The British, on the other hand have a system that for the most part follows as such: Schedule a show on a limited run and then release a Christmas Special at the end of the year. This is a practice that American programmers could take note of and follow accordingly. Nonetheless, our common language brethren from across the pond have given us some wonderful television that not only satisfies their (higher) taste, but in turn, our own.

Since 2001, when American television critics really started to take notice with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s office dramedy cleverly entitled, The Office, British television has been on the radar of everyone that has a passion for the medium. Some shows get more praise than they are worth (Life Is Short) and others not as much as they deserve (Spaced). But overall, I’m glad that we are taking notice of a country that gave us classics such as Flying Circus and Faulty Towers.

Last year, the BBC, paired with the always-solid Masterpiece Theater, produced a cinematic, upstairs/downstairs series entitled Downton Abbey. It was the British counterpart to the Mad Men’s and Boardwalk Empires‘s of American television.  Downton is a beautiful, high-production quality, lush period piece with an incredible cast that depicts everyday life for a range of different social classes. Initially, the series started out incredibly strong, almost making this cold heart of stone tear up in its opening hour. However, since then, it has taken an incredibly melodramatic turn.

Showrunner Julian Fellows quickly squandered the captivating story of downstairs footman Mr. Bates, whose challenging status as “the new guy with a disability” that made me do a “who the fuck is this incredible actor imdb.com search” within the first twenty minutes of hour one, and his transformation to an ongoing “really, another fucking scene with Bates and that slag tooth boring fucking whore that he is in love with…can I blow my fucking brains out now?”, was the show’s heart in its initial run. I could watch Bates for an hour holding the throat of secondary footman Thomas while simultaneously finger fucking a random housemaid (Don Draper style) for hours. Why does a love story have to be at the forefront of every conflict of this show?

The show really jumped the proverbial shark in series two when they did what I thought they should never do: marry off an uppy (upstairs person) with a downy (the “help” for Christ’s sake). No goddamn restraint people. Let me say what we all think as consumers of “low art.” Drama can be really boring at times. Especially manufactured drama. There is no reason to combine the two worlds. Watching a show with a somewhat realistic view of life in the 1910’s was a breath of fresh air at first. Somewhere along the line the writers lost touch with what we really loved about the program. They had to create tension where there was no need for it. There is no reason to show every aspect of British life within in a six-hour block of television that is focused on a very specific part of society in a very specific time period. I don’t need for a writer to inform me that yes, people do, in fact, have miscarriages and suffer gunshots that paralyze them then miraculously walk six months later, die from the Spanish Flu, get put on trial for murder, get fingers shot off, have affairs with Turkish princes that die mysteriously in guest rooms, and other incredibly stupid shit that will inevitably happen during series three.

Will I watch that? Yes. Am I anxious for that time to come some time next year? Not really. I will encounter the new episodes of the drama that draw the life and times of the inhabitants of Downton as I do a new episode of the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-In’s and Dives: with a “huh” rather than a “Hey!”

Anyway, the nonissue of the Romney/Perry $10k bet from last night’s debate exploded in the media immediately, with #what10kbuys becoming a trending topic on Twitter among the whining liberal class. Apparently, Mit has “lost” his common appeal because he can afford to make a random bet for $10,000, while the more valiant of our 99% class are spending that money on broken down cars and hospital bills. But when you look at the public tax records of our elected officials (and as you overlook the invasion of privacy in obtaining and obsessing over those records), THEY’RE ALL MILLIONAIRES. The Clintons, Obamas, Edwards, Romney, etc. Every last one of them. Since our form of democracy is more like a covert oligarchy/plutocracy/quibble with semantics as you wish, we (on both sides of the proverbial aisle) like to pretend we want, or could ever get, an outsider, some mythical “Maverick from Main Street” to shake up the system. And then we want to ridicule, rightfully so, the Sarah Palins and Michelle Bachmanns and (maybe less rightfully so) the Ron Pauls who do have more of a claim to “outsider” thinking, notwithstanding their seeming incompetence.

In my own opinion, I of the 0.0000000028% that resides at (address withheld), it would be MORE deceptive/insulting for a candidate to make a $1 bet, a la the movie Trading Places, and to continue to pretend that they are among the “common folk”, as has been the conservative M.O. for years (not surprisingly coinciding with the stark increase in wealth disparity). Of course, politics is all about impressions, not substance, and this has produced a hashtaggable trend for whiny liberals to rally around. But it will be just as quickly subverted when the winner of the wager donates that $10k to charity, which is the obvious course of action for a savvy campaign manager. And then, will the liberal rabble complain about the fact that the rich have the ability to make such donations, or will they suckle at the welfarish teat that is private giving?

Slavoj Žižek gave a talk at the Wall Street protests the other day (transcript here), which I thought was really good. But I was surprised that he didn’t mention Melville’s character. In The Parallax View, Žižek identifies Bartleby’s attitude, embodied in his invariable response–”I would prefer not to”–to any and all appeals, as “the very source and background,” the “permanent foundation,” of a new alternative order (382).

Why? Because Bartleby’s refusals to participate in the prevailing socio-economic order precipitates a crisis of conscience for the story’s narrator:

It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side.

By refusing that which was heretofore unquestionable, Bartleby establishes the existence of the alternative(s). In Donald Rumsfeld’s terms, turning the unknown unknowns into known unknowns: The narrator knows that another way exists, even if he doesn’t know what that way might be.

This is, for Žižek, a positive form of violence: “[T]he violent act of actually changing the basic coordinates of a constellation”(381). Not solely the act of hitting someone over the head, violence is also the act (non-act) that splits someone’s head open by smashing the boundaries of thought, opening up for the subject new ways of thinking and being in the world.

There’s a lot more here to be fleshed out and expanded on (e.g., the narrative’s place within the financial world of Wall Street), which I’ll continue to write about, but the first step toward a discussion of Bartleby and the insights it may have to offer the ongoing occupation is to smash some heads and open other people up to thinking about it.

There are HTML and ereader versions available for free through Project Gutenberg, as well as an mp3 audiobook version through Librivox.

Žižek’s The Parallax View is published by MIT Press, 2006.

I had been kicking around the idea that would eventually become this website ever since Fall 2009, my first semester of grad school, when I enrolled in a class called The Ethics of Fiction and the American Novel (pdf course flyer). In hindsight, it was really the ideal class to kick off any grad school career, and the animating impulses behind it have continued to inform my work and thought as they have evolved over the course of the intervening years:”What do we mean by ‘serious’ fiction, and why do we read it? What is its relation to life off the page? Can or should a novel provide guidance, inspiration, or even food for thought for a life well lived? If so, what are the ethical responsibilities of authors and of readers? What, if anything, can works of fiction add to a discussion of ethics in ordinary lives?”

What ultimately came out of that class was an essay called “Expatriate Everywhere: Self, Other and the American Ethos“(pdf), a reexamination of the idea of the American individual, primarily through readings of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, two portraits of New York society that bookend 20^th Century American fiction. Rereading it, even from this distance, there are parts that make me squirm in the same way as when I listen to my 7th-grade self sing another stupid song about a girl. And while I’m still not as smart as I thought I was, there are some parts that make me think maybe I wasn’t all that dumb either. That being said, I think it is worth the time to read in full, but for our purposes here I’m just pulling from the last few paragraphs:

This American scholarship of the Self has failed us. We have seen the inviability of the inviolable individual. Our society’s ethos tells us not to look outside of our selves, but to turn inward, steeling our selves, compacting our selves into cold, hard atoms whose only contact with others are accidental violent collisions. We need a new model—a true model—because, as David Foster Wallace said in … This is Water, “The most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

[...]

What the hell is the Self? It is the ever-present mediator of our experience, yet we rarely stop to think about how it is defined or how it affects such experience. We spend our time reading up, building our selves their own personal ivory towers, “tiny skull-sized kingdoms”(Wallace 117), that by the time we look up it is too late. We are stone cold, 200 feet tall and utterly alone. When these towers come crumbling down, like on September 11^th, we are given the opportunity to reconceptualize our selves.

This new model must be able to accommodate shocks, sudden changes, entrances and exits. It must also abolish the individual, acknowledge the essential interconnectedness of all selves. It should replace the “kill-or-be-killed gladiatorial amphitheatre” that we currently reside in with “a busily collaborative beehive or anthill”(Coetzee 119). It should enable us “to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of things”(Wallace 93)…. [W]e have described the unmooring of the Self, the fluid nature of the boundary between Self and Other, the need to be anchored to a referent to gain meaning, the drift that occurs when we have nothing to anchor our selves to…. “This is water.” We are water.

Taking this as our jumping-off point, I want to update and expand upon some of the ideas I started to develop nearly two years ago.

In the coming days, I’ll be taking on what Adrienne Rich called the “never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair,” stringing things together here as I go. Yes, it will be unpolished and rough around the edges (and around the edges I didn’t even know were there). But writing doesn’t stop when you or I click “Publish,” and I think this project can only be made better by feeding back off of people engaged in dialogue along the way.

I really do not have much desire to talk about politics with anyone outside my small circle of college friends that have (or are working on) a degree in political science.  It is not that I don’t think they have valid points or are knowledgeable about the subject.  I feel that I become just too damn judgmental when discussing anything within that field.  I find that most everyone I talk to about the upcoming election, the “Arab spring” or state and local government see things in blacks and whites.  It is probably not what they are actually saying…it is just what I hear.  I cannot help that and I am sorry.  I am a bit of an elitist when it comes to my field.  I myself struggle when talking to a Literature major or a Economics major about those fields.  I can hold quasi-intellectual conversations about almost everything but I feel only confident in political science.

However, one very specific topic within the realm of politics I find I can casually discuss with another individual is the upcoming Republican candidates chances of becoming President of the United States.  The reason I think I can do this has nothing to do with my degree.  I have confidence in my ability (however self-deluded that may be), to predict with some level of certainty, who stands a chance in actually getting elected.  It probably is because I listen to the radio, read the newspaper, watch television very casually and voyeuristically follow social media outlets.  I do not really dig deep into the issues.  I simply listen to the mood of people that do dig deep.  What the news stories of a given day, month, year are can give you a very good feel of the pulse of a nation at any given time.  What details are inside those news stories (a.k.a. the specifics) I believe, are kind of dispensable.  That is my non-scientific approach to politics and life in general.

This brings me to today’s announcement by the Sarah Palin camp that she will not seek the Republican nomination for President of the United States.  I believe that this is horrible news.  She was my great female hope.  Meaning…she is self-destructive, arrogant, and frankly, didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning in the general election next fall.  In other words…my perfect Republican candidate (fingers crossed for my #2 Michelle Bachmann).  So anyone wanting to discuss any of the other candidates chances with me please feel free.  I might not be able to tell you who will win next November, or why he or she might or might not, but I can tell you my own little personal Vegas line.

Obama v. Perry  (Obama +10)

Obama v. Cain  (Obama +2)

Obama v. every other GOP candidate (Obama + 100)

* I will try to update this somewhat regularly because as everyone but political scientists say, “anything can happen.”

At first, I hated not having computer access. I was totally beside myself, stricken with an aggressive, angry boredom–”How can anyone expect me to do anything without the Internet?” I fumed throughout my first half-week there.

But the tasks I was assigned were decidedly non-digital. They required a stack of papers and a telephone to complete, and that was it. No Internet. So, in reality, I could totally be expected to do something without the Internet, and I was, in fact, doing it without any problems. Weird.

Over the last 10 years, it’s become ingrained in my mind–and in American society in general–that we need computers and the Internet to do any kind of work that matters. (N.B. the meta-level paradox of writing about the myth of techno-necessity on a blog doesn’t escape me.) But the truth of the matter is that people have been doing work that matters without the Internet for a lot longer than they’ve been doing work that matters with it (i.e., the Internet). And I’ve come to realize that the hatred I was feeling was really me hating not having an infinite source of distraction from my own thoughts and the work that matters to me.

Because disappearing a whole day into your web browser requires very minimal input from you. You could, theoretically, spend 8 hours solely writing emails or forum posts/blog comments–but no one does that. More likely, you’ll write one or two messages on a good day, then spend the other 7-and-a-half hours reading, watching and clicking. And I’m as guilty of this as the next guy or girl.

So it would seem that, at least for me, writing for online is best done offline. Offline–where I can think about what I’m trying to say rather than how many/which snarky blog posts or [insert cuddly animal species] YouTube videos I can link to. Because if I can’t think of it unprompted, I shouldn’t be linking to it.

I heard on a Writing Excuses podcast that William Gibson never owned/used a computer when writing Neuromancer and some of his other early novels. This all reminds me of being in grammar school: When you finished your work, you could take out a book of your own and read. For someone who loved reading, the policy was like being told you could spend every free second you saved up doing your favorite thing ever.

And I think the difference between being a grammar school student and being a 24-year-old sometimes-employed guy with an M.A. is that now, reading is seen as a nonproductive use of time/hobby. But writing is still seen as work work or, even worse, schoolwork–something you should still dread, so beyond enjoyable that there’s no way anyone would do it while “slacking off” and/or not working.

I wrote this at work, on a legal pad, during the seconds of free time I stockpiled throughout the day completing my analog tasks. The routine provides me with a route by which to write.

The thing I wrote is a script to accompany a presentation for a meeting I’m hosting tomorrow, with several doctors from around the world, to discuss one of my journals. The presentation has been in motion for weeks, various tinkering to the order. But the script is, well, the script. It is me talking for about 30 minutes. Not much different from a monologue, except there is audience participation built in. Today, I read through the bulk and realized there was no plan. I have a plan in mind but I completely whiffed because the structure is pretty firm. I found places to add the plan, the real driving force behind the discussion, a proposal for increasing our content and reputation among urology journals, a kernal of impetus that was lurking behind all the words I had written, and made most of those words superfluous. So,the main point is, I wrote something today.

The script turned out to be about 11 pages long. If you told me to sit down and write an 11-page story, I’d probably feign incompetence. But I did that. Those 11 pages have a clear beginning, middle, and end, with a driving theme and various subpoints revolving around that theme. It represents the majority of what I know about the publishing industry, or at least my small corner of it, and yet, there will be ample room for questions from the meeting attendees, because no one presentation can really be all-encompassing.

In preparation for the meeting, I probably sent about 50 emails of various length and intent. And I have to do all of this for two more journals. People write novels all over their lives and just don’t realize it.

“In the Garden of Eden, God made Eve out                                                                                             of Adam’s rib. Then he made Grimace out of                                                                                         a McRib” -NPR Food

I have been hearing rumblings around the net that McDonald’s McRib sandwich may return sometime next month.  My love of food and my love for the McRib should not be compatible, but they are, and this is my story.

I consider myself somewhat of a foodie.  I love to cook, watch anything about, discuss and sample any and all kinds of food.  This became an obsession of mine during my final year in the U.S. Navy.  I was living alone in Pennsylvania and had no real friends of mention.  I enjoyed being alone and decided to teach myself to cook.  I made all of the basic first time cook’s mistakes.  I under-baked fish, burned almost anything in a frying pan, and made an array of uneven, dense and tasteless breads.  Over time, I became more aware of my surroundings in the kitchen and made use of my time more wisely when attempting to make soufflés or pan-fried pork chops, apple stuffing or a simple ragout.  I enjoyed not only the cooking process, but the food I was preparing as well.  Practice did not make perfect, but it certainly made me more comfortable in the kitchen.

By the time I had learned how to cook for myself (which took me several years) my time in the Navy had ended and I was living in Missouri.  At that time I felt more and more confident about going to random eating establishments and sampling local fare.  I most frequently sought out local joints that were not going to hurt my pocketbook, but would in time hurt my cholesterol levels and waist line.  I tried to eat less of the national chain restaurants and more of locally owned joints that normally one does not come across every 25 miles on the national interstate system.  Every time I ate somewhere local I felt a sense of civic pride.  Even when the food at an establishment was sub-par I said things to myself like, “well, at least I tried this place out” or “the drink specials were cheap.”  I had to keep luring myself back to smaller chains or on-off places to keep myself from becoming what most of us already are…chain-eaters.

I rarely go to chain restaurants anymore, but one thing always brings me back.  McDonald’s McRib sandwich.  God almighty that is one sweet piece of heaven.  I remember as a child going to the McDonald’s in my tiny hometown (one of only 5 resturants there) when the McRib was on the menu.  It was like Christmas, Fourth of July and my birthday all rolled up into one beautiful 500 calorie package.  I never tracked the status or knew when or where that little brown beauty would appear.  One day we would walk in and there it would be.  A few weeks later–gone.

Those days are over thanks to the internet and food blogs.  There is a website entirely devoted to the McRib.  McRib Locator tracks “sightings” of McRibs.  It has a feature where other trackers can either “confirm” or “deny” its sale at one of McDonald’s 31,000 stores worldwide.  That is great news for people like myself that are obsessed with that rib-shaped, sponge-like meat that is “enhanced” by a set of limp pickles and a handful of raw, somehow completely tasteless onions on a crappy white “steak roll” that is soaked with a barbecue sauce so sweet that a small child’s lips might curl up after a bite and admit, “Jeeze Pops, that is just too much.”  I am not that child.

As I head out today to the “Taste of St. Louis” food festival to enjoy local offerings from some of the finest establishments in the Midwest, I will have the McRib engrained in the back of my mind with the hope that next month…it might return!!!