Musings: "The reports of my death..."

...as Mark Twain wrote in 1897, "are greatly exaggerated."

My apologies to any readers of The Whining Stranger who've missed my daily billets absurd, my cranky meditations, my pop culture obsessions. Maybe that reader is me most of all, who's been sad to let this blog slide for sometime now. But it's been a busy semester. And after the Tigers' collapse in the Fall Classic ("Practice throwing to third base come Feburary, ye Motown pitchers!") I fell, quite frankly, into a bit of autumnal melancholy.

So, what I have missed reporting on?

Well, I published a short story last month, which was exciting. And my classes continue to go well, though we're into the grading monsoon period of the semester. I've worn innumerable pencils down circling comma splices and writing "vague topic sentence" in the margins of undergraduate term papers. Today I felt the first surge of impending Yuletide spirit when I booked my trip home for the holidays. 32 and still waking up in the old childhood bedroom on Christmas morning... Which means, yes, Mom still hasn't sold the house. But she will, I assume, at some point.

Politically, the Democrats restored some equilibrium to that mess up in Washington. And joy of joys, that bonehead rummy, by which I mean, Mr. Donald, stepped down. Shame it took 2800 American military casualities--to whose families my heart goes out, and my prayers are directed--before he was willing to admit things weren't going so shit hot. Speaking of matters political, was anyone else as digusted as I was being forced to endure that lousy Chevrolet commercial throughout the baseball playoffs, in which John Mellencamp celebrates "Our country" to a series of contradictory images: Viet Nam, Ali in the ring, Rosa Parks, Nixon saluting from the plane, MLK, Jr, Katrina, the Twin Towers... And all to sell more fucking big trucks. I wait for moresuch inspired commercial spots. Maybe "the Trail of Tears" to sell Pop Tarts; Japanese internment camps shilling for Chef Boyardee; a Swiffer sold by veterans of the Tuskegee experiments... Ah, our country indeed. And history makes for good marketing.

See, cold autumn winds, post-Series depression aside, I remain critical, and whining, and stranger.

Musings: What a week, what a week--

So Jonbenet's "confessed" killer goes free, The Office (thankfully) wins "Best Comedy" at the Emmys, the Tigers try to rally themselves before the brutal stretch run of September, and I survive my first day of teaching yesterday.

Another earnest group of students, another fifteen-week run through reading and grading and nervous lectures and ironing my shirts in a rush before I take off to campus, and feeling like I'll never get caught up, and asking over and over and over, "How soon till Thanksgiving break?" before finally it's Christmas and I'm on a plane back home and I've made it through another term.

Whew.

More coffee, please.

The Whining Stranger on Film: A Sympathetic Academic on Film

Add Steve Carrell's character in Little Miss Sunshine to the ongoing history of celluloid literature professors. Saw this flick last night and loved it, not just for Carrell's sympathetic melancholy academic, but for the whole panoply of dysfunctional--but kindhearted--family types the film offers. Abigail Breslin as the seven year-old competing for the beauty pageant honor named in the film's title is the most moving child actor (with none of drunk-driver Haley Joel Osment's maudlin puckering) since Paper Moon-era Tatum O'Neal.

And the film's finale is choice--an appropriate, but laugh-worthy, commentary on the grotesqueness of child beauty contests.

The Whining Stranger on Politics and Current Events: One Child Beauty Queen = Tens of Thousands Distant Dead Children

Here I am, all in a tizzy about the damn media again. Why am I so easily moved to anger given the predictability of American news agencies. Here's my beef: sure, I want to see JonBenet Ramsey's killer brought to justice. I find her death--and her life, actually--to be an undeniable tragedy. But I would like a little balance in my news coverage. There are tens of thousands civilians dead in Iraq and Darfur, many of whom--duh!--are children. Sure, they didn't wear blue eyeshadow and perform cute dances in cowboy boots. Yes, they didn't sing in adorably warbly little voices with curled blond hair.

But they do deserve a little more attention, no?

This post seems to articulate what is painfully obvious, I know, and I'll feel a tiny bit better if I hit "publish" and get it online.