In Memoriam

This post is in memory of a thought I had--a one-liner--that was pretty good, as I recall--but then couldn't for the life of me remember once I got all the way to this page where I am now writing my post that has now become a kind of gravestone for the forgotten but possibly reanimated thought I have forgotten.  I've been letting a lot of my stray thoughts back into the wild lately, but this one seems to have strayed away all on its own.  

PROVOCATIONS TRANSCRIPT OF A LOST STAND-UP MONOLOGUE DECEMBER 23, 2015 LARB BLOG By Richard Burt

http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/transcript-lost-stand-monologue/

I like philosophy because you don't have to know anything to do it.

You just have to want to know, to ask questions, learn.  

You can't have good sex unless you fuck with boundaries.

Think about it. 

Dear NRA Members

There can be gun control and

You can keep your guns. 

There can be gun control and

You don’t to have wait to buy a gun or have a background check run on you either.  

 Please bear with me.

Gun owners often compare car deaths and gun deaths.  OK. Think of a gun like a car.  They are both potentially lethal weapons.  

Cars have to be registered when we buy them, right?  And you need a driver’s license to operate a car.  To get a license, you have to know how to operate your vehicle safely.  And driving is policed primarily to reduce the risk of injury and death.  So why not do the same things for guns?  Why not require that anyone who buys a gun has to register it?  Why not require a gun owner to get a license to shoot it by passing a test showing that the owner knows the basics of gun safety?  Why not penalize people who have not registered their guns or gotten a license the same way we penalize people who break driving laws?  What do you have to fear, responsible gun owners?  If the government hasn’t come for your registered cars, why do you think it will come for your registered guns? 

This review is from: The One I Love (Amazon Instant Video)

Although  _The One I Love_ does not have a strong ending, the film itself is an inventive combination, or doubling, of two genres about the double, the horror film and the screwball comedy. In the horror genre, the doubles always become enemies, as in the Villeneuve film Enemy [Blu-ray], and one of them ends up dead. (See also the Jessie Eisenberg film The Double.) The earliest version is The Student of Prague. In the screwball comedy version, and The Lady Eve (The Criterion Collection) is a perfect example, a couple who is engaged or already married separates and then meets up again, only this time one of them doesn't know that the other is impersonating someone else. In The Lady Eve, Henry Fonda thinks that Barbara Stanwyck is really two different people in the film. "Positively the same dame" is the last line of the film, and Fonda never realizes that the woman he marries is the same woman he refused to marry mid-way through the film. It's on youtube for free, btw. Fonda falls in love with the double. The film can end as a comedy, however, because one of the two characters disappears, dies, in effect and displaced by the other, newer double. _The One I Love_ at first seems to be a kind of David Lynch horror film about a married couple who have a terrible relationship (think Lost Highway There are even scenes with iphones.) But then  _The One I Love_ becomes very talkie and the couple seem to get happier and able to renew their marriage, like in a screwball comedy. The interest of _The One I Love_ is that it keeps you wondering which of the two genre it belongs to. And the achievement of the film is that it manages to be, turns, funny, frightening, disturbing, heart-warming, and sad. Perhaps the ending is strong, if you consider that the film combines but never reconciles or synthesizes the two genres. The ending seems open-ended: it is perhaps horribly happy, or happily horrible.  There are only three characters, and the one played by Ted Danson disappears early on in the film. It's a very original film, and for that reason some people will dislike it, as the negative reviews here make clear. My wife and I only watched the film because I read it about it in an article about underrated films on Netflix. We were glad we did. You have to pay close attention to the film in order to follow and appreciate it. Even if you don't like my review, you may still like _The One I Love_.​

The Autocracy of University Administration

Even post-research universities cling to the trappings of democracy.  Post-research universities have a number of institutions that are supposed to give the faculty platforms to contribute to decision-making by higher administrators.  One platform is the faculty senate.  The senate itself is organized as a representative democracy. The members of the senate are elected.  The faculty union is another.  Faculty are free to join or not.  These administrators of the faculty are elected by the senate.  It may come as no surprise that the administrators pay lip service to so-called shared governance.  I have already posted on the contempt administrators have for faculty.  What may be more surprising that even the seemingly democratic faculty organization of a department is actually just as autocratic as the university is.  Department Chairs are autocrats.  To be sure, Chairs are elected by the department members and Deans usually go along with the wishes of the department.  And there are committees dealing with merit pay, graduate admissions, and tenure and promotion, among other concerns.  These committees are entirely powerless, however.  They are, to use the rhetoric of a person in my department, "entirely advisory to the Chair."  So the Chair will of course she herself or himself as always doing the right thing whether the department likes it or not while faculty will see, like any group will, the Chair's rewarding of some faculty members and not others as arbitrary, unethical, unjust.  The admin is just a garden variety species of croneyism.  The longer the same admin is power, the more illegitimate the Chair will become in the eyes of most department members.  The sad result of autocracy is that morale plummets lower and lower and even the most highly distinguished members of the department finds themselves subjected to the sado-masochism of everyday academic life.  The even sadder thing is that things could be otherwise.