Alex Kudera's Blog, page 139
November 4, 2012
peace and trade
Last week in the Foucault seminar, I was reminded of a bit of Montesquieu from my undergraduate days--before all my big plans fell apart and I graduated in seven semesters with the only degree I could hustle up under such hurried constraints (an English major).
Anyway, the reading for this coming week, the first three lectures in Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics include his summation of Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795), a short accessible text I read in the first few years after I graduated. Foucault writes: "The guarantee of perpetual peace is therefore actually commercial globalization" (58).
That was enough to get me scurrying around the web for the bit of Montesquieu I had only imperfectly remembered, and I found it at this University of Chicago joint: "Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities."
Writing in 1748, Montesquieu goes on to note we can't expect the same peace from competing individuals within these trade-minded economies: "But if the spirit of commerce unites nations, it does not in the same manner unite individuals. We see that in countries [Holland] where the people move only by the spirit of commerce, they make a traffic of all the humane, all the moral virtues; the most trifling things, those which humanity would demand, are there done, or there given, only for money."
He wrote that last bit 100 years before Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, and both Montesquieu paragraphs seem so relevant to today's world.
Anyway, the reading for this coming week, the first three lectures in Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics include his summation of Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795), a short accessible text I read in the first few years after I graduated. Foucault writes: "The guarantee of perpetual peace is therefore actually commercial globalization" (58).
That was enough to get me scurrying around the web for the bit of Montesquieu I had only imperfectly remembered, and I found it at this University of Chicago joint: "Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities."
Writing in 1748, Montesquieu goes on to note we can't expect the same peace from competing individuals within these trade-minded economies: "But if the spirit of commerce unites nations, it does not in the same manner unite individuals. We see that in countries [Holland] where the people move only by the spirit of commerce, they make a traffic of all the humane, all the moral virtues; the most trifling things, those which humanity would demand, are there done, or there given, only for money."
He wrote that last bit 100 years before Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, and both Montesquieu paragraphs seem so relevant to today's world.
November 3, 2012
never, not, or no longer a toss up?
Nate Silver's Political Calculus, aka Five Thirty Eight, accumulates the data from polls far and wide, but in battleground states most of all, and insists that President Obama has an eighty percent chance of winning the election.
We'll see when we get there, and one thing I know for sure is that we're getting there soon. It seems like roughly half the country, or at least its voting citizens, will be upset with the outcome, but I still suspect a majority of us will also be relieved it's over.
We'll see when we get there, and one thing I know for sure is that we're getting there soon. It seems like roughly half the country, or at least its voting citizens, will be upset with the outcome, but I still suspect a majority of us will also be relieved it's over.
October 30, 2012
Dr. Seuss's Sandy
This came to me via a Shelf Awareness facebook share of a Bookish tumblr:
And then, after the storm swept through, journalist Bill Hangley and poet Pattie McCarthy shared these photographs from The Atlantic. Musician and bookseller Bill "Bile" Greene has also led me to some alarming images from lower Manhattan:
Stay as safe and warm as you can. 
And then, after the storm swept through, journalist Bill Hangley and poet Pattie McCarthy shared these photographs from The Atlantic. Musician and bookseller Bill "Bile" Greene has also led me to some alarming images from lower Manhattan:
Stay as safe and warm as you can.
October 26, 2012
new issues, new horizons
The September/October print issue is out and about, sporting "A Scottish Dizzen," and much, much more! Thank you, Dr. Daniel Peaceman for everything you are doing in this transcontinental literary world.
In my own literary way, I've been living vicariously through The Paris Review's interview with the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso. If only all of our writing lives could be as charmed as his. Here's an excerpt from Calasso on a Kafka in his library:
And this is the first book that Kafka ever published, Betrachtung. There were eight hundred copies. In one of his letters, he mentions having gone to a bookshop to see if anyone had bought the book and realizing that, of the eleven copies sold, only one had been bought by someone other than him.
I hope everyone has a relaxing and healthy weekend.
In my own literary way, I've been living vicariously through The Paris Review's interview with the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso. If only all of our writing lives could be as charmed as his. Here's an excerpt from Calasso on a Kafka in his library:
And this is the first book that Kafka ever published, Betrachtung. There were eight hundred copies. In one of his letters, he mentions having gone to a bookshop to see if anyone had bought the book and realizing that, of the eleven copies sold, only one had been bought by someone other than him.
I hope everyone has a relaxing and healthy weekend.
October 22, 2012
toss up?
John Cassidy at The New Yorker, a magazine endorsing Barack Obama, seems to indicate that the race is as close as some recent polls indicate. His map still tilts toward an Obama victory and yet his writing acknowledges that some of the states leaning blue could very well wind up in the hands of Romney.
On the radio on the ride to Ohio, aside from NPR, whose experts both predict an Obama victory as at least 70 percent likely, almost all of the talk radio is unabashedly right wing to ostensibly neutral, that comes across as right wing when a Democrat (or this Democrat) is in charge.
Larry Kudlow, a bow-tie throwback money guy who will communicate in a friendly way with cohosts across the political aisle, seemed to be the only conservative acknowledging that the Obama victory is still the likely occurrence.
And then there is the conspiracy theory or legitimate questions surrounding Tagg Romney's purchase of voting machines that will be used in Ohio.
So it feels like everything is up in the air, which could be why the Utah paper endorses Obama and one in Florida that endorsed Obama in 2008 now swings to Romney.
PS--On topic, this sappy tribute to freedom, tattoos, and American nationalism caught my eye although it's a bit disturbing as to what it seems to imply about the intended audience (college students? all of us?).
On the radio on the ride to Ohio, aside from NPR, whose experts both predict an Obama victory as at least 70 percent likely, almost all of the talk radio is unabashedly right wing to ostensibly neutral, that comes across as right wing when a Democrat (or this Democrat) is in charge.
Larry Kudlow, a bow-tie throwback money guy who will communicate in a friendly way with cohosts across the political aisle, seemed to be the only conservative acknowledging that the Obama victory is still the likely occurrence.
And then there is the conspiracy theory or legitimate questions surrounding Tagg Romney's purchase of voting machines that will be used in Ohio.
So it feels like everything is up in the air, which could be why the Utah paper endorses Obama and one in Florida that endorsed Obama in 2008 now swings to Romney.
PS--On topic, this sappy tribute to freedom, tattoos, and American nationalism caught my eye although it's a bit disturbing as to what it seems to imply about the intended audience (college students? all of us?).
October 20, 2012
drive to ohio
I saw some amazing fall foliage on the drive to Ohio. The North Carolina section, up 25 North and then I-26 West, and then I-40 West over into Tennessee was particularly beautiful, but I-75 North through Tennessee and Kentucky certainly did not disappoint.
October 18, 2012
God's hair?
"I'm not a Bible-thumper, I am a Christian, but I really feel like God's hand shaved my head. I really do … If Dolly had not lost her hair - or chosen to shave her head - I never would have found this … ," he said.
And so another one of us answers the call of cancer.
Best wishes and health to Bud and Dolly Stringer.
And so another one of us answers the call of cancer.
Best wishes and health to Bud and Dolly Stringer.
another home for the homeless adjunct
Debra Leigh Scott's "How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps" was picked up and retitled at alternet.org. So Debra is fighting her way through the capitalist thicket of her "edupreneurship," and it appears as if she is making progress. My understanding is that she very much needs to get a profitable movie deal, big league book contract, or some other such financial reward from all of her hard work "saving" other people's faculty or students, and I'm sure millions of people she is fighting for could use some extra bucks, health coverage, and more. It would be a wonderful thing if all of her work ultimately does help level the economic playing field for students and teachers at American universities, but it's all important to recognize, and help publicize, that there are some programs in place to help both of these groups.
I guess it takes a lot longer to read a novel on the subject, and that could be one reason Fight for Your Long Day only has so many readers. But overall, in these times of social media and short-attention spans, folks seem to love a good opinionated essay on a topic and then their free-and-easy chance to opine anonymously in the comments section much more than any reading that might be harder work at times and offer its share of moral ambiguity and doubt about all kinds of agendas.
Moderate or nuanced positions are merely for suckers and cowards; defined outrage is in. Yeah, it's election season, so let's let it all hang out and "F" those who oppose us every chance we get. If you don't believe me, just ask everyone from Bill O'Reilly to Rachel Maddow to Rush Limbaugh to Michael Moore. Novels with nuances and ambiguity and perhaps even a strange, half-hidden nonpartisan streak despite a healthy dollop of the left in its focus on the leftover do not go over as well in these polarized times.
On the other hand, it could just be that folks haven't heard of the book. In Philadelphia on Tuesday evening, at a poetry reading, two different folks, one a poet and the event organizer, the other an English adjunct at Drexel, didn't recognize the title when my poet-accomplice was kind enough to bring it up in introducing me to these guys. I've noticed according to amazon's author central, my teaching region has sold many more copies than have moved in Philadelphia despite the book being in a window at the Faber in 30th Street Station as well as in the Sunday section of the Philly Inquirer's business news.
So, as they say, it is what it is.
In sales we talk about how out of ten people, the one person who dislikes you or your product will tell ten people whereas the folks who like you or it will tell one person. Over two years of marketing a novel, I've come to learn that at least in the case of this book, if the person does like the book, the one person they are most likely to tell is the author.
But, aside from another spate of insomnia, I've been in good spirits recently and have experienced life's "blessings and light" in other ways. Some of the examples of the bitter, aging, drunken writers, among the amazingly successful ones, are rather disturbing, and we can all
I'm working full-time, everyone in my family seems to have health benefits that work (knock on plastic keyboard), I do have readers, and some of these readers seem to hold my only published novel in high regard. What more, not only do I have occasional time to read (Foucault's lectures of all things!) and write fiction, but I also have the opportunity to communicate with motivated college students and live slightly vicariously through all various lives and diverse majors that a general-education curriculum brings together in one room.
Although it can be alternately, or even all at once, fascinating, stressful, unbelievable, and terrifying that some of my best students here are seeing the world in terms exactly antithetical to Debra Leigh Scott and everyone else fighting for some greater good or social justice, I learn a lot more from being in a room with my current students than I would if I were back in Philly, teaching in another version of America, one I have more experience with.
Okay. Better try the bed again.
I guess it takes a lot longer to read a novel on the subject, and that could be one reason Fight for Your Long Day only has so many readers. But overall, in these times of social media and short-attention spans, folks seem to love a good opinionated essay on a topic and then their free-and-easy chance to opine anonymously in the comments section much more than any reading that might be harder work at times and offer its share of moral ambiguity and doubt about all kinds of agendas.
Moderate or nuanced positions are merely for suckers and cowards; defined outrage is in. Yeah, it's election season, so let's let it all hang out and "F" those who oppose us every chance we get. If you don't believe me, just ask everyone from Bill O'Reilly to Rachel Maddow to Rush Limbaugh to Michael Moore. Novels with nuances and ambiguity and perhaps even a strange, half-hidden nonpartisan streak despite a healthy dollop of the left in its focus on the leftover do not go over as well in these polarized times.
On the other hand, it could just be that folks haven't heard of the book. In Philadelphia on Tuesday evening, at a poetry reading, two different folks, one a poet and the event organizer, the other an English adjunct at Drexel, didn't recognize the title when my poet-accomplice was kind enough to bring it up in introducing me to these guys. I've noticed according to amazon's author central, my teaching region has sold many more copies than have moved in Philadelphia despite the book being in a window at the Faber in 30th Street Station as well as in the Sunday section of the Philly Inquirer's business news.
So, as they say, it is what it is.
In sales we talk about how out of ten people, the one person who dislikes you or your product will tell ten people whereas the folks who like you or it will tell one person. Over two years of marketing a novel, I've come to learn that at least in the case of this book, if the person does like the book, the one person they are most likely to tell is the author.
But, aside from another spate of insomnia, I've been in good spirits recently and have experienced life's "blessings and light" in other ways. Some of the examples of the bitter, aging, drunken writers, among the amazingly successful ones, are rather disturbing, and we can all
I'm working full-time, everyone in my family seems to have health benefits that work (knock on plastic keyboard), I do have readers, and some of these readers seem to hold my only published novel in high regard. What more, not only do I have occasional time to read (Foucault's lectures of all things!) and write fiction, but I also have the opportunity to communicate with motivated college students and live slightly vicariously through all various lives and diverse majors that a general-education curriculum brings together in one room.
Although it can be alternately, or even all at once, fascinating, stressful, unbelievable, and terrifying that some of my best students here are seeing the world in terms exactly antithetical to Debra Leigh Scott and everyone else fighting for some greater good or social justice, I learn a lot more from being in a room with my current students than I would if I were back in Philly, teaching in another version of America, one I have more experience with.
Okay. Better try the bed again.
October 15, 2012
October 14, 2012
Philadelphia wandering
I flew in on remarkably small planes from GSP to Dulles to Philly and a few hours later, I was visiting my older sister and her family in always sunny University City. After we all ate at an Indian restaurant, I walked back through Penn and Drexel's campuses and saw new buildings and construction all over. The University of Pennsylvania had a whole bunch of new restaurants where I used to frequent the other movie theater as a kid. It was either the Eric III on Campus across from the library on 40th or the G-- on Walnut. But that was so many years ago and now even the Marathon Grill that replaced the Burger King is long gone. It seemed like a happy, healthy, economically stimulated area on an early Saturday evening, far removed from any evidence that American median incomes have slipped by four grand over the past four years or that our median family is worth 77K. It's probably bad form to bring all that up, yeah, I know.
So I walked down Walnut in the colder-than-I-thought-it-would-be weather and popped in to the University of Pennsylvania Bookstore to make sure my same signed paperbacks of Fight for Your Long Day were still on the shelf. Yep, they were. Untouched and unread, so I took them out to check for my signature and then replaced them all save for one which I left open to display, leaning on the paperbacks on a higher state of shelf. Will someone find it and read or at least give it a quick glance? Will a reshelver take this as a clue that it's time for the books to be returned? There appear to be sales in new and used online, but it's a little unclear if the everchanging quantities of new and used available on amazon are genuinely indicative of such.
Who cares, right?
Yeah, so I sauntered over to the magazines and found the latest editions of Boulevard and The Paris Review. Boulevard had an Anis Shivani follow-up, a retort and reply, to the AWP/MFA gangs who've been dissing his disses on the question of whether creative writing can or cannot be taught, or is not or is a form of therapy. And, well, I must confess it is making me feel a little better right now, the writing is therapeutic I should say, but the whole thing seems like some ridiculous binarism than even kids who didn't write their first messages on IBM punchcards can easily debunk, deconstruct, or de-whatever-they-want-to-call-it.
For the average applicant, as talented as she or he may be, the programs themselves seem increasingly impossible to gain admittance to although evidence suggests that in some cases cheating and plagiarism can work. If I remember correctly, George Saunders reported almost 600 applications for 6 spaces at Syracuse, so there seems to be very little reason not to resort to criticizing them as part of one's own quest for readership. If I'm not mistaken, Roberto Bolano did worse than this kind of thing as a young poet in Mexico, and I'd suspect that this is part of how he established his "name" even if he wrote his long novels years later in Spain. The actual writing of the books would be the minor problem, right?
Hah!
But back to rejection and economic doom, Saunders's underlying economic message is that one is most likely to become just another rejected statistic who has lost hundreds of dollars in application fees so that a handful of select writers might indulge in healthy salaries, quality health benefits, and secure retirements. The finances are most likely to be middling at best either and any way unless the poet is willing to resort to some other art for the sake of turning a buck. But aside from the fact that he is dying, just like the rest of us, and must endure such terminal pleasure in cold, dreary upstate New York, Saunders is doing quite fine.
Me? I played it warmer, if poorer, and remained down South when my wife moved to Ohio for her good opportunity. I wanted to live with my daughter full-time this year, but there was no job for me, and I couldn't bring myself to apply for one of three sales positions advertised at Subaru of Dayton or return to begging for adjunct classes while some other "important" writers write the same books over and over again. (I'd love to see more of these repeaters show some cojones and say something public, and positive or negative, about Fight for Your Long Day .)
For the record, in car sales, the opportunites to write are even more fleeting than they are for the adjunct instructors of English comp, but health benefits are generally still available for full-time workers at the dealerships. When I sold Toyotas over 20 months in Philly, I'd drink beer and scribble in a bar late at night, but I never produced anything more than the roughest sketches. I was tired, naye, exhausted, most of the time, and it's as if nothing has really changed over time.
So I put down Boulevard, hoping Shivani is enjoying the fact that he has so many readers for "frenemies" (a term borrowed from this recent Alexander Chee), and although it's the one I'd prefer to be loyal to, and its editor was briefly kind to one of my rejected stories, alas, I'm just another writer with a kid who shouldn't be indulging in any full-retail-price literary journals, and so I felt like I was doing something wrong when I purchased The Paris Review instead, at a corporate-U. B&N no less, by slapping down a plastic amazon card. Its contents included a "novella" by Sam Savage, an interview with both a poet and fiction writer, and news of their $10,000 prize, which although I'll never win, I might enjoy indulging in dreams of such.
So that's it. Then I left the bookstore and walked home, through the mad, overbearing construction at Drexel University, buildings being built on what used to be the cement sidewalk, where I could likely still be an adjunct instructor if I hadn't made the decisive break in August, 2007. No novel and no little girl I'm almost certain, and now it remains to be seen as to whether this newish trajectory produces any more books or kids.
I'm feeling more optimistic about the second novel. A second child seems highly unlikely.
But one way or another, the second novel, the true first novel and the weirder and more original one, is going to come out.
For some crazy reason, maybe just the 45 minutes of editing I put in at 7 a.m., I know this to be true.
So I walked down Walnut in the colder-than-I-thought-it-would-be weather and popped in to the University of Pennsylvania Bookstore to make sure my same signed paperbacks of Fight for Your Long Day were still on the shelf. Yep, they were. Untouched and unread, so I took them out to check for my signature and then replaced them all save for one which I left open to display, leaning on the paperbacks on a higher state of shelf. Will someone find it and read or at least give it a quick glance? Will a reshelver take this as a clue that it's time for the books to be returned? There appear to be sales in new and used online, but it's a little unclear if the everchanging quantities of new and used available on amazon are genuinely indicative of such.
Who cares, right?
Yeah, so I sauntered over to the magazines and found the latest editions of Boulevard and The Paris Review. Boulevard had an Anis Shivani follow-up, a retort and reply, to the AWP/MFA gangs who've been dissing his disses on the question of whether creative writing can or cannot be taught, or is not or is a form of therapy. And, well, I must confess it is making me feel a little better right now, the writing is therapeutic I should say, but the whole thing seems like some ridiculous binarism than even kids who didn't write their first messages on IBM punchcards can easily debunk, deconstruct, or de-whatever-they-want-to-call-it.
For the average applicant, as talented as she or he may be, the programs themselves seem increasingly impossible to gain admittance to although evidence suggests that in some cases cheating and plagiarism can work. If I remember correctly, George Saunders reported almost 600 applications for 6 spaces at Syracuse, so there seems to be very little reason not to resort to criticizing them as part of one's own quest for readership. If I'm not mistaken, Roberto Bolano did worse than this kind of thing as a young poet in Mexico, and I'd suspect that this is part of how he established his "name" even if he wrote his long novels years later in Spain. The actual writing of the books would be the minor problem, right?
Hah!
But back to rejection and economic doom, Saunders's underlying economic message is that one is most likely to become just another rejected statistic who has lost hundreds of dollars in application fees so that a handful of select writers might indulge in healthy salaries, quality health benefits, and secure retirements. The finances are most likely to be middling at best either and any way unless the poet is willing to resort to some other art for the sake of turning a buck. But aside from the fact that he is dying, just like the rest of us, and must endure such terminal pleasure in cold, dreary upstate New York, Saunders is doing quite fine.
Me? I played it warmer, if poorer, and remained down South when my wife moved to Ohio for her good opportunity. I wanted to live with my daughter full-time this year, but there was no job for me, and I couldn't bring myself to apply for one of three sales positions advertised at Subaru of Dayton or return to begging for adjunct classes while some other "important" writers write the same books over and over again. (I'd love to see more of these repeaters show some cojones and say something public, and positive or negative, about Fight for Your Long Day .)
For the record, in car sales, the opportunites to write are even more fleeting than they are for the adjunct instructors of English comp, but health benefits are generally still available for full-time workers at the dealerships. When I sold Toyotas over 20 months in Philly, I'd drink beer and scribble in a bar late at night, but I never produced anything more than the roughest sketches. I was tired, naye, exhausted, most of the time, and it's as if nothing has really changed over time.
So I put down Boulevard, hoping Shivani is enjoying the fact that he has so many readers for "frenemies" (a term borrowed from this recent Alexander Chee), and although it's the one I'd prefer to be loyal to, and its editor was briefly kind to one of my rejected stories, alas, I'm just another writer with a kid who shouldn't be indulging in any full-retail-price literary journals, and so I felt like I was doing something wrong when I purchased The Paris Review instead, at a corporate-U. B&N no less, by slapping down a plastic amazon card. Its contents included a "novella" by Sam Savage, an interview with both a poet and fiction writer, and news of their $10,000 prize, which although I'll never win, I might enjoy indulging in dreams of such.
So that's it. Then I left the bookstore and walked home, through the mad, overbearing construction at Drexel University, buildings being built on what used to be the cement sidewalk, where I could likely still be an adjunct instructor if I hadn't made the decisive break in August, 2007. No novel and no little girl I'm almost certain, and now it remains to be seen as to whether this newish trajectory produces any more books or kids.
I'm feeling more optimistic about the second novel. A second child seems highly unlikely.
But one way or another, the second novel, the true first novel and the weirder and more original one, is going to come out.
For some crazy reason, maybe just the 45 minutes of editing I put in at 7 a.m., I know this to be true.
