My So-Called Intellectual Life: Musings on a Life In and Out of Academe

I think I have said this before on this site but I will say it again. I think the best description of me as an intellectual I ever heard over the course of my 71 years came from my Canadian history tutor. He said to me after our term together had ended that he thought that the best description of intellectual me he could think of was that I was a culture critic. And, again from the vantage point of my 71 years, I think that is the best description of me I have heard. 

So how in the world did I become an intellectual? It was, as I have said before, my Mum who was key to the development of my so-called intellectual life. Once I had learned to read (at what age I first became able to read is lost in the mists of memory at this point) my Mum started buying me books. At first she bought me books on politics and on history.  Then she started, at my request, buying me books of fiction, purchases of which were further stimulated by school.

Very early on, as I recall, sometime in my early teen years, I read Moby Dick by Herman Melville. As a young person I was fascinated by the story and particularly by the story of Queequeg jumping into a whale to rescue a crewman who had fallen into the whale, a whale the crew had caught and were dismembering for profit, something, profit I mean, I learned more about later in life. At the time the metaphors that wove their way through Moby Dick and the allegory Melville was playing with went right over my head. I simply did not have the intellectual capacity, at the time, to grasp metaphor and allegory (sadly many well into their college years and beyond can't grasp them).

Moby Dick was not the only classic I recall reading at the time. I also read several books by Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain. Twain was probably my favourite writer at the time and remains one of my favourite writers and critics today. I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and loved the humour in it and the hijinks that Tom and his companions got up. But it was probably another book by Mark Twain that I read that really began to shape my intellectual life, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I knew Huck, of course, from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I suspect that I expected more of the same kind of humour and hijinks from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that was in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. And there was indeed some of the same humour and escapades in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that there was in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But there was also something else, something else that deeply affected, even touched, me and made me think. That was the critique of slavery and the critique of the ideological fictions that underlay slavery in the book. After Huckleberry Finn I began to want to read more social satires with a bite. I was a child of the 60s after all.

After The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I read books like M*A*S*H*, Catch-22, Slaughter House 5, 1984, Animal Farm, We, The Heart of a Dog, and perhaps my favourite of the bunch, The Master and Margarita. I was also drawn to satirical films like Dr. Stangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (and Hitchcock films which my Dad introduced me to which often had a bit of the old satire in them), television shows like Doctor Who, which had a parodic and satirical edge during the era of the 4th Doctor and Douglas Adams, The Prisoner, probably the weirdest English language TV show to ever grace the TV screen and a television show that matched this weirdness to satire, and to satirical songs like “Eve of Destruction”and "I-Feel-Like-I'm Fixin'-to-Die-Rag".

Another factor in why I become a culture critic with a satirical and parodic state of mind was reality itself. I was a teenager in Dallas as the Vietnam War raged on thousands of miles away in Asia. It was, as I have said several times before, my friend John Cerillo who played a key role in opening my mind and eyes to the bullshit (the domino theory, the many and various threats to the United States, the most powerful military-industrial complex in the world, and all that jazz) that the American powers that be were feeding us about the Vietnam War via the media in its broadest sense at the time. Thanks to John and thanks to what I was reading and watching at the time this critical state of mind become embodied in me. As a result I began to look at government discourse about the war and by extension about everything else much more critically than I did when I was a child and spoke like a child. Tin soldiers and Nixon coming and Watergate simply built upon and expanded my increasingly critical and satirical turn of mind. “War children/it’s just a shot away/it’s just a shot away”. “Rape, murder/it’s just a shot away/ it’s just a shot away”.

The fact that I remember more about current events and popular culture from my conscious teenage years says something about my teenage school years at T.W. Browne Junior High School and Kimball High in Dallas. I remember little about those years now. What little I do remember involves learning how to sing "Texas Our Texas" in my civics class. "Texas Our Texas/All hail the mighty state"! I recall how boring and beyond me I found maths. I don't remember much about any of the social sciences classes I took, something weird since I should have been drawn to the social sciences and would be during my college years, beyond that civics class. They simply bored me since they were so irrelevant to what was really happening in the world around me. I also remember taking the I.Q. test they gave to me (and I assume to everyone else across the United States during their junior high school years), an "I.Q." test that I recall that I scored barely above dolt level on and that most of those who taught me in junior high and high school, as a consequence, think that I was tipped for a career in the rapidly growing industry of customer service (I was required to take a DECA in high school after I moved to rural Indiana). 

Probably the thing I remember most about high school in Indiana was Watergate. Watergate and the bullshit, dirty tricks, and and crime surrounding Watergate was another one of those things that made an impression on me and helped make me into the man that I am today. Watergate also made me appreciate journalism and journalists. for what seems like a brief moment in time from the vantage point of a 71 year old looking back on his life and even made me want to become a journalist at one point, but only again only briefly. At one time, I am ashamed to admit it, I even had a collection of newspapers from across North America that friends of my Mum brought back from their travels and gave to me. 

Like most of my generation I initially fell into the graduate from high school and get a well paying job with excellent benefits at a factory groove. My parents (networks are wonderful, eh?) found me a job at the local Overhead Door factory where I worked until I had an accident that made it impossible for me to work for the six months I recovered from at my grandparents house (My Gran was actually more of a mother to me than my own Mum). 

While I was laid up I took a trip back home to Dallas and, more importantly perhaps, I became interested in the history of Christianity. This seems quite weird and bizarre in retrospect because I wasn’t a Christian at all. Never have been. Never will be. It is not a weird and bizarre as it first seems, however, since I wanted to learn about the real history of Christianity not the mythhistorical one true believers or lukewarm believers used to try to frighten heathen like me with visions of the fiery furnace of hell. I wanted to be able to critique those Bible thumping Christianity that were so present in my cultural environment at the time and didn't realise yet that generally speaking Bible thumpers cannot be argued with on a rational and empirical basis. 

As a consequence of this urge to analyse and critique I soon began thinking about going to college. My father had gone to college before me and so had my best friend at the time, whose name was Steve. I increasingly wanted to follow in their footsteps. So when I was able to I rode my bike (it was a Raleigh) some ten miles into a nearby university, Ball State University. I rode my bike to Ball U because I wanted to go to the library (the old library that know serves another purpose) to read intellectual and scholarly books on the history of Christianity. I could not, of course, check them out of the library because I was not a student there so I had to read them in the stacks. It was also sometime during those pre-college years that I picked up Robin Wood’s book on Hitchcock. I was so impressed with Wood, a culture critic himself who would be in and out of academe for at least part of his life until he settled in at York in Greater Toronto, that he became for me my first intellectual mentor.

The next year I applied to and was accepted at Ball State. On the advice of my friend Steve I took every Religious Studies class I could with Dr. Carl Andrae, including a 400 level Comparative Religion class my very first semester at BSU. The classes I took with Dr. Andrae stimulated me intellectually in a way, excepting my high school English classes never did. Dr. Andrae would became my first academic mentor. 

Thanks to Dr. Andrae I decided that I wanted to become an academic and a university or college teacher just like him (though I think even at the time I was more interested in research than in teaching). That seemed to me about the only role that a culture critic wannabe like me could strive for and, of course, live on in a country that fetishised and worshipped capitalism. 

It was for this reason, wanting to get a job in academia in order to teach, that I transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington. IU was, after all, one of America’s leading research universities at the time (it is really fading fast in the leading research university category) and it was research universities like IU that trained university and college teachers for the academic job market, a job market that was still expanding at the time though that was about to end.

I loved my undergraduate years. I learned so much during them, more than I would ever learn in high school and more that I would ever learn, as I was soon to learn, in postgraduate school. During those years the historians Keith Thomas and George Mosse and the cultural critic John Berger (whose Ways of Seeing I read and watched during my IU years thanks to a Phenomenology of Religion class) became three more of my most important academic mentors and have remained so ever since. 

During my undergraduate years, as I was subsequently to learn, I was a babe in nobody's arms. I was simply not privy to nor did I really want to see since I romanticised academia, what actually went on in universities. After I entered gradudate school, however, I soon learned about all the Peyton Place (metaphor) that universities actually were and are. I learned that life in universities—the places that trained future academics—was actually not that different from what went on outside universities in bourgeois America. I learned that life in the academy was not simply about academic stuff. It was also a soap opera, a soap opera that mirrored, if perhaps in exaggerated form, life in bourgeois America. There was narcissism, petty politics, backstabbing, cliques, cults, sects, sex, sexism, arrogance, favouritism, petty ethnocentrisms, wealthfare, petty antipathies, careerism, money grubbing, and most of all, limited commitment to the intellectual life that I had long romanticised. I, you see, saw the examined intellectual life I saw as a calling (vocare) or a vocation, Most of the academics I met regarded, however, regarded the intellectual as part of a 9 to 5 job. All of this ended up giving me a severe case of cognitive dissonance at the time and ever since, a cognitive dissonance in which I both loved and hated academia and wanted to be part of and wanted not to be a part of, at the same time.

After I took my bachelor's degree I was at a loss with what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had a job working part-time with the developmentally disabled when I was a student and later worked full-time at though I really didn't like it thanks, in part, to burn out (something that was magnified by going full-time), and I certainly did not want to do that job for the rest of my life. As with so much else in life there was a tonne of bullshit surrounding the job. We, meaning me and my bosses, made plans we knew could never be kept. But we had to make these plans since they were required by state and federal bureaucracies. Thes  plans involved moving clients towards independence when they simply could never be trained to be independent. Chalk another one up in the absurdity of the world category. 

Unhappy with my job and still wanting, at least part of the time, to become an academic I applied to and was accepted for postgraduate work at the University of Notre Dame. Trying also to fit be the good little bourgeois mould I was told I was supposed to fit I, at around the same time as I quit my job working with the developmentally disabled I got married. I got married because my son's mother got pregnant when we dated and I felt like I had to do the honourable thing. 

So, while I was trying to go to grad school I became father to a son, and became part of a family, a family which struggled to survive economically while I was in postgraduate school. The graduate school I applied to was Notre Dame and the department I matriculated into was American Studies because I was an interdisciplinary sort of bloke. I ended up not really liking Notre Dame, which seemed like a secular monastery to me. Notre Dame at the time (I don't know whether it does now) had little in the way of the intellectual culture in part because the numbers of graduate students at Notre Dame were small and what few graduate students there were were largely isolated from each other. I needed a lively intellectual culture to thrive. So, I dropped out of UND and simultaneously dropped out of my marriage. I am not the marrying type anyway.

By this time my dream of becoming an academic was tempered and nutted somewhat by reality. I returned to Dallas and got a job at Southern Methodist University. This turned out to be, in retrospect, one of the few jobs outside academe that I really loved (the other was working in a used bookstore in Provo, Utah) and wish I had never left. I worked in the Science/Engineering Library where I was assistant acquisitions librarian. I also worked another job I also loved at the same time, this one on Saturday's at the Cokesbury Bookstore on Preston Boulevard

While at SMU I (stupidly in retrospect) applied to the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, and Ohio University. I got into all of them but could not afford either Chicago or Kansas since they offered me no monies beyond loans and I didn't want to further enslave my life to paying back college loans since I had already taken out several during my undergraduate years. So, (stupidly) I left SMU and headed to Athens, Ohio where I did get money. 

I had one hell of a good time in Athens. Athens was one of the great places to party, to, in other words, drink a lot of alcohol, smoke a lot of grass, and take in the beautiful natural and man-made sites in the US. Every night was like Mardi Gras on Court and Union in Athens with their twenty plus pubs. I hung with four other guys, all very bright. We spent our nights typically at two pubs on Union drinking a lot of cheap beer and debating everything from Marx to Weber to Nicaragua. My curricular activities weren't bad either. I took several classes and did a tutorial in theory with the wonderful Algis Mickunas in the Philosophy Department. 

There remained a problem, however. There was still a part of me that wanted to take a doctorate for purely career reasons and Ohio did not have doctoral programmes in the areas I was interested in. So, after seeing a promo for SUNY Albany on a clipboard in the Philosophy Department while I was waiting to see Dr. Mickunas for my tutorial I applied to and entered an interdisciplinary (I was an interdisciplinary type of guy with interdisciplinary social science and humanities interests) doctor of arts programme at SUNY Albany. The reason I went to SUNY was simple; they gave me a full ride.

I had never heard of SUNY Albany when I applied to the school. When I arrived in Albany I was, I have to admit, disappointed right off the bat not only with SUNY Albany but with the interdisciplinary doctoral programme in the art. What I thought was a photograph of one building on the SUNYA campus on the promotional material I saw at OU was actually the entire university and it was ugly. As for the Doctor of Arts programme, me and another student, David and who I roomed with, quickly christened it the DoA programme, the dead on arrival programme. It turned out that the DoA degree was less than a Ph.D. degree making it even more difficult to try to get a job in academia after graduation in an era of increasing decreasing opportunities for doctoral students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences than it already was. Not surprisingly the programme no longer exists. It seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs in the wake of the retirement of the guiding faculty light behind the establishment of the programme. 

As a student in the DoA programme I was assigned to the Anthropology Department to TA for an introductory Cultural Anthropology class. On faculty member I met in Anth when I took a class with here as a DoA student, Gail Landsman, who became yet another intellectual mentor for me, urged me to apply to the doctoral programme in Anthropology at SUNY Albany and that is exactly what I did. 

I was accepted into the doctoral programme in Anthropology though I really wasn't enamoured by the wholistic ideology of the programme nor what I saw as its ahistoricism at the time. As someone influenced by Weber and Geertz and Thomas and Mosse I felt that anthropology was far too ahistorical so I dropped out of the programme after taking a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and history. 

Upon graduation I floated around picking up retail jobs when I could get them. I ended up working at the DMV in the South Bend, Indiana area, the place my son lived, for a time. In the evenings I continued to engage in the intellectual life. At some point during this period I picked up Jan Shipps’s Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. As a consequence I became interested in Mormonism not only as Mormonism but as a way to engage and expand my interest in social theory, particularly Weberian, Geertzian, and social and cultural construction social and cultural theory. Mormonism, one of the few new religions or cults that survived and bureaucratised in historical rather than prehistorical time became a way for me to link theory and practise or attempt to link theory and practise (something reflected in my subsequent dissertation and later book). 

As someone who did the same thing over and over again (yes I am, I admit, "insane") I once again returned to graduate school but this time to study sociology and, more specifically, to study the sociology and history of Mormonism. So, I applied to BYU. I thought, and I thought I thought rationally, that if you wanted to study Mormons go to the Mormon university in the heart of the Mormon Kingdom in the intermountain West. So I applied for and was accepted into the Sociology Ph.D. programme at BYU. 

The problem this time was once again ignorance. I was ignorant of what BYU was actually like. The Y turned out to be something out of the 1950 mashed up with an episode of The Twilight Zone. I could not believe it but there was no caffeinated coke on campus, no caffeinated coffee (which I don't drink anyway) on campus, and no caffeinated tea  (which I did and do drink) on campus. Men were prohibited from having facial hair and they had to keep their other hair cut in such a way that it would not be below the ears. Women could only wear skirts that were no shorter than an inch above the knee. Fundamentalism or literalism was rampant among some of the faculty and some of the student population. So was sexism. Homosexuality had to be repressed. Men could not live in the same flats as women off campus.

All this doesn't mean that that there weren't things I liked about the Y. At BYU I found a number of outstanding undergraduates. In the class I taught on social stratification I taught the best students I ever taught anywhere over the course of my academic career. I also found that if you wanted to talk religion and particularly the Mormon religion, one could find a very stimulating intellectual culture at BYU and in Mormon culture at large including at the used bookstore I mentioned previously that worked at during my two years in Provo. 

But there was a problem. Once again, ensconced in a university, my inner pendulum swung from the I want to be an academic pole to I don’t want to be an academic pole, the binary in my mind that has been at the heart of my mental life at least since I started postgraduate school and still is. This binary ("I love you/I hate you/I can't live without you") has, fortunately or unfortunately, been at the heart of who I am and what I have done with my so-called life such as it is. 

One of the other problems with respect to my so-called academic career has been something that I mentioned earlier. I was an interdisciplinary sort of bloke trapped in bureaucracies that were largely disciplinary in nature. I tried American Studies at Notre Dame but was eventually turned off by that programme and by Notre Dame itself as I noted. I tried sociology at Ohio but found the school wanting, though it by far is the most amazing party school I have ever seen. I took a degree in anthropology leaving that programme before I took a Ph.D because I found it too ahistorical and too restricting. Moreover, I wanted to study complex Western societies which really wasn't an option at the time and in that place though I did manage with Gail's help to get my thesis on Quakerism in revolutionary England approved the the gradate committee. I again tried sociology at BYU but found it too restricting and too anemic when it came to history and comparative history. During all these years I increasingly came to see history as a method that was essential to all social science disciplines, hell to all disciplines in general. Therefore I decided to return to SUNYA once again after being unable to afford to go to the University of Toronto, Queen's University, and LaTrobe University, all of which I was accepted at but unable to afford, to try to take a doctoral degree in history. 

It didn't work out this time any more than it did the first time, second time, or third time. One of the problems was by this time I had also started reading several of the great academic satires of the era including Lucky Jim, Changing Places, and Eating People is Wrong. All of these fed me into the I don't want to be an academic pole lodged in my mind at the same time that I was trying to take an academic degree. Ron swings like a pendulum do. Additionally, I once again found a bourgeois soap opera at SUNYA and it once again really turned me off to academe. 

So, I again dropped out of school and shuffled between dead end jobs in retail. Eventually, thanks to my friend Bonnie, I got a job at the Encyclopedia of New York State. I parlayed that job into a job in acquisitions at the State University of New York Press. I liked working at the Press. I would still be there if I had not got caught in the jaws of one of those inevitable economic downturns that is constant in the US and the Western world thanks to its inevitable booms and busts. It might have been different if I had taken the job at the University of Illinois Press I was offered (where I would have eventually gotten the Mormon Studies list) and which I stupidly (20/20 retrospective vision again) turned down to stay at SUNY Press until I was made redundant a month or so later thanks to the economic downturn after 9/11. Now that is timing Ron!

Fired by the SUNY Press I returned once again to retail this time in Austin. Not liking the dead end job in Texas I was stuck in and the fact that Austin was full of overqualified people looking for the same jobs I was, I returned to Albany when I was offered a part-time history teaching job at SUNY Albany which now called itself the University at Albany. Teaching part-time in a university was one of the things I could actually make a decent living at, well kind of a decent living at. 

Since I taught in the SUNY system I got a financial break when taking classes in the SUNY system. So I returned to the History Department at SUNY Albany (a department without much in the way of an intellectual culture) and completed my Ph.D. (I had taken my exams before I left for Moscow). By the time I finished my degree I had som much clocked time pension and health benefits time that I decided to keep working if I could in the SUNY system (along with Albany, Oneonta, and Cobleskill I also taught at RPI). It wasn't easy. Anyway nobody wanted me for a full time academic job in history. I had only one job interview and that I loused up thanks to my honesty. So I stayed in part-time teaching in the SUNY system until 2021.

Working as an adjunct wasn’t bad at first. I minded, of course, being overworked and underpaid, of being one of the many lumpen academetariats, but hey I got benefits and a promise of a NY pension including NY state health care after retirement. What made being an adjunct or a seasonal worker in the coal mines of academia was the increasing attempt by the bureaucrats who ran the universities and colleges to force even us part-timers into doing the interminable bureaucratic crap they made and make full-timers do such as those idiotic end of term evaluations of us by students and the increasing retail nature of the higher educational business where the customer, the student, is usually right. The notion that lower level students who don't know much if anything at all about either teaching or real academic subjects (see YouTube "reaction" videos) are competent enough to evaluate professional teachers is beyond looney but it has to be done, I guess, in an era where bureaucratic outcomes and evaluations are a growth industry (which enrich some) in the service or retail sector of the contemporary American economy like the contemporary American university and college industry. This bureaucratic stuff, in addition to the inherent soap opera moroncity, the self-evaluations we had to do at the end of each term, the tests we had to take during the school year, and the inherent inequities of universities and colleges (I had been fucked over by Project Renaissance and SUNY Oneonta as I noted in other blogs), which I had learned to kind of tolerate if uneasily, made working in academe never fully satisfying for me.

I worked largely at SUNY Oneonta until they, as I mentioned earlier and talk about in more detail in other blogs on this site, fucked me over and offered me only one class instead of the usual two after the Covid pandemic and an influx of money from the state. This meant that I would no health benefits and that I would have to drive an hour to teach one class. Instead I retired with a small pension and state health care along with Medicare (I am actually one of the lucky ones in the glorious neo-liberal United States). I enjoyed and enjoy retirement. I can read when I want to, listen to classical music when I want to, watch movies and TV shows on TV, DVDs, and blu rays when I want to, and mess around on the internet at my leisure when I want to. I even managed to finish my aforementioned book on Mormonism which I had started in the 1990s during my retirement. 

I have since applied for and gotten other jobs (and not gotten other jobs) since retirement but I had problems with the bureaucracies at two of those jobs (both of which, including one at Schenectady County Junior College. I wrote about in other blogs) and that turned me off to both of them. I don't have to work for meagre wages simply to survive anymore. One job which I did like was working in one of the branches of the Albany Public Library. I had to quite it because I could not do it physically "thanks" to health issues. The poor health of my pre-retirement years is even worse now.

Somewhere along in this journey, it had to have been during graduate or postgraduate school—learning is sometimes a dangerous thing if your mind is open—something else happened to me, something else very important happened to me. Somewhere along the way I was disabused of the utopianism allied with my wanting to be a university of college teacher and academia in general and became a secular Calvinist ridding myself of Enlightenment ideologies in the process. At the same time I became less and less enamoured not only of academia and the notion that education, in general and for all, was liberatory. Somewhere along the way I learned that while these are all nice little stories they are mythic stories. I also learned that the masses prefer their stories mythic and that they generally create realities to match their political and ideological prejudices. But at least I have a pension that keeps me, at least at the moment (though DonnieDT may still be able to change that for the worse), barely above the poverty level. Despite all this I remain as convinced as ever that there is a difference between the ever examining intellectual life and academic work and that I prefer the former over the latter.

 

The Applying for a Job Kiada: The University System of New Hampshire Idiocy

 

The new digital technologies of the brave new digital world are a double edged sword. I have known this fact for a long time but I recently discovered it yet again when I applied for an online teaching job with the University System of New Hampshire.

As some of you may know I retired from part-time college and university teaching in 2021. To say I have enjoyed retirement other than my ever increasing health problems would be an understatement. I have enjoyed the freedom to be able to listen to classical music when I wanted, read when I wanted, and watch TV shows or movies when I wanted.

Recently, I have begun to think about applying for jobs again. The reason for this is simple. I know that the politically and ideologically correct wild bunch at the White House are thinking about getting rid of Medicare as we know it.

So, I applied for a job at Siena College recently which I did not get partly, I suspect, because of my longer than shoulder length hair. I saw the person who interviewed me via Zoom, actually do a double take when she saw it. I also recently applied for an online teaching job—I did online classes at SUNY Albany and SUNY Oneonta—at Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts and I tried to apply for one at the University System of New Hampshire.

Both Worcester Poly and the USNH actually used the same third party application system (public and private corporations enriching other private corporations). I had no problem using this system when I applied to Worcester. The application system was able to autofill my application at using my vita. I was not so lucky when it came to the University System of New Hampshire application, however.

When I learned about the job from Indeed I went to the USNH company page (academic institutions as corporations) and created an account. I told the application to fill in the blanks with my vita. Unfortunately, it proved unable to do that simple task.  Why it was able to do this with my application to Worcester Poly and not able it at the USNH is beyond me and I want it to remain beyond me. Trying to understand computers is like trying to understand the human mind.

Everything went well with my USNH application until I was asked for my educational background. The system was able to fill in my name, my address, my telephone number, my email, and most of my employment background material. It was not, however, able to fill in my educational history. When I tried to put in the information manually the programme would not let me. Presumably this was because the system was too stupid to realise that since it did not put in the information and I thus had to it could not cope with the fact that I needed to do it manually when it wanted to do it automatically, or rather not done it, automatically. Life as surreal farce. 

At this point I gave up. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time then to waste it (time is money) trying to do what apparently could not be done.

I went back to the USNH again today to see if I could do the impossible. I wasn’t going to try to do this manually since whether I should be considered for the job, a professional job I should add, should be done solely on the basis of my vita since I am not applying for a job at McDonalds. I forgot my password so I tried to get a new one. When I requested a line to create a new password the link the USNH sent me arrived without a link I could actually click on.

The moral of this story? Computer associated systems used for applications can be utterly stupid on occasion. Perhaps this is because of the literalism associated with this stuff, perhaps it is the fact that humans create such systems, or perhaps it is because we live in a kafkaesque world. I don’t know and I don’t care to know. I will leave this theological questions up to hardshell Calvinists to try to discern.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Musings on YouTube Reactors Reacting to Queen’s “Fat Bottom Girls"

One of the great joys associated with the watching of YouTube reactors on music, films, and TV, is watching reactors do injustice to music, films, and TV shows on YouTube.

Most reactors have this fascinating rationalisation for not doing any research about the artists, films, or TV shows they are listening to or watching before they listen to them or watch them. It is the we don’t want to spoil our experience of the song, movie, or TV show we are listening to or watching rationalisation. As a result they don’t do what many of us did back in the day when we heard or watched something we liked; we tried to find out anything we could about the artist, the movie, or the TV show and the meaning of the song, movie, or TV show we were watching. 

We also read the TV Guide summaries religiously of what was coming up next week on the TV show we were watching and we watched the what was going to be on next week's episode promos of the television show we were watching. 

Our YouTube reactors, however, don’t do any of this because they think it will ruin the experience of hearing an artist and watching a TV show or film. They prefer the tabula rasa approach, something that is impossible in the first place given the realities of socialisation.

Beyond not doing research some YouTube reactors have difficulty grasping parody and satire though many do get the joke which the song is in large part. Perhaps it is because they make parody and satire meaningless by rolling both into the omnipresent but empty concept "cheese". I was reminded of this once again when I watched several reactors react to Queen’s 1978 song “Fat Bottom Girls”. 

Several reactors thought the song, written by Queen guitarist Brian May, was serious. They even pondered a historical, sociological, and ethnographic question. Didn’t they like skinny girls back then, they asked? Two other reactors reacting together wondered why Queen’s vocalist Freddie Mercury, who they knew was gay (so much for tabula rasa), was singing a song, which they wrongly assumed was written by Mercury, about women. They also assumed that the song was autobiographical, which it may have been at least in part, but to grasp how it was or whether it was autobiographical they needed to do research on how it was autobiographical which they did no.

American YouTube reactors also revealed a lack of knowledge about British colloquialisms and euphemisms. None of them, for instance, knew that Fanny, the narrator’s naughty nanny (how is that for alliteration), was also a euphemism or that May was likely parodying and satirising, the English upper class, in the song.
 

The Books of My Life: Sexual Politics and Narrative Film by Robin Wood

 

This is another little fragment from the Movie project jigsaw puzzle. It would have been integrated with the material on Robin Wood I wrote in another blog, the blog on Wood's books on Hitchcock and Hawks.

In his Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, Film and Culture series, 1998) Robin Wood has stitched together and revised some of his previously published articles of film criticism to provide us with what Wood refers to in Sexual Politics itself as a book of film criticism. Drawing on Norman Brown, a classicist who, like Erich Fromm, Erik Erickson, Wilhelm Reich and historicised, ethnologised, sociologised, and Marxised Freud, Wood the film theorist, explores the battle between life (creativity, freedom, spontaneous impulse, joy, love unconstrained of rules or limits) and death (repression, denial, punishment, prohibition, mechanisation, possessiveness, greed, money values) in cinema. He explores and engages the battle between the cinema of life or liberation and the cinema of death, the cinema of capitalist and fascist oppression. The cinema of death, Wood argues, is the cinema of the heterosexual couple, the subordination of women in the family, puritanical sexuality, and the oppression and persecution of gays. The cinema of life, according to Wood, is the cinema of liberation and release from all of these forms of oppression.

In the Sexual Politics and Narrative Film Wood explores Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, a film which, according to Wood, embodies the fascist cinema of death. He explores F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, a film which, according to Wood, is a film which offers us, at the end, the false dawn of liberation. And he explores the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, Leo McCarey, Max Ophuls, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette,  Richard Linklater, and Greg Araki, and movies like Loyalties, the two Gaslights, Mandingo and Life Classes, all of which, Wood claims, embody or point toward, at least in part of in full, liberation from the culture and cinema of oppression and death.

Another thing Wood does in Sexual Politics, something that is particularly interesting to me, is to distinguish between four approaches to film (I would, borrowing these from Max Weber, call them ideal type approaches to cinema), the approach of the theorist (he or she who develops theories), the approach of the scholar (he or she who analyses information), the approach of the critic (he or she who engages with a work passionately and arrives at value judgements about that work), and the approach of the reviewer (he or she who engages in what I will call the lowest common denominator approach, an approach represented by Leonard Maltin's movie guides with their star ratings system, an approach that masquerades as criticism but in truth does not do justice to the complexities of culture or aesthetics). Wood, as I said, numbers himself among the critics, someone who approaches film not only descriptively or empirically but also normatively, in terms of value. I would suggest, however, contrary to Wood, that Wood is not only a critic, he is also a theorist, a scholar, and an academic (Like Wood I consider myself what my tutor in Canadian history said I was, a cultural critic; I am a cultural critic who makes use of theories and scholarship but I do not consider myself an academic even though I have taught in the academy). And I would also suggest that all of these aspects of Wood are on full display in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film.

Wood as academic theorist is on full display in several places in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film. Sexual Politics. Next to Wood's second expansion of Hitchcock's Films Revisited;(2002), Sexual Politics and Narrative Film offers, in my opinion, Wood's most systematic approach to film theory in his post-Screen period, a period in which Wood adapted his humanistic auteurism to new approaches to film represented most clearly in English language film criticism in the British film journal Screen. In this book and in his revised books on Hitchcock and Hawks, Wood matches his auteurist and mise-en-scene criticism with several specific aspects of the structuralist, semiological, and psychoanalytic, a psychoanalytic approach which is thankfully not grounded in a universalism, to approaches of the Screen and post-Screen eras of film, television, and literary criticism or analysis. 

Though Wood decries some forms of academic film criticism in Sexual Politics he was an academic, if an outsider-academic, at least part of the time. He taught at Queen's University, the University of Warwick, and York University over the years, after all. Wood as academic and scholar is on full display in his exploration of primary source material. For example, Wood uses documentary material, the original script to be specific, to argue that Letter from an Unknown Woman from 1948 was a collaboration between director Max Ophuls, star actor Joan Fontaine, the screenwriter, the camera man, and the producer of the film and he explores how all of these impinged on Ophuls's vision of the film. In spite of the fact that the film was a collaboration Wood argues that the film remains very much an Ophuls film, a conclusion aided by looking at Letter in relation to other Ophuls films made in the US and Europe, where, critical and scholarly consensus has it, Ophuls was freer to make his own film. It is on display in his historical contextualisations in many of the films he discusses and in their broader political, cultural and economic contexts, particularly the patriarchal capitalist ideological system in which the films were made. It is on display in Wood's exploration of the influence of the Gothic novel and the Gothic film on Mandingo. It is on display in the structuralist and semiological approaches in which Wood delineates the antinomies at the heart, for instance, of Mandingo and Celine et Julie vont en bateau, antinomies which give meaning, he argues, to the films he explores. It is on display in Wood's analysis of how audience identification "works" in, for example, Mandingo and Before Sunrise.

Wood as evaluator critic is also on display in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film. Wood the evaluative critic values films that disrupt the dominant or hegemonic discourse. For example, see Wood's discussion, and importantly so, toward the end of the book of Mandingo, Celine et Julie vont en bateau, and Before Sunrise, all of which he admires because they all push at the boundaries if not cross over the racial and sexual boundaries of patriarchal capitalism claims Wood. Wood's mix of the descriptive and the normative is perhaps most apparent in his essay on the two Gaslights, the British Gaslight from 1940 and the Hollywood one from 1944. Wood prefers the latter because it, he argues, pushes at the boundaries of a woman's inferior position in patriarchal Western society. Criticism, as Wood admits, as non-dogmatic political and ideological correctness.

Wood's Sexual Politics and Narrative Film is, as is always the case with the works of Robin Wood, well written. It is, as again is always the case with Wood's work, characterised by thoughtful analysis and careful readings of the films under Wood's critical microscope. Sexual Politics and Narrative Film is, as is always the case with Wood's work, interesting theoretically, methodologically, and critically. It is, in my opinion, a book every film scholar and every cultural studies scholar should read.

This does not mean I agree with everything Wood says. I, for example, tend to be more of a descriptive sort of bloke than a  normative one while Wood is, as a scholar and a critic, both. This difference does not mean that I don't like some films more than others. Nor does it mean that I like some of the films I do like more than others. I love Celine et Julie vont en bateau, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Jules et Jim, most of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and most of the films of Frank Capra (I do, by the way, agree with Wood about Buffy the Vampire Slayer but not The Sopranos). Generally speaking, however, I try to put my likings on hold when I analyse something historically, sociologically, and anthropologically whether Mormons or Werewolves on Wheels. Finally, I would like to add one addendum to Wood. I would like to add a new sub species of film and TV "reviewer" to Wood's four ideal type typology of theorist, scholar, critic, and reviewer. I would like to add that of the social media reactor, a species that, I would argue, must be placed at the very bottom of the critical barrel. Cue "Money for Nothing".

By the way, I am not arguing that critics should not like, dislike, or somewhere in between the movies they watch. In the final analysis we all like, dislike, or fall somewhere in between the movies and TV shows we watch or the books we read. All of us regardless of "race", creed, or political and ideological colour are politically and ideologically correct in some way, shape, or form (my perception of the world I live in, for instance, has been shaped by Doctor Strangelove, We, and the Master and Margarita). What I am saying is that most critics and reviewers are not as theoretically, methodologically, and analytically gifted as Wood. Nor do most people who watch and express an opinion on a film realise, as does Wood, that beauty and value is in the eye of the beholder and what one considers beautiful at one point in time and space may change at another point in time and space. Finally, let me note that this blog cannot do justice to the breadth of Wood's thought, a breadth that even includes a discussion of emic and etic approaches to cinema. An essential book.

Buying a CD Player Part Two

 

As some of you know from reading earlier posts I have had problems with CD players over the last several years. The problem is that I live close to a busy road. As a consequence when cars go by my CD players I have used previously either stopped briefly or frozen or turned off on the last track. 

 I have, therefore,  been looking for CD players that do not stop briefly or turn off on the last track. As I noted in an earlier post the best one I had found was the Fiios player. Instead of stopping on the last track it simply briefly stopped when a car or truck went by on the street in front of my apartment. It was not, in other words, perfect. Additionally, one could hear clicks if you were up close to the player particularly when the disc was on its last track.

Well I think I have now found the near perfect CD player. It is the Syitren R300 CD player. I found a review of it while browsing “what is the best portable CD player” on Brave and found in my search that it was the recommended one by the New York Times Wirecutter we tested these items page. After using it for several months I can say that I concur with the Times’s assessment. I hear no clicks. It does not stop of freeze when playing a disc. The only down side so far? The volume of the player.

I should also mention that it has an optical port so I am using an OREI SPDIF/Coaxial Digital to RCA L/R splitter so I can hook it up to my Bose Acoustic Wave Music System, the bigger one, via the headphone jack and it works fine thorough my Bose system. Praise the New York Times.

My Brilliant Matchmakng Career: A Fairy Tale

never wanted to be a matchmaker but, once upon a time, I became one if somewhat against my will. My brilliant matchmaking career, as I have subsequently come to call it, happened shortly after I had moved from Dallas, Texas to rural Indiana. 

Some might think that moving from a big city like Dallas to a small rural county in Indiana might be difficult and traumatic. But it wasn't that difficult or traumatic for me for reasons I will try to explain. Yes, Dallas was a city of over 600,000 souls when I left it in the 1970s, while the county I moved to in Indiana barely had 15,000 people and was basically the same size as Dallas in terms of square miles, but what might have been difficult and felt traumatic for some wasn't that difficult or that traumatic for me because my Dad and my Mum had set boundaries for me and my younger sister Catherine after we moved into our brand spanking new Dallas subdivision in 1965. 

One day just after my parents, my sister, and me moved into our brand spanking new home in the Oak Cliff part of Dallas my parents sat me and my sister down at our large rectangular wooden dinner table in the informal dining room and told us that we had to stay within certain boundaries of our neighbourhood. We were not allowed to cross Five Mile Creek to our north, the wood along Blue Ridge Boulevard (the road itself was partially unpaved at the time) to our south, Westmoreland Avenue to our east, Kimball High School and T.W. Browne Junior High to our south east, and Cockrell Hill Road to our west. That me and my sister didn’t always stay within those set boundaries probably doesn’t even need to be said, but I will say it anyway. On several occasions, I must confess, new Beatles singles or new Beatles albums (both me and my sister were mad about the Beatles) made both of us violate the rules on a few occasions and seemingly get away with doing so.

While most people move somewhere for a job or due to a job I wanted to live in Indiana because I wanted to go Indiana University and it was cheaper to go to IU as an in-state student rather than an out of state student (me being a moron at the time I could have gone to the University of Texas for around $50.00 per term rather than the thousands of dollars at IU something I could and should have availed myself of as a Texan). So my Mum, my sister, and myself packed up and moved to Camford County Indiana where my mum got a job working at a local 3M factory. Dad stayed behind in Dallas because of his job. He had a good paying managerial job that he had moved up to step-by-step while working for Philips in Big D.

I wanted to go to IU because that was where my father had gone to university in the 1950s. Dad loved IU, he loved Bloomington, and and he loved telling me over and over again how much he loved both IU and Bloomington. As I listened to Dad talk to me over and over again over during my teen years about his years at IU I increasingly imagined myself living amidst the rolling hills, dense forests, limestone hills, and limestone fences and buildings of IU, Bloomington, and Monroe County, Indiana. When I did finally matriculate at IU I did, in fact, love living amidst the rolling hills, dense forests, limestone walls and buildings of Bloomington and Monroe County. What I didn't love was the subtropical climate of the place with its high humidity. It was simply not a good place for someone with respiratory problems like myself to live.

Speaking of respiratory problems:,I got severe asthma suddenly when I was twelve. My asthma was so severe that I was hospitalised many times over the years, too many to count, in fact, Hospitalisations only ended when I was put on a regimen of Advair and Singulair sometime in the 1990s. 

At first having asthma wasn't that bad thanks to the cortisone my Methodist Hospital doctor put me on. I could even continue running track while being on it. After the cortisone began to cause problems, however, it made my face cheeks puff up, it meant that I could no longer run track and it meant that I had difficulty even walking up the stairs from the first to the second and the third storeys of the Browne Junior High that I went to. Eventually, my doctor replaced the cortisone with a nebuliser which I had to take three times a day and then clean it so I was pretty much housebound for much of my teen years because I really didn't feel very well and the cleaning process for the nebuliser was a complicated and arduous one.

It was my asthma perhaps more than anything else that made me an introvert, a loner, and a sickly housebound kid. All these, in turn, made me someone who was not the kind of person didn't have a lot of friends but who did listen to a lot of music. Now don't get me wrong, I did have a few of what I called friends that I hung out with. John Celino was my best friend in Dallas and he and I hung with each other during school and after. He and I bonded over the Beatles, prog rock, and our opposition to the Vietnam War, which was raging at the time. I even recall that once upon a time he and I wanted to go to Robert E. Lee Park in Dallas to protest the war but our parents, rightly I know now told us no because the cops would bash our heads in. And bash our heads in they surely would have because that is what the Dallas Police typically did to dissidents in Lee Park at the time. The Dallas cops, you see, were not known for their gentle treatment of dissident protestors and probably still aren't.

I had friends in Indiana too. When I first moved to Camford County in Indiana I hang with the two D's: Doug and Dick. We, and particularly Doug and I, bonded over music and pot. Once I stopped hanging with the three D's I hung with the two Ken's, the Ken who had moved from Hawaii to rural Indiana and who, like me, was an exile and an outcast initially because of that, and the other Ken, the Ken who was a homegrown born and raised rural Hoosier lad. It was cannabis and acid which bonded me to the two Ken's. And it was the other Ken who was indirectly responsible for me becoming a matchmaker.

Here is how it happened. One day at high school during a break in classes a girl named Teri, who I didn’t know very well, stopped me in the hallway and asked me if I would introduce her to the other Ken. She knew I hang with him. She told me she liked him and she wanted me to tell him that she liked him. At the time, I didn't tell Teri that I really didn't want to play matchmaker being someone who didn't go in for what I thought were the fantasies associated with romantic love (romantic ideologies associated with love have probably killed and injured more people than Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler combined). I was already cynical you see. Thank you asthma. Thank you Vietnam. Thank you Gulf of Tonkin. Thank you Watergate. Thank you tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Nevertheless, being shy me who needed all the acquaintances he could get I told her that I would do it and I did as I had promised her just a bit later that day when I intentionally ran into the other Ken during class break.

From the moment I told the other Ken that Teri liked him he and Teri became a couple. I didn't see either Ken or Teri much after that though I am sure I gained social capital from them both for the match made in proverbial heaven. I would occasionally see them in the high school halls holding hands and doing what couples typically do, public displays of attraction. 

One day at school Ken stopped me between class break and asked me if I would trade cars with him the upcoming Friday evening. I had an MGB. Ken had an Opel GT. The other other Ken had a Triumph. We were the two and a half foreign sports car having musketeers, me being the half since they hung with each other more then they hang with me. When I asked Ken why he wanted my car he told me that he and Teri were turning a wish they had into a reality; they wanted to screw in all the cars they could before they graduated from high school. Mine was the next car in line for the Ken and Teri screwfest.

Of course, introverted me really didn't want to do the car exchange thing anymore than I wanted to play matchmaker to Teri and Ken. I dnd not like to loan my stuff out fearing that I would never get it back or if I did get it back it would be damaged (both happened to my stuff too many times in my life). Nor did I want the detritus of love to spoil my car (some might suggest that an MG could not and would not be spoiled anymore than it already was by such escapades but that is another story). As usual shy and lonely me gave in I told Ken that I would trade cars with him. 

Ken told me to meet him later that night at Teri's place which was right across from the fairgrounds in the Camford County county seat. At the appointed hour on a beautiful warm spring evening I drove my car as planned to Teri’s and knocked on the door. Ken was not there yet. 

As I entered the house I saw Teri out of the corner of my eyes over in the corner of the living room surrounded by three young women. The three young women appeared to be playing courtier to Teri's Queen preparing her for the evening's ritual love making activities. Teri, and I remember this well for what should be obvious reasons, was dressed in an orange halter top and a pair of green short shorts. I don’t think we called them hot pants yet. Queen Teri's courtiers were making the final adjustments to her kit, what little there was of it that is. What it definitely was was an easy access pass for sex with Ken later that night.

As I sat on the couch I couldn’t help but look again and again at Teri though I tried, as we often did in those days and times, not to. It just wasn't kosher to stare at someone you were trying to eye in secret (though you often did get caught doing it). It was the first time that I really saw Teri, REALLY SAW Teri. I saw that she had an amazing body. Her legs were gorgeous. Her free range breasts, which were sizeable but not oversized, were bouncing this way and that way and up and then down, and I loved bouncing breasts for some obscure reason at the time and still do. Her tanned skin was beautiful save for the rectangular patches of blackheads on her face which I am sure she tried to get rid of but couldn't. We all did at this age. Luckily I had a father who loved to squeeze them. I never realised, until that moment, how attractive and beautiful and sexy Teri was. I an sure I fell in lust with her that very minute of that very day.

About fifteen minutes later Ken arrived and after switching cars I left in his Opel while he and Teri left in my MGB. I imagined Teri and Ken heading out to the rural boonies to have sex in my MGB, assuming it started which it did not always do. The next day we traded cars back and I headed home with Teri again on my mind .She rarely left it for the several days after.

After graduation from high school I didn’t see Teri or Ken at all, something that often happens when you leave high school (see Buffy season four). I was planning on going to college but I had to put college on hold for the time being for some mysterious reason that escapes me now, and started instead working at a factory in town like so many others of my generation did at this stage in their lives. Dad and Mum got the job for me. (Don't you just love networks of power and privilege?) I later heard from someone, I don't remember who, who told me that Teri and Ken had gotten married. I was not invited to the wedding, of course despite being the one who had introduced them. Oh well such is the life of a sickly introverted loner.

One day, I think it was a Friday, my sister and I ran into Ken and Teri in town. All four of us were doing the ritual circling of the downtown square of Camford City before we got stoned, went to the basketball game, and went to Pizza King with what seemed like every other high schooler in the county. We were going clockwise around the square; they were going counterclockwise. They invited us to their trailer outside of town to drop some acid. 

Like so many of the kids of my generation I dropped acid and mescaline and smoked a lot of grass during my high school years. We came to Ken and Teri's. We dropped acid. We got really high. We listened to a lot of music. We ate a lot of potato chips. I saw.

I saw Teri again, really saw her again. This time she was dressed in newish Levi’s, the jeans of choice for my generation, and a white Oxford shirt. She didn’t have a bra on and you could see her beautiful breasts quite clearly through the thin almost transparent fabric of her shirt. She looked amazing. Thank god for white shirts! I could not take my I am trying to keep them secret eyes off her. She was so sexy.

I saw something else that winter night as well. I saw something that deeply disturbed me. I saw Ken abuse, or what I would call abuse, Teri. I don’t know whether it was the LSD that made Ken do the things he was doing to Teri. It sometimes did with those I knew who dropped acid. I hoped it was the acid but I had a sneaky suspicion that it wasn’t and that it was what Ken was really like in private (the acid turned the private into the public). He grabbed her breasts hard in front of my sister and myself so hard that she screamed in pain. When she asked him to stop he manhandled her even more. He was a big guy. He eventually did stop trying to force Teri to do what he wanted in front of me and my sister, probably because of me and my sister, but the damage was done at least on my end. Teri asked me to stay the night, hoping, I suspect, that it would keep Ken from doing more of the same or even worse to her later that night.

My sister and I slept on the two sofas Teri and Ken had in the living room of their single large trailer. It was hard for me to sleep not simply because of the acid high, something that usually kept me up all night, and because of what Ken did to Teri, but also because I was so turned on by Teri. I had been turned on by other women before, one or two as I recall, but nothing like this. I was beginning to wish that Teri and I were a couple.

My sister and I left early the next morning. Teri was awake already and offered us something to eat, we declined, and bid us goodbye. Ken was still in bed. 

I didn’t see Teri again until well into the summer. I was preparing to head back to Dallas before I started uni at the University of Texas in Austin where I transferred because I just couldn't deal with Bloomington weather anymore. By this time Indiana and Indiana University and Bloomington Indiana were causing me so many health problems that I decided to go back home, so many health problems that my doctor told me to apply for medicaid, which I did without success. I did run into Teri one day in town and she invited me out for lunch at her trailer. Ken wasn't there. He was doing his usual thing which generally involved cars, drugs, or some combination of the two. 

It was the first time I really got to know Teri as something other than a sex object. We had a great time eating, talking, laughing, and bonding. I remember her saying how surprised at how funny I could be. I may have been an introvert but I was an introverted devotee of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief album (definitely a hoot when you are high) so I could be funny in that Monty Python sort of way sometimes. 

As I left the trailer I told Teri I was off to Dallas and, after that, to uni in Austin. The factory life was not for me. She followed me into town in her car, a monster of a car, as I recall, one of those whale sized Lincoln's I think. My sister told me later that Teri had run out of petrol and was trying frantically and desperately to flag me down so I could pick her up and take her into town to get some gas but to no avail. I was, I suppose, daydreaming about Teri and being with Teri. By that time, you see, I had fallen in love with her but being the too shy introvert I was I was afraid to tell her I loved her and I was afraid of, as I always was when it came to dating, being hurt. And of course, there was the fact that she was already married.

I haven't seen Teri since that summer day. I did think of her and still do quite often. I did see Ken once, I was back in Indiana hanging with my best friend Steve. Steve drove us down to a ghost town called Elizabethtown on the Mississnewa River in Delaware County. It was one of the places we used to go to to marvel at a bridge that had fallen into the Mississnewa, a fitting symbol for what became of the town, to check out the cemetery there, another fitting symbol of the town that had died at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to smoke some pot. The other place we went to do all three was the thirteen graves.

As Steve and I walked toward the downed and partially drowned Elizabethtown bridge I noticed someone in the distance walking toward us. As I got closer I could see it was Ken. As we moved closer to each other Ken’s eyes briefly met mine and after a split second of recognition I averted my eyes almost immediately from his in order to avoid his gaze and his attention and kept walking toward the fallen bridge with Steve trying to hide the fact that I had indeed recognised him. I didn't want to recognise him because I couldn’t forgive him for what he did to Teri that cold winter night in rural Indiana. I later heard through the gossip grapevine (our internet at the time, one that was quite effective and just as unreliable) that he and Teri had divorced. It was way to late for me by this time.

After college I never returned to my rural Indiana home ever again. And I am glad I never did. The oil crises, globalisation, and deindustrialisation took their revenge on the city, town, and already poor villages of the county. Businesses went out of business or left for climes with cheaper labour costs and better weather. The once vibrant downtown that we circled around this way and that every Friday was decimated and has never, so I am told, recovered. Retail establishments went out of business and the buildings downtown began to literally fall down, some with the help of a wrecking ball. After uni I returned instead to Dallas, well suburban Dallas, Duncanville to be precise, which, like Big D itself, saw more and more people and more and more businesses arrive every week, so many, in fact, that the sunbelt city began to stretch almost all the way to the border with Oklahoma and further and further south in the direction of Waco and Austin.

Though I have never been back to Indiana since I have never forgotten Teri. She has always remained somewhere in my mind ever since. Even today, some sixty years later, I still think about her and think about what might have been. She still lives vividly in my 70 year old brain. But then so much of life is about what might have been isn’t it? I am just happy that what might have been for me was not the occupation (or is it vocation?) of matchmaker even though I did successfully match Ken and Teri one day long ago and once upon a time in the not so magical world or rural Indiana. 

The Bank of America Kiada or Ron Gets Screwed Again Thanks to His IU Credit Card

It, incompetence that is, never stops. It never sleeps. It always rusts. It never ceases to amaze me and, at the same time, it never stops fucking me over in some way, shape, or form. I learned this joyous lesson again today.

So, a bit of backstory first.  I have an IU credit card through Bank of America, hence the picture to your left. I got it when I was still proud of Indiana University alum. It was where I took, on the Bloomington campus, my bachelor’s degree. I am no longer a proud graduate of IU, a school that while it is growing its sports programmes and spending millions doing so, is slashing Humanities programmes, which historically have been at the heart of the college and university in general and at the heart of IU in particular. IU, which was once upon a time an overgrown liberal arts college and not Purdue, has recently seen its administration, its Trumpian administration (the Trumpian governor of Indiana has packed the Board of Directors with politically and ideologically correct flunkies), decided to end bachelor’s programmes in Art History, American Studies, Cognitive Science, Comparative Literature, Dance, Earth Sciences, Geography, East Asian Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, Music-Ballet, Religious Studies, Statistics, and several foreign language programmes. They decided to cut master’s programmes in African Studies, Comparative Literature, Communication and Culture, Journalism (they also tried to end the print version of the student newspaper the Indiana Daily Student but backlash, including from money givers like Mark Cuban, forced them to backtrack on this), Statistics, Theatre and Drama, and several foreign language programmes. They decided to eliminate doctoral programmes in African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, Art History, Astrophysics, Chemical Physics, Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Public Policy, Theatre and Drama, and several foreign language programmes. The flagship Indiana University campus, in other words, is becoming more and more like, as one Cynthia Fox who took a doctorate at IU and who teaches at SUNY Albany reminded me, more and more like the financially unstable I SUNY Albany, a university I did postgraduate work at. That these programmes, particularly the doctoral programmes, were some of the best in the US and were internationally known and highly regarded seems to have been of little if no consequence to the politically and ideologically correct and corrected Board. What does seem to have been consequential is the fact that these programmes were often critical of the mythhistory that undergirds the delusional populist right’s perceptions of American history. And they should have been and should be because academic and scholarly analysis is not nor should not be cheerleaders for delusional mythhistory myths. Moronicity on the march.

It is moronicity on the march because you simply can't have a world class university with doctoral programmes in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Music, or hard sciences without strong language programmes, something IU has had for years and something IU has been known for and something that has made IU a world class university in the post-World War II era. I suspect the parochial closed minded theocrats on the IU Board probably know this and this is exactly what they want because a world class university breeds empiricism and that breeds the questioning of myths, something the theocrats who run IU and want to return it to what is was in the early 19th century, a seminary, don't want. Obey theocratic authority seems to be their mantra. I hope the Association of American Universities takes a long hard look at what is happening at IU, the making IU theocratic again, and do to IU what they did to the University of Nebraska and Syracuse University, drop them from this organisation of elite American research universities. It would be a perfect match since IU has already dropped significantly in world university rankings, and deservedly so, since I was a student in Bloomington. The IU I went to is not the current plummeting IU, an IU that looks more and more like SUNY Albany (which isn't in the Association) every day save that SUNYA wasn't at the bottom of a recent free speech rankings analysis, that exists today. 

But back to the credit card fiasco: Because of these cuts and because of the increasing emphasis on winning sports programmes at IU I returned my diploma to my department, Religious Studies, and I intended never to use the Bank of America IU Credit Card I had again because it benefits the IU Foundation monetarily and financially. It turns out I had to keep it, however. I had to keep it because I became a member at Costco and Costco, you see, has a honey pot deal with Visa, the credit card company, and they only accept Visa at the cash wrap. So, I had to keep my IU card in order to shop easily at Costco because I could not use my American Express card, which is my default credit card. And use my Visa card I did.

In June I paid my bill to the Bank of America. This morning I got up and I discovered that this bill had been paid. Again. Since it had already been paid I wondered why I had been charged twice particularly after I had paid it. After four phone calls, two to my credit union and two to Bank of America (they each blamed the other for the redundant charge), I learned that the Bank of America had recently switched from an old online banking system to a new one. The problem was that the old remained active as well. So while I had paid my bill, something the new system clocked, the old system, which I had the recurring payment option turned on on (it was not on in the new system so I thought I was OK), did not clock the fact that the bill was paid so it charged me again for something I had already paid. Hello Franz Kafka.

I finally got the problem fixed, or, I should say, I hopefully got the problem fixed (stay tuned). According to Bank of America the recurring payment option on the old system has been switched off and my refund has been approved. It took me two hours of pro bono work to get this problem fixed (so much for the time is money mantra). And some wonder why some of us are so angry about the seemingly never ending Sisyphean nature of the brave new digital postmodern world. We are angry because fuck ups like this happen every month if not every week for those of us who avail ourselves of the toys of this brave new digital postmodern world. They are, it turns out much like everything else of importance, a double edged sword. They are very helpful in some ways and they are a royal pain in the arse in others (see above). God I am glad I am not long for this increasingly fucked up digital world, a digital world where fact and fiction mingle on the same level. Moronicity on the march.

Oh I almost forgot, thank you Bank of America for fucking up my credit score...

Postscript: I got the refund from Bank of America on 21 July 2026. It is always nice to get a refund for something one should have never been charged for.