This is without a doubt the best email concerning work that I will receive in my life:

Hello,

Here is content as promised.

Please give me a few ballbusting stories.

It should be tempting, teasing and main focus is "ballbusting"...

btw, I always check all content with copyscape.. so, please, don't copy phrases..

I will be waiting,

To which I say: okay!

A more interesting job situation:

Following is a copy/paste of an email exchange I had with a man while looking for work on Craigslist.

CL posting:

IM LOOKING FOR A LOT OF WRITERS WHO CAN TACKLE EVERYDAY ISSUES BUT ALWAYS MAKE YA GIGGLE DURING IT! YES I DONT MIND THE WORD "FUCK" THERE I SAID IT!! IF YOU WRITE ABOUT RELIGION THATS GREAT BUT I WANT YOU TO BE A SMART ASS WHILE DOING SO.
WHERE ARE ALL THE SMART ASSES WHO HAVE A BRAIN TOO?

My response:

Subject:

Look: you should probably just hire me now so we can skip this whole boring process and get on with the humor.

	Inbox		X

Dear sir:

It would appear that you have engaged upon a quest to find writers capable of writing with wit and humour, and it would also appear that the purpose of this email is to inform you of a passing interest in doing so myself. I could regale you with tales and examples of my skillset, which include things like killing dinosaurs with kitchen knives and stepping on ant-hills, but that would be selling us both short.

That's because I am emailing you, instead, to taunt your excessive usage of the caps-lock button. You see, sir, or maybe madame - I have no idea and you did not provide enough context for me to state with any level of assurance - the 12th was not Billie Mays day, the day of the year in which everyone speaks in all-capitals to honor the fallen infomercial spokesman, and yet you persist in your shouty-madness throughout the length of the post.

What nerve! I thought, what madness! How angry must this employer be! Perhaps, rather, you sought to ensure that your job listing was well-understood and avoided the ambiguity of properly-capitalized-words. Well, dear sir, I feel that I should tell you THAT I AM VERY CONFUSED BECAUSE SHOUTY WORDS TEND TO CONFUSE ME.

If you give me a topic or a website to write for and pay me sufficiently (I'll work for dimes, really), I can guarantee that I will make not only you but also the entirety of your readers laugh. I'd love to see another applicant boast that and say it with any real sincerity.

IF YOU PREFER, I CAN WRITE ARTICLES IN ALL CAPITALS.

Attached is a copy of my resume. I'll hear from you soon, yeah?

--
Daniel A. Russ
Composition Sorcerer, Flint, Michigan

and then his response:

lol. wow I am getting bashed cause of the caps. you see to I am a cunning legiunist. but the problem is I cant spell it!! Im more lazy than anything so the caps and punctuation suffer!!.. I like your style me man. I tell ya what/ give me a week or two and I will e mail ya the site and we will see if its something you want to do. at that time I can explain money and everything else. fair? thanks Lenny

Sounds fantastic to me, anyway.

Interviewing Strangers is Terrifying

So earlier tonight, I went to the Bioshock 2 release at Gamestop in an attempt to learn how to interview people to produce a semblance of a story. I think that it went reasonably well - I spoke with multiple people in the crowd waiting to buy the game and spoke with one man in particular that I thought was interesting. His words can be found at the link above.
..and the process was fucking nerve-wracking.
For the first time in months, I sat inside of my car, smoking fiendishly, and assuring myself that yes, I was fully capable of walking up to strangers and asking them questions without invitation. Yes, I can be social with a purpose. Yes, I can do the games journalism thing.
And, well, I did it. I'm not sure it was a great piece, but it's a start. In the future - notably, at the next Flint Video Gamers' Club thing on Friday - I plan to do essentially the same thing, but on a wider scale and have a more fully-developed story. I suppose we'll see.

wow.com Cover Letter

Well .. here is my cover letter that I'm about to send to wow.com to try and score a columnist position. Let's hope trying to be clever, for once, pays off.

Greetings, editors!

I won’t lie to you: I’m a relatively new reader to wow.com. Why is that? Well, I could tell you that I had never been able to read before coming wow.com and that it delivered unto me an epiphany of literacy, or I could tell you that my eyes were gouged out by red-hot forks and then eaten by huge, flightless birds, only to have been restored mere days ago when a friend mentioned your website, or I could even tell you that I had been trapped deep underground without Internet access by hairy giants, whom I had to slay with little, pointy sticks to escape in a series of daring combat maneuvers - but all of these things would be lies told to explain why I hadn’t read wow.com before. As you may know, lies are not true, and none of these are the reasons I did not before read wow.com.

Rather, I simply did not know about it - but that’s pretty boring, I think, so you guys can choose any of the three reasons listed above for why I did not visit wow.com before. What you believe is entirely your business.

I didn’t decide to send you this email to tell you about why I haven’t been reading your website for the last few years, or any of my heroic exploits that allowed me to do so - but rather why I started reading it, will continue to read it, and why I think you should let me write for it.

You see, I quite like wow.com; it’s intelligent, well-written, and professionally-orchestrated. I could list another fifteen or so adjectives about why wow.com is great and why I feel as though I should be a part of it, but I expect you guys have a pretty good idea of what those adjectives might be - so I won’t waste any more of your time with them. Instead, I’ll move on to why you should hire me to write a column for you.

Reason one: I play Warcraft far more than I should, which I’m pretty sure is a sign that I should either be writing about it, or that I should enroll in a gaming addiction center.

Reason two: I already write about videogames constantly on my website, 40oz1game.com. I also drink a lot of beer while doing so, hence the theme of the sight: computer games and beer.

Reason three: I’m reasonably-okay at writing, and every website can always use more at-least reasonably-okay writers that use a lot of hyphens. I would like to say that I am TOTALLY AWESOME at the craft, but I am a humble man, and I will leave that judgment to you, dear editors.

So here is my pitch: I’d like to write a weekly or bi-weekly column focusing on me thinking about issues and aspects of Warcraft that some people might not, but are certain to react to. Sometimes, I think it will be fun to work with contemporary stuff that all players have experienced on some level - such as the LFG system, and why I think it might destroy the best part of Warcraft. (This article, published on my website originally, can be found here: http://www.40oz1game.com/2010/01/playing-so-hard-i-forgot-to-drink-world-of-warcraft-and-the-lfg-system-and-why-it-sucks/)

The basic idea of the piece, if you are not inclined to read my analysis of it, is that the LFG System removes the best basis for making new pals: meeting, bleeding, and dying with them in dungeons.

I’ve also got a piece in progress about how both the Alliance and Horde expeditions into Northrend are basically endorsements of the Western process of subjugating less-advanced cultures, and another piece about how Warcraft is an enormous endorsement of capitalism where literally every aspect of play is made into a commodity.

I don’t think that I’m going too far out on a limb here when I say that players will react to these ideas - and I think they will mostly disagree with them! That would be pretty much awesome, as I’m used to having people disagree with me, and if it can stimulate conversation on your website - then all the better!

In closing, dear editors, I very much hope that you will consider my proposal with love and adoration. Failing that, I would hope for maybe a begrudging respect, or maybe even mild approval. I’m willing to work for basically nothing, as I am already a poor college student, and not getting paid for work is something that I’ve been doing for years.

A final thing to keep in mind, dear editors: I killed giants for you - with tiny little sticks - just so that I could escape the deep, dark dungeons to read wow.com. Surely, that’s deserving of a columnist position.

Sincerely,

Daniel A. Russ

Various Updates - Stay Out of Trouble, Kids

So I recently found work-study employment with a great local program called Launch. The basic idea is that they provide micro, community-oriented loans, workspace, and workshops for entrepreneurs in Michigan-based colleges. Although I have objections with the system (most notably the great potential for gentrification), I think it's a great program - it helps stimulate the local Flint economy, and gets great ideas into succesful businesses. Even the staunch socialist within me likes the idea.

However, there was a complication - my criminal record. For the sake of posterity, I thought that I would post my explanation of that here - specifically, because it encapsulates my frustration with the entire ordeal.

I was recently informed that I was to explain to you the circumstances of my disorderly conduct charge as it appears on my record. What happened was a party and the consumption of alcohol, which culminated in an ever-increasing level of volume that became an issue once much of the party moved outdoors. When the police arrived, instead of acting calmly and following their instructions, myself and a few friends protested - loudly and drunkenly. This lead to an arrest and a small set of charges, which I was able to reduce to disorderly conduct by way of my lawyer, a set of fines, a year's worth of probation, and a sizable number of hours for community service.

I paid my fines, met every requirement of probation, and completed my community service working for the Mott Community College newspaper. Although I very much regret what I did, and the specter of the charge has haunted me for some time, I recognize that it was the folly of a younger man; several years have passed since the incident, and my record has remained entirely clean and I have stayed out of trouble.

In other news, I've applied yet again to work for mmorpg.com. Mr. Wood didn't like one of my favorite pieces on the objection that it was a little too subjective - that's understandable, but I still think that it was an excellent piece. When I put the finalized version over on 40oz, I'll amend this post to include a link to it. I'm also sending out an application to work as a freelancer for examiner.com - we'll see how that goes. Finally, I'm putting together a pitch for wow.com as a columnist - the basic idea is to be a stuffy academic bitching about thematic troubles in WoW. When I send the pitch, I'll throw it up on here.

Is it better to have th crowd or to be truthful/correct?

--
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

Hooray!

I recently received this email;

Daniel,

My name is Jon Wood, I'm the Managing Editor at MMORPG.com.

I would be interested to see a full pass made at the WoW article that
you pitched to us in your last email. If you are interested, please let
me know. I would like to see the revised version by Wednesday, December
9th if at all possible.

Jon Wood

This means that the opening guns of my career have been fired. Awesome!

Further good news: two of my poems, Pissgrid and Failing in Love, were published in Broadside.

Brevity is stupid.

Today, during a message exchange with a friend on Facebook, she told me that she thought something I said was beautiful. It is my response to her apology for being long-winded. Since it just so happens that a) I can be a very vain and self-centered person, and b) this is entirely my blog and I get to do with it as I please, I will therefore post said beautiful line in an attempt to further inflate my ego:

The one thing that I will never be irritated by is long-windedness; there are many vices in writing, but failing to establish clarity in favor of brevity is the foulest.

The Veteran and the Supplicant: On the Methods and Implications of Modes of Address During the Freeport Debate

Beneath the cut is an examination of the modes of address used by Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in what is perhaps the most important debate in the series of debates they undertook in their respective campaigns for the Senate seat in Illinois. Specifically, it looks at the potential implications of Lincoln's use of "Judge" and "Judge Douglas" as a method of address, and Douglas' use of "Black Republicans" when speaking to and about Lincoln.

It's pretty boring stuff if you're not a) into the Civil War, particularly the preceding politics, and/or b) into rhetoric and how stuff gets named and what that means. In other words, you will probably not want to read this.

Although the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during the campaign for the Senate seat in the election of 1858 for Illinois were often quite similar, one in particular has been chosen for analysis due to the development of what would come to be called the Freeport Doctrine. During the course of the debate, Lincoln demanded of Douglas whether or not a territory could vote on whether or not to allow slavery in its constitution - as per Douglas’ conception of popular sovereignty - or if territories were bound to the obiter dictum delivered at the conclusion of the Dred Scott case, in which Chief Justice Taney claimed that neither the states nor the territories had a constitutional right to bar slavery from existing in any fashion.

Douglas responded to Lincoln with what has become known as the Freeport Doctrine, in which he argued that any territory could bar slavery from existing if it so chose merely by way of the adoption of laws and their enforcement; if a state or territory legislated laws that barred slavery, or if the local population’s law enforcement agencies refused to uphold slavery, then slavery could not exist in that territory. In the words of Douglas;

“It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory under the Constitution, the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations.”

The Freeport Doctrine was an elegant solution to what Lincoln doubtless believed to be an irresolvable conflict for Douglas.

While the historical high point of the Freeport Debate may have been the development of the Freeport Doctrine, it is but a pale shade of the debate in its entirety, in which each man demonstrated their full rhetorical strength. Douglas’ flashy, Washington, D.C.-tinged and highly educated tone, which he utilizes to appear as though he is speaking from a position of authority in which he knows not merely which policies are best but how - and has the power - to enact them, contrasted heavily with Lincoln’s homespun and cordial attitude, which caused him to appear as though he were supplicating humbly to a greater power in the hopes of great social change. The sensibilities and beliefs - as well as ethics - of each candidate come out strongly in their respective speaking sections, and I feel quite clearly in the fashion that each of the men chooses to address the other.

In the course of externally researching perspectives on the Freeport Debate, a common consensus seems to emerge between the impeccable logic and politeness of Lincoln, contrasted with the ravings and crassness of Douglas. While it is true that Douglas is more prone to insults and personal attacks than Lincoln (if only in raw quantity), I am not entirely convinced that Lincoln is deserving of the high pedestal upon which his speaking segments seem to have been placed by contemporary and historical critics, or that he was any more noble in his efforts at Freeport than Douglas; rather, it would seem to me that Lincoln is equally as deceitful and deliberate as Douglas, albeit in a substantially more subtle fashion. That is not to say that Douglas was incapable of subtlety - indeed, what seems to be his crowning achievement in the Freeport Debate was his ability to ensnare Lincoln into choosing party loyalty and reliability or personal integrity.

However, a perhaps more proper place to begin an examination of both Lincoln and Douglas’ rhetorical methods might best be the fashion in which they addresses one another; always, Lincoln refers to Douglas as either “[the] Judge” or “Judge Douglas.” Topically, this appears a cordiality and a polite reverence for Douglas’ station as a legal authority. However, it also serves a more subliminally coercive purpose; to alienate the audience from Douglas. Merely by referring to Douglas exclusively by his title, Lincoln paints him not only as an authority figure but rather a figure displaced from the common man listening to the speech, as presumably, the average citizen of 19th century Freeport Illinois had a far lesser social standing than that of a judge. Further, Lincoln is also removing Douglas from the pool of even the social and economic elite; while lawyers and doctors and perhaps even politicians are arguably seen as being higher on the social ladder, surely a judge is even higher yet.

This device of Lincoln’s, while difficult to actually determine the efficacy of, served if nothing else to draw a line between the two candidates; Lincoln, a lawyer, on one side, and Douglas, a judge and senator, on the other. Referring to Douglas as a judge also draws Douglas as a figure that has been involved in Washington and in the legal system for some time, as both positions he held infer a great deal of experience and time spent. As was seen in the presidential election of 2008, a candidate of change can rally their base in opposition of the established order, which when seen in the context of a new face, can appear as confined in their methods, dated, and possibly even corrupt, and can propel the candidate of change into office far faster than the candidate of experience and knowledge – provided the political climate favors change.

It should here be noted that this is a contemporary perspective concerning social status; in modern, American society, individuals that have attained the status of judge tend to be looked upon with more reverence and respect than would, for example, a sales clerk or carpenter be. Even were members of American society in the mid-19th century possessing of such high social standing as judge not given the reverence that they are today, Lincoln’s insistence on the title drew a clear line between, if nothing else, the economic status of Douglas and the typical citizen.

Although I was unable to determine whether or not Douglas was aware of what Lincoln was doing by referring to him as Judge Douglas, either intentionally on Lincoln’s part or not, Douglas seems to have played directly into Lincoln’s hands when his turn to speak came. Douglas’ arguments, while brilliantly phrased and structured, tended to refer to his experience as a legislator and his knowledge of the players in Washington, D.C.; although they make clear to the audience that Douglas knew the inner workings of both parties quite well (Douglas even going so far as to detail the political alliances made to, in Douglas’ words, “Abolitionize the two parties” (p. 18)), his responses also demonstrate to the audience that he is a politician and not a typical citizen.

Douglas himself wields the sword of labeling quite effectively during his speaking segments, although he utilizes it in a substantially different way. Lincoln’s use of “Judge Douglas” places the spotlight on Douglas as an individual, and not a member of the collective entity of the Democrat Party, which can have the effect of causing Douglas’ decisions, policies, and beliefs to be his in exclusivity - which is exactly the opposite of the effect that Douglas himself created when speaking against Lincoln. Instead of creating a rhetorical device of a form of hero worship as Lincoln did, Douglas instead chose to frame Lincoln as a mere - but inextricable - extension of the Republican Party.

More specifically, Douglas framed Lincoln as an extension of the Black Republican Party, a phrase which he used more than twenty times during the course of his ninety minute speaking segment, and in doing so he accomplished a number of interesting things. Chiefly, he hammered the point that the Republican Party was attempting to grant universal and equal rights, on a national scale, to blacks, and by calling the Republican Party the Black Republican Party he created a label that would endure with the audience and clearly link black rights with the Republican Party. The label of Black Republican is an important one due to the fashion in which Douglas referred to Lincoln; that is, generally, he did not, instead referring to the Republican Party as a whole rather than Lincoln as an individual. However, it should be noted that while Douglas avoids mentioning Lincoln by name overmuch, he does so in a couple of particular instances - most notably, as seen below, when Douglas is attempting to paint Lincoln as a liar or hypocrite.

In order to effectively understand why Douglas attempted to tie Lincoln to what he called the Black Republican Party, it is first necessary to examine the established Republican Party platform and some of the responses Lincoln made to questions asked by Douglas. The Republican platform, and some of the resolutions that it passed, consisted of often strong abolitionist language as can be seen in the resolutions passed by the Rockford Convention of 1854 that Douglas implied was the primary platform of the party;

“...to restore Kansas and Nebraska to the position of Free Territories; to repeal and entirely abrogate the Fugitive Slave Law; to restrict slavery to those States in which it exists; to prohibit the admission of any more Slave States in the Union; to exclude slavery from all the Territories over which the General Government has exclusive jurisdiction; and to resist the acquisition of any more territories, unless the introduction of slavery therein forever shall have been prohibited.”
Importantly, the resolution also contained the following clause; “...we will support no man for office under the General or State Government who is not positively committed to these principles.”

With this platform in mind, it is now necessary to examine some of the responses made by Lincoln in his first speaking session, in which he answers a series of questions that Douglas presented to him, presumably, during the debate prior to the one held in Freeport. These questions seem to have been pulled specifically from the resolution passed at the Rockford Convention; for example, question one asks, “I desire to know whether Lincoln to-day stands, as he did in 1854, in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law?” Lincoln’s response: “I do not now, nor ever did, stand in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law.” Another example; in question three, Douglas asks “I want to know whether he stands pledged against the admission of a new State into the Union with such a Constitution as the people of that State may see fit to make?” Lincoln’s reply: “I do not stand pledged against the admission of a new State into the Union with such a Constitution as the people of that State may see fit to make.” (p. 1-2)

As can be seen even in this small sampling of responses from Lincoln, he clearly is not a politician terribly concerned with towing the party line at the cost of everything else; rather, he has reasoned, thoughtful, and careful responses to the questions (which are later explained in greater detail) that Douglas presented, and it is precisely for this reason that Douglas seeks to tie Lincoln to what he refers to as the Black Republican Party. Douglas is attempting, I believe, to distance Lincoln from his own answers in the eyes of the audience so that the more radical platform of the Republican Party - which may have not been entirely palatable for citizens of mid-19th century Illinois - were also the policies of Lincoln himself.

Clearly, Lincoln’s responses are substantially different than what would be expected were he a politician that heavily identified with the Republican Party as framed by Douglas. It would initially seem that Lincoln’s responses might undermine what Douglas was attempting by referring to Lincoln as a member of the party, but rather, it appears that the entire machination was rather a shrewd logic trap laid out by Douglas, as can be seen towards the end of Douglas’ speaking section. After laying out the platforms built by two separate Republican conventions, Douglas hones in on a particular stipulation found therein; that, as quoted above, “...we will support no man for office under the General or State Government who is not positively committed to these principles.”

Douglas demands of the audience:

“Thus you see every member from your Congressional District voted for Mr. Lincoln, and they were pledged not to vote for him unless he was committed to the doctrine of no more Slave States, the prohibition of slavery in the Territories, and the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. Mr. Lincoln tells you to-day that he is not pledged to any such doctrine. Either Mr. Lincoln was then committed to those propositions, or Mr. Turner violated his pledges to you when he voted for him. Either Lincoln was pledged to each one of those propositions, or else every Black Republican Representative from this Congressional District violated his pledge of honor to his constituents by voting for him.”

(p. 21)

Although Lincoln responds in his closing segment eloquently and effectively, explaining that “...if he will find any of these persons who will tell him anything inconsistent with what I say now, I will resign, or rather retire from the race, and give him no more trouble,” (p. 25) it is difficult to determine on which side the audience will fall. On one hand, Lincoln was quite clear in his opening speech that “If any interrogatories which I shall answer I go beyond the scope of what is within these platforms, it will be perceived that no one is responsible but myself,” (p. 1) suggesting that he is not necessarily entirely in favor of all of the policies of the Republican platform. Conversely, this also suggests that either Lincoln does not care for the platform of the party and will act in what he presumably believes to be in the best interest of the country, or that he deceived the Republicans in order to secure his nomination. What makes this exchange interesting is that the issue would likely not have even arisen had not Douglas forced the issue, and it gave Douglas an opportunity to lay against Lincoln claims of deception that he may not have had otherwise, or alternatively, that the Republican Party is willing to sell its values out in exchange for a strong enough candidate. This is significant because, often, even mere claims and of untrustworthiness and deception can have a profound impact on how an individual may view a public figure like Lincoln. This can be seen in widespread distrust of Al Gore during his presidential campaign due to his mere affiliation with President Clinton over the Monica Lewinski scandal.

Lincoln’s insistence on the labeling of Douglas as Judge Douglas may have served him poorly in the end, as it is entirely possible - and perhaps likely, given the election results - that the constituency preferred a candidate of experience, clout and otherness (possibly the constituency preferred to elect someone they considered their better to lead and represent them?) than the homespun and relatable nature of Lincoln, whom went to seemingly great lengths in his rhetoric to establish how like the common citizen he was.

Ultimately, it would seem that the electorate was more persuaded and found more value in the character and words of Douglas, as he was re-elected to his Senate seat. Although Douglas’ Freeport Doctrine - and, by extension, popular sovereignty - seems to have been widely regarded as the superior policy regarding slavery in mid-19th century Illinois and perhaps the deciding factor in the election, his methods of delivery and discourse must have been equally as critical as these were the engines by which he convinced the electorate. Regardless of how strong or compelling any given policy may be, it must have an effective speaker in order to convince the masses to enact it - lest it fall to the floor to linger among the doubtless thousands of well-conceived but poorly voiced policy plans and ideas that will never see the light of legislation.

A Note on Works Cited:
All quotations and thoughts used above are based on the transcript of the Freeport Debate, found at:
1. Bartleby.com, Political Debates Between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, http://www.bartleby.com/251/
Additionally, notes taken in class as well as the Wikipedia entry on the Freeport Doctrine (located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeport_Doctrine) were consulted for date and name accuracy.

Fiction Contest

I entered a short piece for a 100 word flash-fiction contest over on Boing Boing. The theme was, "Found in space." I'm putting my entry here for, uh, posterity.

What astonished them was the sheer lack of anything worth finding in space; for thousands of years, they probed and mined, sent out satellites and men, and waited in anticipation for progressively more complicated sorts of waves to relay news to their home planet. But that news was always the same: we cannot condense and harvest this cloud, nor can we extract enough water for this planet to be at all useful. Still, they expanded, spread out like a cancer in the dark, always searching for a new sector of space that they might be able to feed on.

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Worldshift

In the span between late-night and sunrise, something strange happened in the world. It was almost as if every physical law governing existence and interaction shifted almost imperceptibly; in fact, it was imperceptible, because nobody really noticed. But they had a feeling.

Gravity pulled every object ever-so-slightly more down to the world. Cohesian mechanics relaxed by a thousandth of a degree, and motor vehicles, while still functioning effectively, seemed to be somehow .. off. It was difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to explain; most people, when they realized it, saw it only on the periphery of their conscious mind. To explain it would have been like explaining their rationale in getting spooked when at home alone and having to leave for fear of something terrible happening - their was no rationality to it, no system of logic, no good reason. But they knew something was wrong, and they were compelled to act upon it.

Yet no one thought to do anything about this shift in the world. Nuclear physicists puzzled over what the implications of increased output in their power plants meant, and how it might affect safety guidelines. Airline pilots felt that they were slipping in between clouds, their oily surfaces pouring over the aluminum casting of the great Boeings of the sky instead of penetrating them as they had the day before. Researchers attempting to harness quantum mechanics into computer power suddenly managed to successfully develop 5-bit states that actually worked, and worked flawlessly - for the first time, they were able to predict exactly where a neutron would be in its orbit. This was most troubling to them of all, but it shouldn’t have been - somehow, the most difficult aspect of their profession, uncertainty, had been removed from the equation.

I first noticed it when driving to a coffee shop from the bank in my home town. While rounding the curve of Court Street in between Center and Ballenger, I noticed the frame of my car diverge, each mechanical component expanding ever-so-slightly, my seat growing wider as fuel efficiency fell. I could see the other vehicles on the road diverging, too, although they were each doing so to different degrees. Bizarrely, this seemed to have no impact on their performance aside from a vague drifting to the right or to the left on the road. I began to wonder if maybe my insides were diverging, too.

I decided that they were. My general anxiety during the mornings was removed, and the standard nausea that accompanies the span between wakefulness and a caffeinated state was removed - for the first time in months, I felt as if everything was right in the world upon waking up. This troubles me greatly - for if I believe everything is right in the world, but know that it is not, how can I attempt to address any of those wrongs? I am still not sure. My edge - my precious, desperate, anxiety-riddled edge has gone missing, and I am filled with a grave fear of the consequences. Will I still be able to function? Will I be able to stoke the flames of hatred deep within me so that I might find success? Will the loss of what separates me from other men begin to show in my diffusion into the crowds, into the faceless masses?

I do not know.

Book Report/Criticism: King Leopold's Ghost

The following is an assignment I had for a survey of African History until 1800 class I am currently taking. The assignment quite specifically stated that it was to be a book about African history BEFORE colonialisation, but, well .. my reasons are explained in the text.


[Publishing infoz:
August 7, 2009
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
1999
Mariner Books]

I would like first - and feel it entirely necessary - to explain my decision in choosing Adam Hochschild’s historical survey of the colonization of the Congo called “King Leopold’s Ghost.” Although the assignment requirements are quite clear in stating that the book must have been written concerning the pre-colonial history of Africa, I chose instead to read and work with a text that instead was about the colonization of Africa. This was not decided out of a sense of entitlement of not having to follow the rules, or out of a rebellious, anti-authoritative sense of doing whatever I like, but rather two very specific reasons - one of which is perhaps more valid than the other.

The first reason, and the lesser of the two, is because I had some trouble finding works concerning this period of African history. However, as I spent time looking for publications of pre-colonial Africa, my mind returned to a topic that I spent a great deal of time working with in the last year or so, and one that has been forever lodged in my mind as one of the great evils of human history: colonialisation itself. As an aside, I will forever find it bizarre that regardless of which word-processing software that I use, the word “colonialisation” - regardless of spelling - is flagged as being a non-word. So, moving along.

During the winter semester last year, I took the class that Mary-Jo Kietzman offered that was centered around Tariq Ali - both his fiction and non-fiction - and post-colonial criticism in general. In it, I found an entire breadth of concepts that I hadn’t explicitly encountered before, but nonetheless found to have made a great deal of sense. While the class often focused on fiction - indeed, the majority of book-length reading that was done was on the fictional novels of Ali and Orhan Pamuk - much of the auxiliary reading was on Edward Said’s “Orientalism” and Steven Harris’ “Postcolonial Criticism,” both of which deal more or less exclusively with the real-world implications and consequences of colonialism.

As stated, I am very drawn to this field of discourse. Additionally, I am a student motivated not by letter-grades but by the acquisition of knowledge and the development of understanding about the world. (I recognize that my using the word ‘acquisition’ here may be inappropriate in this context) Given this, I look towards projects and undertakings as means of learning in greater depth things which interest me and which I will find useful in my academic career. As a student of literature, narrative, discourse, dialogue and rhetoric, a solid understanding of the events leading up to and the consequences of colonialism are incredibly important. What I am particularly interested in are the compositional structures used by various authors in a variety of works, and how those structures affect the message that the author is trying to express. I also wanted to experiment, in a sense, with reading a piece of colonial history - written from the perspective of someone with an intense hatred for colonialism - as a piece of Orientalist literature/non-fiction. By which I mean, I wondered if Adam Hochschild was almost guilty of helping to enforce the problem that he hoped to shed light on.

On the Style of Writing Presented in “King Leopold’s Ghost”

Adam Hochschild is a writing professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and has written many books concerning the histories and perspectives of many peoples, so he is not without the proper credentials to write a book such as “King Leopold’s Ghost.” His style is engaging and thorough, providing for a highly-detailed yet easily-readable account of the development of the Congo. He often includes details about the personal lives of the figures he deals with an attempt to humanize them and shed light on their decisions. Unfortunately, this often means that he creates judgments of his own which are then forced on the reader - for better or worse, Hochschild makes little attempt at retaining a more journalistic, objective viewpoint.

This problem first manifests in his descriptions of one of the central players in the conquest of the Congo; the explorer, vagrant, brutal commander and evil-bastard-in-general, Henry Morton Stanley. He charts his life as first a young boy repeatedly rejected by those typically tasked with caring, and one that became a sensationalist, yellow journalist whom characterized the wars the United States had with the western plains Indians. However, he generally describes him in almost benevolent tones; the reader’s first introduction of him is one built on sympathy and a recognition of his intelligence and beautiful handwriting. Although he is later disparaged as being, in general, a terrible villain, Hochschild gives him more initial praise than the other central player of the book and development of the Congo, Leopold II.

Instead of the flowery, almost uplifting narrative that Hochschild provided for Stanley, Leopold II is generally described exclusively in negative terms. As a child, his fixation with numbers above all else and his cleverness - portrayed as a fox - is emphasized constantly, as is his social awkwardness. Although some of these attributes were also applied to Stanley, they were given to him in a benevolent fashion, reasoning that he had a difficult childhood and that his flaws should possibly be seen as charming distractions to the rugged exterior of the man he would become. Leopold II, however, was never illustrated in a positive manner; although Hochschild clearly and repeatedly acknowledges Leopold II’s incredible intellect and deft social maneuvering, his awkwardness at a younger stage of his life was instead used to paint him as a wretched boy, only barely worthy of the title that he would receive.

As an example, when writing about Leopold II’s moves to acquire stock in the Suez Trading Company and in efforts to acquire a colony all his own, Hochschild writes,
“Leopold’s letters and memos, forever badgering someone about acquiring a colony, seem to be in the voice of a person starved for love as a child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute, the way someone becomes embroiled in an endless dispute with a brother or sister over an inheritance, or with a neighbor over a property boundary.” (p. 38)
While this might seem to be merely an author’s mental image and understanding of the reasons why a certain figure did a certain thing, the prose is nonetheless worded in a fashion intended to sway the opinion of the reader. Specifically, I am referring to his use of “badgering,” a word that, when used in this context, is never positive - indeed, it is always a negative connotation. Why Hochschild chose to use a word such as this - and others, as this is but one example of lexical issues that crop up repeatedly - is beyond my capacity to state with effectiveness. That said, it mostly just seems that he has a bias that he is unwilling to go to any lengths whatsoever to provide. I find this a strange stance to take as a professor working for a graduate school of journalism, a discipline that has built its foundation on objectivism.

His attempts at psychology feel, if anything, out of place. While Hochschild may very well have studied psychology while in university, may have even received a degree in it, his commentary revolving around it feels nonetheless to be that of an amateur. I find this almost entertaining given a line delivered in the Introduction of the book; “However, with my college lecture notes on [Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”] filled with scribbles about Freudian overtones, mythic echoes, and inward vision ...” It would seem that amateur psychoanalysis is something of a regular theme for Hochschild.

Which isn’t to say that his conjectures into the discipline aren’t entertaining; they are. They provide color to characters that I imagine would be traditionally painted in shades of grey, and make “King Leopold’s Ghost” a more entertaining work to read in general. I’m just not sure that they really add anything relevant to the dialogue, and I find the forcing of the author’s opinion on me during reading to be troublesome.

On the Question of Orientalism

One of the questions that I had after I had found this book was whether or not Hochschild himself was guilty of Orientalising the Congo - and I believe that the answer is more or less “yes.” It’s a difficult thing for any western-educated writer or intellectual to escape from, and great care must be taken to ensure its avoidance. Orientalism, coined by Edward Said in his book bearing the same name, is essentially the use of language to describe cultures and peoples of the Orient - essentially everything east of the eastern borders of Europe and south of the Mediterranean - in a way that permits the mental palatability of colonialisation. Examples of this from the figures in question are found throughout “King Leopold’s Ghost,” most often when Hochschild is quoting Leopold II or Stanley. Indeed, Said and Harris both actually quote speeches given by Leopold II when he was working towards his colonial prospect.

Leopold II essentially justified his colonial aspirations of the Congo as ones of altruism and benevolence, seeking to make the ‘uncivilized’ of the Congo into good, civilized Christians. An example, given at the first meeting of the organization that Leopold II built for the purposes of justifying his colonialism (initially mapping it), follows;
“To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade of this century of progress.” (p. 44)
This sentence alone is rife with what were really quite clever language machinations; his use of the word ‘crusade,’ which was always an attempt at Westernizing the Muslim east, infers tones of righteousness and divine ordinance. To characterize not merely the people of the Congo but the entire region as having been engulfed in darkness - and to then suggest that white, European powers were the only beings capable of providing that light - was not only a brilliant piece of rhetoric, but an incredibly disgusting one, suggesting that the people of the Congo are utterly inferior of taking care of themselves.

Incidentally, even spelling the name of the country that would become, ironically named, The Free Congo State, as Congo is Orientalizing it - according to the text, even though the people of the Congo had no written language, the sound its inhabitants made when referring to it was much closer to a K than a C. However, it was Anglicized, and made into a word appearing more compatible with the English language in general.

Unfortunately, Hochschild sometimes also slips into these lexical traps. While he never refers to the Congo as being backwards or really even alien, an almost imperceptible flavor of The Other arises whenever he speaks of the region. That one of his only real sources of information about the region was a native of the area - and one removed from the time on conflict by several hundred years - is troubling. Even more troubling is it that this man - the leader of the Congo when the Portuguese first began exploring and enslaving the area - quickly converted to Christianity, and learned to read and write in highly fluent English.

Granted, I cannot imagine that there were a great many voices from the region during the time which could have spoken out; they were being enslaved under the veil of Leopold II’s fraternity and human-betterment. Hochschild does address this early on in his work; “There was no written language in the Congo when Europeans first arrived ... we have dozens of memoirs by the territory’s white officials ... Instead of African voices from this time there is largely silence.” (p. 5)

There is a hero to the story Hochschild presents, however, even though he may be a westerner that was genuinely trying to aid the people of the Congo. Edmund Dene Morel worked incredibly hard to expose the terrible evils which Leopold II’s Free Congo State regime inflicted on the people, and generated international attention enough to Leopold II’s ruse and deception that he had an enormous impact on its development. However, Hochschild returns again to a writing style that is clearly much more favorable to some figures than others. As an example,
“Morel was all of a piece: his thick handlebar mustache and tall, barrel-chested frame exuded forcefulness; his dark eyes blazed with indignation. The millions of words that would flow from his pain over the remainder of his life came in a handwriting that races across the page in cold, forward-slanting lines, flattened by speed, as if they had no time to spare in reaching their destination.” (p. 187)
Instead of the damning language used for an early Leopold II, or the understanding, almost paternal tone adopted when speaking about Stanley, Hochschild instead portrays Morel as something even more than a firebrand - he paints of him the very image of a justified revolutionary, correct in all actions and entire righteous in mind.

Conclusion

I contrast these concepts - of Orientalism, lexical slanting, Othering and so on - with those found in the two textbooks for class. As it would be far too easy to find quotes almost entirely neutral inside of either textbook, I will avoid doing so, as the intent of the texts and of “King Leopold’s Ghost” are clearly different and to do so would be unfair. What I found fascinating about the two texts was a style of characterization and description that I’d never really previously encountered when reading about Africa; they each write about the continent as if it is normal. Not normal to the standards of the west, not normal for the middle east, but normal unto itself simply because it is. While they each sometimes sound almost defensive of Africa (understandably, I think), they portray it in a light entirely alien to that found in Hochschild’s work. Although I think that each perspective is interesting, I believe that I will prefer returning to the text for information about the continent - even if Hochschild’s capacity to incite the reader, to make him feel something - anger, hate, hostility, anything - far eclipses that of the authors of the textbooks for class. Sometimes, I just want the information - sometimes, I want to be allowed to form my own opinions.

Fun With Grammar/The Trouble With King's English

Quick preface: I posted this on my journal over at OK Cupid, and as I feel that it's a pretty important concept, I'm gonna repost it here because, well, it's my blog and I can do whatever I want with it.

Aside from phrases such as, “I don’t know what to put in these things/You can’t summarize a person in a single paragraph,” the most common message that I read in people’s profiles on Okay Cupid is something along the lines of, “If you can’t type/speak/conjugate/hyphenate/etc correctly, then do not message me.” I find this to be very troubling.

In linguistic surveys, people from across the country (the United States, anyway) typically identify people from the Midwest as speaking the most “correct” form of English. Specifically, those people from Michigan. I imagine that folks from the southwest, the UK, and other parts of the English-speaking world (sorry guys, that wasn’t my fault) would disagree with this. And hey, I’m from Michigan and pretty much disagree with this. Just the same, the perceptions of people determine what is correct and what is not.

That last sentence was important; what I mean by that is that degrees of ‘correctness’ change from region to region, and only due to mass-communication and quick-traveling methods can people as widely dispersed as those in the United States even have a conception, on a gigantically national basis, of what ‘correct’ on this level is. Just the same - as bizarre as it seems to me at times - we do. It is known as the King’s English.

The King’s English changes from region to region. It’s different in the UK, in Michigan (where I am from), in South Africa, in China. Note that ‘King’s English’ does not necessarily mean English itself, but rather the form of whatever predominant language of a region is that is spoken by the power base. The actual form of that power base does not matter; in America, that base is generally that of the government and the voice of media on a national scale. Generally, this refers to a specific dialect of a language rather than a specific language.

When people write or say things like, “I cannot tolerate people that cannot distinguish between ‘you are/you’re/your’ or refuse to use them correctly,” what they are really saying is that they are not willing to engage in discourse with people that refuse, for whatever reason, to conform with the language structures of the predominant power base. Ironically, I see this often in the profiles of people that claim they are unique, anti-conformist, original in every way possible, and entirely themselves - and damn what ‘the man’ tells them to do.

Often accompanying this is a bit of explanation; generally, these accuse people that fail to capitalize every proper noun and conjugate flawlessly as being lazy or stupid. In real-life, this is tantamount to racism; Ebonics, as a dialect, is every bit as complicated and nuanced as any of those found in the English language, and follows a similar structure of rules. This is why, although an individual removed from an Ebonics-speaking community may have tremendous difficulty understanding Ebonics, individuals from those communities have no trouble whatsoever understanding each other.

So why is that someone choosing to write in a more Internet-friendly fashion is immediately thought of as stupid, lazy, or unworthy? Although whether or not Internet-speak/leetspeak/etc is a dialect or not is difficult to determine and is a question for another essay, I believe it to still be important to consider. What’s to say that a person that uses “your” to replace “you are” (instead of “you’re,” for those of you keeping track at home) isn’t actually following a system of their or their communities’ own choosing that is every bit as rule-based as your flawless English?

This sort of discounts those individuals that genuinely do not know how to conjugate a verb and lumps them into the “more intelligent than you might like to think” category automatically, and that isn’t fair. It also is not what I am setting out to do. Just the same, I fail to see that people that are incapable, for whatever reason, of writing ‘correctly’ are inherently stupid. Is the failing of a school system the fault of the individual that had no choice but to attend? Is it somehow their fault that the raw lack of emphasis on grammar after middle school allowed them to slip through the cracks of high school without ever mastering the more nuanced bits of the language?

I don’t really think so. Sure, I prefer to read words written by people that can effectively produce King’s English; it’s easier on the eyes, mind and heart, but simply because they cannot doesn’t mean that they don’t have something valid to contribute to mine or your life, or that they couldn’t have a profound influence on us in some other way. John Milton, the guy that wrote Paradise Lost, dictated the entire thing to his daughters; someone that types five words per minute, has no understanding of conjugation or sentence structure, and couldn’t spell ‘cat’ with a dictionary could compose something on their own more effectively than Milton could.

And yet we revere Milton as a visionary.

Were he physically capable of composing the work on his own, could he have spelt everything correctly and kept the pacing/phrasing/grammatical structures found within the text the same? I don’t know. Is it important? Not in the least - because we have Paradise Lost and, honestly, that’s all that matters.

I guess that what I’m getting at is that the next time you receive a message or an IM or something from someone that writes, “Hey whats up” and fails to conjugate what+is correctly, don’t ignore them. Don’t discount them. Consider, at least, giving them a chance. Maybe they are stupid. Maybe they really are profoundly lazy. But hey - maybe just maybe, they’re a Ph.D candidate in particle physics that decided to dedicate more time understanding how existence functions as a whole rather than mastering the intricacies of composition.

Website!

I began the process of building a website the other day. A blog, I guess - I decided that for what I was trying to do, Blogger and, to an extent, Wordpress - an excellent web dev. kit on its own - just wasn't enough. So I paid my room mate to use some of his service space, and registered the domain. The general layout and format is just about complete with a few more kinks to work out, but the first couple of articles are up.

It's about computer games and beer!

You can find it here:

40 Ounces, 1 Game

You should totally visit it and leave me some sweet comments!

Pretentious

I'm taking a playwriting class right now. I'm enjoying it much more than I thought it would. To be honest, as much as I'm enjoying the actual writing process (even though it's entirely devoid of anything but a first draft ..), my favorite part are the theatre activities/games or whatever we play at the start of each class. For example, today we were told to imagine we were a political pundit, leader, or something that generates national news headlines, and we had to come up with an arbitrary point to present. Then, someone had to disagree with it. For example, I said that the only way to lower the crime rate in Flint is to force all of the poor people to move out. Troubling was it that several people thought I was being serious - but still, an entertaining game.

One of my classmates - a neighbor - asked me for a ride home today. He's an interesting person that I enjoy watching more than actually interacting with - mostly, because he likes to say and do things to generate attention/reaction, and I don't do terribly well in those sorts of encounters. I've always been curious as to what he actually thinks about certain topics - he's so driven towards eliciting an intense response that it's hard to get a handle on it. I imagine that's part of the purpose, whether conscious or un. Anyway, he's been a friend of sorts for awhile, although my relationship with him was initially provoked pretty much entirely as a way of ensuring I retained some connection to a girl I use to be in love with. This is no longer the case, although seeing her car in his driveway last weekend was kind of weird.

I tried to keep the conversation on the drive home - less than five minutes - lightweight, as I was tired and wanted to be at home, basking in the comforting glow of my enormous computer monitor and the joys of THE INTERNET. We talked mostly about random things, and at some point, I mentioned that my primary goal in life was to survive entirely from the written word, and that I didn't really care what format - for now - that that word happened to take. I then mentioned that, ideally, I'd be able to survive writing entirely about video games. This is where the conversation took a strange turn.

He then more or less accused me of wanting to produce irrelevant things that had no bearing on anybody. I agree with this - although I plan to stay active in academic circles, my heart and soul are in video games, regardless of whether or not it will have an impact on anybody's life. I also have absolutely no problem with this - I'll contribute, as I can, to the growth of both academic and social culture in my life, but hey: in the end, my happiness is all that ultimately matters. So long as my chosen lifestyle doesn't fuck up that of other people, then I see absolutely no failing. I responded with my usual response when anybody tells me something is irrelevant:

"Everything is irrelevant if you zoom out far enough."

Most people understand this to mean that, ultimately, I am a nihilist, and don't usually dig deeper into the concept - which is a shame, as I'd love to be challenged on that and have a good argument over it, but hey. My friend did not. Instead, he provided an entirely unexpected response: he called me pretentious.

"What do you mean, that makes me pretentious?"

"That's just a really pretentious thing to say, you know?"

First, lets look at the definition of "Pretentious": (thanks, dictionary.com)
1. full of pretense or pretension.
2. characterized by assumption of dignity or importance.
3. making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious.

I'm a pretty low-key kind of guy (it feels weird to refer to myself as any kind of guy ..) and generally acknowledge my own self-importance when it is demanded of me. I might be an asshole that doesn't like anybody, but I'm generally not the pretentious, academic/literary/etc-elitist sort, so this comment confused me. Isn't nihilism kind of the opposite of being pretentious? I kind of think so, but again - I'd love for someone to argue with me about this.

Why I am still thinking about this I am not sure. It wasn't meant as an insult, I think. My friend - and his .. well, his posse, often call things pretentious. As far as I can tell, their determination for calling something pretentious requires two things: that what you said might have been a good idea, and that they were probably incapable of it themselves. I used to get a kick out of hanging out with them, as they threw around the word 'pretentious' all the time - it felt like being called a weiner in second grade or something, as if they didn't really understand what the word meant.

I'm an English major. A lot of us are irritating, self-indulgent and pretentious fucks. But that's just the thing - he's a writer, an actor, a reasonable intelligent person. He's a grandiose sort when he's speaking, demanding attention in the same way Brad Pitt does (he sort of looks like him and speaks similarly) whenever he enters a scene. Yet I .. well, I don't think most people notice when I enter a room, and I get spoken overtop of rather frequently. I prefer things this way - I'd rather observe than interact. Yet what really confuses me is the irony of his calling me pretentious when it seems like almost every action he executes is designed to draw attention. Isn't that a bit self-important, as if he's saying, "Hey! Look at me! I'm about to do something REALLY SIGNIFICANT AND YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS IT OR ELSE, WELL, WHO KNOWS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN BUT I WOULDN'T WANT TO BE YOU."

That's kind of exaggeration, but only slightly. You'd be surprised.

I should probably mention that his group of friends loves to throw that word around - "Dude, you're pretentious for double-hitting that blunt" and "Quit being so pretentious, we don't want to read your story" are common enough sorts of lines to hear in his home. There's something kind of disturbing going on here (oh, I just found out: if you spell "disturbing" wrong, and right click on it to get the right spelling, the first choice that isn't the word "disturbing" is "masturbating." Awesome), mostly because I find that particular group of friends to be among the most arrogant and self-important of any that attend my school. There's a beautiful, wonderful irony in their designating everything but themselves as pretentious.

But hey, I guess if you zoom out far enough, pretty much everybody is pretentious.

Section 9 Sign

I took a picture of this because I think it's pretty interesting. It's for that Section 9 movie that's coming out pretty soon, and I'm pretty excited for it. Just the same, this image - taken from over the bathroom at Showcase Cinemas West in Flint, Michigan - illustrates a potential issue I have with the film. Although it's really a question:

Will people more readily sympathize with something clearly and radically different than they are than with normal people?

The sign is pretty clearly a play on the segregationist history of the United States; white bathrooms, black bathrooms, etc. Are they actually trying to channel this question? I dunno. That the film, from the trailers, appears to have been shot somewhere in war-torn Africa, I find my question to be even more valid. My bet: people will get more riled up about violence against aliens, and find themselves more passionately inclined towards their cause, than they ever will about real-life genocide and the horrors occurring all over the world in the present-day.

I wish I didn't feel that way.