Wednesday, November 30, 2011

The Joys of Student Writing: Exhibit E

"I just wanted to send this email informing you that i will not be in class tonight because i got scheduled for work and i tried calling to see if some one can take my shit, but no one can take it."

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

MVP

My sister, Mckenzie, has been named the 4A High School Volleyball MVP of the State of Utah.

I concede that her achievement represents an advance for the family over my own Most-Improved Award at the St. Mary's College Basketball Camp when I was in third grade.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

"Shame on you! . . . You can go!"

Amen.



Update 11/20: I awoke this morning still reeling from this video—and its implications for the country.

On occasion certain images present themselves that clarify where the moral authority in a particular debate lies. With that idea in mind, I resolved to write a longer note, arguing that this video gives us that kind of imagery and adding some thoughts on how the police are dressed, their casually sadistic attitude (recognizable to anyone who's interacted with contemporary American police officers), and the students' spontaneous—and wholly successful—search for the language with which to respond to authoritarian cruelty.

But before doing my own writing I read this note from James Fallows at the Atlantic. Which makes all of my points.

This video makes it clear that our choice is simple: either we acknowledge where the moral authority self-evidently lies in this debate and proceed with the changes the occupiers demand, or we permit the United States to continue on its path toward a fascist plutocracy.

I find myself braced by the dignity and moral sophistication of these students. The Occupy Movement will triumph. It is our time's Civil Rights Movement. From what I see in this video, I'm now convinced that this country will not return to the moral desolation, the systemic injustice, the gleeful selfishness that has defined America during my generation. Change has come to America.

TFTD

I cause trouble, therefore I have a soul.

— Amélie Nothomb, Hygiene and the Assassin

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Bloom Springs

In this week's Sunday Times, the inimitable Harold Bloom says in one article—"Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?"—what I've been trying to say with two years of blogging.

Disgrace, by the Seattle Police Department


Photo: JOSHUA TRUJILLO / SEATTLEPI.COM


Thursday, November 10, 2011

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

Disgrace rushes; and then it meanders; and then, like its broken anti-hero, it anti-climaxes. The reader's task is to either resist or embrace its slow collapse. Resist it and you side with the world's optimistic fools (secular liberals). Embrace it and you side with its despairing realists (everyone else). Regardless, the same fate—obsolescence, ugliness, disgrace—awaits.

Because for this particular South African novelist the modern State, which is good for little but moralizing and obfuscation, will see to it that you're denied life's fundamental pleasures. It will deny you beauty. It will deny you privacy. It will deny you the intellectual and physical capacity to construct for yourself an ethical life.

And History, which is the State's official narrative and is most succinctly embodied by your neighbors, is a rapist.

Decency—rare in Coetzee's world—manifests itself as brokenness. If you haven't been broken, you're a monster. If you have been broken, you devote your life to the welfare of animals.

In the protagonist's anti-climax we arrive at Coetzee's primary theme: disgrace, in the age of brutalism, is actually grace, and might be a road to redemption.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

TFTD

Each of us is so ashamed of his own helplessness and ignorance that he considers it appropriate to communicate only what he thinks others will understand.

— Czeslaw Milosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay