Eric Dean Rasmussen Online

As a native Nebraskan who has always been frustrated and slightly baffled by the fact that the majority of Cornhuskers vote Republican, I was pleased to learn that US Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Nebraska, a senior Republican member of the House International Relations Committee, wasspeaking out against the war of Iraq. His decision to break ranks with the GOP chickenhawks suggests that not all Republicans are willing to be puppets of Cheney and co. and is a sign that political independence.

As John Nichols reports in The Nation:

US Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Nebraska, the vice chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and one of the senior Republican members of the House International Relations Committee, announced after a thorough review of the information available to him that he had come to the conclusion that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was unjustified. "I've reached the conclusion, retrospectively, now that the inadequate intelligence and faulty conclusions are being revealed, that all things being considered, it was a mistake to launch that military action," explained Bereuter, who added that, "knowing what I know about the reliance on tenuous or insufficiently corroborted intelligence used to conclude that Saddam maintained a substantial WMD (Wepaons of mass destruction) arsenal, I believe that launching the pre-emptive military action was not justified."

Infuriatingly, Bereuter's remarks and his reasons for concluding that the pre-emptive militrary strike on Iraq was a mistake have been largely ignored by the mass meda, which continues to assist Karl Rove by focusing attention on the lies propagated by the so-called "Swift Vote Veterans for Truth," . Once again, the conservative media bury a real news story in favor of sensationalistic, discredited propaganda.

I'm curious about how Nebraskans, particularly those who back Bush, feel about Bereuter's conclusion regarding Iraq and the nasty campaign being run by Bush/Cheney. Any reports from readers in Nebraska are welcome.

Word to students in my American Literature and American Culture course: Follow this link to Remedios Varo's painting Bordando el Manto Terrestre. Viewing the image of Varo's painting should help you to understand better why Oedipa is so moved by the painting and to answer the following questions from your study guide to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

Focus on: art, affect and knowledge
6a. Reread the passage recalling Oedipa’s visit to an exhibition of Remedios Varo's paintings aloud several times (10–12). Pynchon writes, “Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried” (11). First, briefly contextualize this sentence. That is, explain how, when, where and with whom Oedipa came to view Varo’s painting.

b. Then, refer to specific lines and phrases from the text to answer the following questions: Why was Oedipa moved to tears by viewing the Remedios Varo painting “Bordando el Manto Terrestre”? Why might the narrator have described Oedipa and/or her response as “perverse”? What knowledge is revealed to Oedipa “because of [the] painting”? Be as specific as possible, and address some of the significant details that Pynchon’s ornate narration provides. For example, you might remark upon the fact that Oedipa could “see the world refracted through those tears” (11 italics mine) and speculate on why she feels such a strong connection to the painting of the imprisoned girls. Try to find a reproduction of this painting in an art book or on the Internet.

Kierkegaard referred to it as the aesthetic mode of existence, and here's where it could get me, according to the Dante's Inferno Test...

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Moderate
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	High
Level 7 (Violent)	Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Moderate

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

Here's Ira, digging the scene on the Great Lawn, listening to the music being performed at the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion. Among the musicians we heard were Kelly Hogan, Andrew Bird, and Koko Taylor. The weather was damn-near perfect that day, and the crowd was large, but not claustrophobically huge. In short, it was a fantastic outing.

Ira in the Park Originally uploaded by erasmus.

I'm posting a few pics from our visit to Chicago's new Millennium Park, which is located just north of the Art Institute in the area that was formally an industrial wasteland containing old train cars. The park opened to the public last weekend (July 16-18) and more than lived up to its hype. Despite the predictable cost overruns, I left feeling a bit better about the 8.75% sales tax (not to mention the ridiculous 'sin taxes' on booze) we pay here in Chitown. This picture of Daniel, Ira, and me sitting on the Great Lawn was taken by Adam Richer.

Daniel Ira Eric Originally uploaded by erasmus.

Just a note to self to track down and screen Robert Greenwald's documentary, "Outfoxed," which exposes the extent to which Fox News is a massive propaganda machine. While this information about Fox is nothing new, many students seem to have little ability to discern propaganda from journalism. Based on the account of the film in "How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary," "Outfoxed" may make it onto a future syllabus, e.g., American Literature and American Culture or a composition class, in a segment devoted to media analysis.

My interview with the renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek is now online at ebr, though it's not yet been 'officially' published (that'll occur in August). Because it's a beta version of the essay, you can't yet search for the article in the ebr database and must link to it directly. So, here's a link to the article, "Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek". A condensed version of the interview will appear in print in the minnesota review n.s. 61-62 (2004): 79-93.

Zizek & Rasmussen Originally uploaded by erasmus.

It's been and will continue to be an emotionally rich day. Daniel, my stepson, arrived from Sweden and was waiting for me when I came home from class. Right now he's napping, and Ira and I are listening to a jazz CD by the Gavleborgs Ungdoms Big Band (GUBB) on which he plays. On "Congo Square," track six, that's my son performing an alto-sax solo. Later today, I'm heading to Seth and Maeve's place to celebrate Seth's birthday. Hopefully, Daniel will be rested enough to join us. All of this is exciting, and last night I didn't sleep much in anticipation of today's events, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the extent to which I was affected by the following passage from Jesus' Son Denis Johnson's powerful short-story collection.

"His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath. He wouldn't be taking many more. I knew that, but he didn't, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person's life on this earth. I don't mean that we all end up dead, that's not the great pity. I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real" (10).

I was reading this section, which describes the narrator's (known only as Fuckhead) response to a car crash that he has just witnesed, and damn near broke down when I came to the line "that's not the great pity." I could feel the tears welling up behind my eyeballs, and had to gulp down a huge breath in order to finish the sentence. In retrospect, I suppose the moment was slightly embarrassing, though at the time I didn't feel so self-conscious about the public display of emotion. At the time, I was too overwhelmed by the eloquence of Johnson's prose to feel embarassed by my sudden near loss of compusure. What's somewhat embarrassing (though that's not the right word here because I'm also grateful that my work, i.e., literature, is still able to move me) or makes me feel self-conscious is that I don't know if I can adequately explain why I was so affected by this passage. And as an English teacher, it's my job to explain why and how words work the way they do.

I might begin, I suppose, by noting the irony at work here. For one, I was reading this passage aloud in an attempt to explain why I'd included Jesus' Son, a work that is both naturalistic and romantic, in a work on postmodernism, art and aesthetics. After all, the stories aren't especially concerned with representing features often identified with 'postmodern' culture, e.g., electronic simulations, cybernetic organizational structures, etc. Moreover, if postmodern art and literature is thought to display a lack of affect, the passage's concern with pity and my response to it would seem to suggest that Johnson's short stories are anything but afffectless. But these thoughts came after the fact. I began reading the section in order to follow up on a student's suggestion that Jesus' Son displayed the ontological uncertainty that Brian McHale and other literary critics have found to be a distinguishing feature of postmodern literature. The student suggested that the fact that Fuckhead was a drug addict and that many of the episodes recount moments of his being on drugs made it difficult to determine what really happened. I agreed with her take, to an extent, pointing out that while drugs are certainly a means of inducing 'ontological uncertainty' the irreality of the novel was not a function of the narrator's drug use. Rather, the drug use was better understood as a symptom of a more fundamental irreality.

In any case, I came to class with a cluster of passages from the novel, including the one quoted above, which occurs in the first chapter, "Car Crash," that explicitly dealt with the ways different characters had difficulty discerning what was really real. I'd highlighted, marked, and even read aloud the passage to Ira last night, but was nonetheless blown away by the way Fuckhead so perfectly registers what I'd call the core of postmodern pathos, that is, the recognition that language (and other mediating technologies) can never adequately articulate or re-present the Real, but always leave us fumbling in our fallen reality. My students had already heard me give glosses on Derrida's critique of logocentrism, so I didn't go there, but I think that this passage might've made them feel the poignancy of his deconstruction of metaphysics. Derrida and Johnson's writings both suggest, though in very different ways, that the ethical challenge of our time is to somehow remain faithful to our spiritual yearnings for transcendental experiences, while remaining aware that such yearnings are, in some sense, impossible, illusory and even dangerous.

Jesus' Son is a post-metaphysical novel about salvation. It closes with Fuckhead, now working in a nursing home, coming to terms with being in this world, learning to live in and be at peace with a reality that will never be fully redeemed. "All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us" (160).

I promised myself I'd refrain from saying anything more about Fahrenheit 9/11 until I'd seen it, but want to archive this positive review, By Way of Deception, written by Stuart Klawans, the film critic for The Nation.

In response to my post regarding Hitchens' attack, a friend (y'all will know who immediately, but I'll keep the name anonymous) wrote me the following: "I really dug that piece by Christopher Hitchens from your blog. I saw him on Dennis Miller a few years back and thought he was just about spot on. He was smoking and drinking scotch the whole time too like a true journaliste'. I haven't seen the film yet either, but Moore has long bothered me and Hitchens nails the reasons why. Michael Moore is really a paddy cake and should stick to paddy cake subjects. No wonder the French love him."

Regarding those remarks, I have a few comments... One is that of the three political commentators mentioned above, Hitchens is the only true journalist and writer; Moore is a skilled provocateur, and Dennis Miller is the true paddy cake. I lost my HBO, but as of about 9 months ago I found that Dennis just isn't funny any more, unless you find smarmy frat-boy humor (e.g., jokes about turning the Middle East into a parking lot and other allegedly 'patriotic' statements) to be clever. Dennis ain't anywhere near as smart as he wants to believe, and his rightward turn and subsequent defense of the Bushies and the civil-rights violations and constitutional attacks authorized under Homeland Security just proves that he sees the world in black and white--them (those A-rabs) against us (the US of A). Moore, on the other hand, can be reductive, but at least he does do work that qualifes as, or at least draws from, investigative journalism.

Moore should definitely not stay away from the Iraq War or other difficult topics. In fact, part of what let us into the mess we're currently in is that the mainstream media i.e., the big TV networks, e.g., ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, and newspapers such as The New York Times) refrained from asking the hard questions about the Bush Administration's reasons for invading Iraq. Either the journalists were intimidated by the right-wing pundits into thinking that rigorous questioning of Bush and co. would tag them as the "liberal media" or their corporate handlers silenced them either indirectly or directly. In any case, the Bushies got a pass. The amount of attention paid to Whitewater or Monica Lewinski with Bubba's administration paled in comparison to the attention that should've been devoted to asking the hard questions about Iraq.

I don't know whether Moore asks or answers these questions in his film, but since our media failed to do so, more power to Moore for making an effort before the election to alert the American public to why the Bushies' really wanted this war with Iraq (sorry, Hitch, but helping the Kurds has nothing to do with it) and how our democracy is taking a beating as a result.

Lesson of the day: If you're planning to run for public office, you might not want to marry a famous actress, take her to S&M; clubs and try to get her to perform sex acts on you while other people watch, and then get a messy divorce from her. Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan, of Illinois, may have learned that lesson the hard way. Court documents the couple has fought to keep private contain allegations by his ex, actress Jeri Lynn Ryan ("Boston Public," "Star Trek: Voyager") -- made during a hearing about the custody of the couple's young son -- that Ryan demanded that she accompany him to sex clubs in New Orleans, New York and Paris. The New York club, she said, had "cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling." Ryan admitted only that he did take his wife to "one avant-garde nightclub in Paris which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return." Despite controversy over the allegations, Ryan says he'll continue his run for Senate. (Associated Press)

C: Wow. I had no idea Illinois politics was so interesting. I guess Ryan is just another typical "Family Values" Republican.

E: That'd be ILL politics....

My favorite bit was that Jack Ryan referred to the swingin' sex establishments (S&M; dungeons for repressed Republicans) as ‘avant-garde’ clubs. I was just discussing the concept of the avant-garde in class on Monday, & will have to bring up Ryan's recent attempt at resignification. (I wonder if he considered the anonymous voyeures, who were invited to watch him and his wife go at it , to be in the position of the vanguard?)

Heh, heh... It's not schadenfreude if the people who get their comeuppance were hypocrites, right?

I hope this incident means that the Illinois senate seat is Obama's come November. Obama, to his credit, has refused to comment on Ryan's sexual past. When asked, he simply responds that the issues he wants to address in the campaign do not involve Ryan's personal character, but are about issues that effect the pubic, such as poverty, health care, etc. Classy.

# posted by EDR @ 12:55 AM   1 comments

I'm eager to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and am curious to compare the reception it receives from the public and the pundits. In "Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore," Hitchens, a man of the left who left the Nation because (as far as I understand) he was the lone hawk regarding Iraq amongst the magazine's regular contributors and editors, attacks Moore what could be (not having seen the film) a legitmate flaw -- an inconsistent argument and position regarding the Bush Administration's foreign policy.

Although I thought Moore's Bowling for Columbine was definitely worth seeing and deserved credit for being ambitious, I left the theater thinking that it raised too many questions about violence in America without seriously, i.e., rigorously, trying to provide any answers. As a consequence, at times the film seemed either exploitative (of the victims of gun violence who appeared to be bearing their wounds publically for no discernable purpose) or too glib. That said, the film was worth seeing, and I hope the scenes of middle-Canadian hunters, etc. might help to dispel the idiotic myth that people in countries with more strict gun regulations are somehow emasculated, disempowered, or less 'free' when compared to Joe America.

At this point, I'm wary of being overly critical of Moore's larger project (unlike Hitchens, I think Moore provides a genuine service by informing people about facts and phenomena--rural poverty, the waste promulgated by the military-industrial complex, etc.--that are generally ignored in school, on television, the radio, etc.) since I think the majority of Moore's political pranks are well intentioned and display enough irony to distinguish them from propaganda.

As Hitchens suggests in his article, the left needs figures who can 'entertain' if they are to attract an audience in our mass-mediated wasteland. It appears that, at present, Moore may be as good as it gets. (I'm told Jon Stewart is rising to the challenge, but alas, this scholar of the postmodern can't afford cable TV, which is, in itself, a perfect pomo paradox.) Moore's message is more fair and better thought through than the bulk of the lies we get via Fox News, etc., but it may ultimately be the case that you can't do justice to complex issues while employing soundbite editing (Please provide with with emperical proof to refute my last hypothesis) for an image-driven medium. In any case, I'm damning Moore with faint praise and will hold off making any more pronouncements until I actually see the film.

Wilco (from left, Glenn Kotche, Jeff Tweedy, Nels Cline, John Stirratt and Pat Sandone), photographed by Tony Cenicola for the New York Times.

Wilco Originally uploaded by erasmus.

As I was telling Jimmy yesterday, I was out & about in Wrigleyville with my iPod & it just clicked for me--A Ghost Is Born I mean. Initially, the songs I'd downloaded (still don't have the full album, but will break my moratorium on CD purchases for this one) failed to grab me the way, say, "Jesus Etc." did from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but that might've been because I was listening to the tracks as singles, individual songs, shuffled in random order, rather than as part of an organized larger whole. What, back in the day, used to be known as an LP record. Seeing Wilco play "Hummingbird" on Letterman the other night softened me up to the newer songs as well.

In any case, here's an ok article from the Sunday New York Timesabout the band titled "The Ever-Expanding Legend of Wilco" that is slightly annoying, because its stereotype of fervent Wilco worshippers strikes me as being largely a straw man constructed by the reporter to show off how 'broad minded' his or her tastes are. Where the reporter, Kalefa Sannah, gets the notion that the bulk of Wilco fans are aging boomers, I don't know. Someone should tell Sannah that people in their late 20s to mid 40s are not baby boomers. ('Course, as Westerberg put it "We got no war to name us," so perhaps this generation remains as demographically invisible as Douglas Coupland and all those generation-X writers believed back in the early 1990s.) In the course of discussing A Ghost is Born, Sanneh never explains why he would pick J Lo & the "mutiethic hordes" (whores?) on the dance floor over Wilco's rock 'n' roll experiments, but, then again, who cares.

There's not a lot in the article that hasn't been written elsewhere (last week's Chicago Reader cover story had the full scoop on Tweedy's recent struggles with anxiety and addiction and Wilco's shifting lineup and it didn't present it in VH1-behind-the-music-tabloid fashion), but at least this NYT article has a great photo of the band. It'll be interesting to see how Ghost does when it hits the stores on Tuesday.

Yesterday, I switched my posting font from Hellvetica to Baskerville. Serif fonts are more readable for longer lexias, and I find Baskerville to be a particularly eloquent font. Unfortunately, it's produced a bit of a technical glitch on my site. Apparently, the punctuation marks (apostropes, em-dashes etc.) in some of my previous posts are now unreadable in Baskerville. I haven't yet decided if I should switch back to the sans-serif, Helvetica, switch to Times New Roman (or a simiar serif font) or stick with Baskerville. I know I don't have the time to go back, line by line, to corrrect the typos in previous posts, and though nobody else in the world probably cares a bit, as someone committed to aesthetic theory, I am annoyed by the unprofessional looking typos on my website. What to do, what to do... For now, I guess, it'll stay, as is. Perhaps I can find an effecient fix. In any case, the site may be experiencing some technichal aberrations if not difficulties the next few days as I do some experimenting with the coding.

Been revising an introduction for my forthcoming interview with Slavoj Zizek, which will appear in its entirety online in ebr and in condensed form in the the minnesota review. I'm posting my draft here to get a better sense of the online layout. I need to see if I should break up my three paragraphs for easier reading on the screen.

The following interview with Slavoj Zizek took place on the morning of September 29, 2003 in the Palmer House Hilton, a Gilded Age-era hotel in downtown Chicago. In the hotel's opulent lobby, it was easy to spot the bearded Zizek amongst the nattily dressed businesspeople and well-healed tourists. As befits a self-described "old-fashioned left winger," Zizek seemed to be dressed down for our meeting. Yet when Zizek lectured at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute later that night, he wore the same striped knit shirt and casual pants and looked even more disheveled. But although Zizek's comfortable attire and his unassuming demeanor lacked the authority and panache of an 'academostar' such as, say, Edward Said (who had passed away just four days before and whose elegant and opulent fashions even The Nation remarked upon favorably), once Zizek began to philosophize he instantaneously grew in stature. He spoke extemporaneously with an arresting verve and displayed the theoretical prowess and outrageous sense of humor that have established him as one of the world's foremost intellectuals.

Not that such academic accolades probably mean much to Zizek, who described himself as a philosopher with "a very technical, modest project"--to reactualize the legacy of German Idealism. After determining that it was too noisy in the bustling lobby to conduct the interview, we headed to Zizek's room. "So, what's your agenda?" he asked me conspiratorially as we entered his room, which appeared almost ascetically empty. Zizek was on the road for several weeks, but he apparently traveled with only a single duffel bag, a laptop computer, and some novels by Henning Mankell, the Swedish detective novelist. Zizek was coming down with a bad cold, and apologized for his sniffling. While I readied my recorder, he climbed into bed, pulled up the covers, and in an comfortably reclined position, cracked a joke about waxing philosophical from his sickbed. His self-deprecating humor helped me to relax, not least because Zizek's posture reminded me of the provocative author's photo adorning on the back cover of The Puppet and the Dwarf. Shot at the Sigmund Freud museum, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacques Lacan, the photo features an intense looking Zizek lounging on a canopied couch covered with a southwestern-style rug. Immediately above Zizek's outstretched legs, affixed to the back of the couch, is a framed picture of the bottom half of a woman's torso with her hairy vagina prominently displayed. I half expected to see the picture hanging above Zizek's hotel bed, but in the interest of professionalism refrained from telling him so and launched into the interview, which lasted just under two hours.

Despite being under the weather, it didn't take long for Zizek to display the vigor and loquaciousness for which he is famous. As he launched into a polemic against the Other as posited in Levinasian-Derridean theory, Zizek lurched up from the bed and began gesticulating with his arms, his strength increasing with each idea that rapidly came to mind. For the remainder of our interview Zizek was extremely animated, and the rapidity of his speech increased with each passing minute. It quickly became clear that I would be unable to ask all of the questions I had diligently prepared and, in retrospect, I wish I'd more thoroughly interrogated him about his animosity towards deconstruction. My sense was that, were I to ask only one question, Zizek would've continued to talk for the remainder of the interview. In order to get my questions in, I had to speak quickly and risk interrupting the verbose Zizek, who was understanding of my desire to direct the interview but clearly wanted to insure that he was able to elaborate upon and clarify his points. Not surprisingly, then, the interview ran over its allotted time by almost an hour. After all, two new books on Deleuze and Iraq were forthcoming, and Zizek enjoyed joking with Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva, my Russian-born wife, about Western misconceptions regarding Soviet-era life behind the Iron Curtain. As he apologetically escorted me and Ira out the door, Zizek was still theorizing at a machine-gun rate. "When does he get the time to write?" we wondered, in awe of our encounter with this sublime, yet humble, Slovenian philosopher.

Read here about a UK journalist's horrifying Welcome to America. More evidence suggesting that the Cheney-Bush regime are using the war on terror as cover for turning the U.S. into an authoritarian police state. Dissenters beware, if you don't toe the Republican party line you too may be detained. The arrogance and stupidity of the security guards is disgusting, though their demeanor matches that of our so-called Commander in Chief. It all makes one ashamed to be an American. Even if Cheney and Bush are ousted in November, it will take years for our country to recover from the damage that they've inflicted on our democracy.

When I returned home from teaching, a wecome message awaited me on my answering machine. After a couple listens I was able to discern that I'd won two tickets from WXRT to see the Cowboy Junkies play a secret show Tuesday evening at Schubas Tavern, an intimate little club on Southport, not too far from my home, that specializes in singer-songwriter and folkier indie rock. I didn't even remember entering WXRT's contest, so this was quite a surprise. I just wish Ira was in town for the show, but she's in Dublin, downing Guinnesses in honor of James Joyce and Ulysses.

I haven't seen the Cowboy Junkies live since, if my memory serves me well, 1992, when they opened for the great John Prine at a show I attended with Steve Horowitz, who was then teaching journalism courses at Coe College. I'll reminisce about Steve another time, but do want to say that he still practices music journalism and is one of the critics polled for the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop list. Steve's top-10 list is generally filled with goodies, and I credit him with predicting that I'd be getting into more country music as I aged.

I must confess that I haven't kept up with the Cowboy Junkies. Black Eyed Man (1992) is the last CD by them that I bought, and Pale Sun Crescent Moon is the last CJ CD that I've heard in its entirety. So, it'll be interesting to see if their sound has evolved at at. In any case, I expect Margo Timmins' voice is as haunting as ever.

This concert should be the third great Americana/Y'alternative/Alt-Country (or whatever they're calling quality country music these days to distinguish it from the phony crap heard broadcast on stations throughout middlebrow America) show that I'll have seen in five days. On Friday night, Jim Kourlas and I heard Nora O'Connor play some songs from her forthcoming (due in August) album on Bloodshot records. For those who don't know of the lovely Miss Nora, she's an Irish-American girl from Chicago's southside, and she's got a voice as good, if not better, than that of the more famous Irish singer who shares her last name. I like to describe her as the Emmylou Harris of Chicago's indie scene, and as if to justify that description she played a couple songs that Emmylou has covered the other night. On Saturday, I returned to The Hideout, where I met Jim and Leo, to attend a secret Handsome Family show that was also a celebration of Brett and Rennie Sparks' 16th wedding anniversary. They playfully bickered throughout the whole set, & it was just fantastic. Brett singing reminds me of Peter Sellers morphing into a cross between Johnny Cash and Nick Cave. That is, his barritone conjures up the Cash and Cave comparison, while his facial expressions add a touch of the comic to the often gothic scenarios about which he's singing. More on The Handsome Family later...

Time for the News Hour, some exercising, dinner, and scholarly pursuits.

I'm just experimenting with flickr, a beta interface that enables one to upload and store digital images on their site. Right now, the service is free. Unfortunately, Blogger's profilie feature isn't working properly, as I'd like to add a picture into my toolbar. For now, though, this'll do the trick.

Eric Rasmussen self-portrait Originally uploaded by erasmus.

(Attempted to post this on June 12, using "BlogThis!," but it didn't work; however, the text was saved in an e-mail that I received, so here it is). I'm posting this link to an article/book excerpt for possible future inclusion in a composition course that would focus on ideology and the media. Not sure whether 'teaching the conflicts' is effective, or if I should simply teach more overtly left-leaning material (say, from The Nation or In These Times that provides a more fair and reasonable take on current events than the right-wing propaganda that David Brock once wrote and now wishes to expose in his recent book The Republican Noise Machine. The argument against spending time reading material from the far right is that students are already bombarded with the biased bullshit espoused by Rugh Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, etc. Therefore, time would be better spent reading materials that they are less likely to be exposed to, ideally journalism and academic texts that strive to maintain a sense of professional integrity by being intellectually objective and, if overtly political, then doing so whilst retaining some standard of the objective truth

Yesterday I picked up a cheap copy of The Cultural Turn, Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 by
Fredric Jameson. It's a book that I should've read long ago but didn't, because I was under the impression that the book just recycled essays, in including the famous "Postmodernism and the Consumer Society" that had been published elsewhere. Although much of what Jamseon has to say in the book is already familiar to me, I'm finding it quite useful for my own research on the present status of the aesthetic. In particular, the chapter "'End of Art' or 'End of History'?" is proving to be a great catalyst for my thinking about a cluster of novels written in the past couple decades.

For example, I'm quite taken by the term "ephochality." I know, I know, y'all think that academics are all too frequently smitten with neologisms and esoteric jargon that makes their writing impenetrable to all but a select coterie. Well, in this case, I'm herer to tell you that the term is straightforward and necessary, for it provides an effecient way of describing a pervasive phenomenon of our--hell, let's not be bashful about using the term--postmodern condition. Jameson uses the term "epochality" to describe the dominant attutide that we have to the beliefs held by people living in other temporalities. Jameson writes, "I believe, however, that the historical significance of Fukuyama's essay is not really to be found in Hegel or Kojeve, even though I also think we have something to learn from them: namely, a relationship to our own presesnt which I will call 'epochality' and by way of which we defend the historical meaning and significance of the present moment and the present age against all claims of the past and the future" (CT 90).

Jameson is commenting here on Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, an enormously influential article and later book (Fukuyama had a position in the George Bush Sr's State Department). I don't want to rehearse Fukuyama's arguemnt, which concerns the idea that from an evolutionary perspective, political systems have reached their final stage of development. In other words, the Westernized liberal democracies that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States, France, etc. are more or less where it's it, and everything to come will just be fine tuning the systems to make them better conform to the abstract ideals (liberty, fraternity, equality, etc.) upon which they were founded. egarding our relationship to the present, namely, our inability to imagine that alternative beliefs from either the past or the future could alter our beliefs about the present. I us "ed the colloquialism "where it's at" deliberately, because one of Jameson's insights into Fukuyama's essay is that "despite the appearances, Fukuyama's 'end of history' is not really about Time at all, but rather about Space" (CT 90) and the recognition that, in the new globalized economic system, there are virtually no uncommodified parts of the world left.

But let's return to "epochality." The term, as Jameson uses it, provides a shorthand way of articulating our (i.e., those of us living in Westernized democracies) inability to imagine that beliefs from either the past or the future could possibly alter our beliefs about the present or provide the model for an alternative social system. In his previous writings, Jameson urged readers to "always historicize," but recently he has, I think, grown even more aware of the amnesiac nature of our contemporary existence. One result of our lack of knowledge about the past is that it makes it more difficult to imagine that the present too will one day be regarded as a historical moment. Thus, our attention is fixated on the present and the immediate, or, at best, the near future. In the United States, for example, the general failure to act now in order to limit global warming, or the tendency to ring up huge debts without much consideration about how future generations will pay them off are two symptoms of our epochality.

Basically, Jameson is concerned about our inability to imagine a better world than the one in which we currently live, which is filled with extreme poverty and suffering due in part to inequalities perpetuated by global or postmodern capitalism. Because capitalism is fueled by the capitalists' extraction of surplus labor from workers, and because the current global capitalist order is, to a widely unacknowledged degree, dependent upon a pyramidal distribution of wealth and resources, including food, shelter, health care, etc. Jameson believes that we need to implement a different global social order. Unfortunately, in his view, this project strikes most people as being not just impossible to realize, but impossible to even conceptualize. That is, for many, at least for the political and economic elite who own most of the world's wealth and are the primary benefactors of the all-mighty market, the present order appears to be the be all and end all. Jameson, as is well known, is a Marxist thinker. He still believes in a socialist or communist project. What I would like to know, is how does he think we could get from here to there without a bloody, world revolution that could possibly leave the planet uninhabitable?

I'm posting this article/book excerpt for possible future inclusion in a composition course that would focus on ideology and the media. Not sure whether 'teaching the conflicts' is effective, or if I should simply teach more overtly left-leaning material (say, from The Nation or In These Timesthat provides a more fair and reasonable take on current events than the right-wing propaganda that David Brock once wrote and now wishes to expose in his recent bookThe Republican Noise Machine. The argument against spending time reading material from the far right is that students are already bombarded with the biased bullshit espoused by Rugh Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, etc. Therefore, time would be better spent reading materials that they are less likely to be exposed to, ideally journalism and academic texts that strive to maintain a sense of professional integrity by being intellectually objective and, if overtly political, then doing so whilst retaining some standard of the objective truth.

I've had to turn off the tube and the radio entirely these past few days, because I was getting nauseous from all of the slavish media coverage surrounding Reagan's death. It's one thing to pay respect for a dead leader, but it's another to completely distort and deny historical facts in order to create a faux hero. Thankfully, there are a few dissenting voices out there amidst all the bullshit passing for journalism in the conservative media sphere. One such voice belongs to Christopher Hitchens, who can generally be counted on to challenge the prevailing wisdom among both the right and the left. While I think Hitchens was overly hawkish in his support of the current war in Iraq, his remarks on the Reagan Administration's lies and corruption are spot on. Hitchens' Not Even a Hedgehog - The stupidity of Ronald Reagan provides a welcome anecdote to the myths and propaganda we've been bombarded with over the past few days. And while we're wearing black, let's pay our respects to Ray Charles who died today at the age of 73.

Well, Ronbo has finally kicked the bucket. I predicted the Gipper's death would occur in the midst of the 2000 election 'recount, when it might've helped the Republicans to shift attention from the nasty realpoliticking going on down in Florida, but apparently he lasted a bit longer. Not surprisingly, the conservative mainstream media are fawning over the dead president. It's quite disgusting, & I'm sure right-wing sycophants will use Ronnie's death to divert attention from the current troubles that the Cheney-Bush administration have created in the country and abroad. Could Ronnie's death have been timed so that the GOP could take airtime away from the attention that Bill Clinton and his memoirs will likely receive? I'll leave that one for the conspiracy theorists to mull over.

In the meantime, let's have no nostalgia for an age that never existed & remember that Ronnie's administration was one of the most corrupt ever. His aides were charged with the most ethics violations of any U.S. administration ever, & Iran-Contra was a true scandal on an even bigger scale than Watergate. I, for one, am not at all saddened to know that Reagan has died. He was a deceitful politician who was little more than a puppet for crooked handlers who used him to advance a non-egalitarian political agenda that further divided America into a land of haves and have-nots.

Here's hoping that I can get tix for The Hives w/ Sahara Hotnights at the Metro on July 26 and that the show will be an all-ages affair. Usually, being an old man & all, I prefer to see shows without the youngun's present, but Daniel, my 19-year old son, will be visiting from Sweden. I want to make this a family outing. It'd be cool, if Ira, Daniel, & I could see two of Sweden's best bands playing here in Chicago. Note to self: Tix go on sale June 12. From the sampling I heard at their website, Reigning Sound, a Memphis band, should be worth hearing too.

Returned from Sweden last Sunday afternoon, but have been too busy to post. My trip, by the way, was a success: Ira received her visa and will be joining me later this month. Our son, Daniel, (it still sounds strange to me), will join us hear for three weeks in July. Hopefully, I'll be able to get him into some jazz clubs. As he is an aspiring saxophonist, I really want him to experience Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge.

When I arrived home Claire, my sister, was waiting for me at my apartment. Claire was in town for the Law & Society Association's 2004 conference and was staying at my place until Wednesday morning. Since we only get to see each other about once every two years or so, I wanted to make the most of our time together. At the same time I had to make final preparations for the "But is it Art?" course I'm teaching at UIC, which began on Wednesday, and catch up on all sorts of personal things that were left unattended in May.

In short, it's been a busy, but rewarding week. As always, it's good to be back in Chitown. I love this city, though I'll admit that the poverty remains something of a shock whenever I return from Sweden, which has a much more successful welfare system, in part because they haven't fought in a war for the past two-hundred years and tax kroners go primarily to fund projects at the local level. Ira told me that something like 90 or 95 percent of one's taxes are used at the local level. As a side note, I should say that Sweden's record of pacifism is quite admirable, though remaining 'neutral' in World War II strikes me as an act of extreme bad faith and quite cowardly. On the whole, however, the Swedes seem to have used their democracy to work out a savvy blend of socialist services with an innovative capitalist economy. But let me return stateside...

During her stay Claire and I went to the Art Institute, saw Jim Jarmusch's new film, Coffee and Cigarettes (which I'll report on another time), shopped in Wrigelyville, dined at Standard India's buffet, and just hung out together. It was a lot of fun, and I hope we'll get a chance to see each other again in August, when Ira will be here. At the Art Institute, we spent the majority of our visit in the modernist and contemporary art section. I needed to spend some time taking in the Abstract Expressionist paintings in preparation for teaching Vonnegut's Bluebeard, a fictional autobiography written by a 'erstwhile' Abstract Expressionist painter named Rabo Karabekian. I'm also teaching a book titled A Flight of Birds, which features fiction and poetry inspired by some of Joseph Cornell's boxes, so we spent a fair amount of time leisurely taking in the Bergman's fabulous collection of surrealist art.

I'm hoping that I get a chance to take my English 109 class to the Art Instutute. I'm quite excited about this class, but will save my posts for that later. I need to eat and should get outside since it's a beautiful day. Although I should stay in and write, I think I'll go to Montrose Beach and read Richard Powers' Plowing the Dark and/or Walter Benn Michaels's The Shape of the Signifier.

Singing off...

Haven't posted for some time, because I'm in Sweden and have limited Internet access. Ira's home computer is a virtual antique running Windows '97 & she's got a per-minute dial-up connection that is apallingly slow, so I've stayed offline, which hasn't been a bad thing. I've spent the past hour in her office at Uppsala University reading articles about the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which are problably not the abberations that the Bush Administration and the military have portrayed them to be. It's all very disturbing. I suspect the reputation of the United States has suffered irreparable damage, in large part because of the extreme arrogance of Bush and Co. Recently watched Lars von Trier's Dogville, which can be read as a disturbing allegory about American arrogance and the will to sadism behind the ethos of compassionate conservatism. Ira needs to use her computer, so I'm signing off.

On both a personal and a professional level, I'm pleased to report that The Unknown, a pioneering hypertext novel co-authored by William Gillespie, Frank Marquardt, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton, is now available as a free downloadable Zip file. I just downloaded it myself, & if I'm posting here in the next couple days it means that their hypertext didn't infect my Mac w/ some monstrous form of digital herpes.

But seriously (as Derrida said to Searle) as a friend of The Unknown, I'm glad to see that the fellas got their shit together and not only archived this beast (which, judging from recent posts on Scott's blog may be stirring yet again; will it ever be finished?) at the Open Source Books website, but managed to be the first hypertext novel to be listed in the archives. W.W. Norton loves that kinda shit. Here's hoping that the next edition of Norton's Postmodern American Fiction anthology includes The Unknown alongside Michael Joyce and J. Yellowlees Douglass. This kind of recognition is minor and as a genre comedy tends to be undervalued, but once the 'tipping point' is reached, The Unknown has a good chance of becoming a cult-classic--like 'out-there' writing by Burroughs, Ballard, Dick or Acker--that eventually gets its props in the literary mainstream.

Were I to pimp The Unknown to Paula Geyh and the other Norton editors, my argument on behalf of the work would be that it is an exemplary piece of what Deleuze dubbed "minor literature," and that the major tongue they were twisting was that of the literary establishment. This hypertext appeared at a time when the literati were begrudgingly shocked into acknowledging that the printed word has always been a network technology for establishing connections between people, and The Unknown can be read as a testimonial to a joyful belief that the publishing industry, just like the music industry, was in the midst of losing its grip on the dissemination of art. Obviously, this historical moment hasn't played itself out. The Unknown deserves to me read for more than socioeconomic or historical reasons. I think it demonstrated that metafictional irony hasn't played itself out, and that self-reflexive writing was more necessary than ever in a culture where everything seems to be choreographed for a voyeurs. The also reminded those who forgot that metafiction needn't be smug and smarmy or cold and impersonal. Somewhere Donald Barthelme was laughing.

SNL is on, & I realize that I'm using this post as a way of not grading final exams. But before I return to the grading, a bit more on the Deleuze... I know it's something of a cliche to talk about hypertext as an embodiment of Deleuzean concepts like the "rhizome" or "the body without organs," but in the case of The Unknown, it really makes sense. A major trope in the hypertext (in the tradition of Burroughs, Pynchon, etc.) is how intoxication can function to reinscribe disembodied information within the realm of the all too human.

The Unknown carry on the migratory, masculinist tradition in American Literature that Delueze & Guattari so admire (Melville, Miller, Kerouac, etc) and in tracing their quasi-autobiographical line of flight across American (a fictional book tour), they managed to make it funnier by notions like the death drive, the will to power, etc. that permeate so much of literary modernism. Were Deleuze still with his, I think he'd appreciate The Unknown, though he'd probably refer the fellas to the passages in A Thousand Plateuas advocating the practice of getting high on water. The Unknown doesn't get overlooked in the anals of e-literary history. Not that Scott, who, when he is in his carney barker mode can make Mark Leyner appear modest, is likely to let that happen. But it takes more than a streetstoopid, self-promotional machine to spead the word. Reliable access is key, and it's good to know that (God forbid) should this gonzo crew push things too far & disppear forever into cyberspace, or some dungeon created by John Ashcroft for domestic threats to Homeland Security, The Unknown will remain available for reading.

If saying farewell to Jeff & Cris Smith--two of my closest friends in the world who, after 8 years in Chitown, moved back to Nebraska to get some of "the Good Life," (i.e., piece o' land and some peace & quite)--on Monday night wasn't sad enough, now there's another sign that the Chicago I know and love just won't be quite the same. Ray Pride's excellently titled cover story, "Subdivision Street: America--The Passing of an Era at Leo's Lunchroom," in this week's New City announced that Leo's Lunchroom (1809 W Division Street) will be closing soon.

I just scanned the article quickly between a couple of el-stops, so I don't know the date or the specifics, just that the current owner has decided that, after 10 or so years, it was time to sell the business. First the Busy Bee, then Myopic Books, then Jean's Place, then Tuman's Alcohol Abuse Center, and now Leo's. All my favorite haunts in the Wicker Park/Ukranian Village/East Village area from the No Time era have shut down, changed owners, or moved. Even though I've been leaving in Uptown for a few years now, I still miss these places, which draw me back to the old 'hood even though most of mis amigos, like me, have mooved to cheaper and less gentrified places. Glad that Ira got to dine at Leo's once at least. Of course, she appreciated Leo's healthful food served in hearty portions with no pretense or bullshit and the authentic Americana ambiance. I hope the Double Door is able to renew its lease; haven't heard any new news about that, and that the Rainbo will remain open. It would be a damn shame if the area became totally saturated with "stininkin' juppies."

Dear X,

It's been good having you in class, and I'm looking forward to the paper on A Clockwork Orange. That said, I do wish you would've spoken up more. As an Honors Student, you should make a concerted effort to productively contribute in class discussions. And if you find the material difficult, push yourself to figure out why. Ask questions, no matter how naive they might appear to be. Chances are, you're not alone, and as a teacher, it's not easy knowing whether or not people are making sense of material or not.

I want to respond to your remark about not enjoying reading postmodern novels. While I can understand -- and to be honest, don’t care one way or another -- why you might not enjoy reading postmodern novels, I would ask you to consider the following question: what relevance does the alleged difficulty of the language in a particular text (fictional or non-fictional) have to do with one's ability to learn about a topic?

The language used in a text might impact the way you approach it. You might, for example, have to muster the self-discipline to study it regularly, or to consult a dictionary, but your like or dislike of a subject, for whatever reasons, shouldn't impact your capacity to understand or comprehend it.

What concerns me is that, based on your remarks, you appear to confuse your affective response to a subject (and a text) with your ability to understand the concepts and ideas discussed in that subject or text. I want to argue that, ultimately, these things—one's affective response versus their ability to reason and interpret -- are not directly related.

Now, of course, if you happen to 'like' (we won't unpack that term right now) something (say, Cubs baseball or postmodern novels or investing in the stock market) you may be more prone to familiarize yourself with texts about it more regularly, which should help you to increase your knowledge about it, but your liking or disliking it has no bearing on your ability to analyze, interpret, and understand it.

Moreover, I reject entirely your implicit claim that the 'difficulty' of the language used in discourses about a subject necessarily makes that subject inaccessible to the 'common man'. Who is this common man, and in what subjects does he or she naturally or automatically have an adequate grasp of the language? Politics? Sports? Literature? Economics? History? Molecular biology? Chemistry? Art history? Jazz? Hopefully you see where I'm coming from.

I'm trying to make a couple key points here. First, by the time you reach university-level study, every subject should be difficult (i.e., require a great deal of time and effort to understand) to the hypothetical 'common man' on the street (whom I generally regard as a 'straw man' figure; e.g., most everybody has a certain amount of knowledge that makes them uncommon or exceptional in some sense). Indeed, a subject will be difficult and challenging not just to those who are not versed in it, but especially to those who chose to specialize in it as well. That’s because life, the universe, and everthing is, in general, pretty damn complex, at least from our perspective as mere mortal homo sapiens. If the subject matter is not somewhat unfamiliar, difficult or challenging, it probably means the topic has been dumbed down or oversimplified to a level inappropriate for an institute of higher learning.

Second, the necessity of mastering a specialized vocabulary or a group of terms and concepts is not limited to academic study. Specialization is a fact of life in the modern & postmodern world. Every profession has its own way of speaking and its own ideas and concepts that, to the uninitiated will appear obtuse and difficult. This fact is not an insurmountable obstacle, though it is a fundamental challenge that the student of a subject needs to be addressed.

This phenomenon of (ultra) specialization manifesting itself in language holds for more than professions too. Think about music , or sports, or computers or a host of subjects that people get 'obsessed' with. I can talk in depth about rock music with my peers, at least about punk, indie, and alternative music from a certain period, but I’m lost when I hear aficionados of certain subgenres (electronica, hip-hop, death metal, etc.) discuss their bands and their scenes. And my ability to recite and interpret song lyrics from Paul Westerberg's oeuvre (both solo and with The Replacements, relating them to his biography & the sociopolitical & historical phenomena that he sang about) in no way necessarily enhances my ability to play guitar or produce a professional sounding record or to even understand what guitar players mean when they analyze chord progressions or what sound engineers mean when they debate the merit of Pro Tools versus another type of digital-audio software.

Let me give you another example. Because I visit certain websites regularly, have read certain books, and subscribe and read MacWorld each month, I can talk shop with my friends who are fellow Mac users (at least at a certain level, which is general from my perspective, but seems scholarly to my Mom, a stubborn PC user whom I’m tried unsuccessfully to convert to Apple for years) but if my friend who does graphic design gets too into a discussion of, say, how to produce an effect in Photoshop, I’ll need to reach for the reference manuals and interrupt him with questions. Likewise, my European friends who didn’t grow up with American football, often can’t make heads or tails of the discussions I have with my American friends about the NFL playoffs and the NCAA’s Bowl Championship Series. They have to ask about or look in a reference source about terma and rules that will, to them, seem esoteric until they become more involved in a subject. They've got to learn how the game is played. (I don't want to push the discipline as game analogy too far, because the metaphor will break down at a point).

In short, X, you’re an Honors Student. You’ve taken English Comp. If the terminology used in a text confuses you, you should know enough and have the discipline to consult the appropriate reference sources in the library. And if you don’t know offhand which sources to check, you should know enough or have the initiative to ask me, or a professor, or, hell, even a librarian.

Anyway, I don’t mean to sermonize, but since I was supposed to direct your honors paper, & you didn’t come to my office hours, I figured a few “words of advice for young people,” as William S. Burroughs would put it, were in order. Basically, I want to make a point about one of the things you should be doing while you’re attending a university as an undergrad: exposing yourself to different subjects and figuring out how to make sense of & orient yourself within a field/subject/discipline. You needn’t enjoy all of them; indeed, the point is to figure out which ones most interest you so that you can pursue them further down the line, as a professional &/or as simply a curious person. I hope you’re in the process of developing an intellect and that, regardless of your taste in fiction (which, I’ve found can fluctuate radically depending on external factors entirely unrelated to a text’s content) my class has shaped you in a positive way by teaching you how to think more rigorously. As ol' Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “That which does not kill me only makes me stronger.”

It’s almost 3:30 a.m. 'Nuff said.

Take care, and drop by my office occasionally. I like to hear how my former students are doing, and I can let you know my reaction to the Swedish metal you recommended.

All best,

Eric R.
=====
From: [deleted]
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 19:18:12 -0500
To: ericrasmussen@mindspring.com
Subject: RE: [engl105s04] Engl 105: Participation Grade questionnaire

Responses are directly underneath the questions. Enjoy!


>===== Original Message From ericrasmussen@mindspring.com =====
>Dear Class,
>
>Below are a few questions that you will need to answer. Please e-mail me your
responses by Friday, April 30 in a reply to this message.
>
>In your responses, please write complete sentences and be as informative as
possible. This is your chance to 'lobby' on behalf of yourself for the
participation grade you believe that you deserve.
>
>Before answering, please reread the course attendance and participation
policy on your syllabus and then answer the following questions.
>
>1. How many days have you been absent &/or tardy this semester? Be honest,
and if you truly cannot remember, offer your best estimate. If you wish to add
any additional explanations, feel free to do so.

I have been absent a few times lately due to medical reasons. Tardy often due
to class running long beforehand. Outside of that, its the discretion of the
prof.

>
>2. Do you participate actively in &/or out of class? If so, please
characterize your participation (class discussion comments, questions,
Blackboard posts and responses).

I do, but mostly outside of class, not inside. Noone really participates in
class, and the class feels more like a lecture than a discussion, which suits
the class with the difficult readings we've undertaken. My honors assignment
in the class also shows active participation in English Fiction.

>
>3. Have you come to talk with me during my office hours or on another
occasion (after class, during the breaks, etc.)?

I have spoken with you a few times after class and via email.

>
>4. Have you gone to the Writing Center outside of class? If so, how many
times and with whom did you have a conference? Did you find the visit helpful?
Why or why not?

I did use the Writing Center for the Lolita paper, and the counselor's name
escapes me. I did not find it helpful, because I am an active editor of
others papers within the dorms. I feel that I can do this myself, and plan to
take Engl 222 next year, Spring, to increase my skills as an editor for a
career in the field.

>
>5. How do you feel about your progress in the course thus far? Are you happy
with your efforts and the work you've produced? Where do you feel you made the
most improvement?

My coursework has been fundamentally sound, as shown in my stellar midterm
short answer section. My reasoning in postmodern literature, however, has
been lacking a bit, as I have struggled with the fine points. I would like to
add that I personally do not enjoy reading post-modern novels for the reasons
that they exclude the common man with difficult languange. Some discussions
in class linking this material to modern day examples have aided me some.

>
>6. What participation grade do you think you deserve?

Between a B-B+, -A if the Honors Activity paper counts towards my
participation grade and not my total grade.

Not just planning for the Summer semester, but for the Fall as well. Thankfully, this Fall I'll have a Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule, which I'll need as I prepare for my exams and the presentation of my dissertation prospectus to the department.

Significant Connections: Making Sense in Postmodern American Literature
Engl 109 (#11163): American Literature and Culture
Eric Rasmussen
2:00-3:15 pm TR /115 Stevenson Hall (SH)
University of Illinois at Chicago, Fall 2004

This reading-intensive course provides an introduction to recent American fiction, particularly as it relates to various poststructuralist and postmodern theories about language, communication, and meaning. Our class investigations will emphasize the concept of connectedness, that is, the ways in which a range of texts imagine various subjects (human and Other-wise) to be linked to one another and how texts are understood to be technologies through which significant (though not necessarily meaningful) connections are established.

Reading Catherine Belsey's Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction and Steven Shaviro's Connected, or What it Means to Live in a Network Society will introduce students to terms (e.g., difference, significance, subject, ideology) and concepts (e.g., differential vs. referential accounts of signification) that will enable them to make sense of key theoretical positions about our so-called postmodern culture. Class discussions will focus on how these theoretical claims (about topics such as new models of human subjectivity and the extent to which reality is thoroughly textualized) play themselves out in postmodern American novels. That is, the situations narrated in the fictional texts will provide examples with which to assess both the utility and the validity of various theoretical positions.

We will definitely be reading Don DeLillo's Underworld, and students are advised to read this fairly lengthy novel along with Belsey's short primer over the summer. Other literary authors whose work we might read include: Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Octavia Butler, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, E.L. Doctorow, Shelley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Chuck Palahniuk, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace.

Course requirements include two exams, two 3-5 page papers, in-class presentations, and mandatory attendance.

Tomorrow's the last day of classes for the Spring 2004 semester, but I've already got the Summer 2004 semester on my mind. I'm hoping I can succeed at getting my students, most of whom will likely have no idea what the topic of my Engl 109 course will be, to get out and visit the Art Institute and develop an interest in modern and postmodern art.

But Is It Art?: Art and Artists in Postmodern American Literature
Eric Rasmussen
English 109: American Literature and American Culture
Summer 2004, University of Illinois at Chicago

Course Description
What is art? Who creates art and why? How and what does art communicate and how are we to understand it? These are some of the general questions we will address via a select body of recent American literature that is specifically engaged with art (artworks, artists, and the artworld). Reading Cynthia Freeland’s But Is It Art?, a basic introduction to aesthetic theory, along with a sampling of novels, short fiction, poetry, criticism and film will enable us to assess a range of positions about the meaning and significance of art in postmodern America. We will be particularly interested in how the models of human subjectivity implied in these works relate to manner in which artworks or texts are imagined to signify.

The literary authors we read and discuss, some of whom are also non-literary artists in their own right, will likely include: Laurie Anderson, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Shelley Jackson, Rick Moody, Howard Norman, Robert Pinsky, Richard Powers, Kurt Vonnegut, and Paul West.

As a reading-intensive course that is meeting on a compressed summer schedule, the pace will be brisk, and students will need to read a fair amount most every day to keep up with the class. Course requirements include two exams, two or three short papers, in-class presentations, and several trips to the Art Institute of Chicago. Students should begin to become familiar with the Art Institute’s 20th-century collection, particularly its abstract expressionist paintings and the surrealist assemblages of Joseph Cornell. Since this will require several trips to the Art Institute, you may wish to purchase a student membership to the museum.