Devising personal methodologies.

At Borders, John was checking out "Law School Confidential: A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience," and I picked up "Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui." John had picked up his book first and asked me what I thought. I said I thought it would be better to devise your own plan for law school, based on what makes sense to you and accords with methods you've used successfully in the past. The law school book is designed to help a broad range of people with lots of different styles and abilities and intentions, and maybe you could scan it quickly and get some ideas, but you're better off creating your own methods.

I then set out to browse and picked up the clutter book, even though I detest bogus spirituality books, because ... well, why? Because Borders had it out on a display shelf? Because clutter in the house really does feel like a spiritual problem? Because I need inspiration to unclutter my house even if it is bogus? So I scanned the book, reconvincing myself that clutter must in fact be removed, but ultimately realizing that what I'd just told John about the law school book was true about the Feng Shui clutter book: I need to devise my own methodology. But I was pretty absorbed in the book for a while. When did I become unabsorbed? Oh, round about when the author moved on past uncluttering your house and your office to uncluttering your colon. I did check out the list of 21 steps for uncluttering. Why so many steps? [Speaking of clutter ... ] There were steps like "Attune yourself to the place. Announce your presence and radiate your intentions." There were a lot of rules too, like: don't play any music.

But steps and rules can be helpful, even if they are essentially made-up nonsense. They can create a sense of purpose and dedication. I invented a ritual for reading and studying in law school, then I believed in following my ritual, and that belief helped me. Now, with my cluttered house, I need to devise my own methodology. My idea is to locate the core of disorder--those shelves!--and tranform it into the origin of a new, austere, streamlined tranquility, then enlarge that core of orderliness by small degrees, moving out to the next locus of disorder.

Whoopi's swipe at Hillary.

According to the NYT, at that Democratic fundraiser the other night, where Whoopi Goldberg helped the slow members of the audience perceive the double entendre of the President's last name, she "also struck an unexpectedly nonpartisan note when she said Nancy Reagan was the last White House occupant who 'really looked good.'" Who even remembers Democrats saying anything nice about the way Nancy Reagan looked back in the 1980s? That was just purely, gratuitously mean to Hillary Clinton!

Coffee and conventions.

I've been sitting here at Espresso Royale, drinking caffeine long enough to start finding the laughter of human beings bizarre and annoying and reading and blogging long enough to run my laptop battery down to 48%. I'm torn between two directions to walk upon exiting this place. I could turn left and walk up to the Capitol Square, where, this week, the Art Fair is taking place. I love art, so I hate the Art Fair, but I might go up there and see what might be photographable. (The camera transforms places I don't like into destinations.) I could turn right and head up to the Law School, where I would like to edit a handout for Monday's Conlaw class, an answer key to the Spring exam. Other tasks abound--notably, writing the exam (to be given on Thursday) and editing the Civpro2 materials for Fall. [UPDATE: Left turn avoided.]

A few minutes ago, a colleague broke my screen-staring spell, and we chatted for a minute. She's off to various destinations, including Boston. I said I hoped she wasn't going during the Convention, because things are reputedly going to be very inconvenient. (She's not.) This led to a bit of a discussion about what the demonstrations in New York and Boston were going to be like. I was thinking about this New Yorker Talk of the Town.

“It’s going to be a little bit like the Battle of Seattle,” Pat Buchanan, the former Presidential candidate, predicted the other day, alluding to the large-scale demonstrations against the World Trade Organization conference in 1999, during which police fired rubber bullets at overzealous protesters. ...

Buchanan [reminisced about the 1968 Democratic convention where he] quickly realized that images of the most rabid, unruly protesters—inevitably the focus of television coverage—provided better counter-spin than any Republican sound bite could. ...

This year’s preëlection fervor calls to mind 1968 in many ways, though clearly the scenarios are not quite parallel. Democratic activists are intending to undermine the Republicans’ Convention, not their own. And Pat Buchanan is no longer a Republican operative. ... Buchanan plans to be in New York for the Convention, as a journalist. He will be wearing a coat and tie, of course, and some lessons of Chicago and Seattle will linger in his mind.

“I thought the demonstrators in Seattle”—the anarchist minority, that is—“destroyed the effectiveness of a protest by union people and a broad-based coalition,” he said. He imagined a swarm of his antiwar brethren: “If the image is of the President and Republicans assembled inside, having a strong, united, purposeful Convention, and you’ve got a bunch of ragtag, you know, anarchists and leftists and long-haired demonstrators and foulmouthed accusers outside, well, the contrast—I can tell you who will win that one.”

My colleague responded to this image by saying that it would be important then for demonstrators to think of creative ways to earn the attention of the TV news editors. I said something cynical about puppets--meaning those large political effigies one always sees at demonstations--and she opined that those puppets were great. I really don't think those things are going to tend to counter the impression created by ugly or chaotic demonstrations. We'll see soon enough.

What we're wondering about today.

Jeremy focuses attention on the pressing question whether Lambuel is a hoax. (Here and here.) Lambuel is such a sweetly drawn Christian lamb in a turtleck sweater that one resists the thought that the person who drew him was insincere. But elsewhere on the website, you see a Baby Jesus cartoon that was obviously drawn by someone who harbored ill feelings toward Christianity. And when that Baby Jesus finds his way here, as Jeremy notes, you've got to admit that Lambuel means only to mock. You can also tell it's a sham from the "children's drawings" section: you can always detect an adult's attempt to draw like a child. For some reason, it never looks right. I note that if you Google "lambuel hoax," Jeremy comes up third. A question I have is whether the comedians who put up this website were hoping only to entertain adults by satirizing the way religious belief is induced in children or whether they wanted to trick the kids who will surely find their way here.

Rank ambivalence.

The Saturday NYT, which maybe thinks nobody's reading, always runs a couple of articles that dip into the thoughts of the world of scholarship. Today, one topic is "rankism." (The other topic is radical traditionalism, and it's the better article, but I'm only going to talk about rankism here.) "Rankism" is a word coined by Robert W. Fuller to signify "the bullying behavior of people who think they are superior."

"I wanted a nasty word for the crime, an unpleasant word, a stinky word," he said, referring to his choice of the word rankism. "Language is incredibly important in making political change. I always go back to that word sexism and how it became the catalyst for a movement."

Hmmm... well, I believe in the power of language too. For example, when a grown man uses the expression "a stinky word," I pick up a whiff of childhood pain. And when a man tries to start a movement using a word, I hear the prudish teacher/nanny/mommy chiding "use words." And when the movement is about quashing "bullying," I sense the presence of a man intensely in touch with his sensitive inner child. So, that's the material whining for attention in the nerdy Saturday paper.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times, the one everyone reads, is running this article, which is up now online, jumping off the screen with candy-colored cartoons of luscious women. A woman named Coco Hanson Scales writes "The Hostess Diary: My Year at a Hot Spot," detailing how she wielded the ego-swelling power to exclude people from a popular restaurant.

[The owner] is fanatical about making the lounge an oasis of rail-thin, beautiful women. He drills me about the kind of clientele he wants and doesn't want. If people are unattractive, I must seat them in corners or turn down the lights so as not to draw attention to them. I make sure the servers know to bring their orders quickly so they are not tempted to walk around.

To Ms. Scales's credit, as she tells the story, she got tired of it all within a year--tired of hearing the cooks mutter "diablo" as she scampered by in skirts so short she could never bend over, tired of seeing the staff mock the President's daughter for loving Guns n' Roses, tired of shuffling Monica Lewinsky out the back door. She's thinking of going back to school. Maybe she's reading the Saturday Times. (Seriously, I think we all know what Scales is doing: writing a catty book about all the celebs that passed through Hue.)

Rethinking: Is Joe Schmo worth watching?

Well, Throwing Things convinced me to watch my TiVo'd episodes of The Joe Schmo Show from the last two weeks. "Quite possibly the most inventive show on TV"? (For slow watchers, I'm about to spoil some things.) I was all for keeping Ingrid on the show. After the cliffhanger episode two weeks ago, when she was saying "Where's my script?," I was yelling, "Give her a script!" So I was glad to see them reveal the trick to her and offer her a place as an actress in the cast. The move from out of the loop to in the loop is interesting. But almost immediately thereafter, they brought a new woman in to be the new dummy. They didn't "invent" much of anything. They kept Ingrid, but they essentially shuffled her to the side. When they brought in Amanda, they replaced Ingrid. They did not have enough clever ideas to really use Ingrid in a brilliantly reconceived story. They just wheeled in a dumber woman. I'm sorry, but I resent Amanda. The show should have turned into Ingrid's story: Can she act? Dare she betray what's-his-name? Doesn't she feel guilty about taking the $100,000 to dupe her counterpart? Instead, it's back to square one with Amanda. Who cares?

A political dieting strategy.

One man's struggle to avoid beer and another's to avoid politics, both complicated by conditions in Madison, Wisconsin.

Obsessing about the 0s.

Tonya is obsessing about turning 40 and soliciting advice from people who have. So I'll respond.

When you turn 40 (or any of the other 0s), you can finally stop thinking about how you're about to turn 40. You just did. It's the lead-up that's the problem. And it starts early, maybe even on the "5." That is, you've been thinking, oh no, I'm pushing 40. You don't have to think that anymore, and it's at least 5 years too early to start with I'm pushing 50. It's only the pushing that is onerous. No one ever frets about pulling 40. There isn't even an expression "I'm pulling 40." That's because the 0s are only hard to push, not to pull. So just get around over into the pull position and it'll be just fine. So enjoy the next 5 years. In fact, enjoy the next 8 years: you're free to see years 44-47 as your "mid-40s." Don't go with the "pushing 50" thought until you're 48. And then, you have my sympathies, because that's really going to hurt.

Which leads me to my second point. You can feel much better right now if you just think how it would feel if you were turning 50. But what about these poor souls who are pushing 50? Well, they can just think about how people turning 60 feel. But really, once you're 50, you've thought too much already about the subject, and, like a lot of other things, it's become too boring to keep thinking about. In fact, one of the benefits of being over 50 is that a lot of formerly troubling thoughts just don't have the power to bother you anymore. It's quite liberating to be so jaded.

UPDATE: Prof. Yin has a way to lengthen the time between the aging obsessions. I think if the zeroes came up more frequently we would make less of them. If the time between zeroes were longer, wouldn't we really flip out when they came up? Or is 10 years exactly the time period that makes the zero seem so significant? I remember turning 10 and thinking it was tragic that I would never again be able to write my age with a single digit. And that I was one-tenth of the way toward being 100. And how horrible it was to think that I was probably at best only going to have 9 more stretches of time equivalent to the inconsequential time period I'd already lived. I found that quite frightening, and I did not even yet realize that the 10 year periods feel much faster when you are older. I thought 10 years when you are a child seem like very little because when you are a child you hardly get to do anything. A related tangent: someone was saying recently that if the words "eleven" and "twelve" had been "oneteen" and "twoteen," we would not have the notion we do of what a teenager is.

Radio.

I'll be talking about blogging--of all things!--on WHA-AM 970 here in Madison this Sunday at 2 pm on Jean Feraca's show "Here on Earth." The last time I was in the WHA radio studio was to do a call-in show right after the Florida Supreme Court's oral argument in Bush v. Gore. It seemed painfully obvious at the time that the litigation had reached the end of the line. Maybe I will manage to have some equally apt insights this Sunday.

Mineral Point.

Yesterday, I drove out to Mineral Point. Here's the view from High Street, looking down to Commerce:



It's a very old town, with some beautiful old buildings:



Here's the White House:



The most distinctive thing on High Street is this sculpture of a dog, which juts out above one of the storefronts:



The dog theme, tied to the town's name, is carried over into more recent representations:



There are a lot of antique shops, and maybe in one of them, you'll be able to find a dog you like, like this one, which I'm now sorry I didn't take home with me:

Where is Bush?

John (my son) sends me a link to this National Review editorial with the message "NR agrees with you ... Read the last paragraph." The editorial is mostly about Kerry's VP choice ("Edwards brings real strengths to the Democratic ticket. He is an attractive figure. Voters seem to respond to youth, energy, and good looks"). I see that NR agrees with a point I blogged yesterday; they write:

Republicans will be tempted to make an issue of Edwards's background as a trial lawyer. They should not overestimate the extent to which the public at large shares their dislike of trial lawyers. They make their money, after all, by telling sympathetic stories that win over ordinary people.

But that last paragraph John points me to is this:

Bush and Cheney have shown some lassitude this year. They should get their campaign started. The spur of competition might do them some good, too.

I haven't blogged this opinion of mine yet, but yesterday, I was saying to John that I don't think Bush is really trying to win the election. Where is he? Is he fighting at all? I was seriously speculating last night that Bush doesn't want a second term, that he's tired and thinks he's done enough. He's done so much in one term, and history will judge him on how well the events he's set in motion play out. It's as if he's thinking: I've already done two terms worth. I got my work done fast. Can I go home early?

Soup lyrics.

Here are the four lines of "At Long Last Love" that Cole Porter wrote while he was in excruciating pain with his legs crushed, pinned under a horse for hours, waiting to be rescued--according to John Lahr, writing in the New Yorker (link via A&L Daily):

“Is it an earthquake or simply a shock?
Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?
Is it a cocktail, this feeling of joy?
Or is what I feel the real McCoy?”

You know soup does not make an appearance in song lyrics all that often, but oddly enough, just the other day, I was sitting in a cafe, eating an almond scone, and I noticed this bizarrely soup-related lyric in a Sam Cooke song:

Shake it like a bowl of soup
And make your body loop de loop
Put your hands on your hips
And kinda let your backbone slip
Move your body like a whip
And just shake!

Now, you just know the original idea was to shake like a bowl of jelly (like Santa Claus in "'Twas the Night Before Christmas") but he switched to soup for the sake of rhyme.

The only other soup lyric I can think of offhand is the Lewis Carroll lyric "Beautiful Soup." I'll try harder later, but I've got to run to class.

UPDATE: Well, I see Bob Dylan did his own version of Sam Cooke's "Shake." It's called "Wiggle, Wiggle." Here's the soup part:

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup,
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop,
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead,
Wiggle - you can raise the dead.

Pretty funny, and a nice salute to Cooke. "Under the Red Sky" is a Dylan album I never paid any attention to.

And here's the text of "Beautiful Soup," set alongside the poem it was parodying. Carroll substitutes the homely image of soup for the lofty image of a star.

ANOTHER UPDATE: You can listen to "Wiggle, Wiggle," and buy "Under the Red Sky"--cheap!--here, on Amazon. The Amazon commenters are pretty brutal, several calling it Dylan's worst album. "Wiggle, Wiggle" wins special contempt. No one seems to get that "Wiggle, Wiggle" is to "Shake" as "Beautiful Soup" is to "Star of the Evening."

"Better hair."

John Kerry, on his first day of campaigning with John Edwards, makes this claim:

"We've got better vision. We've got better ideas. We've got real plans. We've got a better sense of what's happening to America," Kerry told thousands of supporters here in the first of two stops in Ohio. "And we've got better hair. I'll tell you, that goes a long way."

That bulbous wig of a hairdo Kerry's been using to offset his lengthy face is good hair? That flappy, fine fringe accentuating Edwards' babyish looks is good hair? Please! For decades, I've been groaning about the outdated Beatle haircuts worn by aging Baby Boomers. Long hair is a young man's style that makes an older man look like an unattractive woman! Beatle styling, with combed down bangs in front, belongs in the 1960s--early 70s at the latest. It's as if 20 years from now, some guy were to run for President and wear his hair like this. I realize practically every man in Congress is making the same mistake of keeping the Beatle do alive, but could someone please tell these people how terribly estranged from any sense of style these men are? The only one of the current candidates with a respectable hairstyle is George Bush. Cheney ought to wear much shorter hair: he's making the same mistake as Edwards, but he's unable to pull if off because of baldness. It's especially important for balding men to wear their hair quite short. (Bonus fashion advice for Cheney: get smaller glasses.)

Early morning.

Did you see that the first post today has a 4:33 a.m. timestamp? And yesterday's was 5:02? My two-hour 8 a.m. class has completely transformed my biorhythms, apparently. I was already a morning person, but this is a bit eerie. At least the NYT is already here at that hour. The Wall Street Journal is heard thudding onto the front sidewalk some time later. I don't subscribe to the WSJ, but for months someone else's subscription has been delivered to me. Why doesn't that person notice and call them? You may say that I ought to call, that I have an ethical obligation to call, and I agree. I called after three days of misdeliveries. I had to go through several touch-tone menu levels and then wait on hold for quite a while. Finally, I got through to a human being, and I patiently explained the problem and was told it would be fixed. Am I supposed to do that again? Frankly, I think the WSJ has an ethical obligation to come help me with my recycling!

"5 Films About Christo."

Even though I'm avoiding buying DVDs the way I did back when they first came out and it was possible to buy everything I was interested in, there are still some things I must buy as soon as I see they exist. "5 Films About Christo" is one of the things in that category. I love the Maysles Brothers documentaries (like this), and I'm also interested in the artist Christo. (Interested enough to consider planning a trip to New York just to be able to see "The Gates" in Central Park next February. I saw an exhibit about the project at the Metropolitan Museum, which is still on view and will be until July 25th.)

Here's a nice short review of it in the Onion AV Club. An excerpt:

Each film is rife with inherent drama, as Christo and Jeanne-Claude battle bureaucracy, weather, and countless other variables endemic in mounting projects of such size and scope. In Christo, the Maysles find a fascinating and dynamic protagonist, a mercurial, lanky, heavily accented, intermittently incomprehensible iconoclast whose Coke-bottle glasses, long black hair, and intense demeanor make him look like a cross between Kramer from Seinfeld and a deranged monk. In attitude and bearing, Christo is like a religious fanatic whose religion is art. In the early films especially, Christo interacts with drawling, homespun Americans who must see him as some sort of space alien from the Planet Art.

Naked lunch.

Here's an interesting little squib in today's NYT:

LOUISIANA: CLUB CAN'T KEEP WOMEN OUT OF 'MEN'S GRILLE' The State Supreme Court ruled that the Southern Trace Country Club in Shreveport could not exclude women from a public dining area based on its desire to protect their sensibilities and the men's privacy if the men wanted to dine "in various stages of undress." The club had argued that the Men's Grille, the only one of its restaurants that is open on Sundays, is near the men's locker room to preserve the "locker room environment," and that men occasionally eat there in only a towel or in the nude. The court said Tuesday that the practice violated the club's own dress code, and it upheld an appeal court's ruling that the policy was arbitrary and capricious.

Imagine if you were allowed to discriminate all you want as long as you are naked. Or did the court say that if only the clubhouse rules said you could dine naked, you really could discriminate?

But what is wrong with people that they want to eat in a "locker room environment"--with its fungal overtones? And while you're getting your act together, and getting rid of the "Men's" in "Men's Grille," how about getting rid of the "e" in that "Grille"? A "grille" is that metal shield for the car's radiator. You cook on a "grill." I love the way, in their quest for a manly clubhouse, they embraced the fey Ye-Olde-Shoppe approach to spelling. For a literal-minded person like me, "Men's Grille" conjures up a picture of a large car with lots of little (naked) men stuck into the front metalwork. I'm seeing a Gary Larson-style cartoon.