It's About Power

You've all been waiting with bated breath to hear about my fall 2002 TV viewing schedule, right? Right? Okay, I haven't exactly been losing sleep over it myself, but it's sort of fun to think about. The current lineup: Buffy, Angel on a probationary basis, and Firefly as a fill-in option. The current non-lineup: Smallville, plus all those HBO shows people keep recommending to me. I actually watched Six Feet Under and Sopranos last weekend at a friend's house, and while they seem to be well-crafted dramas, I don't like pure drama. The characters go from misery to misery -- at least in a play, you know they're going to end it eventually! -- and live lives that fail completely to resonate with mine. They also say "fuck" in more situations than I would have thought desirable or even possible. And, frankly, I don't find evil appealing and don't enjoy watching graphic violence or death in and of itself. I've known for years that I prefer my entertainment in something approaching epic flavor, with a big scoop of fantasy on top, a generous coating of humor, and maybe a few sprinkles of romance or horror or what-have-you. My favorite episodes of my favorite shows aren't generally the high-drama ones. Soap operas either bore me or make me uncomfortable. The same applies to most hour-long evening dramas. I'd rather watch a smart sitcom, if such a thing exists. I'd rather watch a smart Disney movie.

I said I'd only watch Angel this season if they managed to accomplish several things, most of them fixes to the disaster that was late S3. So far, the spoilers for the first episode seem to be promising one of my wish-list items and hinting at a second, so I'll give the premiere a shot. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, apparently, and I'm a terminal optimist to boot. Speaking of terminal optimism, I had even been wondering whether or not to try Firefly. On the plus side, there's at least one actively religious character in the regular cast, which intrigues me; on the minus side, Joss Whedon almost always comes across as patronizing towards his viewers in interviews, and that I can do without. Anyway, the only Buffy broadcast I can watch this season wound up in the exact same timeslot as Firefly, so that decision's been made for me. Buffy trumps an unknown any day. I figure I'll wait around, read through the occasional TWoP recap, note the reactions online, see if the show survives past its initial six episodes, maybe catch an episode or two during Buffy reruns. If Firefly makes it through to a second season and still sounds appealing, I'll watch reruns or borrow tapes or something. Incidentally, has Inara (the licensed prostitute character) actually given any indication that she is, as various people keep suggesting, a sacred prostitute? Because I understand that she's mentioned praying, but one can have religious beliefs and be a prostitute without fusing the two identities.

Finally, Buffy, which had me genuinely interested (and simultaneously annoyed, but what else is new?) at the end of S6. "Back to the beginning." Well, I disagree with the people who've rated "Lessons" best of all the season openers -- I thought "Anne" was very good, "When She Was Bad" and "The Freshman" were fine, "Bargaining" was flawed six ways from Sunday, and "Buffy vs. Dracula" was monumentally pointless -- but I suspect that "Lessons" fits somewhere around the "fine" category. (Spoilery and overly long commentary follows.)

Not amazing, that is, but solid and potentially promising. The A plot focused on Dawn and on the Dawn-Buffy relationship; I'm not terribly invested in either, but I'm willing to give them a shot, and this wasn't too treacly for a change. Also, Dawn's tremendously more interesting when she's fighting instead of whining, and I've always enjoyed Michelle Trachtenberg's acting. The actors playing Principal Wood and Kit show promise; the actor playing Carlos doesn't, but I'll settle for hoping that he improves, vanishes, or dies. I also hope that we get a repeat appearance from a few of Dawn's S5 and S6 friends, if only to establish that they're no longer close. Continuity is a Good Thing.

The Willow and Giles scenes were bittersweet -- bittersweet because there's never enough Giles, and while I'm happy to hear that they're ditching the "magic addiction" storyline from last season, I wish they'd thought of that, oh, last season. England looks lovely, though. (Note to self: on application for this coming summer's research funds, do not put either "miss Giles" or "craving prepackaged cheese-and-pickle sandwiches" under "reasons for travel.") Willow has yet to make me feel that she shouldn't be punished -- within the show's moral system, if not my own -- but at least the dialogue didn't imply that everything was hunky-dory with her. By the way, if the earth has some sort of consciousness, how do multiple dimensions work, and what is the Hellmouth again? Oh, and not that I'm not happy to see Giles, but did the horse have a point?

Xander didn't annoy me with his sudden successfulness, which is a good sign. It was also nice to see Anya again. Alas, she clearly hasn't spent the summer visiting Giles in Bath, and all the Scoobies have apparently dropped her like a hot potato, world-saveage notwithstanding. In fact, she looks like hell, and not all of that can be put down to character development. Has Emma Caulfield lost weight or something? I look forward to seeing Anya's role in the show increase; no matter what, it should be a great improvement over the Wacky Wedding Hijinx of last season.

James Marsters has, to my relief, gained back a bit of the weight he lost (apparently to some sort of illness) at the end of S6. He looks a lot better. I hadn't prepared myself for the unbleached hair -- or, rather, I'd known about it, but I failed to correlate my general lack of attraction to blonds (even bleached blonds) with my continuing indifference towards Spike's alleged sexiness. Without the blond hair, though.... I had a moment of sympathy for the Pro-Cheekbones Brigade. Well, he'll probably bleach it back shortly, so I won't have to worry. Spike's still got one of the most interesting plotlines on the show, Angel redux notwithstanding.

As for the final sequence... that may or may not have been the seasonal Big Bad, but we all know Spike never met the Mayor, so I'm thinking there's something beyond mere hallucination going on. I'm hoping they tie it in with the First Evil from "Amends," but I won't hold my breath. (What on earth would drive a souled vampire to live right under the Hellmouth, by the way? I mean, besides "plot convenience." It's not as if Sunnydale lacks for abandoned buildings and/or basements.) While we're waiting to figure it all out, though... that sequence was fun, wasn't it? Please, let it be the last time we ever see Warren, Glory, or Adam. Drusilla should really recur sometime this season, though. And the Master came through, as always, with his trademark unsubtle inversion of Christianity. The Master is a religion geek's ideal vampire, which explains my fondness for him.

"It's about power." Yes, fine, we get it. Who thinks Joss has been reading too much Foucault?*

* -- Did anyone else suddenly start trying to decide which parts of Foucault's oeuvre would best suit the Scoobies? Giles: The Archaeology of Knowledge. Willow: The History of Sexuality, although that's a cheap shot. Spike: Madness and Civilization, of course. Anya: Discipline and Punish. Xander: The Order of Things, for lack of anything better. Dawn: Language, Countermemory, Practice. Buffy: Power/Knowledge. (While we're at it, Angel'd probably enjoy I, Pierre Rivière, but let's not think about the possible applications of The Birth of the Clinic.) I was also imagining a post-ep tag in which pseudo-Buffy says "it's all about power" and Spike responds, "Well, Slayer, I feel that the implied concept of a single panoptic institution which lies behind your statement fails to provide any criteria for judgment while ignoring the multiplicity of strategies and tactics by which dominated as well as dominant groups strive to improve their positions in the instutional substructure." (I mean, he's temporarily insane; there's no reason he shouldn't've read, say, Habermas.) I know there are plenty of lit geeks in Buffy fandom -- this has to have occurred to someone else, right? Right?

Two To Speak, One To Hear

Anyone who's been reading this blog for awhile has probably noticed that translations make me extremely cranky. On some level, the problem stems from my belief that any concept important (or untranslatable) enough to warrant leaving in a foreign language is also important enough to merit further explanation in the language of one's audience.* Unfortunately, I like to quote many things that weren't written in English, and while I read some of the original languages involved, making a halfway decent translation from another language into English takes time and effort which I don't often have to spare. (It's also, truthfully, not a skill I've cultivated; I often make fairly literal translations for use in scholarly articles, but I've never been satisfied with them on a stylistic, much less artistic, level.) So I get stuck with other peoples' translations. Sometimes I try to use translations which are available online, in case someone wants to check the context of my quote -- but the translations available online are so old that they usually leave a great deal to be desired. Sometimes I use another translation; often, when the original language is one I more or less know, I throw in a few notes with emendations. (I do the same thing when I teach classes, only less incessantly.) By and large, translations simply leave me dissatisfied.

I'm fairly sure that much of this comes from my being Jewish, rabbinically Jewish -- and, more precisely, from being an inadequately educated rabbinic Jew. In the process of recoiling from the fear of assimilation into Hellenistic civilization (which at a certain point became "fear of assimilation into Christianity"), rabbinic Judaism decided that its scriptural canon was properly learned and read only in Hebrew. Even in the fairly liberal synagogues I frequent, a good part of the prayer service is also held in Hebrew (with the occasional bit of Aramaic); the usual alternatives are English translations which disappoint me either as translations or as prayers in their own right, so I much prefer the Hebrew. Jews also have entire interpretative traditions based on painstaking study of how each Hebrew word is spelled and written in the official version found on every scroll, and I am the sort of person who thinks these interpretative traditions are downright nifty. Unfortunately, I never really got decent Hebrew instruction as a child, and I never fully picked up the language (in particular, I don't know from grammar and philology). Why I haven't managed to learn it properly when I've got a good ear for languages, have acquired quite a few others, and have memorized huge chunks of Hebrew for both worship and choral-singing purposes... well, I think it's a combination of complicated psychological whatsis and sheer lack of time. But it's safe to say that I'm a little oversensitive when it comes to sacred-language issues.

Still, it's odd to find myself aligned with the rabbis on this particular set of sacred-language issues. What I dislike most about the rabbinic tradition is its isolationist tendencies, of which this anti-translation bias is a prime example. I've asked myself what I would have been back in first-century Palestine -- is it possible to read the New Testament (which I find far more powerful in Greek than in English) and not ask yourself whether you would have joined the Christian community? -- and I think my answer is "a Hellenist," or, more precisely, "a Greek-speaking Diaspora Jew, but not assimilated." (Back to being an apikursa. At least I'm consistent.) On the other hand, I'm not in the first couple of centuries of the Common Era, and I happen to know that what I actually am -- a twenty-first-century American Reform Jew, although some of those categories are more important than others -- makes a lot more historical and theological sense when it's recognized as a legitimate outgrowth of mostly-Ashkenazic rabbinic Judaism along with Hasidism, modern Orthodoxy, Conservativism, etc.** So I struggle with rabbinic texts because, well, I'd be doing it anyway, but I'd rather know whom I'm fighting.

Despite my reservations, then, I'm sort of pleased that the rabbis agree with me about translation -- but they take the issue well outside the realm of worship. My Talmud study list finally moved from tractate Bava Basra into tractate Sanhedrin just before Yom Kippur -- I probably should've said a prayer at the completion of the tractate, but I said "Yippee!" instead -- and I am happily absorbing crucial information such as how many judges it takes to try a false prophet, how many judges it takes to try a man suspected of having sex with an ox, what sorts of penalties are issued for testifying falsely in cases of bestiality, and how these differ from the penalties for testifying falsely in cases of adultery.*** There are still a few bits from Bava Basra that I mean to talk about in here one of these days, but today's email contained a passage from Sanhedrin 17 that fit perfectly into my musings on translation. It's got to do with trying to figure out the composition of a Sanhedrin, the twenty-three-person panel of judges who decide on fairly (but not extremely) important halakhic issues.

First we have Rabbi Yochanan, Hillel's worst student: "We only put on a Sanhedrin people of great stature and appearance, that are sages, old, understand witchcraft, and know all 70 languages in order that the court of justice should not have to hear testimony through an interpreter." A couple of exchanges later (just so you know, snakes are ritually clean), Rav Yehudah, in the name of Rav, teaches that one does not establish a Sanhedrin (that's the 23-person panel of judges) in any city which lacks two people to speak and one to hear. What does this mean? Well, Maimonides -- pretty much Mr. Medieval Sephardic Judaism, for those of you who have inexplicably failed to learn all about this crucial topic -- explains that it refers to two judges who can teach every subject in Torah, and one who can listen and respond to teaching on every subject in Torah. This is a nice idea. However, I prefer the interpretation of Rashi -- Mr. Medieval Ashkenazic Judaism, and no, this will not be on the test -- who explains Rav's injunction in terms of languages. Each city with a Sanhedrin must have two people who can speak the seventy languages of the world and one who can "hear," or understand, all seventy. Then, of course, another set of debates starts around whether the three people are really four, and whether they're part of the Sanhedrin or separate from it, and, trust me, you don't want to go there.

Now, I'm still kind of wary of my impulses toward religiously motivated linguistic separatism -- I mean, just because I find Hebrew important enough to beat myself up over not knowing it well enough doesn't mean that everyone else has to. I prefer Latin to English Masses, too, but almost all my Catholic friends think I'm odd that way. Some people would rather worship in their native language, and this makes sense to me intellectually if not emotionally. Also, a religious bias against translation can be carried to fairly ridiculous lengths; I sympathize completely with the Islamic tenet that the Qur'an only counts as such in Arabic (Arabic is next on my must-learn language list after Hebrew), but I have relatively little patience with the sort of fundamentalist Christians who insist that the King James Version is the only proper rendition of the Word of God.**** Basically, even though referring to "the sacred" gives me low-grade methodological hives, I don't want to use language to block off access to, uh, the sacred. On the off chance that I, or anyone, even could.

But the passage from Sanhedrin isn't about scripture or liturgy. It's about fairness and informed judgment. It's about opening rather than limiting access. The Talmudic sages apparently didn't care for translators in their courts. They wanted everyone to be able to testify in their native language and to have at least some, if not all, of the judges understand that language. (Okay, they also wanted all their judges to be old men, but I'm concentrating on the positives here.) They clearly envisioned their courts as someplace where people from all over the world could have a fair hearing. (Which model my own national government would do well to observe.) Learning all the world's languages is only an ideal, of course, although I suspect that one could probably understand 99% of the world's languages after learning the right seventy. But there's something about this ideal that I find beautiful, and it's nice to remember that the Talmud can surprise me, once in a while, by being progressive.

As for me... well, there's no solution to my translation problems. Maybe I should shoot for understanding witchcraft instead. In a not unrelated issue, I finally get to watch the Buffy S7 premiere tonight....

* -- The Talmud study email list I read routinely plunks entire lines of Hebrew into its summaries, and that drives me bananas -- not only because I keep having to look things up, but because it creates a deliberately unwelcoming atmosphere. Of course, that may be the idea.
** -- Which is why the intermittent effort to Sephardize Reform Judaism occasionally irks me. I'm all in favor of learning new melodies, but it does a disservice to both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish traditions by rejecting one and exoticizing (can we say Orientalizing?) the other. Yes, I know, it's tied into Zionism and all that, but it doesn't work halakhicly (why do you think Israel has two Chief Rabbis?) and it's going to take time and genuine diversity if it's to work culturally. Of course, European Jews having an inferiority complex about themselves in comparison to Middle Eastern Jews is itself a nice little early-medieval custom.
*** -- Seventy-one; twenty-three; death, because the false testimony could've condemned innocent people and animals to death; and not nearly enough for my peace of mind -- there's not much contrast between endangering the life of a woman versus endangering the life of an ox, although I believe there are also fines due in the case of the ox.
**** -- Possibly because such a position tends to involve remarkably goofy views of church history. This Chick tract has a rather... uh, unique... view of the history of the Bible's formation and translation. I can never decide whether to laugh, point out the flaws in what they say about Alexandrian Christianity, or be very afraid.

Tongues As Of Fire

Several of my favorite news sources have been telling me all about Mel Gibson's new movie. Apparently, it chronicles the last twelve hours in Jesus' life -- that'd start it just before the Last Supper, I believe -- and is to be "in Latin and Aramaic" without subtitles. Now, I enjoy a good life of Jesus as much as -- no, considerably more than -- the next nice Jewish girl. However, I have mixed feelings about this one, without even considering reception issues (e.g., what types of fanfic are most likely to result if the movie is at all successful). In something approximating order:

1) Cool! Finally, a movie where I'm the target demographic!
2) Okay, technically I'm not quite the target demographic. (The Aramaic-language movie they should make for me, personally, is an adaptation of As A Driven Leaf in which Elisha ben Abuya's daughters get written back into the story. Preferably directed by Abbas Kirostami. And aren't we all glad that I don't produce films?) But it's close enough for jazz.
3) Plus, my friends and I can sit around and critique the grammar! Whee!!
4) I should be less excited about that, shouldn't I?
5) Depending on who and what they show, they should be using other languages -- Greek in either Pilate's or the Tetrarch's household, and definitely some Hebrew at the Last Supper. Latin for court cases, of course, and conversational Aramaic. [Edited because I've been thinking this over, and I bet that Pilate's questioning of Jesus would've taken place in Greek, too. The odds that Pilate knew Aramaic, or Jesus knew Latin, are really tiny, and there's never any mention of a translator.]
6) I wonder if I know anyone who's working on this?
7) Oh, dear God. They're going to try and figure out exactly how Passover was celebrated in 30 C.E., aren't they? Lots of luck, guys.
8) And how are they going to harmonize the chronology in the synoptics with the one in John? They're not going to use Thomas, are they? I mean, is this even remotely source-critical?
9) Oooh, wait. Are they going to skip the resurrection? 'Cause it sort of sounds like it.
10) And they'll have to decide whether to go with a tau-cross or the one we recognize in contemporary iconography.
11) Also, it'll be interesting to see how they portray the different strands of Second Temple Judaism.
12) If they add in the blood oath from Matthew, I may throw things at the screen. Preferably matzah. Made, for the record, with nothing but flour and water.
13) Where can I get into the betting pool on whether the absurdly-left-wing Jewish groups or the absurdly-right-wing Christian groups will condemn this project first?

Live From Times Square

It's been a year since I started this blog. I still have no terribly clear idea of what I'm doing, although I have managed to narrow down the field of what I'm not doing. I'm not talking about the specifics of what I teach or what I write. I'm not usually talking about (living, non-authorial) people or places by their proper names. I'm not talking about politics or Important Current Events (at least not much). I'm not talking about my day-to-day life unless I deem it especially interesting, or unless I really, really need to vent. I'm not talking about anything which requires more than four, or possibly five, endnotes, until Movable Type develops a plugin to support numbering those suckers. I'm not only talking about fandom, or religion, or books, or family, or TV, or gardening; I don't like to put anything into an intellectual ghetto, although I strongly support the creation of a secure Home for Disturbed Emotions somewhere down in my subconscious. I am, in fact, disturbingly fond of mixing both my metaphors and my hobbies,* which is why I'm surprised that a blog based on the fiction of my anonymity has managed to survive this long. In honor of this occasion, then, I'm going to try and make a positive statement about what I'm doing. Heaven help us all.

Last week, there was a small flare-up of the ongoing debate about what happens when blog and "meatworld" (I almost prefer "real life") collide. I don't read the blog which triggered it, but I understand that a member of someone's family read his blog and was upset about the ways s/he was being referenced in it. A lot of people responded with messages of support for the blogger, praising him for emotional, intellectual, and artistic integrity. (Here's a link to the blogger's response, which mentions most of the posts I'd been reading.) I'm not at all involved in the immediate debate, but I find myself wanting to suggest that bloggers should strive towards a hermeneutic of charity rather than one of suspicion. Or, more simply, I think that integrity is a lot less important than compassion when it comes to what we write about and how we write about it. "Integrity" is, after all, rather an individual issue, and while I'm not given to flights of humility, I do occasionally realize that the universe does not revolve around moi.**

I sometimes think that blogging is rather like having a conversation in the middle of Times Square on New Year's Eve (only, mercifully, without the widespread inebriation or Dick Clark). A blog isn't exactly public, in the sense that it's not the broadcast chatter being conveyed to millions of TV viewers; in fact, only you and a handful of friends (who came with you, or whom you made three hours ago) are probably involved in the conversation. It offers the illusion of privacy. However, your conversation is not at all private. Just about anyone could pop up in Times Square and listen in on your conversation if they hear an interesting phrase, maybe even joining in. The TV camera (what's that, Slashdot? Metafilter?) could pan by at any moment and expose you to even wider examination. That is, anyone could, in theory, get online and read Baraita. My friends -- the majority who don't know about this little experiment -- could. My department chair could. My mother could. (Just in case, and in keeping with the Times Square metaphor: Hi, Mom!) Finally, other people -- that is, people who are not you or your friends -- register primarily as inconveniences. The difference is that in NYE on Times Square there's real immediacy to the presence of people other than you and your friends; you cannot move anywhere you want or do anything you want because there are simply Too Many People around you. In blogspace... not so much.

I'm not suggesting that Times Square on NYE is a model of interpersonal cooperation and harmony, except in the most crudely physical sense. (That is, nobody gets trampled. Uh, usually.) But the Wonderful World of Blogging -- the blogosphere, Blogistan, Blogaria, what-blogging-ever -- could do with a bit of Times Square. There are people all around us, the ones we invited, the ones we didn't but are conscious of, and the ones we don't realize are there at all. We can't -- heck, we shouldn't -- do certain kinds of things, or certain kinds of posts, if for no other reason than because otherwise we will hurt ourselves and/or other people, and neither of these is a desirable outcome. We are all here for different reasons; some of us are here more immediately and more regularly than others, while some of us have been around here a lot longer than others (and, logically enough, have staked out some of the best positions). There's no particular eschatology to blogging -- at least, I sincerely hope we're not waiting for some cosmic or geopolitical ball to drop -- but there is, from time to time, some sense of common purpose. I think I'd like it to be something a little grander than hoisting a sign saying "Hi, Mom!" or "Greetings From Boondoggle!" just in case the camera comes around.*** If I figure out exactly what it should be, of course, I'll let you all know. (In fact, I'll keep the occasional ethical or moral conviction about blogging behavior for another day; right now I'm trying to speak purely in terms of self-interest.) Meanwhile, though... I don't want anyone to get hurt. Myself included. There are a lot of us out here, and some years it's really cold.

(I warned you about mixing metaphors, didn't I? Okay, then. Happy New Year to my blog, and good night to the rest of you.)

* -- Except that I do not plan to found a religion based on fanfic about The Victory Garden and wait for my parents to find out. Just so you know.
** -- Yes, Miss Piggy is a personal heroine, but for entirely different reasons. Actually, the various Myers-Briggs derivatives class me as an ENFJ, which probably accounts for a lot of things.
*** -- You know, I thought about using New Orleans Mardi Gras as an analogy instead, allowing me to talk about beads and cultural capital, but then I realized that I'd be accusing some bloggers of exposing their breasts in exchange for necklaces, and... I didn't.

Confessions Of A Librarian's Daughter

I suppose you could consider this my Monthly Meme, but it's in a good cause. One of the best, in fact. The version of this that's been going through my blogroll tends to involve listing everything one has read off the ALA's Top 100 Banned Books List; I thought about doing that, but then I looked down the list and counted 34 books I'd read plus or minus a few forgettable YA novels. Also, anyone who's reading this blog has probably figured out for themselves that Banning Books Is Bad (and also counterproductive, but don't tell). So I will offer a few nuggets of semi-socially-relevant commentary instead:

• My Hometown's citywide book club started off with To Kill A Mockingbird. At the time, I thought it was a predictable choice; now I... well, still do, but I'm also kind of proud. Are there any civic Banned Book Clubs? Because there really should be.


• How on earth did anything called Curses, Hexes, and Spells stay in a public or school library long enough to be banned? All but the most unremittingly historical witchcraft- and magic-oriented books in my non-university library experience have tended to be listed as "lost" or "stolen" almost at once.


• Incidentally, is Bless Me, Ultima about the computer game, by any chance? That'd be theologically, uh, interesting.


• Jean Auel's "Earth's Children" series (otherwise known as Those Clan of the Cave Bear Books, Yes, The Movie With Daryl Hannah) were a much more valuable sex-education resource for my entire third-grade girls' lunch table than my mom's old copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. (The latter was so obscure about everything except female anatomy that I only managed to match up some of its references with their intended referents a decade later.)


• On a similarly educational note, Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret is a lousy text for teaching girls about menstruation, because everyone I know spent most of the book thinking, "Belts? What the heck are they using belts for?"


• Maurice Sendak wrote a banned book? Oh, please. Of course, I saw another banned-book list with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods on it. At least there I figure there were PETA activists objecting to the book's rosy portrayal of hog-slaughtering activities.


• My mother did not know about Banned Books Week until I told her. (This is especially disturbing if you realize that my mother is in charge of public outreach and special-events planning for our library system.) If the Hometown Library has any display at all for this week, citizens will have my incessant nagging to thank. They will also have our state's strict DUI laws to thank, as the people my mother so tactfully calls her "volunteers" are in fact the cream of the county's mandatory-community-service crop. (Mom occasionally wishes she could snag a professional grantwriter, but she has so far rejected my perfectly reasonable suggestion that she invite all possible candidates to a party at the library, spike the punch, and alert the city police.)


• While there are probably several of these books that the Hometown Library doesn't carry, I happen to know that the only one to which access is restricted is The New Joy of Gay Sex. This is because all the Joy of Sex books are kept behind the reference desk, along with a small book full of important pipe-fitting dimensions, and can only be borrowed in exchange for a driver's license. This is not a question of censorship, oddly enough; it is a question of which reference books were being stolen most frequently. (The part where periodicals stack access to Playboy and Penthouse is theoretically adults-only is indeed censorship, but I don't worry about it too much; the section in question is easy enough to get into, and I have yet to find anyone who can explain why we subscribe to Penthouse in the first place, although I have my suspicions about certain members of the library administration.)


• Fortunately for many of us, the Holy Bible (in pretty much any possible form or language) contains more sex, violence, and supernatural goings-on than nine-tenths of the ALA's banned books list. I'd like to thank Moses, Joshua, and the whole gang for their complicity in my utter lack of age-appropriate reading material throughout my first couple of decades.


• Where's the Banned Videotapes and DVDs list? While we're at it, where's the Top 100 Most Frequently Filter-Banned Sites in Public and School Libraries list?

The thing to do, I understand, is to read at least one new banned book in the coming week. I've narrowed my choices down to either Song of Solomon or Heather Has Two Mommies. Other suggestions are, of course, welcome. Happy reading!

[Note: this post took longer to show up than it should've, for the very boring non-censorship-related reason that I forgot to switch it from "draft" to "publish." Oops.]

On Divine Justice

For those of us keeping track, Yom Kippur starts tonight at sundown. Last year, I discussed why this holiday is not (necessarily) about atonement. This year, I'm going to discuss why it's not necessarily about justice, either.

Certainly, it could be. On Rosh Ha-Shanah, so goes the story, God makes a list and checks it twice -- sorry, wrong holiday -- God makes a list of everyone who deserves to live another year.* On Yom Kippur, God seals the book. This means that we have ten days to make absolutely, positively sure that we're on the proper side of the divine ledger. During the ten days between Rosh Ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, then, we're supposed to fix whatever relationships we have strained and make restitution for any wrongs we have committed so that we can ask and obtain forgiveness from others. While we're at it, we're supposed to throw in some extra charity and prayers. Just before Yom Kippur begins, we also recite a communal prayer asking God to release us from any vows we're likely to take in the next year (this isn't retroactive) that we're unable to fulfill. All of this is a necessary prelude to Yom Kippur itself, which only helps fix problems in the relationship between human beings (as a community; all confessions of wrongdoing are couched in the first-person plural) and God. If everything adds up by the end of the day and all the bases have been covered, we're probably going to wind up in the Book of Life. From this perspective, God is like the IRS, only scarier and with less paperwork. One of the alternative names for Yom Kippur is Yom Ha-Din, the day of judgment or justice.

Despite all of this, I'd like to suggest that Yom Kippur isn't really about justice. There are many aspects of Judaism which are about justice -- most notably large parts of the prophetic tradition, which allows Christians and Muslims to get in on the act as well. "Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate." That's Amos 5:8, my father's favorite Bible passage since all the way back in college when some foolish person signed him up for a course on the Prophets to fulfill a Scripture requirement. (Shortly afterwards, he concluded that all organized religions are a sham under which people try to seize power. Justice is an awesome thing, but it doesn't mesh terribly well with lived reality.)

One of my favorite Bible passages has a rather more indirect connection to the prophets, but it gets repeated in the prayers for every single service in the Jewish liturgy for this holiday season. It's another of those name-of-God things I'm so fond of. In Exodus 34, after he has carved the second set of stone tablets, Moses asks God to "show me your glory," and the Lord passes before Moses and proclaims something the JPS version translates as: "The Lord, the Lord, a god compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin." Then God clarifies that He doesn't remit all punishment but only carries it out to the third and fourth generation.** One strand of Jewish tradition (which contradicts several others, but never mind that) claims that Moses finished the second set of tablets -- and this entire conversation took place -- on Yom Kippur, so that we are commemorating the anniversary on which God opted to forgive us for that little oopsie with the golden calf. The Babylonian Talmud (Rosh Ha-Shanah 17b) explains that God's passing before Moses actually involved showing Moses the proper order of prayers for Yom Kippur! Naturally, then, God's words in this passage must be at the heart of the holiday. Right? Right.

This passage is also a popular one elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. It appears in near-identical form in Numbers 14:18 (where the third-and-fourth-generation bit makes it in) and Psalms 86:15 (where it doesn't). Then -- I did promise we'd get back to the prophets -- the same phrase shows up in Jonah 4:2, after Jonah's call to repentance has galvanized the city of Nineveh, the capital city of Israel's worst enemy, and saved it from the destruction it so richly deserved. You may recall that Jonah (the guy with the fish, for those of us who confuse our minor prophets) was none too thrilled to be sent to Nineveh in the first place. Now he informs the Lord God, "I told you so." More precisely, he complains that he knew this was going to happen, since, after all, "you are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment...."

"Renouncing punishment"? The proper exegetical response to this from anyone who's been paying attention is "huh?" Quite apart from the way Jonah's fudging his quotation -- "renouncing punishment" isn't mentioned anywhere in the other three repetitions of the passage -- the God of the Hebrew Bible does not, on balance, come across as especially forgiving. He wipes out most of humanity once, destroys cities the way most people do laundry, and routinely holds grudges that outlast several dynasties. God's gratuitous acts of mercy are usually the direct result of one of the Chosen People getting extremely mouthy ("Betcha can't find ten righteous people!" "Oh, yeah? You're on!") and/or appealing to the divine sense of self-importance ("How's it going to look if you bring the Israelites all the way into the desert and then let hyenas pick their bones? All the other gods will laugh and point."). In fact, Jonah only gets out of the fish's belly by buttering God up with a little extemporaneous psalmody.

However, Jonah is a genuine prophet -- albeit a prophet working his way up to a major temper tantrum -- and so it's worth considering the possibility that he's right about God in this passage. The more I think about the original proclamation in Exodus, the more I suspect that Jonah may have gotten the gist of it. If God extends kindness*** to the thousandth generation, transgressions aren't going to make much of an impact. I mean, how many people have had no decent ancestors from the Neolithic forward? If you want to be literalist about Scripture, come to think of it, Noah -- "a righteous man, blameless in his generation, who walked with God" -- is less than a thousand generations from any one of us, and Noah is the ancestor of all surviving humankind. Of course, God's kindness only extends so far, and some people are apparently so clueless as to be beyond help (I am merely paraphrasing key parts of the Pentateuch here), but, more often than not, the whole punishment-renouncing routine gets a workout. Abraham gets Lot out of Sodom, Jacob wrestles with an angel and manages to get Esau to forgive him, Moses convinces God to stick with the Israelites after the golden calf incident, and there are multiple instances of God changing God's mind throughout the later history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Jonah's "I told you so" is not entirely off the mark.

Unfortunately, Jonah is righteously pissed off about all this. The prophetic tradition is, after all, about justice, and Nineveh (of all cities) getting off the hook doesn't please Jonah one bit. This being the era before press conferences, he simply stomps off into the desert to sulk. God, in one of Her more patient moments, provides a quick-growing plant to shade Jonah, then arranges for it to die so that He can catch Jonah mourning for the plant. "Aha!" says God, or words to that effect. "You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left [i.e., children], and many beasts as well?"

As a gardener, I've always felt rather sorry for the plant, but it occurs to me that I'm falling into the same mental trap as Jonah. If I care about a plant -- a volunteer seedling, probably a weed -- should I not also care about the city headed by my country's worst enemy, in which there are many, many innocent children and animals, not to mention ordinary people who have no possibility of disagreeing with their rulers? If we as a "nation" care about all the people who lost loved ones in the WTC and Pentagon attacks, people we never knew or met before (and I'm not saying we shouldn't care about them)... oh, wait, I'm trying to be subtle. Never mind.

I've been trying to figure out when, if ever, the Christian liturgies get around to reading Jonah publicly; I think we could stand to hear it more often. A Greek Orthodox friend tells me that they fit Jonah in at Vespers on Holy Saturday. In the Jewish tradition, however, Jonah is the prescribed prophetic reading for Yom Kippur afternoon, part of the order of prayer revealed to Moses in Exodus 34, and the last reading from Scripture before God signs off on fates for the upcoming year. So, you see, it's not necessarily about justice.

You can all figure out for yourselves what the antecedent of that last "it" is.

* -- One of our cheerful and oft-repeated holiday prayers lists a series of possible ways in which people could die. Fire, water, sword, wild animals, strangling, stoning, earthquake, plague... plus, the YK afternoon Torah passage is Leviticus 18, the Big List of Sexual Sins. Really, these services are tailor-made to hold the attention of our youth.
** -- Which some foolish person assigned me, years and years ago, as a Bat Mitzvah portion. (It's read during the sabbath in the middle of Sukkot -- with the armies of Gog and Magog descending from the North as Haftarah, and if you think I managed to make sense out of all that at age 13, you've got to be kidding.)
*** -- The word JPS translates as "kindness" isn't anything that wimpy; it's chesed, which can also be rendered "mercy," "fidelity," or "loving-kindness" for starters. While we're at it, emet isn't "faithfulness," it's "truth." Someday soon, I will post about my translation issues once and for all.

Not A Fandom Issue

Today's (okay, yesterday's) big news in online media fandom: fanfiction.net has decided to eliminate certain sections of its (mostly free) multi-fandom fanfic archive. They're getting rid of NC-17-rated stories, any stories about real people (already under a partial ban), and chat-room-based stories. Now, because ff.net has traditionally been willing to provide publishing space for anything, however long, poorly written, and uninspired, and because its server suffers frequent downtime, the overall quality of the fic there is pretty low. Most active media fandoms have their own network of specialized archives and mailing lists, which provide ample (free) publication and archiving opportunities for aspiring authors. (Consider everything that falls under the BTVS Writers' Guild banner, for instance.) Multi-fandom resources are springing up all over -- Glass Onion has been supplemented by the even-more-inclusive Silverlake. So what's all the fuss about ff.net's decision?

Well, the fuss falls into several different categories. People who had paid for extra access to ff.net probably have a very legitimate gripe, but that's a business issue which I have no intention of addressing. Otherwise, people who seriously feel that their legal rights have been violated by a site administrator's choosing to remove some content from his own site are probably out of luck. People who wish to defend the artistic integrity of chat-based fic can... oh, sorry, I'm laughing too hard to type about it. Never mind. Also, people who wish to defend the ethics or morals of real-person fic can form a line to the right; I don't agree with them, but I think it's a worthwhile issue to discuss, and I'll be getting around to it someday. I want to join in the fuss caused by the people who think ff.net's decision is a bad thing, politically speaking, except that, as always, I have more to add.

See, I don't think this is a fandom issue. I think it's part of a much larger set of issues concerning intellectual property and the Internet. I don't often blog about them, but I keep up with them, and, frankly, the RIAA's latest antics and the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case are way more important than anything ff.net could do on its own. (If you read this blog and have no clue what I'm talking about, shame on you. Go read here, here, and here for starters.) That said, there's no reason why people involved in media fandom shouldn't start fussing about the precedent set by ff.net's decision, as long as we're fussing about the right things. Between the RPF and the NC-17 stuff, ff.net is pretty clearly eliminating content which is likely to get it sued, and is doing so preemptively, before (to my knowledge) any such legal action has even been threatened.

As I've said before and will say again at greater length, I think much of the real-person fic on ff.net -- sexually explicit stuff about TV stars or boybands -- is morally and ethically wrong. This has absolutely nothing to do with its legality, which should be judged according to U.S. laws (ff.net is based in the U.S.). I don't know as much as I should about our libel laws, but I do know that they're reasonably tough to convict under; one can defend against libel suits by successfully claiming that the statement in question is true, that it is a comment or opinion on a matter of public concern, or that it could not be taken as an assertion of fact by a reasonable person. (I am tempted to suggest that a lot of boyband slash falls under that third category.) For an invasion of privacy claim, a public figure usually has to prove actual malice (those are on a state-by-state basis). This isn't shaping up to be a good decade for civil liberties in the U.S., but it's still kind of tough to prevent something from being published just because it might be offensive, even to All Right-Thinking People.

And yet... many ISPs (which are, last I checked, exempt from U.S. libel suits under one of the few non-loony provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act) still have extremely restrictive content terms. There are constant efforts to control and censor all sorts of media which might harm Our Nation's Children (which is ridiculous, not because watching thousands of people get blown on TV away can't influence a kid, but because we already have a class of people responsible for the moral development of those children: parents). When I started setting up my professional site at Boondoggle University, I couldn't help but notice that I was supposed to avoid not only "warez" (does anyone actually use that word?) and "adult content," but also links to adult content. (I can hardly wait to find out whether or not the Song of Songs qualifies). I knew there was a good reason Baraita's on another host, but that one has some equally questionable contract terms. This is not a good trend. It's not illegal, but it's not a good trend. And that's the trend which ff'net's new policy fits into.

As I've also said before, my biggest problem with "fandom revolution" rhetoric is that it's often thinking too small (well, that and the way the word "revolution" was permanently overextended in the '60s). If media fans want to change the culture surrounding them, they should think about the larger issues their concerns tap into. There's not going to be an immediate groundswell of support for stories which feature -- I'm quoting Jen, because I don't think I could come up with a better example -- "Fred/George Weasley with a Britney Spears center," however aesthetically pleasing and insightful they may be.* Writing more such stories is a statement, sure, but statements need to be couched in language that will reach its intended audience, and it might be nice to have an audience outside the two-point-four people who'd actually consider reading such a story on its own merits. Henry Jenkins -- you know, the Textual Poachers guy -- has moved on to defending "violent" video games. In my dream world, some of the organizationally gifted fandom-defender types at Silverlake get really active in organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression, such that their agenda includes fanfic among other types of art that require protection. You know -- speaking of the '60s -- we have seen just how lasting cultural change is when it's confined to one generation and a smallish space at the intersection of class, race, and other societal variables. How long did the cultural "revolutions" of the '60s last?

This isn't just a fandom issue. And even as fandom issues go, ff.net's decision shouldn't be keeping anyone up at night. But fussing might be a good thing anyway.

* -- Editorial comment: ew, ew, ew. Okay, done now.

Refusal To Mourn

I have started and abandoned at least two distinct blog posts this week, trying to get at my apprehension about tomorrow and my efforts to avoid all the TV "coverage" of the first anniversary of September 11th. I'm not sure whether my dislike for this year's September 11th coverage stems from my lack of close personal loss in the events of last year, my preference for ceremony and ritual over scripted extemporaneity, my tendency to express grief alone or with family instead of in public, my inability to watch more than five seconds of those Last-Minute Phone Calls compilations without crying, my resentment of the lack of global and historical perspective on the part of commentators who should know better, my discomfort with intruding on what I perceive as the private grief of others, my distrust of the politicians who are already using this anniversary as a launching platform for their latest re-election campaign, my conviction that there is no way in hell the TV coverage is going to be within a statute mile of "dignified," my petty (but unfortunately not-quite-exorcised) irritation that a bunch of stupid terrorists screwed up my birthday forever-and-ever-amen or at least for the next ten to fifteen years, or my guilt that I'm still irritated about my birthday when tens of thousands of people lost loved ones forever. This concludes the confessional portion of our program.

For a more acerbic and uncomfortably funny take on September 11th coverage, read Vali's list of topics not to be addressed by herself (or me) this week. For anyone who's curious about what I will be doing tomorrow, barring further national emergencies: I plan to teach my usual morning classes -- we'll see how much does or doesn't get discussed -- and then I'm thinking of attending a nearby Mass of Remembrance. I like ceremony, I think my desire for commemoration just barely outweighs my desire to go off and brood, and if I attend something explicitly Jewish, they're going to drag in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which creates odious comparisons no matter how you look at it. I will, however, say Kaddish (during the Eucharist, I think -- not much else to do when you're waiting for people to file past your knees) with my special "Dear God, what the hell were you thinking?" inflection. Then I will hold office hours. I wish all of you well in whatever you choose to do or refrain from doing.

The title of this entry comes from a Dylan Thomas poem that seems to make sense in this context -- to me, anyway. It's called A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London.

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Apples and Honey

Today's not terribly deep thought: isn't it odd that if you take American and Ashkenazi Jewish traditions together, both apples and honey are associated with school and teaching? In theory, at least, one gives apples to teachers -- why I do not know, although I'd like to imagine some sort of sly allusion to Genesis 3. One puts honey on a page of letters the first day of a child's Hebrew instruction in order to demonstrate that learning is sweet. One eats apples and honey together for Rosh Ha-Shanah, of course, the New Year which makes perfect sense to those of us who run our lives by school years. Unfortunately, my students failed to figure this out and give me apples today, so I need to run by the grocery store before I go to services. Tomorrow afternoon, when it is traditional to go home and eat a large meal with one's family, we have a departmental picnic. I'm bringing the honey cake. Convenient, isn't it?

Shanah tovah, everyone!

Hazardous Conditions

In the Someday I'll Look Back On This And Laugh department: as I think I mentioned before, my Non-Intro class was finally -- two days before the beginning of term -- assigned to a Level Three "smart classroom," with all kinds of neat gadgets implanted in a giant podium. Unfortunately, the L3 classrooms are at a premium, and so they're scheduled nonstop during building operating hours. In other words, I had no way of going to the classroom and fooling around with it, short of arriving ten minutes early for my own class and encouraging the stats professor who's there before me to move her student conferences out into the hall. However, I'm good with computers, and I couldn't believe that a system designed for the average faculty member could pose serious problems for me, so I went ahead and tried the ten-minutes-early thing this morning. I had the keys to open the cabinets; I knew how to work the lights, the projection screen, the VCR, the blasted document camera... the CPU and VCR were both receiving power, but I couldn't figure out how to get anything up to the screens, and none of the toggle switches worked. So I had to concede defeat, scrap my lesson plan (which called for both the VCR and the document camera), and lead an impromptu discussion about a book that I'm positive half the class hasn't started reading. Given those caveats, actually, it went reasonably well (the ten or so students who participated seemed to be interested). As soon as the class was over, I marched to our media center and explained to the nice young woman at the desk that, no, I did not need "technical assistance"; I needed someone to tell me how to get the damn monitors on. She called over another worker, who explained to me that I needed to touch the central screen -- the whole system is apparently touch-based -- for it all to come alive and start giving me programming options.

Oh. Well. Why didn't it occur to me to fondle the central screen? (And if the whole system is touch-based, why do they have a keyboard and a mouse -- not a trackball, but an old-fashioned corded mouse -- under there?) Why couldn't they have put a little label to that effect somewhere near the screen? And why, in the name of all that's holy, didn't they tell us about that instead of just encouraging us to "use technology" during our orientation? Grrrrrrr.

Okay, so this is not an "I love my job" kind of day. This is an "I basically like my life, but I want to sleep in at least once this month, and I wish I could just fast-forward to finals week" kind of day. On the plus side, surviving this kind of day also makes me Very Easily Amused -- by, for example, the Hazzard County Driver's Test at Brunching Shuttlecocks (via Snarkcake), which I aced earlier today. (I don't really drive like that. Well, mostly.) I remember the Dukes from when I was very young -- I didn't watch the show often, but I had a mad crush on General Lee, and even owned a toy version of it. It continues to bother me that I never wrote it any fanmail, especially after learning that it sent back form letters with tire-tread print "signatures."

You know, one can carry the whole Admissions of Personal Flaws thing too far. I'm going to get back to work before I start telling the world about the weird and disturbing LOTR/Zork/Angel/grad-school/Acts of the Christian Martyrs crossover my subconscious mind came up with between the first and second snooze buttons this morning.

School Daze

I've been relatively reticent about my first week of teaching -- in part because I want to preserve my students' privacy, of course, and in part because I've been too damn busy, but also because my opinion of myself as a teacher was veering wildly all last week. I ranged from adrenaline-fueled euphoria, during which I wondered why I hadn't asked for an 8 am class, to utter despondency accompanied by the certainty that I was traumatizing all my students for the rest of their natural lives. Needless to state, neither of these is strictly correct -- although I do enjoy being up first thing in the morning, and now my schedule forces me to go to bed early enough to accomplish that. Also, somewhere around about Thursday night, I remembered that the overall quality of my emotional life improves when I eat regularly, so I went to the store and loaded up on everything from red bell peppers to Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie lowfat frozen yogurt (which, of course, helped me get through my sermon). My desk is now fully stocked with cereal bars and microwave popcorn (both technically lowfat, although I'm a little dubious about how "lowfat" and "cheesecake" can coexist on a single label). I'm still drowning in paper, but I plan to do a lot of filing tomorrow afternoon during my office hours. And last but not least, I've decided that I do like teaching full-time after all.

I'd never taught a fifty-minute class before -- always 1.5-hour or 3-hour monstrosities, bolstered by at least six pages of closely typed notes. Now I have two fifty-minutes classes, and -- much to my surprise -- I like them. Fifty-minute classes don't really require notes; you can only get in maybe five points anyway, and you just have to decide which five points and how best to start off the class. My intro classes are both full, at 35 students, which is a little too big for really good whole-class discussion; I plan to divide them into small groups fairly regularly, but I've also resigned myself to having to call on those back-of-the-room folks by name. (Of course, it will be difficult to do this before I've learned everyone's names; I finally gave up on convincing the Web-based registration system to print out class lists the way it's supposed to and am making simple Excel spreadsheets for keeping track of attendance and ungraded assignments.)

The Intro Classes are also fun because I have so much latitude. Of course, nobody's tried to exercise curricular control over anything I teach, but the Intro Class's mandate is so broad that one can opt for any number of things with total pedagogical integrity. It's sometimes easier to teach out of your subject area, I've heard, and I'm beginning to believe it; if I only know a handful of important things about Subject A, I have a lot less to sift out before I decide what to require my students to know about it. Once I get to the part of the Intro Class that is in my subject area, I'll see how things go, but right now I'm having great fun keeping a few steps ahead of the class. Plus, most of them are so young and confused that they bring out my nurturing instincts. One of them came to my office hours and apologized for being ten minutes late to the second class due to sleeping through his alarm. (I almost told him that I wasn't keeping track of attendance for the first week -- it's impossible, what with people transferring in and out -- but I didn't want to spoil the effect of the Extremely Serious Attendance Policy on the syllabus.)

I'm less in love with the Other Class right now, partially because it's a version of something I've done before, and partially because I need to carve out time to go play with the "smart classroom" and figure out how to use all the gadgets when there's not actually a class in there. (I was standing on my tiptoes today trying to cram things onto the blackboard and thinking, "I know there's a computer and projection screen somewhere in that podium.") The students in this class are more difficult to read; some of them seem genuinely interested in the material (parts of which are rather sexy), but others are clearly in it to fulfill a requirement. The energy level isn't exactly hopping as yet. I think it'll pick up this week, though, once they start having to write up text summaries and present them to the class along with discussion questions. I confess to hoping that the student who responded to my first-day syllabus read-through with the question "Why? I ask all my teachers this: why should this be important to me?" will go ahead and drop the class, since he hasn't been attending, but it is sort of reassuring to know that there are levels of self-importance I've never reached.

In grad school, I knew many people who were good at either learning or teaching, but not both -- and many who disliked one or the other, which is probably worse than a correctable lack of skills. I knew I was good at learning, and the evaluations said I was good at teaching, but I wasn't always entirely convinced that I liked teaching in practice rather than in theory. Now I'm considerably surer, because in all my mood swings last week, I never stopped liking the students. Except that I hate our two-week drop/add period with a fiery passion, and I think it will be much more pleasant to have a day or two off from teaching in the spring.

Now if I could just get around to setting up a research agenda....