A tenured professor at Penn State Altoona is in trouble (the firing kind) for strongly opposing the new "Integrative Arts" degree program, and for offending a donor with a staging of Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago. I'm not familiar with the Altoona campus (I came straight up to University Park instead of passing through one of the feeder campuses), so I've never heard of this professor before. I wish I could say that I'm surprised that Penn State would be so spineless, but the way the university is structured, the donor is always right. Where else would they get the money for their metastatic-cancerous construction campaign?

Via Erin O'Connor, but of course.

Jessica said, in a comment below,

I keep waiting on a unified, nifty box set for Utena. I want it to be horribly, titty pink, like the Barbie color. It'd be great if it had glittery sparkles on it, too, or maybe that metallic overlay stuff.

Barbie is, at best, a secondary market for the doll-fancier version of the drag queen. Its primary market is still prepubescent little girls. I thought that the early marketing by CPM of Utena was too pink-innocent-girlie in the first place. (I thought that they should have tried aiming it at the Zena Warrior Princess crowd, even though that market was a tad butch for Utena) The new DVDs have a much more neutral affect, and I think that's for the best. Having finished watching the DVDs, I now recognize that I was overstating Utena's transgressiveness, but that doesn't mean that it isn't still too mature for the pink-preteen-girly-squeal! demographic that a pink-heavy box would appeal to.

[Jesus, could I possibly squeeze more bad grammar into a paragraph than the above example? If any of my grade-school English teachers are dead, they're rolling in their graves e'en now.]

Anyways, my impression from the first time I watched Utena through, was that the show morphed from a slightly racy, eccentric magical girl show into something a great deal darker and polymorphously freaky. To a certain extent, that was an artifact of shock and projection. Now that I've seen the show through for a second time, I recognize that it's not quite as wild as I thought it was. Yes, the symbolism is still there, but then there's symbolism and subtext in all sorts of otherwise-whitebread material. Utena just made more of a deal about it in the actual text itself, and then hammered home the point with a lot of silly gratuitous bishounen beefcake which, upon reviewing, was closer to Tiger Beat than Playgirl.

That being said, we are talking about a show whose themes are the incest taboo and gender roles. Gender roles by itself isn't anything to get excited about. But Utena's sister-complex freakout take on gender roleplaying results in some damnably hinky material. It's a rare teen-audience-show in which the explicitly homosexual elements are the least transgressive and disturbing, but Utena manages to do it.

Of course, Utena's wilful trampling of the distinctions between homosocial and homosexual norms is nothing new to anyone who might have encountered any amount of fanfiction, so maybe I'm being a bit blasé here. Shock of the new and all that. But the rampant incest-romance elements – Akio-Anthy, and their two precursor-echos, Miki & his sister Kaori, and Touga & Nanami – seem to put that issue firmly in the fore. Furthermore, the mythology of the Prince, a world of princesses and the witch-sibling seems to place the incest taboo at the heart of heterosexual romance, which is a damned strange way to look at the world, if you ask me. Looking at the ending in that light, it seems to suggest that homosexual romance is a broken solution to the sibling-incest-taboo problem.

Now, don't get me wrong. It's a brilliantly written and executed demonstration of this thesis. It's the theme itself that strikes me as bashit crazy. It's a solution in search of a problem. Of course, this could be my cultural conditioning speaking. Many anime and manga creators seem to be much more obsessed with the sibling incest taboo than your average American artist. Americans would seem to care more about the parental incest taboo. I don't think I've seen anything on that subject from any anime or manga creator outside of outright pornography, come to think of it.

Oh, by the way. Jurjen Smies' No Cameras is back, and with a vengeance. He's whaling on fucking moron Richard Perle, North Korea's lack of a need for nukes with 10,000 artillery tubes aimed at Seoul, and Michael Crichton's latest bullshit & the sacrosanct status of the *non*endangered species of whales. I had about given up on Jurjen - it's good to see him active and blogging again.

Murgh. Didn't intend to disappear like that, sorry. Bossman suddenly decided to demand that I, like, work for my salary. The nerve! So I was re-writing a user manual from cover to cover for the fourth or fifth time... Makework. Makes the world go round, it does.

I'm reading about six or seven books right now, once I finish the Blitzkrieg Myth I'll see if I can crank out a nice, thorough tap-dance on it's author's tiny little pin-sized skull. Reads as if one of those self-educated too-clever-by-half blowhards from the old alt.alternative.history.war newsgroup decided to write hisself a book, Martha. Full of proof-by-omission, mis-use of quotes, naked hero-worship and strawman molestation. The thesis is basically that J.F.C. Fuller and Gulio Douhet have much to answer for, and by god, they're gonna, if it's the last thing the author does. Bah.

In other news, Maison Ikkoku still rocks, if you can ignore Viz's subtitles, Utena is pretty nifty, and to judge from recent episodes of R.O.D TV and Godannar, there's some sort of microtrend in the offing in anime: childlike, brain-damaged ex-hotties as wards of our protagonists. Very odd.

Plague was, indeed
Something else
Too little to be a rat
Too wild to sit, quiet
Mere commonality
Micy silent
Like the other mice.
So, ratlike, he crept
Raiding the office larder
Trapped, mined
A juicy, dangerous place.
But, no matter how
Extrodinary
Mice must die
When steel jaws close.
No chloroform will end
His broken misery.
But cuteness cures
Where daring fails
And today resides
Plague the half-rat
In the warm cage
Of a warmhearted fool.

12/31/03

Last request of the night, from a friend of one of the other poets. She asked for rats, chloroform, and a third element which I can't remember, and which I think I might have dropped from the composition. I explained the story behind it, and she was greatly amused.

Midwinter trek
Through the late
December thaws
From one mountain
To a distant valley
Family tradition
New minted.
Not New Years Eve
But the First Night
Not parties and waiting
But an ice-rimmed
Celebratory glow
Lost parade maybes
The search more important
Than the little loss
And to culminate,
An eruptive glory
Of fire and light
And an infant new year
Aborning.

12/31/03

Mother and daughter, visiting town from the mountains of Cambria County, west of Altoona. They had mis-placed the parade, which appeared obligingly as I was copying out a finished version of this poem for them.

"They died with their boots on"
Or the mighty pilot-hero
In his soaring jet
The physicality of gender
Derived from the things
Until the boots themselves
Stand erect
And airplanes cleave the
Skies in masculine ardour
Then came a October
Afghanistan burned
Under a woman's contrail
And tonight a lioness in GI boots
Strides upon Mesopotamian soil
While her little cub opens
Boardgame gifts
Christmas alone at home.

12/31/03

Customer-poet, who later was one of the slam competitors. She asked for "Gender, boots, airplane, boardgame", and I gave her something like this. My original notes weren't much like the finished product, and I'm not sure if I got this version quite like what I delivered into her hands.

Africa rises in my mind
Teeming land of many breeds
Ranks of animals
Two by two
Noah's ark
In rocks and soil
The earthen ship
Holding our idea
of Nature
While nature rots under my heels.

12/31/03

This was my first try at something for a stern little boy, who asked for something about Africa, then demanded if I would write couplets or haiku. I decided that this attempt was a little bitter and nasty for a child, and put it aside for the following haiku, which he was asking for, anyways. And yes, I'm aware that I dropped a syllable in the second line. You try composing formally while an intense little blond critic stares you down.

In Africa are
Many varied beasts
But little weather.

On the fifteenth hour
Of our Marathon
Boxing Day Session
The console began
A certain
Barely discernable
But definite steaming.
No! Not yet!
Our link Madlys
Beating the gum out of
Some random
Incidental
Dead humper
Smeared in a sudden
Burst of staticky chaos
Well, poop!

12/31/03

Lyzzy and Madeline again, for a second round. They wanted something about the game they had been playing, the Legend of Zelda, featuring the words gum and poop. I live to serve.

Lyzzy came up
From the big town
Philly by the river
Philly by the bay
Visiting the folks
The high mountain
Family home
Far from the city
Far from the neighbors
Every year to spend
The holiday days
Brief between
Long school days
Madeline big cousin
Her holidays friend
And all too soon
It's see you
Next year.

12/31/03

Second set of customers, as named, above. Two young girls, asked for something built around their names. I'm damned bad at names, let alone strangely-spelled ones.

My little sister
Bundled up tight
new-shoe proud
Shy before the
Strange and bearded man
In that empty room
Big brother I
Staring, suspicious
Under my favorite cap
He asked a few
Pointed
Pointless questions
I wonder if they're
Done with the ice sculptures yet?

12/31/03

The first set of customers - a mother with her children. She wanted something about sisters and brothers. Wow, I thought. You really don't want my unfiltered thoughts about family. So I went with something more observational.

"Some people are not nice people."
The truism tripped forth
And fell before us
Redfaced and sprawling
Bulge-eyed and fierce
And so-sure certain
That you aren't one of those people
And I'm not one of those people
And most of those, here
Silent listening judging
Are not those people.
But not all of them.
And everyone scans the others
Suspicious.

12/31/03

Another stretch-piece. From the above overheard line while waiting for customers at the spontaneous poetry event.

The tractor blade sweeps
Through the slow afternoon light
The grass wet irridescent
Gleaming in the wake of
A brief early burst of
Snow or rain or sleet
Neither the season nor
The weather determinate
Golden light streams over
Bruised skies over
The dying leaves over
The last green lawn of the year.

12/31/03

One of two practice-pieces written as a warm-up for the spontaneous poetry thing at First Night. This one was from the words "irridescent, tractor, wet". You can really tell my sad inclination for seasonal poetry. No customer, just an example start-set mentioned by another poet.

New blog from an Arab-American CA (Civil Affairs) soldier in Iraq: Iraq 2.0. He's kind of irate about Halliburton, and calls the CPA "Can't Produce Anything", but is very big on the Iraq project.

Via Jeff Jarvis, everyone's favorite World-blog enthusiast.

Kids, you tried your best, and failed miserably... The lesson is, NEVER TRY.

I found Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age very informative, so when I saw he had written something called The Long Summer, I couldn't resist. It's a coarse-grain discussion of Fagan's climatological determinist ideas about how cultures develop and die, covering, roughly, the periods of the Late Ice Age and the present Holocene, the "Long Summer" of the book's title.

It was much less obvious in the last book than this one, but Fagan has a big rage on about civilization. He's very, very concerned about the possibility of a climatological catastrophe, and the "vulnerability" of the global civilization. That was clear enough in The Little Ice Age, but in The Long Summer that concern has become a didactic hammer with which he will pummel every skull within arm's reach. Every culture that could be dignified with the appellation "civilization" is properly labeled "vulnerable" or "precarious", usually both, in exactly those terms. Non-literate agrarian cultures get a half-pass on account of their inability to tell us directly of their agony, but it's only non-literate, non-sedentary hunter-gatherers and nomads that earn the gold star in Fagan's moral climatology: "effortless". When somewhat sedentary cultures like the Middle-Eastern Natufians harvest gazelle herds in job lots:

The hunters did not bother to harvest individual animals. Rather, they culled herds en masse, killing animals of all ages, including the youngest beasts, over a few weeks in early summer, when the gazelle moved north to the river valley in search of lush pasture. Sometimes they slaughtered entire herds.

However, when good, climatologically moral Cro-Magnons hunted in the same fashion, this is how Fagan describes the scene:

Judging from modern-day caribou hunts, the Cro-Magnons would let the leaders of the herd pass through the water unharmed, then set upon the animals behind them, harvesting beast after beast with effortless skill. The animals would rear and whirl in panic, bellowing, their dead companions floating downstream where other members of the hunting band hauled the carcasses into the shallows. Many would escape to the far bank, to regroup and continue their exorable march. But the hunters would cull dozens, even hundreds of beasts, butchering the carcasses with brisk efficiency on the riverbank.

Note the key-words "effortless" and "efficiency". Meanwhile, Cro-Magnons get work-words like "butcher" while the civilizing Natufians get value-words like "slaughter". The activity was the same. But the Cro-Magnons didn't threaten the landscape by being successful, by growing in population. They scraped along on a thin edge, in small, long-term stable numbers. The Natufians would eventually produce new agricultural technologies, grow, be forced off their lands by a climatic downturn, and then return as the first true farmers, and eventually, literate peoples. Bad. BAD.

This cycle of "nomad good, sedentary bad", "literate bad, oral tradition good" and "herd-following good, hunter-gathering OK, farming WICKED" continues throughout the book, at varying levels of emphasis and didactic force. Fagan doesn't recognize the added value to a culture of a social base of a hundred thousand over a social base of five thousand, and this bias expresses itself throughout the narrative. Risibly, literate cultures are portrayed as having "short generational memories" while the even-shorter, even-narrower cultural memories of oral-tradition cultures are ignored, or even lauded as sturdy and knowledgeable.

In my considered opinion, Fagan has fallen into the classic trap of disbelieving in things that he has no direct knowledge of. That is, literate cultures record exactly, within the same generation, the results of famine, disaster, chaos and terrain abandonment. Oral tradition cultures, swept away by the same or similar disasters, either leave no records due to the collapse of the story-telling chain, or else pretty up the story, in a very human attempt to consider their beloved ancestors in the very best of lights.

But Fagan even thumbs the scales when there is evidence, when he has the bloody evidence in front of him, but won't tell us. I didn't realize this for the better part of the book, due to my college-survey-course paucity of knowledge on the subject of pre-literate history. But I've seen stuff about the Anazasi collapse (which he insists on calling "Ancestral Pueblo" for political reasons he doesn't detail, but which I can guess), and it wasn't the calm and collected migration that he paints in such placid colors. It was a period of chaos, cannibalism, and slaughter like every other drought-and-famine collapse one might care to consider. It's exactly the same situation as the others which he details in such damning terms among literate cultures. But because the Anazasi, excuse me, "Ancestral Pueblo", were not literate, Fagan gives them a pass, and describes them in the most glowing terms he will offer for miserable, overpopulous farmers.

In short, Fagan displays in this book one of the worst cases of Cain-and-Abelism I've yet encountered in a scholarly work.

On the other hand, he does go over some climatological theories about the Holocene which I haven't encountered before, backing up his previously-mentioned worries about a collapse of the Gulf Current via a freshwater collapse of the northern ice cap. The examples he offers, however, are not sudden, world-wide meltings, as described in The Little Ice Age. Rather, he describes vast freshwater glacial lakes, formed on the edge of glacial plates over long periods of time, which eventually cut through the edge of the icepack in a catastrophic flood that creates the freshwater pool in necessary to shut down the North Atlantic Conveyor. This is not a subtle series of events, difficult to discern, or fast-moving. The glacial lakes he describes are not something the formation thereof would escape modern detection. That isn't currently happening. Nor are there any other threatened inundations, such as the Euxine Lake disaster, currently pending. These actually seem to weaken his case for impending doom.

All in all, a very infuriating book, but it has enough detail, and I'm disinclined enough to take any of it as gospel word, that I don't regret reading it.

Came in this morning to find mousetraps spread about the office like a minefield of toepoppers. I'm told that they caught four mice on Saturday, so the boss, in his usual overkill way, went and tripled the number of traps. There's an array of six traps around the wiring bundles in the old systems room, presumably on the theory that the mice are getting in through that big hole in the floor around the wiring. I fully expect somebody to break a toe on one of these things sometime this week...

No, none of the mice survived. Plague is starting to look pretty damn lucky.

OK, this is something different. Somebody decided to start posting Samuel Pepys' famous diary as a blog - with entries falling on the same day as when they were written 343 years ago. Hrm, I wonder if that's according to the Julian or Gregorian calendar? England ran on the Julian calendar until 1752, centuries after the rest of Europe. The entries are heavily hypertexted - I haven't explored those yet.

But Pepys has already appeared on at least one "best blogs of the year" list.

Speeches by Michael Crichton have been making the rounds in the blogspheres, including this one about how he considers global-warming orthodoxy a religion, and this one about how he blames SETI and the Drake Equation. Now, I'm inclined to mildly agree that global-warming orthodoxy sets off my bullshit alarms, so I didn't talk about the subject when the first Crichton speech seeped through the blogspheres. But there are other things that set off my bullshit alarms, and among those things I must now include this second speech, blaming SETI and extraterrestrial-optimism for a pseudoscientific mindset that contributes to cryptoreligious dogma on subjects like climatology.

Mind you, Crichton's not saying that flying-saucer, alien-abduction cultism is to blame. He's blaming the SETI project and the "Drake Equation" in particular. He noticed that the Drake Equation isn't exactly rigorous - it's more a way of organizing our notions of the possible possibilities on the subject of extraterrestrial life and intelligence - and decided to blow rather volcanically up about it. Crichton apparently believes that nearly forty years of negative results is proof that the Drake Equation is unfalsifiable. He also seems to think that negative results are also evidence of wasted effort. For a writer to be so excited about falsifiable hypotheses, while so damning of an ongoing experiment with negative data suitable for eventual falsification of said hypothesis, is somewhat inexplicable.

Of course, the fact that Crichton is in no sense a scientist might have something to do with this. I sort of want to agree with his dismissal of chicken-little climatology, but the man makes it damn hard...

Dave Merrill is, among many other things, the Anime Weekend Atlanta conrunner who achieved satanic status in fandom by proposing the elimination of the cosplay/masquerade in less-than-diplomatic language. He used to write a column for an online Georgia webzine called Athenstown; when that gig ended, AnimeJump put up his archive and gave him a place for his intermittent columns. His latest column talks about the sudden deluge of "How To Draw Manga" artbooks in the direct market, and touches a bit on why that's a damn silly notion, rather along the same lines as "How To Write Russian Novels" or "How To Make Iranian Movies".

Meanwhile, on the rest of AnimeJump, Mike Toole has inspired me to go buy Interstella 5555, which is saying something. I was almost certain that the prolonged intersection of French synthpop and Leiji Matsumoto would drive me nuts, but Toole's description has me interested....

I ended up doing mostly poetry-group stuff for First Night. Took off work early, and helped with the "Spontaneous Poetry" thing. Basically, volunteer poets sat around a storefront (which used to house Allen Street Video and nowadays holds the county Democratic Party when they're doing anything), and wait for people to come in and demand a poem based on some sort of concept, phrase, or set of words. They were supposed to donate a dollar per poem to the charity du jour, which I think was the Women's Resource Center. One poet went outside to play barker, as there wasn't much spontaneous demand for spontaneous poetry. Mostly foot-traffic of people walking back and forth from the Allen Street ice sculpture displays to the various stuff going on in the new borough building and Central Parklet. I've got my notes from the spontaneous poetry - the finished versions went with the donors - and I might polish them up and post them later today. Some of them aren't totally horrible.

They had organized a "Burning Man", to which we were supposed to attach resolutions or regrets, which would be burnt along with the "Burning Man" doll itself about an hour before midnight. I only found out later that the winds were too high at the appointed time, and they snuck the "Burning Man" doll, regrets and resolutions entire, out the back exit of the borough building. Very disappointing. They had a variant on this concept, with a pile of split logs next to perforated-drum fires in Central Parklet. There were sharpies on a table in between, and you'd write your regrets on the log, and toss it into the drumfires. I did this to make up for the "Burning Man" fizzle, so my regrets got burnt anyways. The log-tossing kicked up a cloud of sparks that put out the crowd huddled around the fires for warmth, so now I've got a brand new regret for next year!

The poetry slam went off, and it was actually something of a roaring success. I read "The Book of cummings", which was an obnoxious thing to do - especially when Dora came along after the first round and read the exact e.e. cummings passage which that poem took issue with. Seventeen poets in the first round. Not bad. I didn't make it to the second round, of course, but I didn't stutter or otherwise embarrass myself. My favorite of the other poets was an older woman who read a nice Robert Frost-esque piece about abandoned houses along a river road. She made it into the second round, but the third round was dominated by young whippersnappers with young themes.