Stories from LA

Today’s LA Times has an article about a brewing backlash against the homeless in downtown Madison, WI. Years ago I wrote my senior thesis about the young people (my primary focus, anyway) that spent time in a small park just off State Street, the pedestrian thoroughfare that connects the University of Wisconsin campus to the capital. Shortly after finishing my thesis I interned at the YWCA’s family homeless shelter. Having had those experiences, I take somewhat more interest in news about homelessness in Madison than I do that in LA. I also feel that I’m qualified to say at least a little about what the issue looked like there in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The article starts with a nice idyllic view of Madison, where residents knew panhandlers by name and interacted with them amicably. It contrasts that picture with a current fear of the homeless resulting from two unsolved murders in the downtown area. In both cases the victims were killed in their homes, in the middle of the day, presumably by strangers. The police have focused some of their investigation on homeless in the area. This has, apparently, included taking DNA samples. This resulted in some arrests on other charges, but no break in the murder cases. The LA Times article suggests that some of the services Madison does provide for the homeless (including some shelters downtown as well as meals) are coming under popular attack. [Read more →]

There is something fascinating to me about the way certain things stick in one’s memory where they are pulled up to the surface by strange unrelated things.

As a freshman at UW I took an honors comparative literature class that focused on Kafka, Beckett, and Borges. It was intense, strange, and wonderful. The class itself often felt a bit like a Kafka novel in that we were required to write responses each week and a final paper on one of the three authors, but what the professor expected these writings to contain was a mystery. I’m sure I would have found that less weird later in my academic career but at the time the intellectual freedom to do what I wanted with the ideas was a bit scary.

For the final paper I focused on Kafka, reading his letters and some of his stories that we did not read for class. Meanwhile my friend Chris wrote her paper on Beckett. In the course of doing extra reading for her paper she came upon the line “Doubt, Despair, and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath-chair to the greatest of these?” She used this line in the subject line of an email she sent me (I don’t recall what the email was about but I’m willing to bet that it was related to our uncertainties about the academic work at hand, paired with our relative uncertainties about various romantic entanglements). This line has stuck with me, despite not actually knowing what a bath-chair is nor how this line fits in with the rest of the piece from which it comes (it’s in More Pricks than Kicks, which I seem to recall was even more confusing to me than even the rest of Beckett).

Years later I began listening to Sleater Kinney. I was a late-comer to much of the cool stuff on the Kill Rock Stars label, picking it up long after it was new and hot. I think it was 2004 or so when I began listening to Hot Rock, a good nine years after release of the album and seven years past my semester of immersion in Kafka and Beckett. Still every time I hear the song “The End of You” I find myself jolted into thinking about that snippet of Beckett when I hear the verse which includes the lines:

Tie me to the mast
of this ship and of this band.
Tie me to the greater things
the people that I love.

I seriously doubt this is actually a reference to Beckett.  It’s more clearly (taken in the context of the rest of the song) an allusion to The Odyssey but still every time I hear it I think, even if only for a fraction of a moment, of that line and the way I was back then.

I miss the intensity of classes tackling things so unfamiliar they pulled me far out of my comfort zone and made me think things I swear it would never have occurred to me to think on my own.  How do you capture that outside the university?  Certainly reading widely is one way, but how do you recreate the intensity of classes?  Perhaps the only answer is to build a time machine and go hang out with Gertrude Stein and Picasso in Paris.

Am I the only one who thinks there’s something wrong with a world where magazines feature ads for diet drugs for dogs?  It’s bad enough that every time you turn on the TV or flip open a magazine you’re faced with a plethora of blue, purple, and red pills that you’re encouraged to ask your doctor about.  Now you have to remember to ask your vet whether Slenderal might be right for you dog.  I just have to make sure not to get confused and accidentally get propecia for the cat (who already seems to have plenty of hair to spare, judging from the state of the blanket he sleeps on).

And for those who don’t get the title of this post, it’s a reference  to the talk “Deconstructing playing with Katie” from the Animals and Society section of the 2006 ASA, which Jeremy Freese discussed here (and elsewhere but I’m too lazy to dig for it).

I’ve lived away from home long enough that when my mother says something about getting pop in a grocery store with a lot of ambient noise my mental word filters don’t parse that she’s talking about soda.

Ok, so people who know me know that I’m pretty obsessed with food. I always have been. Fortunately lately I’m obsessed with growing food, cooking food, and exploring new food. This is a great improvement over when I was fifteen and obsessed with the calories in food and how to avoid said food without my mother noticing. And it’s also better than my first couple of years of college when I lived on a very limited dorm-food diet (most of my protein came from dairy and eggs because the meat was scary) and was obsessed by fantasies of tasty home-cooked food, particularly my mother’s vegetable soups.

I’m slowly reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and I fully intend to get to Michael Pollan’s two recent food books soon as well. I’ve also been reading a lot of gardening blogs and the great sociology blog on food, critical eating. All of this has me thinking a lot about where food comes from, the connections between farming and the environment, and the general politics of agriculture. Well, I’d like to be thinking about the general politics of agriculture but I don’t really know enough to form any sort of coherent analysis. I know there’s a whole system of subsidies. I know this country has shifted to a lot of factory farming. I know that understanding some of the ins and outs of free trade requires understanding farm policy. But beyond that I’m virtually clueless, which is pretty embarassing given that I grew up surrounded by farmland (though my family never farmed).

Can anyone point me towards good histories of farm policy in this country? I’d like to understand what the current policies are, where they came from, and what interest groups were involved. I don’t really have a clue where to start, short of combing through syllabuses online for pieces that look interesting. Since I’m shortly going to be heading into a period of unemployment and job searching it seems like a good time to put together a reading list to expand my knowledge on the subject.

p.s. Yes, I know, asking for reading suggestions implies that I think I actually have more than a small handful of readers.  There is no evidence to support this assumption but I’m an optimist.

Some time last winter the fence at the back of our yard disappeared, leaving nothing between our yard and the yard of the neighbor behind us. Notice how this story starts with a very firm assertion of private property? It’s the nature of fences, I think. They bound where you are from where you aren’t. I’d like to say that I’m against fences. I feel like I should be, that fences impede the formation of community, of common interest. But if I said that I’d be lying, particularly since I spent a small portion of my afternoon yesterday talking with a fencing contractor about the logistics and material involved in rebuilding the lost fence. After a bit more than a year sans back fence I am looking forward to a fully enclosed yard.

Why am I so eager to finally bet the fence repaired? I’ll give you a guess, just one. Yes, the neighbors. I want to be neighborly, I want to believe in community, I want to not lock myself up in a walled property. I mean theoretically I want those things. Realistically I desperately want a fence because the neighbors are driving me nuts. It started with the dog. Smokey, the little yappy dog who obviously can’t recognize property boundaries without a fence. As far as Smokey is concerned, without a fence our yard is his yard, and he has every right to raise the alarm when we tread upon his territory. If it were just the dog, I might feel differently about our fence contractor. If it were just the dog I’d probably not look upon this man as a savior instead of just a craftsman.

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Sometime between now and whenever I go to vote tomorrow I need to figure out how to vote on the seven propositions on the ballot (as near as I can tell those are the only ones I need to worry about since Prop S doesn’t seem to be on the ballot in Altadena). My polling place is within an easy walking distance so I will probably postpone much of this though and research until tomorrow morning and then take a nice stroll to vote, get lunch, and wander around enough to declare it a day I exercised.

I try not to be politically apathetic. I really do but all too often the ballots are overwhelming and I end just guessing on a lot of it. While that’s perhaps not a bad strategy for your average multiple choice tests it seems like a lousy strategy when the test is “what do you want politics to look like for the next X years.” In some sense I think voting blindly is really worse than not voting at all so I often skip things that I haven’t had a chance to research, particularly if they’re non-partisan positions where I’d be voting based on something utterly arbitrary like gender or how melodious the names are. [Read more →]

I’ve been reading Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan lately. It’s good stuff.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about the coming primary election. Yes I live under a rock culturally speaking but I do read the Economist and the LA Times pretty frequently and I regularly interact virtually with people who read news from all sorts of places. So my living under a rock has not protected me from the inundation of election madness. Thus, this page from transmet really spoke to me (click on the snippet below to get my lousy scan of the whole page).

And yeah, I haven’t actually figured out how I’m going to cast my vote.  I mean there are so many appealing ways to be tortured.

I was just reading something about the state of the union address last night that quoted the line:

“We have seen how Pell Grants help low-income college students realize their full potential. Together, we’ve expanded the size and reach of these grants. Now let us apply that same spirit to help liberate poor children trapped in failing public schools.”

This inspired in me a brief moment of hope that perhaps in the years that I haven’t been paying attention to the state of need-based aid for college undergrads we’d made some progress in funding higher education for poor students. Of course that moment of hope melted away when I looked at the current numbers. As an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin I was a work-study student worker in the financial office for two years. During that period I came to understand that, though my background disadvantaged me in certain ways, I was very lucky that my parent’s economic situation wasn’t ever so slightly better. Lots of students coming from families with incomes in the $40,000 and above range were eligible for very little federal or state need-based aid. Combine that fact with the fact that the limits on stafford loans were lower than tuition at UW and the school had almost no aid available above what was available from the government, and there were a lot of people for whom the question of how to pay for their education wasn’t an easy one.

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Last weekend I was feeling kind of crappy and decided I’d curl up on the couch and watch some stupid TV. The problem with this plan, of course, was that we don’t have cable, a tivo, or any of the other technologies that allow some sort of control over the stupidness of the available television. We have an HD tuner, which gets us all the networks, but seriously Sunday afternoon isn’t exactly the best time to curl up and watch network TV. My intent was to make use of Netflix streaming to watch copious amounts of Law and Order but once I actually got the computer attached to the TV working (with its finicky power supply and wireless keyboard from hell) I found I was no longer in an L&O mood. As I was flipping through what netflix has available I noticed that they had Sleeper Cell.

When the series first came out there were a couple of billboards for the show I drove past regularly. I can’t find a picture of the cast for the first season all together, but imagine if you will a billboard with a black guy, a Saudi, a french man, a bosnian, and a blond white boy from Berkeley with the tagline “Friends. Neighbors. Husbands. Terrorists.” With that as my only previous information about the show I was pretty much expecting an utterly offensive train wreck. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for highlighting the fact that not all arabs are terrorists and not all terrorists are arabs but the advertising made Sleeper Cell look like fear mongering of the “oh my god fear everybody” variety, which doesn’t exactly strike me as an improvement. So I opened a bottle of wine and settled in to see how bad it really was. [Read more →]