Dewey Readmore Books

About halfway through the book Dewey by the librarian Vicki Myron, I wondered how much Marge Piercy, that depression born daughter of the tough realities of the American midwest, she had read. It seemed to me she probably had some, probably more than I have. If not, she’s got something to look forward to, and maybe one or two more books to write.
The reason I thought of Marge Piercy was what struck me as the major sub theme of the book, the working lives of women. Mainly of course there’s her life, as the librarian of a small town in Iowa. But there’s also the life of her fellow workers in the library (where is it written that most workers in most libraries should be female? But it seems to be so), and the life of her mother.
Mostly though, I was grateful about the way she found to tell the story of her cat. Anyone can tell cute stories about a favorite pet, and enough people do. I’ve read or two of most cat related mysteries and enjoyed the experience the way last month and two years ago I enjoyed eating at McDonald’s for dinner. Dewey is not that kind of meal.
The author of Dewey "had" me when she began talking about attending Al-Anon meetings to recover from an alcoholic marriage long before Dewey showed up at her library (although this portion is told as a flashback). This assured me that she had a story that that had something to do with life as I've known it.
It helps that I’m married to a woman who once ran a small library, and that in every town I’ve ever lived in (most of them towns of less than 20,000), the local library has been a focal point of my sanity, and the local librarians have been that curious mixture of provincialism and cosmopolitanism that librarians and English teachers are. If there is a mold here, Vicki Myron fits it.
She’s an activist librarian. The librarians I’ve known have all had a sense of mission. None of have thought that they were going to save their community through their library, but several have definitely made it a point to provide the resources to community members that would make a difference in their life, and that’s the type of librarian Myron is.
The cat, Dewey, gives her is a thread to tell her story to make a rambling 25 year career more or less coherent. More importantly, her relationship with Deewy provides a metonymic figure of how human lives and animal companion lives are intertwined. To be sure, she saved Dewey’s life. He did no save hers, and it would be overstating it to say he made it meaningful; but he did give her a story, which in turn allows her to tell the story of her career–always a welcome challenge–and of her brothers’ and mother’s deaths.
3/4 of the way through the book, she assures the reader that Dewey is not a substitute son. Nonetheless, she frequently refers to herself as his mother–so is she saying he thought of me as a mom, but I thought of him as a pet?
Vocabulary breaks down. What he is her male offspring/companion.
Early in the novel, she tells of Dewey being found in a frozen library drop box, one so cold his paws are frozen to the bottom. She rescues him and washes him off; do I detect some birth imagery here? Later we find that she herself was the victim (there’s no other word) of an unauthorized radical hysterectomy. Is it entirely wrong to see this icey box as an image of her own womb?
This does not belittle her in the least. Rather, I’m trying to make a point about the cyborgian nature of human/animal relation. Anyone who has washed, fed, slept with, and disciplined an animal knows that animal companions both are and are not similar to children, just as they are similar to a spouse, a girl/boyfriend, and a nurse. They are not any of these things, but "pets" and these relations are embarassingly similar, and disarmingly intimate. We belittle them (and ourselves) if we only talk of them of them in an "aw, cute!" way (which by the way is why is why I thought of Marge Piercy, and not Anne Tyler; Tyler, though a better writer than either of the other two, is also more fundamentally comic, if not necessarily sweeter). People who live with dogs and cats know that these companions will help you survive some of the worst experiences of your life, and so it is when Myron talks of fights with her daughter, of her own illnesses, and the deaths of close family. We also know that these animals–not all of whom are as well mannered as Dewey–will bring us some real pain and heartache

Follow Up (Jan 4)

The day after I posted this, The Times and Democrat ran an article about the Vicki Myron adopting another kitten: The original article was published here.

Also, I heard of a book, Animals Make Us Human, which is about some of the things issues about inter species relations. Let me quote from the Publishers Weekly review:

Grandin, . . . the autistic author assesses dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, poultry, wildlife and zoo animals based on a core emotion system she believes animals and humans share, including a need to seek; a sense of rage, fear, and panic; feelings of lust; an urge to nurture; and an ability to play. Among observations at odds with conventional wisdom: dogs need human parents, not alpha pack leaders, and cats respond to training.

Dogs and cats don't thing of us as dogs and cats, anymore --or, I suspect, less--than we think of them in people terms.

One of Best of 2008?

The most interesting piece of filmcraft in The Dark Knight, which I recently saw on DVD, is the final shot of Keith Ledger as The Joker hanging upside; the picture swivels in the frame until he seems to be upright. His hair and other objects in the frame continue to fall "down," which is now "up" to the viewer, but Ledger himself is confident, poised; the Joker is using that poise, that non-chalance to taunt The Batman, because he knows he’s won. If the Batman kills him, he’s broken the Batman. If he doesn’t, this cat and mouse game will go on, which must be what the Batman really wants; the crime fighter shows, through his actions if not his words that he wants the criminal to continue.
It’s a simple trick of deconstruction. When you find a pair of binary oppositions which define themselves against each other (God, Satan; Good, Evil; Democrats, Republicans), you can usually make an interesting claim that A, which tries to crush or at least marginalize B, in fact defines itself by B, and so NEEDS B. (This also works with x and y). It’s a legitimate trick, one that’s been around for a while, but which deconstruction (and feminism and post-colonialism) have used over and over, sometimes more productively than at others. To some extent, a manufactures b; constant dieting leads to being overweight; an obsessive compulsive with neatness creates a chaotic life. In Dark Knight, the world of crime has turned to the Joker to be their hero to counter the heroics of Batman itself.
This convergence of opposites has always been part of the Batman story. However often the story gets rewritten, it always begins with Bruce Wayne as an orphaned rich boy whose parents were killed in a senseless robbery, "good" being birthed as the spawn of "evil." But this champion of capital and the superego has always associated himself with the id, with his underground lair and his horned mask, whose "ears" do not look anything like bat ears. (Why does he fashion himself after the most timid of predators, one known for avoiding trouble by wrapping itself up in its arms and hiding? According to the two page origin story that appeared about 6 months after Batman’s first appearance, Bruce Wayne adopted the bat persona because criminals are superstitious. I always assumed that this 1939 character was inspired by the 1931 adaptation of "Dracula"; according to my crack research team, aka Wikipedia, Batman’s creators say they were inspired by a 1930 haunted house movie called something like "The Bat Whispers." Okay, fine, but why were They inspired by a timid, flying mouse-like creature that eats mosquitoes? If only THEY had had access to Wikipedia, they might have named their movie after something truly scary, like unemployment, or Economic Deflation. "Unemployment Whispers!" "Deflation-Man"! Damn, that’d have been scary).
Back to this movie.
I was not surprised to see this superhero flick turn up on so many best of 2008 lists. Rarely has a movie been so tuned in to the zeitgeist. This Batman is America in the George Bush era. How did we end up creating evil when from the start we were focused on destroying it? To be blunt, The Joker is terrorism, and Batman is the war on terror. In Batman Begins, Chritian Bale’s Batman hung a character upside down to scare a response out of him; torture works (and I don't believed "hanged" would have been the right word, because the man is question is not hanged by the neck, but what do I know?). In The Dark Knight, this certainly works to get a response out of The Joker, but so what? Throughout the movie, The Joker consistently gives different answers to the question of how he got his scars (a question no one asks), but answers, it turns out, are not answers.
Thus the ending, in which Batman riding off on a motorcyle invites the world to blame him for everything that has gone wrong (I’ve skipped over the whole 2-Face / Harvey Dent subplot, so let me simply say that this neatly reflects the moral ambiguity developed elsewhere). Do we see a slight hint of America in Iraq?
I hope this is the end of the Batman film franchise for a few years. It takes a fair amount of showmanship to mix aesthetic figures of the failures of the American war on "terror" with really good motorcyle chases, but its the type 0f thing that can only be done once. After that, what you'll be left with is the motorcycle chase, which will certainly be twice as stimulating, but probably less than half as interesting.

Sources: Dell Support Staff Trained by CIA at Secret Black Box Location

The core concern of this blog is the way in which self/other (self/technology, self/animal,
self/montser, etc.) interactions define the nature of the self, particularly as those interactions are represented in popular culture. For the most part, "I" ( I almost want to say "Dasein" here) experiences Being through those interactions, though the experience of these interactions is that "they" are "me." I.e., I think of my machines as an ability I have, for instance, to surf the web in my shorts in the living room; I am only aware of my machines as things when they cease to function correctly, as when a laptop gives me a blue screen.

This is why I thought it would be worthwhile to blog about my horrible experiences with Dell support. I was trying to be modarate in my last two posts. Big mistake! I take back every moderate thing I said about Dell!


It's truly incredible. I've been waiting for support to call back for over 90 minutes. They sold me a hard drive, assuring me this would solve my problems.

It didn't. New Hard drive, same error message.

Only then does the techie think that maybe the drivers on my system might be out of date.

I want to hit someone. Hard. With a 7 pound dell laptop.

I've now been waiting for support to call back for over 105 minutes.

Reflections on What I'm watching on DVD

The Closer, Season 1 Disc 1

Good to see Kyra Sedgewick again. I remember her from the Laroquette show. Good to see a 40+ woman in the lead. Best moment so far: "If I enjoyed being called a bitch to my face, I'd still be married." Worst moment: At the end of the first episode, she puts on cocktail dress, then collapses on her bed eating a Ring Ding and moaning (its the dress that's inauthentic).

Birds of Prey

I never even heard of this when it was being aired. Released to coincide with "Dark Knight" in theatres, it was apparently a little noticed tv show about the daughter of Batman and Catwoman, aka Huntress, and a semi-retired Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) after she was paralyzed by the Joker. On the plus side, it gets the world of the comic book right (there are references to the three former Robins at one point), and the main villian is a blonde psychoanalyst playing Sharon Stone crazy, and good "atmosphere." On the downside: Clunky dialogue (i.e., villains who explicate their thinking for the hero), a pretty girl playing "Huntress" with very, very limited acting chops. Also, her shtick is that she dresses as a prostitute while on patrol to blend in with the underworld. Only she doesn't. She dresses like an actress, which is to say, she doesn't look like the character or like a real person. I may not watch the next two discs.

The Wire, Season 4, Disc 1.

TV bliss. The best television show ever? Maybe. We'll know more in about 3 years. (I would have said that about Hill Street Blues once).

Regarding they who reputedly do suck of hairy bananas

Yesterday, I sent an email to Dell while I was waiting for them to answer the phone (every few minutes, the loop they played on hold would run an ad for what sounded like a higher tier of service than I was getting. Capitalism at its finest?)They replied:

Thank you for contacting Dell Online Customer Care. I see that you are not
satisfied with the level of service you have received. I sincerely apologize for
any inconvenience caused to you. I have forwarded your message to the management
and I assure you they will look into this issue and will work on making
improvements based on your feedback.

Eventually I DID get through to a human being. I told him that I has been transferred at least 8 times already in the last hour, and asked him if he was going to transfer me again or try to help me. In short I was an impatient jerk. Incredibly, I had gotten through to the right department and he set out to try and help me. I told him my tale of woe ( the tattoos, the piercings the family dysfunction, discovering Soldier of Fortune magazine...) eventually leading up to the appearance of the dreaded Blue Screen on my laptop last year. I told him how I spent hours on the phone with other tech guys trying to diagnose and spend two hours wasting his time and mine going through diagnostics that I had gone through before.

He decided that, just for kicks, we should start from the beginning.

As impolitely as I could, I asked if he’d been listening. Nonetheless, I felt our relationship got stronger after that.

Two hour later, he gave me step by step directions on how to return microsoft windows to its original factory settings, which was what I had asked him to do two hours earlier. Unfortunately, both times I tried, I got the blue screen. He agreed to call me back this morning at 10.

He didn’t. I called Dell again.

This fellow didn’t waste much time. He gave me directions on how to reload my original software. When that didn’t work, he said, "Your hard drive is flawed."

That finally made sense. I ordered a new one. I probably could have ordered one cheaper shopping online, but then I would have lost the right to resent Dell when the reinstallation does not work. I need something for my bucks.

What to make of all of this?

First the obvious: this helpline is designed around impatience. They keep you on hold so that you become impatient. Each person who answered the phone seemed to be proceed on the assumption that I didn’t know what I was talking about: they interrupted me, they asked meaningless questions, they were too quick to transfer me, and they transferred me to the wrong person. This is the result of impatience.

It’s also clear that each person I have dealt with in this process (going back to December or January) knew a little bit less than they wanted to appear. They kept putting me on hold, apparently to check what things meant, what to do next.

Nonetheless, though so far the end result has not been worth the toil, it's oddly satisfying when you finally get past all the junk and actually start collaborating with someone half a world away. "It’s asking for a prompt. Do I press return or let it continue? Its giving me the same error code as earlier. Do you think I should restart it?"

Frankly, it made me think of Habermas and his suggestion that the discourse between psyschoanalyst/analysand could be a model for communicative action. The analyst doesn’t want anything from you but to collaborate in fixing your problem. Habermas (as I recall) seems to suggest we need a politics based on this, to complete the project of the enlightenment. To which the scientifically minded reply, "psychoanalysis?"

It seems to me that the model of the tech support hotline/customer is an idealized version of Habermas’s ideal use of language, ie communicative action . Once you actually get to talk to someone, solving the problem is really the only goal. But the embodiment of this form of communication is something that only the mind of Philip K. Dick would have foreseen. Calls get dropped and misrooted, endless loops of useless reminders play. And the end result is about as effective as psychoanalysis, which is to say, after all the frustration, there was a feeling of breakthrough, which in and of itself feels good–but so what? Nothing has changed, and it won’t until after I drop 2 C-notes for a new hard-drive.

Thinking about my own reactions, I had put off and put off making these phone calls because I KNEW it would be like this. I was right. Owning a dysfunctional laptop is oddly paralyzing. There are things I think of myself as being able to do, BUT I can’t do them because I don’t have a laptop (ie, type blog entries in my living room while sitting in my underwear). Getting a new laptop was going to be expensive, and fixing this one very, very unpleasant (especially because they kept claiming that they had resolved my problem). So the problem sat.

It’s like trying to convince a doctor that your knee really hurts, while he’s insisting that a little ibuprofen is all you need (that happened to me last year too). It’s also like trying to convince a mechanic that your brakes need work, while he’s telling you they’re just wet. I took time off from my day and my work to get my brakes fixed. They ain’t fixed. I’m going to have to go somewhere else another time. I feel sick.

Let me state the obvious. We are our machines when they are working, or rather, they are extensions of our body, parts of it for all intents and purposes. Then they stop working correctly. So we stop working correctly. In the brave new world, tech is -- not potency but the illusion of potency -- and I felt impotent.

An Open Letter to Dell support services

Your telephone help is inadequate. I'm being polite.

Back in March, a sevice rep told me I needed to download drivers for my computer. He was going to send me information how. He never did. I sent two follow up emails, asking for help. No reply.
Yesterday a woman who claimed it wasn't her job helped me do exactly that. It took ten minutes.
As I write this, I have been on the phone for 1 hr, 40 minutes, and have yet to be transferred to anyone who believes that addressing my problems (persistent blue screen) is his job. Got that? I give everyone my service tag and express tag number, explain the problem, and they transfer me to someone else.
This is not satisfactory.

Noir goût

About a year ago I picked up a copy of John Marks’ Fangland because it was a staff selection of the good people at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville (www.malaprops.com), and because it looked like a light hearted satire, in which a fictional version of 60 Minutes (called The Hour in the novel) is taken over by vampires. I was expecting a kind of Network News with corpses and fangs.
Corpses it has. Fangs, despite the title, no. And though it’s not without satire, it’s not a comedy. More, Marks seems to think he’s writing a real novel (as a opposed to another vampire book).
Loosely, it’s a retelling of Dracula. The main character is Evangeline Harker, and she stands in for both Jonathan and Mina Harker. There’s also a Renfield character and character’s who can be loosely associated with Seward and Van Helsing. Dracula’s three wives, whose attempt to feed on Jonathan Harker make for that novel’s most genuinely frightening moment also have counterparts in the form of three brothers who are shown vividly but mysteriously; like their sources, they provide a sharp, frightening menace to the novel early on.
Like the novel Dracula, the book is told in a scrapbook epistolary style of diaries, letters, journals, and, because this is set in the 21st century, email (why no blog?). Evangeline is an assistant producer sent to the province of Transylvania in Rumania to interview a man who claims to be the head of a crime syndicate that has operated since the cold war. He turns out to be the novel’s version of Dracula, named Ion Torgu, an odd enough name that I figured it was probably an anagram; best I could do was “noir goût,” which would translate into “dark taste,” a fair description of the character and what he represents.
What Marks borrows especially effectively from Bram Stoker is that he brings the monster onstage early, still trying to act human, than, after Evangeline escapes his clutches, keeps him in the background.
The most effective thing the novel reinvents the vampire without any of the standby clichés. Torgu, for instance, collects burnt, ruined debris, including holy relics. Why is not entirely clear, except that it seems to be the type of thing a vampire would do.
Because it’s difficult to read Stoker’s novel with fresh eyes, most modern readers probably miss how mysterious the nature and extent of Dracula’s powers are throughout that novel, and this, too, is something Marks borrows effectively. Torgu can and does pass his vampirism on to our heroine—but just how is a little mysterious.
Equally mysterious—but not in a good way-- is the reasoning behind why two members of the Hour staff plan an explosion to call attention to Torgu’s evil. Not to kill him, but, apparently, to make people believe he’s trying to kill them. I could not figure out if their thinking was supposed to be infected, or if this was supposed to seem like a heroic, last ditch act.
All of this is set in a studio nearby Ground Zero. Marks makes effective use of that setting, though frankly I wish he’d avoided. The devastation of ground zero is one of the things that has attracted Torgu to NY. But if he’s attracted to mass death, wouldn’t Iraq or parts of Africa have been more interesting to him?
He also has some apparent plan to infect the world with his vampirism through a broadcast, though to what end I’m not certain.
Still, it contains chilling scenes. Everyone who works for the Hour starts to hear place names whiere slaughters have happened being whispered. Evangeline finds that writing starts appearing on her skin as the vampirism takes hold of her. And the most chilling, one of the senior Hour correspondents is seduced by Torgu, and slowly turns into a shade.