BLOCKQUOTE.org

It sounds so reasonable.

“As an institution, we are committed to the careers of our junior faculty, and we certainly recognize the pressures and challenges that exist at that point in their careers,” said Kenneth Warren, Deputy Provost for Research & Minority Issues at the University of Chicago. “The more we continue to acknowledge and be supportive of the important balance of life and work, the more successful we will be in attracting and retaining them.”

"University of Chicago announces new efforts to strengthen work-life integration"

And pray, O pray, prospective students — pray like your forebears prayed for rain that it might trickle into pedagogy.

Measure

The windows of this coffee shop overlook the stretch of Clark Street that made me ache for the North Side the August night I strolled it in avoidance of the ride back to Hyde Park. It wasn’t long after moving south that panic set in and my heart throbbed in any part of the city where people wandered in pairs or trios or alone or lounged on porches or leaned over patio rails. The entire city opened, including this portion of the neighborhood I’d cursed the whole of my two and a half years in the city proper. I longed for action, and I still want it.

Today I’m well over my time to purchase ratio and use the free wifi of an adjacent business. When adults younger than me, in their coats, hats, and messenger bags, come to the large table I am not sharing, I ignore them until they’ve already started turning back. Truth be told, they look hurt. Some day in the future they’ll get to this chair before I do, and they’ll have the window, the sunlight, and the passing cars.

The new workweek starts tomorrow and I’ll think about them, and about the towers that empty onto the 172 at its first stop, just east of the viaduct at 51st Street, as I pass the bus on my bike. It’ll be a brief thought, one of hundreds along the lone mile from my apartment to Swift Hall.

That mile made so much sense a year ago — long before I’d given any thought to porches and patios, the sports bars I still avoid, and the people out walking together wherever it is they’re going, because the places they’re going don’t matter as much as the fact that the places constitute a plurality, and the people aren’t all hyperintelligent affluent twentysomethings. Even with more friends than I’ve had in my nearly thirty years of life, Hyde Park is a lonely place, one I am and will be ready to leave for wherever in this city I end up after.

Barack this, would you?

To “barack” a $20 is to convert it to a 10, a 5, and five ones. The change we need!! (ex. “can you barack a 20 for me?”)

Danny Peck

I’d bet bank tellers know what’s coming at “10.”

I can’t wait for this to enter the vernacular. Internets, do your thing.

Nights and Weekends

I desire a weekend because I have come to appreciate rest. Therefore a weekend is my goal for the week. It should start Saturday morning. No course work should want my attention past Friday night. This is the goal.

The goal will be accomplished by giving up the majority of my weeknights to course work. I am willing to do this because it happens that I so lose them regardless of intent. I lose them because as a graduate student at the University of Chicago I receive an unreasonable amount of course work. This is the reason I have few free nights.

You will note a problem here.

The sum total of assigned work exceeds what is reasonable to assign in considering the limited time given to complete it. The amount of time available for completing all assignments is itself less than the amount of time existing within a week. Thus the work is greater than the time. Because the work cannot thusly be completed within time, some work will not be completed.

A number of decisions must then follow, that is, to determine which work will not be completed. The type of work and the work’s value must be weighed against the value of the course for which it is assigned relative to the other courses for which work is assigned. Every term in this equation varies over the course of the quarter, though the course values remain high and thereby lend greater value to their respective assignments.

However, the value of courses decrease, and the work for each follows, in direct proportion to my sense of well being. If I desire to finish a great amount of work, and I also desire to rest from work, the amount of work must decrease to accommodate rest.

So it becomes a daily decision which assignments will be completed and which will not. Yet effort will be made to accomplish as much work as possible. As mentioned, the greater amount of work cannot be completed except at night in addition to effort made during daylight.

This is how it will work.

I would go into greater detail and with sounder logic were I not about to trace the edge of the penny beside my laptop with a pen, and to think very seriously about which pen to use from among the many pens within reach, and also about which piece of paper on my desk will receive the tracing. I am going to make dinner.

Fear itself.

The latest security alert from UCPD advises students to “Avoid isolated bus or train stops, especially at times when few other people are around.” A few parts to this.

All train stops serving the University are isolated. The CTA Green and Red Line stops all sit west of Washington Park, which as noted is beyond range of UCPD operations. Metra trains stop closer to campus but, elevated and fenced off, are less visible from the street and typically darker than CTA stations.

All bus stops are isolated, or as good as isolated. To the extent that even sheltered (or canopied) stops are open air and ungated, all bus stops are exposed to all means of street traffic irrespective of their location.

Bus and train stops are routinely depopulated by busses and trains. After each pickup and drop off, busses and trains leave few people waiting around stops. This is how public transit works.

There is no accurate means of gauging appropriate times for the presence of other people. Someone will always be the first person at the stop. Often, that person will be the only person at the stop.

Considering which it’s hard not to read the tip as inducement to stay home in Hyde Park.

Dap

As I moved to hop off the 6 at 51st and Lake Park the young black driver mouthed something incomprehensible and thrust his arm my way for a fist bump. He caught me off guard, in higher spirits than most CTA drivers stuck letting in wind and snow every quarter mile. I figured one of two things accounted for his mood. It was either that he was drunk or high, or that soon a white southerner will hand a South Side black the keys to the White House. Maybe both. I bumped and wished him well.

I know Obama’s inauguration means more for others than me. Not because I’m any less relieved than the rest of the world that the Bush era closes just hours of now. 2000 was the first presidential election I was eligible to vote in, and through the drama of the following weeks I lost hours of sleep and hundreds of calories from anxiety over the course a Bush Administration might take. As a usually articulate Texan professor said of Bush during the 2000 primaries, “If this guy’s elected . . . well, that’s scary.” His prescient words rang in my ears more times these last eight years than I’m comfortable counting. I too am long since ready for this nightmare to end.

No, I know it means more for others because I was at Grant Park on election night, in the free viewing section with most of the people I rode up from Hyde Park with, mostly students and African Americans from the neighborhood. The bus was packed, there was no moving except together with each other and the bus, bodies pressed to warm bodies. From security concerns Lake Shore Drive was closed, so the driver took an alternate turn up Martin Luther King Drive toward the Loop. I doubt many missed the symbolism.

Someone toward the front had a radio or smart phone and announced states by name as they were called. Each time the bus roared. “Pennsylvania!” “Woo!” Caught by the momentum we started congratulating each other for the outcomes of other states. Our enthusiasm surged past elation so that we came to our destination prepped for a win and deeply in love with everyone.

When the West Coast polls closed and CNN called the race for Obama, Grant Park erupted with deafening noise that finally hushed to let John McCain concede the race. Hushed, but not silenced; not without blacks talking back to the old man on the screen, venting lifetimes of anger. It had never been more apparent to me why this election mattered. When Obama spoke, I saw so many damp eyes. I’d had a sense that I needed to be in Grant Park that night, with the crowd, come what may. I knew it would be history but I couldn’t know just what kind of history. The back talk and the tears cleared that up for me.

One of the thousands of tiny glowing screens in the crowd belonged to the African American man in front of me. His open cell phone was close enough for me to read his half written text message, which read something like, “I hope obama inspires manhood in u.” I watched him deliberate over his words for each of the five or six texts I saw him send, each an even toned admonition. He himself was small and slow — not the image one conjures when given the word “manhood.” Yet there he was, inspired by the event and empowered to challenge others to responsibility.

We have a long way to go past January 20, 2009, toward restoring to every member of our society the dignity and promise of life in this country we share. Still I am hopeful the small acts I have been so privileged to witness signal great shifts in the national consciousness such that Dr. King’s vision of a community whose members judge each other solely “by the content of their character” may soon not simply be a dream.

It is not up to me to make what changes need making, but without question it is my duty to respond in the affirmative when called; the driver’s extended fist was an honor I’d have been wrong to refuse. In that moment we weren’t a black driver and a white rider, just folks on a bus in the middle of a city. Like I said, I’m hopeful.

BREAKING NEWS: Chicago still segregated!

The fact is, racial patterns that took root in the 1800s are not easy to reverse. Racial steering, discriminatory business practices and prejudice spawned segregation in Chicago, and now personal preferences and economics fuel it.

"Chicago, America's most segregated big city," Chicago Tribune

“Chicago is segregated and self-segregating,” I tell visitors. Everyone tells visitors.

The city’s historically divided by racial lines and for the most part residents adhere to those lines. Blacks live with blacks, whites live with whites, Latinos live with Latinos. Poles shop Polish groceries, Mexicans patronize Mexican pubs. We eat apart, we drink apart. Nothing new.

Remind me to write about Hyde Park sometime.

On why we lie.

“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,” said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”

"A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit," New York Times

We’d rather not know a lot of things. The culture we have primes us from infancy to believe life is unlimited possibility and goodness, all Dr. Pangloss and no Candide. “The best of all possible worlds” is our world, everything harmonious and rational, no suffering or want beyond our capacity to solve. This is what we ache to believe and how we want to live.

There’s a reason humans, over the long course of our history, reject prophets. Truth-telling exposes our weakness and vulnerability as qualified things (here is your indulgence, here is your exploitation of others) with actual social costs. We’d prefer our lies went unnoticed because there’s a trauma in having to acknowledge how profound an effect they have on our lives and on the lives of others.

We’re seeing something terrifying in this age of 24-hour news, persistent internet connections, and cell phones that keep us always within reach of everyone. The terror we’re seeing is the collapse of infantile notions that bad things happen to others, if they happen at all. Airplanes fly into skyscrapers before our eyes, everywhere we happen to be in the world. We’re losing the option of tuning out bad news and the ability to relegate it to someone else’s backyard.

Exacerbating the situation are opt-in social networks like Facebook. On the one hand they depict us one-dimensionally, as we’d like to be seen in general, and on the other they reveal us duplicitous (or multiplicitous) characters by recording and displaying our interactions for the mass of our “friends.” In the first case: the lies we tell ourselves and others. In the second: the bare facts exposed in our communication. Not only are we shown to be liars but we’re forced to own up to our lies — with Madoff and Blago, naked all day every day.

And as of now we have no psychological or spiritual resource to address the shitstorm of truth, the first winds of which rap our windowpanes.

One long blonde hair pulled from the sweater I wore to yesterday’s lunch and just before today’s I found another had woven itself into the velcro of my bag. Not long ago a darker hair clung to the tan ribs of my corduroys, and shortly before this a six inch strand more brunette than red that had folded itself into my sheets deterred my advancing fingertips.

I am led to conclude there are women who occupy my apartment in my absence, such as whenever I step into the elevator to the ground and the belongings and spaces I abandon disappear from my memory as I concentrate on the places I leave for. Or it may be they are always here, most of the time invisible but leaving conspicuous traces to inform me of their existence and also to taunt me. I want to meet these women. We can have coffee. By now they must know where I keep the filters.

Thing in the thing.

Linguists see a difference between things and what we call them. The terms they use are signifier and signified. A signified is a thing itself, while a signifier is a name or label given to the thing. For instance, the signifier “keyboard” refers to the signified thing I push my fingers into to make these letters appear on my screen. My example is imperfect since my description of the signified thing relies on signifiers like “fingers” and “push” — which indicates there are many layers of signification. Whether signifieds have any being separate from signifiers is a debate as old as human language itself, but I’ll leave the ontological question for another post. What I want to say here is that it’s almost impossible to communicate without the use of verbal signifiers, and that it is important to understand that there is a difference between words and what they describe.

Most of our social interactions take place on a high level, high meaning on top of many layers of signifiers. A word as common as “hello” bears a tremendous amount of meaning that we can’t describe without getting dry mouths and headaches. “Hello” is shorthand for the sense of recognizing one or more people whom we’re communicating with. Sometimes it’s a question, like when answering the phone, that acknowledges the person who made the call and announces a willingness to hear what this person’s going to say. We accept that the simple word stands for the complex idea, and rather than explaining the complexity every time we encounter someone, we just say, “Hello.”

We don’t give it much thought. Because it’s pretty well accepted we don’t have to. In this way language is like money. A five dollar bill is not a valuable thing apart from the fact that it stands for a certain thing that is worth trading for another thing. The paper note does not itself mean something necessarily, nor is the other thing necessarily equal to the note. The thing is that we agree the note has a meaning equal to that of the other thing. It is less common for us to think about the real, actual, in-the-world things that invest a five dollar bill with that value than to accept that it has that value. Money, like human language, stands for things that aren’t the things themselves.

It’s not uncommon to find things that don’t match with words. Many experiences can’t be described — love and grief are two experiences that demonstrate the inadequacy of language. At the point of language’s failure we tend to take one of two courses. One is to resort to metaphor, where we speak another level removed from the experience we mean to signify. We say it’s like something it’s not actually, “like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June,” speaking about the thing by speaking around or above it.

The other course is to make explicit admission of the fact of lacking words and to let the thing stand on its own, without signifying it.

If you’re reading this, then it’s probable that like me you’ve inherited a culture ill at ease with that second option. The scientific temperament that informs Western culture wants to name things so it can place them within a rational order, and whatever escapes classification is a threat to the order. The way we think and communicate in this culture places great value on signifiers and distrusts whatever resists signification. The things that stand for things seem to matter more to us than the things themselves.

And not without good reason. But it’s for this exact reason I’ve struggled most of my life to take part in the culture. It was a watershed in my intellectual and social development to discover the possibility that my brain simply works differently than most people’s brains. My own thinking seems to happen on a level much lower than others’, closer to the objects themselves than the language we might use to describe them. I parse the world in terms of things and their relationships to one another — objects defining spaces, color variation, patterns, discordant sounds. Mine is a language, but it’s not a social language.

With practice I am less and less conscious of the cognitive process by which I get from my language to the social language, but some moments the gears of my talking machine need a good oiling.

At a coffee shop yesterday afternoon I was headed for the bathroom and saw a woman standing it in a way that suggested either she was looking at something on the door or waiting for someone else to vacate the bathroom. I needed to use it and had to know what sort of an obstacle she posed. The accepted way to learn this information is to form the problem verbally. In a couple arduous seconds my thoughts became the words, “Is someone in there?” Not the clearest formulation, but still revised from what preceded it in my mind, something like, “Thing in the thing?” The first thing was the visual conception of a nondescript person occupying the second thing, the familiar space of that particular bathroom.

The only way to bridge what I visualized and the response I and my parasympathetic nervous system needed at that moment was to translate these things into words that would make sense to the woman. In the limited time I didn’t get as precise as I’d wanted. And by precise I mean the higher level of signification at which most of our social interactions take place, where the things that stand for things are crucial, because we’re not understood without them.

Related: Dissecting the language of music