
• Kentucky
• Va Tech

SEC-West*

• Alabama
• Auburn
• LSU
• Mississippi
• Southern Miss
• Tennessee

Sun-Belt (Dissolved)

WAC (Dissolved)

Top Ten Side-One, Track-Ones

Recently, NPR's All Songs Considered had a post about the best side-one, track ones ever. So, of course, I had to make my own list:

Top Ten (in order):

1) “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” The Doors by The Doors

2) “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nevermind by Nirvana

3) “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles

4) “Born in the U.S.A.,” Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen

5) “London Calling,” London Calling by The Clash

6) “Guitar Town,” Guitar Town by Steve Earle

7) “The Girl from Ipanema,” Getz/Gilberto by Stan Getz and João Gilberto

8) “A Love Supreme, Pt 1: Acknowledgment,” A Love Supreme by John Coltrane

9) “Second Hand News,” Rumours by Fleetwood Mac

10) “Nebraska,” Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen

Now, to make it even more interesting, here is my Top Ten Eponymous side-one, track-one (also in order):

1) “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles

2) “Born in the U.S.A.,” Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen

3) “London Calling,” London Calling by The Clash

4) “Guitar Town,” Guitar Town by Steve Earle

5) “Nebraska,” Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen

6) “What’s Goin’ On,” What’s Goin On by Marvin Gaye

7) “My Favorite Things,” My Favorite Things by John Coltrane

8) “White Light/White Heat,” White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground

9) “My Funny Valentine,” My Funny Valentine by Chet Baker

10) “Running on Empty,” Running on Empty by Jackson Browne

Honorable Mention (in alphabetical order):

“About a Girl,” MTV Unplugged in New York by Nirvana

“Alice’s Restaurant Massacre,” Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie

“Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul,” Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus

“Blinded by the Light,” Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. by Bruce Springsteen

“Blister in the Sun,” Violent Femmes by Violent Femmes

“Blue Rondo a la Turk,” Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet

“Boyz-n-the-Hood,” N.W.A. and the Posse by N.W.A.

“Breaking the Law,” British Steel by Judas Priest

“Caring is Creepy,” Oh, Inverted World! By The Shins

“Come Together,” Abbey Road by The Beatles

“Debaser,” Doolittle by Pixies

“Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough,” Off the Wall by Michael Jackson

“Enter Sandman,” Metallica by Metallica

“Fire of Unknown Origin,” Fire of Unknown Origin by Blue Öyster Cult

“Folsom Prison Blues,” At Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash

“Gimme Shelter,” Let it Bleed by The Rolling Stones

“Gloria,” Horses by Patti Smith

“Good Times, Bad Times,” Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin

“Hard Day’s Night,” Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles

“Head Like a Hole,” Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails

“Highway to Hell,” Highway to Hell by AC/DC

“Hotel California,” Hotel California by The Eagles

“King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1,” In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel

“Let’s Go Crazy,” Purple Rain by Prince and the Revolution

“Like a Rolling Stone,” Highway 61 Revisted by Bob Dylan

“Lion’s Mane,” Creek Drank the Cradle by Iron & Wine

“Loser,” Mellow Gold by Beck

“Magical Mystery Tour,” Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles

“Mrs. Robinson,” Concert in Central Park by Simon & Garfunkel

“Peter Piper,” Raising Hell, by Run D.M.C.

“Phases and Stages (Theme)/Washing the Dishes,” Phases and Stages by Willie Nelson

“Pink Moon,” Pink Moon by Nick Drake

“Radio Free Europe,” Murmur by R.E.M.

“Rehab,” Back to Black by Amy Winehouse

“Roscoe,” The Trials of Van Occupanter by Midlake

“Say It (Over and Over Again),” Ballads by John Coltrane

"See No Evil," Television by Television

"Shotgun Willie," Shotgun Willie by Willie Nelson

“Speak to Me/Breathe,” Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd

“So Far Away,” Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits

“So What,” Kind of Blue by Miles Davis

“Soul Man,” Soul Men by Sam & Dave

“Vicarious,” 10,000 Days by Tool

“Walt Whitman’s Niece,” Mermaid Avenue by Billy Bragg and Wilco

“Watermelon Man,” Takin’ Off by Herbie Hancock

“Welcome to the Jungle,” Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses

“Where the Streets Have no Name,” Joshua Tree by U2

“White Room,” Wheels of Fire by Cream

“Wouldn’t it be Nice,” Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys

“Disease is the Love of Two Alien Kinds of Creatures”: Desire as Pathogen in David Cronenberg’s Shivers **Explicit/Adult Content**

What follows is a little talk I did for the UO "Horror and the Horrific" film series about a month ago. Yes, that is how long it's taken me just to copy and paste something onto this blog. So sad.



“Disease is the Love of Two Alien Kinds of Creatures”: Desire as Pathogen in David Cronenberg’s Shivers

Shivers is one of David Cronenberg’s oddest films: it is his first commercial, feature-length film; it is little-known; it is rich with allusions (William Blake, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hobbes, St Luke the physician); and, like most of his films, Shivers makes extensive use of binaries. What I’d like to do is examine just one set of binaries on which much of the film’s horror is based, but one that is less obvious than a first viewing would suggest. My thesis is obvious, however: desire—instead of the parasites or infected sex maniacs—is used to horrify the audience.

Since what we’re about to watch is something you’ve likely never seen or even heard of, I want to quickly outline the film. WARNING: Here be spoilers.

The first scene is a montage of binaries, visualizing the confusion that results from their coexistence. In Starliner Towers, an ultra-mod high-rise condominium, we see a slick property manager “hunt” prospective renters; interspersed with this is the actual “hunt” and mutilation of a young woman by a much older man. The scene ends with the man slitting his own throat with a scalpel. From here the film proceeds along two complementary lines—a detective story in which the main characters try to figure out just what is going on, and a horror story in which the main characters try to resist infection. As the detective yarn unfolds, we learn the older man was a scientist who created a parasite that is half aphrodisiac, half venereal disease—with which he hoped to turn the world into a giant orgy. As the horror plot unfolds and the infection spreads exponentially, Dr. Roger St Luc, the condo’s medical officer, and Nurse Forsythe (Lynn Lowry in her post-The Crazies and pre-Cat People role) try in vain to resist. Eventually, she’s infected and finally infects St Luc.

I notice that when I give the bare outline of the plot, the film sounds like an on-the-cheap forerunner of Resident Evil or a reimagining of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. For most first-time viewers, the aspects that make Shivers a horror movie are the parasites and the infected. When we get a good look at them, the parasites look like phallic turds—pretty disgusting if the special effects weren’t so laughable. But they invade the boundaries of the body and colonize people—pretty scary. The infected, unlike Romero’s zombies, look mostly normal, but they are aggressive, and the film depicts them all as sexually transgressive.

But I wonder…there is a fear of pathogen in the film, but the fear isn’t elicited by the squishy, brown parasites or the infected, bare-chested janitor who advances on our hero in the basement boiler room. Instead, uncontrolled desire is the pathogen that elicits horror in the audience because the film suggests that there’s nothing inhuman about the actions it depicts. We are all already infected.

But what about those parasites? How are they not horrific? What about the infected? The former is disgusting and the other threatening, but that hardly counts for horrific. In fact, the parasites cause permanent damage to only one character and aren’t directly responsible for a single death. The infected are sexual predators, but they’re only responsible for one death in the film; the supposedly healthy characters kill five people. So I’d like to suggest that the parasites and infected are scary but not horrifying.

That likely needs some explanation because you’re probably wondering how “scary” and “horrifying” are different. What I mean by “scary” is the scene or action that may frighten us, but that we can leave behind. To use an example from the era of Shivers: in Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), it’s damn scary when Leatherface comes out of nowhere and smacks Kirk with the hammer, dragging him into the house and slamming the steel door. But the dinner scene is horrifying because Sally is trapped and we finally understand that the family is operating by a set of rules known only to them. Norman Bates in that wig also fits the bill. Regan MacNeil vomiting pea soup does not. The horrific, for my purposes, is that set of disturbing aspects of a film or text that you can’t quite shake, so it seems to me that unbound desire is the really horrific aspect of Shivers. It’s the sexual violence and transgression that really make the film disturbing.

(I should stop for a moment here and note there are quite a few sexualities depicted here that we don’t necessarily consider transgressive. But this is 1975—six years after Stonewall and only four years after the National Women’s Political Caucus was formed: the list of mainstream sexualities was still pretty narrow, so when I label something “sexually transgressive” know that I am talking within the context of the film only.)

In the context of the film, we see almost no sexual desire in a positive light. We’ll see only violent heterosexuality. We’ll also see unwilling participation in group sex, overt lesbianism (on which Cronenberg see ms to linger), subtle male homoeroticism (which provokes some of the most vigorous responses from St Luc), pedophilia, S&M, and incest. And I don’t even know how to categorize Barbara Steele’s character being raped by a parasite in the bathtub (parasite sodomy?).

What’s horrific is that humans are capable of—and often prone to—everything we see in the film. If anything, the parasites unchain desire in the characters. And this is exactly what Hobbes wanted to do. Linsky tells us: “Hobbes believed ‘Man is an animal who thinks

too much, an over-rational animal that’s lost touch with its body and its instincts,” and we learn that the parasite was designed to “turn the world into one beautiful, mindless orgy.” It works all too well, and seeing his experiment work, Dr. Hobbes (just like Victor Frankenstein), recoils in horror, killing his young lover (the twelve-year-old-girl all grown up) and himself to try to stop the spread of the pathogen. So the film presents the old binary of cool reason and flaming desire, and shows us what happens when the balance skews too far toward the animalistic side: it’s probably no accident that Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying—and its popularization of the “zipless fuck”—was published two years before Shivers was released. The film is almost certainly responding to this notion and the ongoing sexual revolution—meditating on a limit case.

Cronenberg himself seems to confirm this. As steeped as he is in Freud (see The Brood and Dead Ringers, especially), it should be no surprise that he thinks “civilization is repression. You don’t get civilization without repression of the unconscious, the id.” Starliner Towers and St Luc, then, are civilization with all the repressive social controls. The parasite removes those controls and leaves the infected free to pursue individual desires without regard for the welfare of the civilization as a whole—as “nasty” and “brutish” as anything Dr. Hobbes’ namesake ever imagined.

Nurse Forsythe perhaps says it best in her monologue toward the end of the film. She tells St Luc about a dream she’d had the night before:

“in this dream I find myself making love to a strange man. Only I'm having trouble, you see, because he’s old and dying, and he smells bad and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual…He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh, that disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other…That talking is sexual, that breathing is sexual, that even to physically exist is sexual…And I believe him, and we make love beautifully.”

(Fun fact: in the original script, Cronenberg has Forsythe making love to Freud himself.)

Now, she’s infected when she shares this with St Luc, but I want to point out that she had the dream the night before when she was still healthy—and this again points to the latent desire in every human, desire that is enabled by the parasite but not caused by it. St Luc, one of the most asexual characters in a Cronenberg film, responds as civilization. He represses the expression of transgressive desire by promptly punching Forsythe in the mouth and gagging her. But he does not kill her (for civilization cannot kill desire); instead he totes her around for a bit longer. The two are eventually separated, and St Luc holds out until he’s trapped in the condo’s swimming pool by a horde of infected.

A swimming pool.

Cronenberg could not have picked a more evocative metaphor because in Freudian dream psychology, water is one of the main metaphors for the unconscious. What we end up with, then, is St Luc—who coolly discussed the finer points of parasites and smoked a cigarette as Forsythe seductively writhed out of her nurse’s uniform,

who flees from three over-sexed women in a pool as if they were Romero’s zombies—St Luc, the patron saint of medicine and physicians, is literally and figuratively submerged in the pool of his unconscious. Hands in the air, he is baptized into desire. All his inhibitions are washed away.

With his fall, we are ushered into the world of unchecked desire: old men desiring young women, old women desiring young men, men desiring little girls, fathers desiring daughters, men desiring men, women desiring women, and—for some reason—twin girls wearing leashes and dog collars. The parasite returns humanity to a more animalistic state. The real horror of Shivers, then, stems from human nature: the performance of desires we’ve all had but repressed is that part of Shivers that is horrific—because it nudges, if only for a moment, our own horrific unconscious into stark outline. As Tom Stoppard’s Guildenstern so eloquently puts it, “it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque,” but a grotesque that we carry within us always.

Centers of Wisdom vs. Centers of Knowledge

Old people have always been considered centers of wisdom; whether or not we respect them for it, most people recognize that old folks have a helluva lot of life experience on the rest of us.

But I was listening to Guy Clark's "Texas, 1947" just now and I realized that in the last 100 years or so it's much more common to view younger people as centers of knowledge. The song was written about the first time he ever saw a Streamline train out in west Texas:

Trains are big and black and smokin', louder'n July four,
but everybody's actin' like this might be somethin' more

than just pickin' up the mail, or the soldiers from the war.
This is somethin' that even old man Wileman never seen before.

Not anymore, kids. Anyone under 20 has seen hundreds of things that their grandparents haven't seen--or even dreamed of.

I wonder what that does to our sense of wonderment about the world around us...

The Sweet, Sweet Case Against Torture

Over at The Raw Story, there's this little tidbit about FBI interrogation:

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free cookies.

Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.

I'm scared. If the FBI ever interrogates me, it won't take much to break me--but they'll have to spring for the Pepperidge Farm Milanos to get anything out of me. They put some crappy Hydrox cookies in front of me and they'd better break out the thumbscrews. I don't talk for just any crappy cookie.

But, of course, the most striking thing about this anecdote is that the soft sell works, too. I'm not arguing that 100% of the time torture gives false or useless information; I don't think that's true. Maybe these acts of torture did save thousands of American lives, but I have two problems with this argument.

1) What does it profit a nation to gain its safety and yet lose its soul? That's a revision of Matthew 8.36, and it fits us to a tee. Once you start giving up the things that make us (or that we pretend make us) who we are, there's nothing left. We are, so say the cultural conservatives, a nation with not a religion, not a race, not an individual, not a shared history, but a group of ideas at our center (that's Allan Bloom, Geoffrey Hart, and the National Review talking, not me). If we want immigrants to integrate into our nation, if we want strict Constitutionalists on the bench (Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity), then we better damn well be willing to stick to those core values when the going gets tough. Oddly enough, those two blowhards are the very ones still trying to defend activities that were--and again are--deemed torture. So they're essentially saying that our core values are only important when they're not being tested. Nice.

2) Furthermore, it does not follow that because torture (did produce/probably produced/maybe produced) actionable intelligence other techniques that aren't against the Geneva Convention might have produced the same information. It's a freshman composition-level fallacy to think that the success of torture means that it was the only solution. That's a lot of faith to place in something that has such a possible downside. Non-abusive interrogation might have helped produce a Muslim world more receptive to American overtures and ideas than the large-scale entrenchment and increased radicalization that we seem to have spawned with our treatment of prisoners.

I'm not disparaging the men and women who found themselves in the position of interrogators. It is easier to inflict pain and abuse on someone you loathe. I certainly would not want to be in the position of these interrogators (many of whom were not trained as interrogators and were just thrust into the position) since they were working with prisoners that they had every right to believe were responsible for the death of thousands of Americans.

It's not surprising that vengeance rather than intelligence became the goal (how else could you hang people in a room by their wrists, place a spolight or strobe shining in their faces, and blast the Red Hot Chili Peppers at them?). Rather than working them over and making them help you, the more inviting way is to punish. It's understandable--maybe not excusable, but understandable. What is not understandable or excusable is that top-level governmental officials not only let this happen, but went out of their way to make it happen. The FBI apparently repeatedly asked for top-level permission to do some of these "enhanced interrogation techniques" before it would even allow them to take place. John Yoo and many others in the DoJ went out of their way to create a legal footing for these actions.

I think we--as with our economy, infrastructure, intelligence, election reform, ethics reform, etc.--took the easy way out. And just like all those other instances, it's going to cost us in the long run.

To Rage Against the Machine or to Fight for Some Time at the Wheel?

Jane Miriam Epperson Brinley has written an interesting piece for the Washington Post on the College Board's decision to reduce the Latin AP exam to just Virgil. No more Catullus. No more Cicero. No more Horace. No more Ovid. As far as the College Board is concerned, Virgil is Latin literature.

She's frustrated, and rightly so. Her career and passion just got kicked in the teeth, was just labeled "unnecessary." As a medievalist, I feel her pain. But her response, her analysis of why this happened is way off. She comments:

In the gap created by our national reluctance to centralize education policy, the College Board, an unelected body, has ended up as the de facto Education Ministry, and when it makes decisions we have no recourse....The College Board's curriculum-setting role goes beyond the AP course itself. Latin courses for elementary schools (a growth area), middle schools and high schools will now change, and textbooks will change along with them....So long as AP exams continue to influence high school curricula and so long as financial, and not educational, imperatives seem to drive College Board decisions, we should be asking who we really want in charge of all our disciplines.

She's lamenting the lack of a centralized "Education Ministry"; leaving my objections to the Euro-centric nomenclature of "Ministry" aside, I'd respond that such an entity is problematic in its own right and isn't the magic bullet she seems to think it is. No Child Left Behind mandates a state-wide standard that all students should meet. This creates at least two unfavorable outcomes: 1) a child in Portland, Oregon will be held to a different standard than a child 10 miles away in Vancouver, Washington. 2) Children in Orange County, Compton, and Berkeley, California all must meet the same standard--even though their resources, skill levels, environments, and perhaps even goals for education will be quite different.

NCLB is a top-down approach that demands teachers "teach to the test" because that is how the so-called progress of each school will be judged. It essentially creates a centralized "Education Ministry" in the form of state bureaucracies that pretend they know what children need to learn. I cannot understand how someone living in Indianapolis, Indiana knows what a child in Tell City needs to learn--but even worse is the presumption of knowing how she needs to learn it.

Alongside the NCLB at the elementary and secondary level we also have magazines like US News & World Report shaping our universities. In 2001, Baylor University adopted what became known as the 2012 Vision which has as its goal "moving Baylor into the upper echelons of higher education." These 12 imperatives follow closely the criteria by which US News & World Report judges the so-called "Best Colleges." In fact, they look like Baylor just imported the criteria wholesale and added "with a Christian identity" to a few of them. So really, Baylor is spending a decade to get a national magazine to like it.

And Baylor hasn't even tried to hide this:

• Larry Lyon, the head of the Graduate School was using the magazine as his benchmark when he said "The universities that are listed as top tier undergraduate universities by US News & World Report have, on average, 40 percent of their students enrolled in graduate education. We average about 12 percent."
• In its pitch for the Bush Presidential Library the PR folks apparently thought the magazine's judgment of the university was a selling point, writing: "Over the years Baylor's academic programs have received national and international recognition through solid rankings in U.S.News and World Report and other respected publications." Baylor didn't get the Bush Presidential Library--even though it probably should have.
  
• And then there is the May 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that flatly states: "Baylor is clear about how it will calibrate its success...its overarching goal is to enter the top tier of institutions, as determined by U.S. News & World Report's college rankings."
  

So a magazine is the entity controlling the long-term direction of a major university (and I'm sure Baylor isn't the only one--which just makes it worse). What is wrong with that picture? I mean, I'd take the College Board over the US News & World Report any day of the week and twice on Sunday. What's more, neither NCLB nor US News & World Report have anything close to the sort of system of appeals that Brinley wants. And I doubt that any larger "Education Ministry" would, either.

Even if it did, it doesn't sound like Brinley could make a compelling case for keeping a more thorough Latin program. Here is her big rationale for the importance of Latin:

Latin, revered by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders -- John Adams declaimed the speeches of Cicero, once even in a toga -- has been placed in the hands of a bunch of administrative functionaries.

I hate to be catty toward someone who's trying to work through some of the things that medievalists are facing at the university level, but this argument is not going to cut it. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams loved Latin? OK...great. What have you done for me lately?

That rationale doesn't even make me want to save Latin, and I love Latin (without strong Latin programs, medieval programs get weaker, too). I say scrap the complaints about the system itself and the financial motivations of the puppet-masters of education (the College Board may be financially driven but it's actually just following the lead of almost every university in the nation). Start telling everyone why you matter, why Latin programs shouldn't be anything past "Latin for Pre-Med" or "Latin for Pre-Law"--what one Latin professor I had at the University of Texas called "Words for Turds."

If you start thinking about that, you'll find that defending reading Ovid's Metamorphoses or Catullus' poems to Lesbia puts you in the same boat as the medievalist who's defending his work on footnotes in Duns Scotus or the cultural anthropologist who's defending her work on Nicaraguan Lesbian Poetry. It seems that if we could just all row in the same direction, we'd have something going.

But we can't seem to. Hell, we can't even seem to agree if we're in the same boat. I guess the real disagreement I have with Brinley is that which animates lots of discussions about what to do. From Marxism (Social Democrats and Communists) to medievalists (Bonnie Wheeler and Eileen Joy at Kalamazoo), it seems to run along the same lines: reformists changing things from within, revolutionaries making radical breaks from without. I don't mean to pick on Brinley, and I don't have a problem with radical breaks (sometimes they're the only option). But issuing a weak-voiced call for resistance to a well-funded, fully-entrenched institution like the College Board in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post doesn't seem like the kind of call to revolution we need. It just seems to me emblematic of a lot of the response from the academic community. We keep appealing to the better angels of the lawmakers' and citizenry's natures, but we're talking to people who largely don't get that allusion. Or what an allusion even is.

Maybe we need to stop complaining and waiting for someone to step in. Maybe we need to stop looking up at our so-called betters and begging Oliver Twist-like for some more. Maybe we should either damn the torpedoes and continue, Roark-style, with our chosen work--perhaps tell everyone else what they need instead of asking if they'd like to hear us now. Or even better we could collectively shrug and unseat the world. Personally, if we're going to do something, I'd prefer the latter. If we did it and the world went on without us, at least we would know where we stand and stop kidding ourselves about our importance. If we did it and it all started sliding downhill, at least for awhile we'd get the respect we deserved.

Thoughts?

BABEL CFP: Monstrous Binaries: Monster Theories in/at Play

Monstrous Binaries: Monster Theories in/at Play

“It is conventional to call ‘monster’ any blending of dissonant elements. I call ‘monster’ every original inexhaustible beauty.”—Alfred Jarry, “Les Monstres”

Whether or not it is beautiful, the monster is certainly inexhaustible. The BABEL Working Group invites submissions that explore the inexhaustibility of literary monsters as they both demand and defy binary characterizations. How might binary models explain, occlude, or displace other monstrous possibilities? The invitation is purposefully open and might include approaches that range from postcolonial theory to Russian Formalism, from queer theory to ecocriticism (and all points in between/beyond).

The panel will be a part of the 2009 SEMA conference, and its goal is to bring together disparate readings of monsters, letting them commingle, coexist, and (perhaps) coalesce for a few minutes. Abstracts should be for papers fifteen minutes in length. They may offer focused examinations of primary texts or more abstract, theoretical discussions, but all submissions should make explicit their theoretical genealogy.

A *partial* list of approaches might include: Kristeva, Foucault, Girard, Plumwood, Derrida, Bakhtin, Lacan, Cohen, Levi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, Propp, Zizek, Canguilhem, Butler, and/or Freud.

Deadline for Submission: 11 June 2009

Send Abstracts (150-250 words) to:

Timothy Asay (tasay@uoregon.edu) or

Marcus Hensel (mhensel1@uoregon.edu)

BABEL Working Group: http://www.siue.edu/babel/Babel-Home.htm

SEMA 2009 Conference: http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/site/gShQhq/sema2009