Just in time for election day, I finished political scientist David Faris' new book "It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics". Faris argues that the Republican party has spent the last two and a half decades waging a war of procedure on government--rather than running and governing based on a political philosophy, they have exploited ambiguities in the constitution and law, as well as previous reliance on governmental 'norms' to entrench conservative governance throughout Washington D.C. Faris' prescriptions to combat this are quite bold, and include no-brainer policies like a national holiday on election day, and statehood for the 4 million US citizens who live in Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. However, he also advocates for more radical inteventions, including splitting up electoral behemoth California into 7 states, and packing the US Supreme court with additional jurists, as well as retiring existing jurists after a period of service on the court.
I voted in NY-19, a tight race where the newcomer Antonio Delgado ultimately prevailed. I also drove a van from Hartwick to take students to the polls, and helped the Otsego County Democratic Party with last minute Get-out-the-vote efforts.
I read Pitchfork's history of Outlaw country in 33 songs. The list opens with an interview with Steve Earle, with whom I've recently gotten acquainted through his classic album Copperhead Road and his more recent political rager Jerusalem. Earle went to Texas, and then Nashville as an acolyte of older country stars, before joining their ranks, and then losing a battle against drug and alcoholism that eventually led him to prison. The list includes many people I knew (Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Earle, Townes Van Zandt) but lots of other folks I didn't know and am looking for
I read Andrew Bacevich's Open Letter to Elizabeth Warren. Bacevich is a former professor at my alma mater, Boston University, and a scholar and thinker whose deep humanism and broad historical perspective on American foreign policy I find genuinely fascinating and engaging whenever I read it. His basic argument in the letter is that a progressive domestic policy needs to be matched by a difficult but necessary conversation about the limits of American intervenionist foreign policy. He says that any president must engage with the reality of climate change and its geopolitical consequences, the redistribution of global power from the America and Europe to other places (largely China), and the growing threat of State and non-State cyber warfare.
I read the socialist historian Mike Davis' interview in Jacobin, where he addresses some of the specific population issues he laid out in his book Late Victorian Holocausts (which I must confess that I own, but have yet to read). In this interview, Davis argues that the deaths resulting from the coercive pull of profit-making, imperialism, and modernity rival or even exceed the routinely (and rightly) discussed atrocities of socialist and communist states in the 20th century. These morbid numbers games are useful only rhetorically, but are worth remembering, particularly as we stare down a climate catastrophe, caused by untrammeled capitalist growth and already causing extreme suffering.
As part of my on-going masochistic exercise of reading all of Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's edited tome "The Weird", I read the cult-novella "The Other Side of the Mountain" by Michael Bernanos, printed in its entirety therein. It's a strange and wonderful story of an unnamed young boy who joins up with a sailing ship, whose journey starts with tragedy and horror, and ends on an island with something much more bizarre and wondrous. I don't want to spoil it, but it's a wonderful piece of eco-fiction, where the characters are encreasingly enveloped by an alien landscape that seems to exist outside of anyone's ability to comprehend, and may be either indifferent or malevolent to their presence.
The Yager Museum held it's annual storytelling even "The Horror in the Museum." Every year, students, faculty, and staff read or perform their favorite pieces of spooky fiction and drama, and its always a blast. This year we had fantastic readings of Poe, Lovecraft, Stephen King, folktales, and original works by students and staff. I coordinate this event and it's one of my favorite things in the year. Fun fact: the event is named for a story that Lovecraft ghost-wrote/revised for Somerville, MA native Hazel Heald.
The students in MUST250: Collectors and Collecting (the course I'm team-teaching this semester at Hartwick) started their last project, a Collection Analysis assignment. This is a project where they have to describe a collection of objects, usually by interviewing the collector, and analyze it for its social and symbolic role. We've cribbed and modified our version of this assignment from the one used by Professor Paul Mullins, who teaches it in his Modern Material Culture class at IUPUI.
In which I list, in no particular order, my current five favorite songs for Halloween.
I've been making Halloween playlists since I was about 19. Part of what I like about it is that so much of popular music dovetails with, but only obliquely addresses the subjects associated with Halloween--fear, mortality, sartorial experimentation, and (at least in the US iteration of Halloween) consumerism. So finding songs that capture something is usually somewhat more of a narrow hunt than searching for songs about, say, Christmas.
What follows is stuff I've been listening to this Halloween. Some of the songs are old songs, some are new, and some are just new to me. As you can probably tell, I have a mood that I like to keep--I'm not a "Monster Mash" kind of guy.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - "The Curse of Millhaven" Realistically, I listen to big chunks of Murder Ballads (the album from which this song comes) every Halloween, and most of the songs could fit on this list. But I've always been fascinated by the jaunty, oom-pah rhythm, which makes this song sound like the polka that will play in the lounge of Hell when you arrive. Plus, while the song is ostensibly about a psychopathic murderer who is incidentally a little girl, the real character here is the town of Millhaven, which Cave populates with odd and disturbed teenage boys, eloquent high school teachers, class struggle, and all manor of mayors, janitors, hospitals, the young ones and the old ones.
Slint - "Glenn" . Slint's 1993 Album "Spiderland" has always been on my Halloween listening rotation ever since I heard it in High School. It's a mysterious, enigmatic album that contains at least one legitimate ghost story, and a couple other songsthat could easily pass for one. But this year, I've found myself listening to the lead song on their posthumus 1994 untitled single. It's instrumental, but the musicianship is so evocative and lyrical that it almost doesn't need words. Creepy, menacing, and powerful, I love this song. Plus, the shocking and gorgeous cover kind of sets up with images whatever story the song is trying to tell with music.
Bruce Springsteen - "State Trooper" . This song, on Springsteen's sparse, bleak album "Nebraska" was supposedly inspired by his encounters with the avant-garde proto-punk band Suicide and their Faustian masterpiece "Frankie Teardrop" (which comedian Tom Scharpling argues is the scariest song ever written). Springsteen is most famous for his rich, sympathetic character studies of poor and working people, but here he revels in ambiguity. Why doesn't the narrator want to be stopped by a State trooper? Why is he driving down the New Jersey Turnpike in the middle of the night? What has, in his words, "been bothering me my whole life"? Why is he listening to talk show stations that make him, "lose your patience"? Something horrible has happened, and neither Springsteen nor the narrator he fashions will say what it is. He leaves his usual open-heartedness behind, and forces us to confront something strange and uncomfortable, possibly even abominable.
Friday, November 9, 2018 at 12:00PM 
I read volume 9 of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' brilliant and poignant graphic novel "Saga". The only question I have is whether we'll see Ponk Konk again...
