Book on Display

My new book on display at the MLA convention. (U of Minnesota Press booth in the book exhibit).

My new book on display at the MLA convention. (U of Minnesota Press booth in the book exhibit).

Looking Ahead: 2004

Warren Ellis is running a year-end series on his blog, where he asks various people to give their visions, or predictions, for 2004. Here’s my entry:
Surprise me.
That’s what I ask of 2004.
Some of the things I can predict for the year to come are good. Personal things, mostly. (Moving on to greener pastures, for one thing).Others are bad. Political things, mostly. (The re-election, coronation, and Ascension — in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” sense — of George W. Bush).
But nothing’s more dreary than predictability, the linear playing out of cause and effect.
Time passes: and that means that things can go off track, change course, suffer a phase transition, enter the orbit of a chaotic attractor.
Of, course, there’s no guarantee that these changes and surprises will be happy and fortunate ones. Sometimes they are, but other times they are tragic, unbearable, hideous.
But a world without change, in which everything is predictable, is a world that’s already dead.
So surprise me.

Warren Ellis is running a year-end series on his blog, where he asks various people to give their visions, or predictions, for 2004. Here’s my entry:
Surprise me.
That’s what I ask of 2004.
Some of the things I can predict for the year to come are good. Personal things, mostly. (Moving on to greener pastures, for one thing).Others are bad. Political things, mostly. (The re-election, coronation, and Ascension — in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” sense — of George W. Bush).
But nothing’s more dreary than predictability, the linear playing out of cause and effect.
Time passes: and that means that things can go off track, change course, suffer a phase transition, enter the orbit of a chaotic attractor.
Of, course, there’s no guarantee that these changes and surprises will be happy and fortunate ones. Sometimes they are, but other times they are tragic, unbearable, hideous.
But a world without change, in which everything is predictable, is a world that’s already dead.
So surprise me.

Spam

Things are really getting out of hand. My service provider’s spam filter caught 676 spam messages in the last 24 hours, a new record. There were 2 legitimate messages that the filter wrongly tagged as spam. Plus there were an additional 10 or 20 (I didn’t count) spam messages that got through the filter and made it to my email client (which caught about half of them, the rest I had to delete one by one). I’m not sure whether to be amazed more by the efficiency of the spam filter, or by the sheer volume of spam that I get sent; I suppose the two are correlative phenomena of ferocious Darwinian competition – an evolutionary arms race – on the Net (something I am also thinking about because it is a major theme of Peter Watts’ SF novel Maelstrom, which I am almost finished reading and will report on shortly). The filter makes it a minor annoyance instead of a major headache, but still. A year ago I was receiving 150 pieces of spam a day, and thought that was a lot….

Things are really getting out of hand. My service provider’s spam filter caught 676 spam messages in the last 24 hours, a new record. There were 2 legitimate messages that the filter wrongly tagged as spam. Plus there were an additional 10 or 20 (I didn’t count) spam messages that got through the filter and made it to my email client (which caught about half of them, the rest I had to delete one by one). I’m not sure whether to be amazed more by the efficiency of the spam filter, or by the sheer volume of spam that I get sent; I suppose the two are correlative phenomena of ferocious Darwinian competition – an evolutionary arms race – on the Net (something I am also thinking about because it is a major theme of Peter Watts’ SF novel Maelstrom, which I am almost finished reading and will report on shortly). The filter makes it a minor annoyance instead of a major headache, but still. A year ago I was receiving 150 pieces of spam a day, and thought that was a lot….

Meetups

Tonight I went to, not one, but two meetings arranged through meetup.com. The first (pictured) was for users of Movable Type, the software that runs this blog. The second was for supporters of drafting General Wesley Clark for President. Due to the fact that both meetings were at the same time, as well as that we needed to go home to put Adah to bed, I didn’t get to spend much time at either meeting. Hopefully I will get another chance to meet my fellow bloggers, all of whom seemed to be genuinely nice folks.
As for the Wesley Clark meeting, it was enormous, and showed that many people have great enthusiasm for a Clark Presidential run. Me, I’m supporting Clark, at least for the time being, because I think he has the best chance of actually being able to defeat Bush. Among the Democratic contenders, Kucinich and Sharpton are the two with whom I am most in ideological agreement, but neither of them has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning either the nomination or(if one of them did, by some fluke, get nominated) the general election. As for the party hacks who are in the race – Lieberman, Gephardt, Edwards, Kerry – they are all tired, and spell worse-than-Gore disaster in November 2004. That leaves Dean, who is in some ways admirable, and who is very popular in Seattle, but I don’t really believe he can defeat Bush either (not because he is too “liberal”, which he really isn’t, but because I think is appeal is too limited, and he is too unexciting a candidate; he could carry the northern tier of states (like New England and the Pacific Northwest) which more often than not go Democratic anyway, but not much else. Clark, however, is telegenic and smart – I really think he’s the only Democrat who could wipe the floor with Bush in a debate. I don’t know many of his stands in detail, but his defense of Enlightenment values and secular liberal democracy on Bill Maher last weekend was quite encouraging, and he can get away with it because he’s a General (no way Bush, Rove, and company will be able to impugn his patriotism).
So I guess you could say I am taking a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in endorsing Clark – just as Hunter Thompson did when he came out for Jimmy Carter.

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Tonight I went to, not one, but two meetings arranged through meetup.com. The first (pictured) was for users of Movable Type, the software that runs this blog. The second was for supporters of drafting General Wesley Clark for President. Due to the fact that both meetings were at the same time, as well as that we needed to go home to put Adah to bed, I didn’t get to spend much time at either meeting. Hopefully I will get another chance to meet my fellow bloggers, all of whom seemed to be genuinely nice folks.
As for the Wesley Clark meeting, it was enormous, and showed that many people have great enthusiasm for a Clark Presidential run. Me, I’m supporting Clark, at least for the time being, because I think he has the best chance of actually being able to defeat Bush. Among the Democratic contenders, Kucinich and Sharpton are the two with whom I am most in ideological agreement, but neither of them has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning either the nomination or(if one of them did, by some fluke, get nominated) the general election. As for the party hacks who are in the race – Lieberman, Gephardt, Edwards, Kerry – they are all tired, and spell worse-than-Gore disaster in November 2004. That leaves Dean, who is in some ways admirable, and who is very popular in Seattle, but I don’t really believe he can defeat Bush either (not because he is too “liberal”, which he really isn’t, but because I think is appeal is too limited, and he is too unexciting a candidate; he could carry the northern tier of states, like New England and the Pacific Northwest, which more often than not go Democratic anyway, but not much else). Clark, however, is telegenic and smart – I really think he’s the only Democrat who could wipe the floor with Bush in a debate. I don’t know many of his stands in detail, but his defense of Enlightenment values and secular liberal democracy on Bill Maher last weekend was quite encouraging, and he can get away with it because he’s a General (no way Bush, Rove, and company will be able to impugn his patriotism).
So I guess you could say I am taking a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in endorsing Clark – just as Hunter Thompson did when he came out for Jimmy Carter.

Blue Angels

Seafair is a Seattle summer festival; it goes on through much of July and culminates the first weekend of August. I’ve never quite understood it, even though I have lived here for 19 years. There are some cool parades for kids, miscellaneous events like “landings” by the Seafair Pirates (a bunch of businessmen in pirate costume who swagger about; in recent years they have toned down their act), and – on the final weekend, which is now – the hydroplane races in Lake Washington. Traffic is going to be a nightmare this weekend, since we live right near the main viewing area for the races.
But the part of Seafair that I really hate is the Blue Angels: Navy precision fliers who put on an air show every year for Seafair final weekend. The planes may look pretty up in the air, but it is HELL living in the neighborhood above which they perform their maneuvers. The noise of their repeated fly-bys is incredibly loud; the animals are terrified, the baby can’t sleep, and the overall effect is nerve-wracking. I know we should thank whatever forces or powers there be that this is only a simulation of war, and we are not actually getting bombed; but our not-so-well-to-do, racially diverse neighborhood really does feel under assault. And it’s all the more galling that this is for the benefit of jokers from the suburbs who are better off than we are, and who can enjoy it as a show because they don’t actually live here. I don’t understand how they can allow air shows and such in (above?) heavily populated areas like ours.

Seafair is a Seattle summer festival; it goes on through much of July and culminates the first weekend of August. I’ve never quite understood it, even though I have lived here for 19 years. There are some cool parades for kids, miscellaneous events like “landings” by the Seafair Pirates (a bunch of businessmen in pirate costume who swagger about; in recent years they have toned down their act), and – on the final weekend, which is now – the hydroplane races in Lake Washington. Traffic is going to be a nightmare this weekend, since we live right near the main viewing area for the races.
But the part of Seafair that I really hate is the Blue Angels: Navy precision fliers who put on an air show every year for Seafair final weekend. The planes may look pretty up in the air, but it is HELL living in the neighborhood above which they perform their maneuvers. The noise of their repeated fly-bys is incredibly loud; the animals are terrified, the baby can’t sleep, and the overall effect is nerve-wracking. I know we should thank whatever forces or powers there be that this is only a simulation of war, and we are not actually getting bombed; but our not-so-well-to-do, racially diverse neighborhood really does feel under assault. And it’s all the more galling that this is for the benefit of jokers from the suburbs who are better off than we are, and who can enjoy it as a show because they don’t actually live here. I don’t understand how they can allow air shows and such in (above?) heavily populated areas like ours.

WAPblog

Inspired by Warren Ellis, I have started my own WAPblog. This is a mini-blog (very brief rants/thoughts/etc, text-only) accessible through any Web-enabled mobile phone. Just bookmark http://tagtag.com/shaviro on your mobile phone.
If you don’t have a WAP-enabled mobile, you can go to my startpage, where you can access the content of my WAPblog, Warren’s, and several others.

Inspired by Warren Ellis, I have started my own WAPblog. This is a mini-blog (very brief rants/thoughts/etc, text-only) accessible through any Web-enabled mobile phone. Just bookmark http://tagtag.com/shaviro on your mobile phone.
If you don’t have a WAP-enabled mobile, you can go to my startpage, where you can access the content of my WAPblog, Warren’s, and several others.

A Note on “Cracker”

Here’s something that has been puzzling me. I mentioned a few posts ago that my infant daughter’s first word was “cracker.” Now, nearly every white person I have told this to has immediately made some joke on the order of, “is she talking about her daddy?” (I am white; my wife and daughter are black). No black people to whom I have told this have had any such reaction. Indeed, my wife, and other black people, have expressed complete puzzlement as to why so many white people would spontaneously make this “joke.” So, my own question is this: why do so many white people seem obsessed with black people supposedly calling white people “crackas” (which they freely interchange with “cracker”)? What kind of strange racial imaginary is behind all this?

Here’s something that has been puzzling me. I mentioned a few posts ago that my infant daughter’s first word was “cracker.” Now, nearly every white person I have told this to has immediately made some joke on the order of, “is she talking about her daddy?” (I am white; my wife and daughter are black). No black people to whom I have told this have had any such reaction. Indeed, my wife, and other black people, have expressed complete puzzlement as to why so many white people would spontaneously make this “joke.” So, my own question is this: why do so many white people seem obsessed with black people supposedly calling white people “crackas” (which they freely interchange with “cracker”)? What kind of strange racial imaginary is behind all this?

First Words


My ten-month-old daughter’s first word is “cracker”; she likes to eat various sorts of biscuits, cookies, crackers, teething biscuits, etc., and this is her term for all of them. Sometimes she speaks the word, as if asking for a cracker. But she always repeats the word a number of times, whenever we give her one. What’s striking is the happiness with which she repeats the word; her pleasure at being able to say “cracker,” her delight at having expressed a meaning, far exceeds the pleasure she gets from eating the cracker itself. A pretty good exemplification, I think, of what it means to be human.