debitage
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 8.9.01
I suppose the festival doesn't exactly count as a change. It's held every year. The stands are basically the same -- Belgian waffles from the Lions Club, pizza by the West End Fire Company, Chinese auction sponsored by Pool Pals, strawberry shortcake from the Hospital Auxiliary, and so on. The stands and tents are always in the same places. The Boy Scouts are always on garbage detail, carting around garbage barrels full of paper cups soaked with vinegar from Smitty's fries or pierogies. Jimmy Sturr and Tommy Schaffer and the Blue Mountain Ramblers are always the headlining acts. But it's something happening. It's part of the year-to-year routine, but it shakes the community out of its week-to-week and day-to-day routine. Even if Palmerton doesn't seem to change much in the long run, it's not static. Buy a sausage sandwich today, and in a week some Scout will pick the wrapper up off the flattened patch of grass where the sausage stand used to be.
When I left, it was still warm. But I could see some red in the maple trees along Broad Street, and somebody was burning something somewhere. I'm trying really hard not to sound cheesy here, but I like fall a lot. I think that's my biggest regret about going to Australia when I did -- not missing the presidential election (though they were kind enough to hold off on finishing it until I returned), or not being able to take the field archaeology course, but missing fall. There were a lot of days when, walking to Uni, the humidity and temperature would be just right, and if I was thinking about something else the bits of eucalyptus bark laying around, and I'd be fooled. So I'd look up, expecting to see red-leaved maples and brown-leaved oaks and a few yellow leaves left on some birches and willows. But instead, there would just be bright green eucalyptus leaves, and I'd remember that there was only going to be more growth as we go into summer. Australians don't even have the name "fall" for the season between summer and winter, because their trees never lose their leaves. It was depressing. But I kept looking up, as if there were some part of my brain convinced that if I just kept trying someday it would be fall. So now I have to make up for that fall I missed. We're off to a good start. The comment links may be broken at the moment, as I'm in the process of installing remotely hosted dotcomments.
7.9.01
The biggest surprise has been the Old Testament prophets. I had been under the impression from the New Testament that they mostly talked about the coming of the Messiah. But in reality it's page after page about how God is going to lay the smackdown on Israel and Judah for their sinful ways, and send them into exile in Babylon for a while. The Messiah stuf has to be in there somewhere, because people were expecting a Messiah when Jesus showed up. But it's buried under the dissertations on how God's wrath will soon fall on his people. This leads me to my next observation: If I were God's editor, I'd send Him back to do a rewrite. I already mentioned the redundancy of harping on how God is going to destroy Israel and Judah (but then never giving a full account of the actual exile, so as to be able to compare and see how well the prophecies were fulfilled). And I don't get why we need Samuel-Kings and Chronicles, since they tell the same story (albeit with different versions of how Saul died) without really adding much in the way of unique detail or perspective from one to the other. In fact, they mostly refer us for the interesting stuff to other books, which, according to the footnotes, have been lost for good. At this point I'm pretty well convinced that the Biblical infallibility proposition is wrong. This is not to say that I don't think there's a lot of merit to the Bible and what it says about humanity. I just think that assuming that the Bible is either perfect or complete, or accepting things solely on the authority of the Bible is dangerous.
6.9.01
5.9.01
What struck me was how well everyone else there knew what was going on. They were all up on the personalities and politics of Washington and the media (print, radio, and TV). They asked him insightful questions that I wouldn't begin to have the background information to ask. I get self-righteous sometimes about the "Colgate bubble" and how people here don't know what's happening in the world, but I really have no right to talk. I'm lucky if I can get through the Nation and Opinion sections of the Washington Post every day. I don't think I've ever really watched CNN. And these people had opinions about all these things. This may sound bizarre coming from someone who was Commentary Editor for two years and still writes a weekly political column, but I really don't have strong opinions. There have only been a handful of commentaries -- the Gay Boy Scouts one from last year and this year's stem cell piece -- that I really had clear pre-existing opinions on. Usually I identify an issue, then try to figure out which side I can argue (which has led me into some really bad devil's advocate commentaries). I fully expect to read back over my old commentaries in a few years and toss them one by one into the circular file. This all leads me to ask why I'm The Maroon-News' most consistent political commentator. At a place like Colgate, my columns ought to be the first to get cut for space or quality. The only problem is, all the better potential commentaries never actually get written. This isn't me complaining about how we don't have good writers. My point is that I got a good dose of reality today.
4.9.01
The bad news (for all of us): The two remaining members of Splashdown, who were forming a new band, broke up. They better start up Freezepop-caliber solo projects. Although after they let people download Blueshift for free, I don't think I really have the right to make demands.
3.9.01
I'm reading Bruce Knauft's Genealogies for the Present, a history of recent anthropological thought, for my seminar. Knauft is arguing for what he calls a "critical humanist" perspective for understanding cultures. He wants to balance cultural relativism, which in its extreme form can lead to uncritical acceptance of whatever otehrs are doing, with cultural critique, which in its extreme form leads to judgmental ethnocentrism. So far, so good. But he describes cultural critique as being specifically the exposing of inequality and domination. Setting aside the obvious leftist political implications of using that terminology, I think singling out inequality as the way in which cultures can be critiqued is too narrow and too biased. It assumes that inequality is the fundamental problem worth criticizing (which conveniently fits into the longstanding postmodernist-leftist tradition of decrying Western colonial hegemonic domination). And it presupposes the answer to the age-old philosophical debate over the relative merits of equality versus freedom. I would instead propose what I call (though I'm sure I'll discover this theory being argued elsewhere under a different name) utilitarian anthropology. Under this theory critique would not be limited to those problems that manifest themselves in inequality, freeing us from the assumption that inequality is necessarily fundamental in any moral or structural sense. Instead, culture would be held up to the mirror of utility (the most net happiness/benefit/satisfaction, or the least net unhappiness/burden/dissatisfaction for the most people for the longest time), and critique would be applied in those instances where cultural forms generate unhappiness or restrict happiness. Utilitarian anthropolology would also remain true to the spirit in which cultural relativism and ethnography were conceived -- of letting the people being studied speak for themselves. Examinations of inequality are prone to outside judgments of what is and isn't equal, particularly given the Marxist conception of culture as a force mystifying domination and preventing the people in the situation from seeing what's "really" going on. But happiness, benefit, and satisfaction are subjective judgments that can only be made by the people involved. By listening to the people being studied, a utilitarian critique will critique culture by the standards of the people in it, much as cultural relativism endeavours to praise culture by the standards of those in it.
2.9.01
Barbara is alseep on my floor right now. This is good in that I don't feel so bad about doing school work that I unfortunately have to get done today while she's here. But it's bad in that she'll be less inclined to go to bed early, and I will therefore be obligated to be a good host and stay up and be social, as I don't know when I'll wind up seeing her next (we've talked about the possibility of going Beth-hunting in Boston over fall break, but the Princeton football game that Saturday may kill those plans).
CIGARETTES DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR? You Fuck'n Bet They're Delivered! Well, they at least managed to use the correct "they're/their/there." posted by Stentor Danielson at 18:48 -- link -- comment
We didn't have cinder blocks this time, but we did have two old broken computers that had mysteriously appeared in our laundry room. We decided that since they were broken already, it wouldn't hurt to throw boots at them. In the first game of the night, Dave beat me 4.5-2 (his last 2 points came on a double boot, which is an automatic win). Then Barbara beat Amanda 5-1. In the loser's bracket, I shut Amanda out 5-0 for third place. Then Dave squeaked out a 5-4 win over Barbara to retain his Boot Game champion crown. Then Amanda, Barbara, and I decided to play a three-person round with our off hands (left for me and Barbara, right for Amanda). I won, but Amanda managed to score four points and have the lead most of the game. Maybe she secretly really is right handed. Afterward we went to my computer to test out a disk that Marty had found in one of the computers. I am seriously not making this up -- the disk contained the program file COMMAND.COM, which means that it was a boot disk. 2) Yesterday, walking past the library I found a paper sign laying on thr ground. The background was a very digitized picture that looked like it came from an illustration of the Black Plague, showing a man and a skeleton toasting. The text of the sign said: AFTER SEX? A: Have a cigarette delivered right to your door!! COMING SOON If anyone can explain that, let me know. 3) I am so out of shape. I should have known this based on how out of breath I was from chasing Amanda for one lap around the hockey rink. But I went and played a long game of midnight ultimate frisbee on Friday anyway. When I woke up yesterday I felt fine, so I headed off to fencing practice. At fencing we did lots of footwork, and two rounds of wall sits. I think one of the circles of Hell that Dante missed was people doing wall sits. So now this morning I am extremely sore, to thr point that I am really not looking forward to having to walk up the hill to church once I finish this post. |
I think I've posted more today than I have all week. But I have another observation to make. Marty and Jesse were just here. Marty told me "I'm going to do something immoral and illegal, so I want you to do like this." Then he put his hands over his eyes. I did likewise. There was some rattling, and then Marty and Jesse were gone.