Epistemographer

I’m about to go home for the night. I arrived on campus a little more than 12 hours ago, and with the exception of a productive and positive meeting with my committee chair and a brief excursion to pick up Chinese food for dinner, I’ve been sitting in this same damned chair the whole time.

Grading papers took ages; I need to re-evaluate this whole “online papers” concept, at least for the purposes of grading. I hadn’t realized that it would be so difficult to note small grammatical things online, the sort of detail that one might just circle with a pen and annotate with an “Awk.” I might try creating PDFs of student papers and annotating those for the next assignment, or maybe I’ll just kill some trees and print everything out…

The cubicle in which I work:

The classroom in which I teach:

The odometer that just clicked over to 70,000:

Like I said in the last post, I’m a boring, boring man these days…

I’ve been sitting at my desk on campus for most of the past three days, and I’ve got another month or so of this to look forward to. Between teaching and trying to finish my dissertation, it’s going to be a loooong month.

In other news, I got my webcam hooked up at my desk, so you can watch me as I sit here and work. Right now, the only software I’ve bothered to set up for videoconferencing is MSN messenger (I know, I’m a corporate sellout, but it’s so damned easy to use), so fire a message to jmg48@cornell.edu via MSN and say howdy if I’m online…

For anyone in the NYC area this weekend:

RIVER ALEXANDER’S MAD JAZZ HATTERS

SAT. JAN. 17, 7-9PM, BARBES

aLIVE, aLIVE – OH! Hello Friends. Come experience the Mercurial Exuberance of delightful song and novelty of the 20’s and 30’s. Dance, Cavort, Frolic and Gallivant to Jazz, Vaudeville, Hokum, Swing and Soulful Undescribables (It’s getting good folks).

it’s at BARBES. BARBES, at Sixth Avenue and Ninth St.(376 9th.St.) in lovely PARK SLOPE, Brooklyn is just the most slopping over with innate character bar this side of the Rhine. EARLY SHOW 7-9PM. Excellent and evolving band: Aaron Maxwell charms the guitar, Gil Shuster conjures the wash-tub bass, Gillian Austin delights with the washboard and percussion, Karl Meyer soulfully saws the fiddle, and River Alexander on vocals, guitar, jew’s harp and harmonica. I’m very excited about the show. We’re followed immediately by Delta Dreambox, whom I’ve heard are most excellent. IT’S GONNA BE A LULU!

River’s great, and the lineup playing with him is fantastic. I’m not kidding – until you’ve hung out in a small room with a guy playing a bass made of a washtub with a broom jammed into it, you have not lived. Not to mention the washboard percussion.

Spent yesterday doing the traditional Christmas festivities: chinese food and a movie, natch! The movie was a particularly appropriate one, The Hebrew Hammer (tagline: “He’s the baaaadest Heeb this side of Tel Aviv”). It’s been billed as a sort of Shaft for Jews, which is appropriate not just in its appropriation of its riffs on Shaft as a movie, but also because the film is in some ways filling the same sort of function: both movies reject assimilation, embracing and foregrounding aspects of a minority subculture. In the case of The Hebrew Hammer, this shows up not just in the ironic fetishism of the Star of David, but in the character of the Hammer himself, who is in fact a badass, if a badass who’s surrounded by strong women and who overintellectualizes everything.

On a tangentially related note, Doug Rushkoff has a great post up about the relationship between Hanukkah and Christmas:

For some Jews, Christmas is where we draw the line of our assimilation. In other words, we might go see Handel’s Messiah, but we won’t decorate a tree, or have one in the living room. (Even though the tree is actually a very pre-Christian pagan German thing, I know.)

That’s why it’s kind of funny that Hannukah is celebrated at this time, too. Not because of the whole ‘oil lamps defy the darkness of solstice’ thing, which I’m sure has its pagan roots, too. No, it’s because Hannukah celebrates a war against assimilation – a moment where religious, country Jews stormed the city and clobbered the Jews who had given up their identity and assimilated into Greek culture, and then forced them all to have circumcisions.

It is often said that without the Hannukah wars, Judaism would have perished.

So it’s kind of fun that this holiday about fighting the pull of assimilation – about drawing the line, and feeling the difference – happens right when America is at its most Christian feeling for many of us.

Read the whole thing, and regardless of whether you were around Christmas lights, Hanukkah lights, Kwanzaa lights, or plain old secular lights, I hope you had a good holiday.

Now, on to New Years Eve…

Happy Holidays to all…I’m down in Florida, adjusting to wearing shorts and sandals while I get some reading done by the pool. Sometime in the next few days, we’ll get a wireless network set up at my father’s place, and then I’ll barely have to come inside at all!

In the meantime, dissertation work proceeds apace – currently I’m fleshing out a bit of chapter 1, about the hobbyist community of VCR owners that formed in the mid-late 1970’s. Toward that end, I’m reading through Kristen Haring‘s dissertation on the technical identity of ham radio operators…I’ll post more as I work through it, but only about 50 pages in I can already tell that it’ll be a rewarding read…

I’ve been wanting to delve more into foodie blogs, and in my first excursion into that world I came across Fuck Corporate Groceries, a Chicago-area blog with a singular mission:

…so i decided to spend the next [while] not shopping at corporate grocery stores, living instead on food purchased at neighborhood places. i figure this way i’ll save money, explore chicago’s independent food sellers, eat better(?) or at least, more interesting food, and i won’t be supporting the man…

Sounds like an appealing idea to me…

Spend a few hours tonight at a positively cutthroat game of holiday bingo organized by my friend Elisa. The drill was straight-up bingo, where every time you won you got to choose from a pile of presents brought by participants or, if you weren’t really feeling the whole 10th commandment thing, steal a gift that someone else has already opened.

Jenny and I walked away with a bunch of great items, several of which are handmade and quite cool, but the one that I couldn’t believe that nobody store from me was a snowball-maker from Restoration Hardware. As the product description says, “Never again experience the frustration of lumpy, icy snowballs and soggy mittens. This wonder tool lightly packs the snow into perfect orbs that fly far and explode spectacularly (and safely) on contact.”

Such a pity I’m going to Florida for a few weeks. Luckily, I’ll be spending tons of time in Ithaca next semester, so I’ll have ample snowball-making opportunities…

Wicked cool wiki (if you’ve never heard of a wiki, here’s more info) – this one’s being used to build a database of restaurant reviews in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and elsewhere…

So, Jenny and I are leaving today’s taping of The Daily Show (we were supposed to go a few weeks ago, but wound up too far back in line and had to reschedule our tickets), and as we’re walking out, this absolutely beautiful version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow comes over the studio speaker system – the background is nothing but ukelele strumming, and the singer’s voice is warm and mellow and smiling.

We get home, and I spend a few minutes on KaZaa trying to figure out what song this is – after sampling about a dozen versions of Somewhere Over the Rainbow I find a medley of that song and What a Wonderful World by a guy named Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, who’s apparently the Hawaiian singer of the past fifty years (sadly, I’d had no idea). Judging by the samples online at Amazon, “Iz’s” CDs are just the thing for those winter days when the sky is gray and cold…check them out for yourselves!