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Dr. Robert E. Witt, Chancellor of The University of Alabama System, announced the following this afternoon:
“I am pleased to announce that Jo Bonner will join The University of Alabama System’s senior leadership team as Vice Chancellor for Government Relations and Economic Development on Aug. 16.
“Jo’s extensive government experience and outstanding economic development record make him ideally suited for this important new position.”
Dr. Judy Bonner, President of The University of Alabama and sister of Rep. Bonner, responded with the following statement:
“I am very pleased that Jo will continue to serve the state of Alabama in this new capacity with the UA System office. Certainly, his experience and expertise in the area of government relations and economic development will be invaluable as he works with all three campuses to enhance the quality of life for all Alabamians. On a personal level, I am very proud of him, of the contributions he has already made and the work he will accomplish in this new position.”
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2013-05-23 ::
dave
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[This is a blog post about a thing on Adult Swim few people may even know anything about. Just as a warning: you might not care about what follows.]
It’s an Eggersian title, TGEiTH, and similarly steeped in irony. Not necessarily cloaked in it. To get everyone excited about a thing that in the end wasn’t exciting whatever TGEiTH entailed was cloaked instead in secrecy. Turns out it was a 15-minute highly ironized behind-the-scenes documentary about Adam Scott and John Hamm filming a shot-for-shot remake of the Simon & Simon opening credits.
I’m 35 and if I’d ever heard of this show I’ve never seen so much as a clip of it.
I don’t get it. I guess the idea for Adult Swim (out of whose key demographic I’m days away from falling) was that the mustaches and period costumes would be enough for the kids to laugh at. And maybe if I were in my 40s like Scott, Hamm, et al., I’d be able to watch and go like “Oh yeah, that’s totally how that opening went” in my head. Then I laugh from the delight of recognition?
What’s not interesting: this is all such dull easy 90′s-style irony. What might be: this 90′s-style irony is charged in TGEiTH by our post-millennial-style celebrity worship. A shot-for-shot remake of a 1970′s TV show’s opening credit sequence is not inherently funny. Not any more than the sequence itself is, campily, through the lens of 30+ years of developing TV sensibilities. But such a remake starring the guy who plays, on basic cable, a tall alcoholic child in the 1950s who looks all right in suits? Not yet, but it helps.
There’s a kind of cool-kid clubbiness to TGEiTH. It’s like watching the hammy team captain get laughs during the spring musical because everyone knows him outside his costume. Cameos by Megan Mullally, Pauls Scheer and Rudd help. What I’m saying is I think most of the allure of this thing is in watching cool, good-looking, A-list funny people hang out and be silly together. It’s not a gross desire per se, but there is something gross in “Also Starring MEGAN MULLALLY” serving as a joke.
Right? Maybe I’m just down on people playing themselves playing other people for laughs. Maybe I’m just confused that such winking self-reference can still find a loving audience. No way would TGEiTH exist without its star power, and now Adam Scott’s doing another one in a few weeks, co-starring Amy Poehler.
What’ll it be this time? Scarecrow and Mrs. King?
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2013-05-22 ::
dave
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Die Deutschen lieben ganz vieles!
So this was a thing we’d do in 8th grade German I class, taught by Frau um … who knows. The actual East German Frau teaching German at Herndon Intermediate School in 1991 and not the—Frau Griffith!
Her name was Frau Griffith!
At any rate, Family Guy had a thing last week about a show where a German man approved a series of named things by saying “Das is gut,” which I shouldn’t have to translate. It reminded me of this thing we’d do in 8th grade German I class. Frau Griffith would go: Also! Was lieben die Deutschen?
This means: “Okay, now! What do the Germans love?”
And we’d answer in a kind of list. Here’s the list:
- Wandern
- Blumen
- Kaffee und Kuchen
- Frische Luft
- Bier
- Schokolade
- Ordnung
(i.e. hiking, flowers, coffee and cake, fresh air, beer, chocolate, and order. ORDNUNG!)
A question that was never asked = Who among earthlings doesn’t also love these things?
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2013-05-20 ::
dave
Monday 20 May
2013
Filed under
Announcements
It’s been a bad-news year. It’s been a great newsyear, which usually amounts to a bad-news year. You all know why. As I’ve slacked on the output on this blog of late, I want to do a personal 2013 recap thus far.
JANUARY
I was in Boston for the MLA conference, interviewing for only one job. One job I didn’t end up taking. The trip wasn’t a bust, in that I got to spend a day looking through the Bill Dana Comedy Archives at Emerson College, which was maybe the most urban campus I’ve ever seen. A set of buildings along one stretch of downtown Boston. The library was on a certain floor of a certain building. The archives a certain set of rooms on the floor above. A fruitful visit. Plus I got to stay with my friend Jay and meet his wife and stepdaughter. The rest of the month I sat on the couch and ate poorly while playing the guitar and singing off key. N was staying with family in South Dakota, applying and interviewing for jobs in Omaha. I remember nothing else of the month, other than going gluten-free for two weeks with no noticeable effects to my digestive health or energy. I probably drank too much.
FEBRUARY
N came back, just after his birthday, having not found a job in time to retain his many professional trading licenses. It was a dark time. This was the very inevitability we’d worried about for months, the one that drove me to the job market in order to give us some options other than stagnation. I was flown to the campus for the MLA-interview job. I was flown to San Francisco. The former place was too remote for N to find work. The latter place too expensive for us to afford. UA’s faculty-in-residence program, which I interviewed for last summer and got far along in the process of, put itself on hold, making our plan of using free housing to save up enough to buy a house fall completely apart. It was a dark time. Then I got one job offer, and then I got another. Then job negotiations revealed a way to afford living in the Bay Area. By the end of the month we made a decision: I’d take a job in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. We’d move this summer to California.
(more…)
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2013-05-20 ::
dave
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Growing up, and still probably, the lion was my favorite animal.
Soon I can walk somewhere to eat one.
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2013-05-18 ::
dave
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Did you know that John K(ricfalusi) of Ren & Stimpy fame sells original caricature portraits? Like this!
Or this one!
If you got me this for a birthday or Sukkot or whenever I’d want one with me either mixing cocktails with a rude appendage made windowpane shiny, or wearing a crossword puzzle as a diaper. And let me remain handsome.
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2013-04-29 ::
dave
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Oh good grief.
Sugar is of nature, but adding sugar to peanut butter is, it seems, unnatural. We’re trying to cut down sugar use in this house, so we’re buying the kind of peanut butter consisting of merely peanuts and oil that comes in a tiered chemical preparation you have to stir to enjoy. And then either you continue to stir each time, or you store it in the fridge where eventually it becomes an inch of gritty oilless plaster it’s hard to spread on much of anything other than the hottest slice of toast.
In short: ANPB has two problems that make it not worth buying:
- Stirring is a pain and a mess and ends up with spilled oil dripping down the jar.
- One can’t get the same creamy consistency through the jar the way you can with some classic JIF.
This requires a twofold solution:
- When you get the jar home, turn it upside down so it rests on its lid for a day. Then stir on day two—you’ll find that half the job’s been done for you.
- After use, store it on its lid in the fridge.
The goal is to keep the oil, which rises, heavy at the bottom of the jar. It’s never been the case that I’ve had too-gritty PB at the top of a jar using this method, but if you did it’s easy to dip down into the depths and draw up the liquid you need.
I didn’t even get this off Lifehacker. No, I’m not the first person to come up with this plan. But that Wired guy doesn’t take care of the storage problem. And this method’s a lot better than—good lord—mixing PB in a separate bowl.
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2013-04-20 ::
dave
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Subject: A Message from the Dean of Students
Date: April 9, 2013 4:26:57 PM CDT
Faculty and staff,
Bama Students for Life will be sponsoring a display from the Genocide Awareness Project on the Quad on April 10 and 11. The display includes extremely graphic anti-abortion photos. Students who are upset by the display should be encouraged to contact the Women’s Resource Center or the Counseling Center.
Dean of Students
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2013-04-09 ::
dave
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This idea’s been festering for a little over a year now. I’m ready to (hastily, between classes) articulate it I think.
Young people (i.e., people my age or younger, people who grew up using the Internet in at least high school) are embarrassed by the Internet, or by our constant use of it, our continual reliance on it, our generation’s identification with it.
Sure: it’s embarrassing. The internet is as stupid as it is useful.
The way this embarrassment gets expressed is fascinatingly by co-opting the language of people who aren’t good at the Internet.
When my students and some friends talk about the Internet, they—all of them, almost exclusively—talk about “the Interweb” or better: “the Interwebs” (referring to that moment when Bush referred to “the Internets” in the 2004 debates). I observed a student’s class where he made a tumblr for the course and called it “English 200 blawg”. This is the same thing. A blog for a class is an embarrassment. But if you can spell it or refer to it in a way that is consciously wrong or malapropistic, it’s like this signifier to the party of the second part that you are aware of how embarrassing it is to be talking once again about the Internet.
Adults just say “blog” and “the Web” and “the Internet”. They remain only objects, with way less significance. This isn’t about irony so much as it is about utility and self-doubt. It’s either pure humility, or the performance of same.
(I said it’d be hasty.)
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2013-04-09 ::
dave
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Nonfiction’s older than the English language, but it’s when I go hunting for scholarship on book-length works of narrative nonfiction that I remember how—as far as the academy is concerned—the genre is young and new.
Check out how these two articles on The Right Stuff open. These are initial sentences.
From Charles S. Ross’s “The Rhetoric of The Right Stuff“, pub’d summer 1981 in The Journal of General Education:
Not to be confused with the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who borrowed the name of his most well-known book, Look Homeward, Angel, from Milton, Tom Wolfe is a New York journalist who has been publishing books with catchy titles since his Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby appeared in 1965.
And here’s Spencer Brown, reviewing TRS alongside three other NF books for The Sewanee Review in 1980:
If pressed to find a trait common to these four dissimilar writers, I should point to their sophistication, their being very With It.
It was The Right Stuff that lifted Tom Wolfe into his current station, but putting aside the “Lemme tell you about this weirdo of the moment you’ve probably never heard of” presumptions, there’s a kind of nervous hand here. Or an uncertainty of how to get going.
Every other week I’m shown links to articles online about how PhD school is worthless because no one gets tenure-track jobs. It’s untrue. People get these jobs every year. I’d say one bang-up plan for one’s doctoral studies would be some critical work on contemporary nonfiction, because like it’s easier finding sympathetic online reviews of Jonathan Franzen novels than it is anything anywhere on nonfiction books.
But then again: why would anyone bother studying this when there are fewer English departments in the country interested in hiring in this field than there are sufferable Jonathan Franzen memoir pieces in The New Yorker since, oh, the Clinton era?
Am I wrong? The novel died last year, and I think it died the year before that, too. Why isn’t the academy—and let’s not all piss on the academy, where many smart and hard-working people make their livings—moving on with the rest of us?
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2013-04-07 ::
dave
Endorsements
2013-03-27 ::
dave
Obvious Things
2013-03-19 ::
dave
teaching
2013-03-13 ::
dave
taxidermy
2013-02-22 ::
dave
