Four Excuses

Fosco recently hinted that he has been a busy little bee for the last six months and promised to tell you what he was doing instead of blogging. He's already offered two excuses . In the interests of not dragging this out, here are all of the other things that prevented Fosco from blogging for most of this year:

• in the past, Fosco has occasionally complained about being single. Well, somehow the previously unlovable Fosco has found himself a boyfriend. For our purposes here at Fosco Lives!, we're going to call him "Ozias Midwinter" or "Oz" for short. Oz is (if you'll permit me to say) quite adorable. He hails originally from the Sandwich Islands. He works at the corporate headquarters of a trendy company located somwhere between San Jose and San Francisco (psst: it's not MMM Carpets. Mmm... carpets...). He is fun and things are going really well. Oh, and he thinks blogs are pretentious and narcissistic. Well, yeah.
  
  
• Fosco's a little embarrassed about this one... but he got himself a Second Life. You've maybe heard of Second Life: that virtual "game" where you just sort of live a life instead of actually going on a quest or something. For gay men in Second Life, this means three activities: sex, dancing, and shopping. (Wait, is that just Second Life?) Fosco is proud to say that, while he did indeed explore the Big Three, he has moved toward a more productive second life: as the owner and curator of a contemporary art gallery! Apparently, that's what Fosco would be doing if he lived in a world (like Second Life) in which books and food are totally irrelevant. Right now, Fosco's gallery is showing works by artist-of-the-moment Jeff Wall. I'll probably blog more about Second Life at some point in the future.
  
  
• since discovering Arrested Development during my recovery from The Accident, I've been hooked. In my spare time over the past eight months, I have managed to watch the entire series (two and two thirds seasons) FIVE TIMES. Five whole times! It's heaven... for crazy people.
  
  
• here's a time waster extraordinaire: Facebook! As an old-timer Harvardian, Fosco remembers when the facebook was a book. It was called the Freshman Facebook and it was sent out to all members of the firstyear class the summer before they arrived at Harvard (or did they give it to us at orientation? Well, whichever.). It had the high school pictures of every member of the firstyear class. It was indexed by first name! It told you where each student was from and which freshman dorm he or she lived in. It was the perfect guide to getting to know one's classmates.
  
  The online version is useful for different reasons: it's a great way to catch up with your old friends, you can explore your social networks, and the interface is very clean and fun and appealing. It doesn't look cheap and vulgar like MySpace. Here's the key to Facebook: Facebook is the Target to MySpace's WalMart. And who doesn't love Target?

Places to Go, People to Meet

You may remember Fosco's sister, Maggie Tulliver. She has recently moved to Hyde Park in Chicago. Well, allow me to direct you to her brand-new blog: Tyrannical Whimsy. If you give her all the love and support you've given me, she's sure to reward you just as I have: with six month "hiatuses" and frequent typos.

Also, I would also like to note the addition of several other new blogs/links to the sidebar here at Fosco Lives! Fosco's former student Mere brings her cynicism to your table at Connoisseur of Human Folly and members of the multi-talented Goddard family can be accessed here and here.

And, if you ever think the patient on "House" has lupus, please remind yourself of your folly by visiting this site.

That is all.

America is fucked lying.

Here's the most depressing news story of the year:

One in Four Read No Books Last Year

Sigh.

I have no energy to introduce this quote:

''I just get sleepy when I read,'' said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

Fosco is sad. He can't even make a good joke here.

Two Truths and Lie: Haunted by Mormons.

Remember this feature? Where I offer three titbits from the news? One of which (in some small, small way) has to do with lying? Here we go...

• Those two giants of social science research, the Associated Press and MTV, released the results of a major study today on "young people and happiness." By young people, they mean 13-24 yr olds.
  
  Here's something interesting and no entirely surprising:
  

  Young people who are non-Hispanic whites are happier than blacks and Hispanics by a wide margin: 72 percent of whites say they are happy with life in general, compared with just 56 percent of blacks and 51 percent of Hispanics.

  Well, as long as the white kids are happy...
  
  Even better news:
  

  In looking to the future, 70 percent say they want to be rich - and nearly half think it's at least somewhat likely they will be someday.

  I remember thinking that when I was a teen. I wish some cynical blogger had burst my optimism back then.
  
  Fosco finds the following result most telling:
  

  And contrary to popular views of technology as a source of stress, many young people would be more stressed out without technology, with nearly half saying they never turn off their cell phones - even when they're trying to chill out.

  As someone who almost never turns his cell phone ON, Fosco now understands why he hates young people so much.
  
  
• You may remember the horrible suicide last summer of UCSC's Chancellor Denice Denton. There were several unpleasant aspects to this story, including some possible relationship issues between Denton and her partner Gretchen Kalonji (as well as the possibility that idiot student protesters may have contributed to Denton's depression).
  
  The story got sadder this weekend, with the Kalonji is suing Denton's estate because she received nothing in the will nor from Denton's life insurance policy.
  
  Now Fosco has no idea what to make of this case. Clearly there is a cautionary lesson here: if you're in a long-term relationship, you should change your will to include your partner.
  
  But this is what is bothering Fosco:
  

  UC officials declined Friday to comment on what Denton's benefits were and how they were dispersed, but according to [a Denton family attorney], Denton didn't leave the insurance money to anyone and the policy has been split between Mabee and Denton's estranged father in accordance with UC protocol.

  Again, it is clear that Denice Denton probably should have named a beneficiary of her life insurance policy. However, why wouldn't the UC system pay that life insurance to Denton's life partner of nine years? If Denton and Kalonji were legally married (you know--that thing that straight people can do?), wouldn't Denton's life insurance money go to Kalonji without trouble?
  
  Gay people just keep getting hosed.
  
  
• The 2008 US News College Rankings are out! Princeton continues its dominance; Fosco's alma mater Harvard is still pretty good.
  
  But what of UC Santa Cruz? Apparently, UCSC is about where it usually sits (#79), but now it is TIED for #79 with... MORMONS. That's right, Bringem Young University is tied with ultraliberal UCSC.
  
  You know how Fosco feels about Mormons, so you can appreciate the irony here. I've been thinking of ways to resolve this problem: can UCSC challenge BYU to a tiebreaker?
  
  Suggested tiebreakers that UCSC would win:
  
  • bong painting contest
    
  • Diet Coke chugging
    
  • blow-job-a-thon
    
  • evolutionary biology quiz
    
  • surfing
    
  • voting for change
  
  That's my school! Go Slugs!

Sunday Reading: Dan Harper wants your kids to squirt his car.

It's Sunday: time for another column from the inimitable Dan Harper.

A somewhat dull offering today, although it does seem to get away from him toward the end. He starts with "the house that we lived in for 40 years, which we sold a few months ago" and ends with a story about "the family Ford [that] delivered us to California for the last time 50 years ago."

And in between, there's some weirdness with a carwash:

Kids of every age and color swarmed all over it, scrubbing absentmindedly while they watched me through the car windows. For a few minutes I was the fish in a fish bowl.

At one time there were more than a dozen kids scrubbing and squirting my car. After this ferocious drubbing stopped, I rolled down my window and asked a plump little girl if they were finished with me. She thought it over and said, 'Yes, you can go now.'

I wouldn't let my kids wash his car.

Or was it?

You may remember last week, when Fosco posted a camera-phone photo of Patti Smith in his review of her concert. Look familiar?


Fosco will be the first to admit that he lacks the camera equipment and motor skills of, say, Herb Ritts or John Mackey (seriously, have you seen his camera work?). Looking at the above picture, it occurs to Fosco that you (Dear Reader!) have only Fosco's word that the blurry figure is indeed Patti Smith.

Who/what else could it be?

• Lindsay Lohan
  
• Eddie Vedder
  
• Johnny Storm, the Human Torch
  
• a solid gold idol of Baal
  
• Patty Smyth
  
• Our Lord and Savior, Jesus H. Christ
  
• Hannah Montana
  
• an Edwardian fairy

HSM2: Instant Review

Fosco just finished watching "High School Musical 2." Some thoughts:

• there are several very catchy songs--at least two to rival HSM1. "The Music in Me" is the standout.
  
• just like HSM1, there was almost an hour of dead space in the middle of the movie. I really expected the pacing to be better.
  
• Zac Efron is indeed unpleasantly bronzed. Two delicious shirtless scenes for him, though.
  
• the black girl had even less to do in this movie than in the first.
  
• Lucas Grabeel as Ryan Evans was gratifyingly more central to this movie than the first; unfortunately, his character couldn't quite handle the increased depth.
  
• kudos to the writers and to Disney Channel for refusing to fix the clearly proto-gay Ryan up with any of the stray girls in the script. I was worried throughout the whole second movie that there would be a "happy ending" in which he becomes interested in a girl. And more kudos to portraying his relationship with his father as supportive and playful. There is good anti-stereotype work here.
  
• boos to the sound mixing. All of the vocals in all of the songs clearly had the electronic tang of Pro Tools. Obviously, occasional electronic help is necessary for most artists, but the work here was purposefully obvious. I suppose the music producers thought it made the songs sound more hip-hop or whatever, but it's going to make these performances sound dated by, oh, tomorrow.
  
• What is wrong with Ashley Tisdale? Her voice sounded extremely weak--much weaker than in the first movie. And after her hilarious "Fabulous" number (around minute fifteen), all the fun drains from her performance. She played the villain with such elan in HSM1, but can't pull it off here.
  
• the climax: a talent show that is crashed by the resort employees. Hmmm. "Dirty Dancing?" I love a movie that isn't afraid of cliche...
  
• and what about that moment where Zac Efron's character hugs Vanessa Hudgens from behind and puts his forearm completely across her breasts (as opposed to under her breasts). Do you hug people like that? And isn't that a bit racy for a movie that prevents the main couple from kissing until the final resolution?
  
• For the most profitable franchise in Disney Channel history, the special effects were laughable. I've seen better effects in Ed Wood films.
  
• the most enjoyable moments: the wacky family dynamics in the Evans family. There could have been more.

On the whole, I would rate HSM2 as enjoyable, but not nearly as good as HSM1.

Now Fosco has to learn all of the songs before the special "sing-along-at-home" version airs on Sunday night.

We're all in this together!

It's Friday night and Fosco is staying in. And not (just) because he's too engrossed in Armadale to hit the bars. No, tonight Fosco will be in front of his television to watch the premiere of "High School Musical 2."

Fosco has considered himself an honorary tween for several years now, at least in terms of his taste in music (Aly and AJ) and lip gloss (raspberry, baby!). But even more so, Fosco adores the tween sensation made-for-TV movie HSM. He owns the CD and the DVD and can do serious karaoke to all of the songs. Oh and someday he's going to write about the latent queerness in the script (yay Lucas Grabeel!). (Hmmm. Am I now going to get some tween commenter to write in to tell me that HSM isn't queer? Ooooh, I can't wait.)

And tonight... a whole new HSM! With all of the original cast returning (and yes, I'm sure some of them did have other things to do)! From the reviews I've read, it sounds as if HSM2 wisely takes its cue from the "Saved by the Bell" summer episodes in which the characters all get jobs at a beach resort. Beach resorts are the perfect place for singing and dancing and romance! Although let's hope there is no dirty sanchez action in this one.

Here are some HSM-related titbits:

• My good friend Nathan found the best blog today: Zac Efron Please Stop Tanning. The title refers to the male lead in HSM and HSM2 and his quite unfortunate exposure to ultraviolet radiation. It's a hoot. I think I'm going to add it to my "Blogs I Read" sidebar...
  
• You can purchase life-size cardboard cutouts of the main characters in HSM (see photos accompanying this post). Lucas Grabeel, who plays Ryan Evans, is 5'9" in real life. Did you know that his character wears nine different hats during the first movie? How many will he wear in the second movie? I hope very many. They are like his trademark.
  
• The character Sharpay (played with scene-chomping gusto by Ashley Tisdale) is a dead ringer for one of Fosco's ex-girlfriends.

Oh, and just in case you were interested, Fosco now knows what flavor lip gloss he would be. See below.

You Are Raspberry Chocolate Lip Gloss

You tend to approach life as a fun game - being playful at every turn. You're a flirt with flair, and your the type most likely to surprise your date. But you're popularity doesn't stop with guys... you've got a great group of girlfriends too! You're fresh, aggressive, and more than a little sassy. The tangy taste of raspberry and watermelon goes great on your lips.

What Flavor Lip Gloss Are You?

Decline and Fall: What's Wrong at The New Yorker?

Even during the school year, Fosco always reads The New Yorker. I would like to suggest that it is a defining characteristic of any New Yorker subscriber to feel as if the magazine was at its best when she began her subscription and that ever issue since then has been symptomatic of a decline. Fosco still cherishes his memories of the editorship of Tina Brown and execrates the muscular current events focus of Dandy Little David Remnick. But suddenly, in the last few months, The New Yorker has been getting pretty bad. Ergo...

Welcome to new recurring feature here at Fosco Lives!: a column grousing over editing/fact-checking/writing problems at The New Yorker.

This week's offense is from the "Talk of the Town" piece by octagenarian baseball aficianado Roger Angell. Read closely:

Bonds's record dinger, in the fifth inning of a night game against the Washington Nationals at Petco Park, in San Francisco, came in his third at-bat of the evening, succeeding a loud double and a single. (p.25)

I don't think you have to be Morganna the Kissing Bandit to notice the factual error in the above sentence. Of course, Petco Park is in San Diego, not San Francisco. The San Francisco ballpark in which Barry Bonds hit his "record dinger" is, as millions of people know, AT&T Park. Do they have fact checkers at The New Yorker anymore? Do editors read Talk of the Town pieces? And is Roger Angell senile? I want answers.

Oh, let's do one more... I owe this one to the editorial-eye of my good friend Jean Goddard. It's from John McPhee's essay on the US Open golf tournament from the 8/6/07 issue.

Soon, though, a day of epiphany came, on a specific round, when, aged twenty-four, clearly, if not for the first time, I envisioned golf as a psychological Sing Sing in which I was an inmate.

Readers of this blog know that Fosco is a longtime admirer of John McPhee, but the above sentence is hideous. McPhee should have to give back the Pulitzer for writing it. And even if McPhee thought this was a good sentence, is he now beyond editing? Couldn't a New Yorker editor have done something about all those commas?

Go Rimbaud!

In the sheets
there was a man
dancing around
to the simple
Rock & roll
song

Fosco saw Patti Smith in concert last night. That's right: the legendary Patti Smith. She's a prophetic poet. She's a rock goddess. She's a shaman. She's the godmother of punk. She's an ecstatic visionary. She's #47 of the 100 Rock and Roll Immortals as identified by Rolling Stone (below Bruce Springsteen, but above Elton John).

It was amazing.

She played the Catalyst in downtown Santa Cruz, which is a much better club than it looks from the street. The club holds 800; I'd say there were 600 there (how does Patti Smith not sell out this show?) The crowd was totally Santa Cruz: aging hippies with hash pipes, packs of graying lesbians, the painfully sincere. Oh, and Fosco's academic advisor was dancing right in front of the stage. And further back in the scrum, Fosco sighted both the current and former directors of UCSC's Center for Cultural Studies. Nothing like the presence of some academic heavyweights to make a newish grad student feel self-conscious.

But it didn't matter once the show started. Fosco was about 20 feet from the stage. Patti Smith looks great. She's sixty this year, and has some lines and some gray; but even so, her eyes are compelling and her smile winning. She was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a t-shirt with a peace sign and "LOVE" written on it, and a cool black blazer with flared cuffs (Fosco wasn't quite close enough to see the label when she took it off). Her hair is long--well past her shoulders--and a bit frizzy. She may be older, but she's still unmistakably the woman in the famous Robert Mapplethorpe album photograph from "Horses" (below).Damn, that's a good picture. Here's a not good picture, taken by me last night:When she's dancing, she does these wonderful hand gestures.

She seemed extremely friendly and down-to-earth. When she came on stage and between the first four or five songs, she walked to the corners of the stage and waved to the crowd with both hands. She reached down to shake hands with the people in front.

As the show went on, she seemed to lose a bit of her equanimity (and who can blame her--crowds are always so annoying). At one point, she confronted a bleached blonde lesbian in the front who was videotaping her with her camera: "Get that fucking camera out of my face." After the song, she elaborated: "If you're going to take a fucking picture, take a picture. But don't make a fucking documentary film. I fucking hate that." Hear hear!

And, in response to some women in the front who kept trying to have a loud shouting conversation with her between songs: "You must be from New Jersey like me, because people from New Jersey can't shut the fuck up."

Here's another bad picture:

Between songs, she told great stories in her charismatically laconic way:

• about her day in Santa Cruz and how she and the band went to beach and how she saw an attractive girl in a bikini doing a seal call. It reminded her of something out of H.P. Lovecraft.
  
• how the girl who sold her pizza earlier in the day warned her not to order the anchovies because they had been in the freezer way too long. (She dedicated "Redondo Beach" to her.)
  
• how she used to watch Television at CBGB.
  
• how she ended up making out with a seal near a muffler shop in Santa Cruz (actually, this may have been more of a vision than an actual story).
  
• about one of her favorite shows when she was growing up which featured a Buddhist bunyip.
  
• how she browsed a great Santa Cruz bookstore earlier in the day (almost certainly Logos) and bought another copy of William S. Burroughs's Interzone, even though she owns six copies at home. But she wants to read it while she's on the road...
  
• how her father once turned off a television when Frank Sinatra missed a note and how that made her "break out in a cold sweat."
  
• and about how much she misses Jerry Garcia.

And the music? She played for almost 2.5 hours. Fosco stood near the front for the first hour, but then got tired and hot (and tired of having pot smoke blown in his face) and moved farther back. For that reason, the first part of the setlist below isn't really in order (note-taking so close to the stage is difficult):

• Dancing Barefoot
  
• Redondo Beach (the order gets iffy after this one)
  
• Are You Experienced? Jimi Hendrix, of course. (with a kickass clarinet solo!)
  
• Summer Cannibals
  
• We Three (was GORGEOUS tonight)
  
• Within You Without You (George Harrison).
  
• Ain't It Strange
  
• Beneath the Southern Cross
  
• some other song I can't recall...

The second half of the show...

• a song performed by her lead guitarist Lenny Kaye.
  
• White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane.
  
• Because the Night
  
• Soul Kitchen, The Doors.
  
• Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana. This is a great cover, check it out on her cover album Twelve.
  
• Gloria. My favorite moment of the concert? When Patti sang: "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not miiiiiine."

And the encore:

• Perfect Day, Lou Reed. She changed one of the lines to "Shakespeare and anchovies and Santa Cruz--What fun!" Then she traded singing "you just keep me hanging on" with the audience. It was pretty powerful.
  
• Not Fade Away, Buddy Holly. Dedicated to Jerry Garcia.
  
• Babelogue-Rock and Roll N*****. It was impressive, especially when Patti demanded that we form our own political party and that we refuse to buy the "shit" that corporate American keeps trying to sell us. I was a little disappointed she didn't speak my favorite line: "I spare the child and spoil the rod. I have not sold myself to God." But it still rocked.

Oh yeah, and then Patti Smith ripped the strings off her guitar.

She RAWKS! See her if you can, my friends. Oh, and check out her very cool website. What other rock legend would have a tribute to Victorian essayist Thomas de Quincey? Shweet.

Hidden Meanings Department

This is pretty cool. For the past year or so, there's been an art installation at the top of Adobe's Almaden tower in downtown San Jose. It's called the "San Jose Semaphore" by artist Ben Rubin. The idea is that there are four rotating orange circles that produce, over time, a coded message. It looks like this:


What is the coded message? That's part of the fun!

Deciphering Semaphore’s encryption technique and decoding the message is posed as a challenge for the public. To the first person or group to successfully crack the code, Adobe will award bragging rights and acknowledgment on both the Adobe website (www.adobe.com) and the San Jose Semaphore website.

Well, there is finally a solution. Two San Jose research scientists have cracked the (extremely complicated) code. You can read about (but probably not understand) their work here. You can read the (somewhat more comprehensible) artist's explanation of the cipher here.

Basically, the code uses portions of the text of James Joyce's Ulysses (and why not?) to encode the entire text of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The entire novel is playing in the air in San Jose! What a hoot!

In the same spirit, Fosco would like to offer a similar event for his readers. Fosco has embedded a secret message in the gibberish below. The first person who decodes this passage (title and author are required as well) will win a special feature story here at Fosco Lives!

Secret gibberish passage:
Ce livre a son lieu de naissance dans un texte de Borges. Dans le rire qui secoue à sa lecture toutes les familiarités de la pensée--de la nôtre: de celle qui a notre âge et notre géographie--, ébranlant toutes les surfaces ordonnées et tous les plans qui assagissent pour nous le foisonnement des êtres, faisant vaciller et inquiétant pour longtemps notre pratique millénaire du Même et de l'Autre. Ce texte cite << une certaine encyclopédie chinoise >> où il est écrit que << les animaux se divisent en: a) appartenant à l'Empereur, b) embaumés, c) apprivoisés, d) cochons de lait, e) sirènes, f) fabuleux, g) chiens en liberté, h) inclus dans la présente classification, i) qui s'agitent comme des fous, j) innombrables, k) dessinés avec un pinceau très fin en poils de chameau, l) et caetera, m) qui viennent de casser la cruche, n) qui de loin semblant des mouches >>. Dans l'émerveillement de cette taxinomie, ce qu'on rejoint d'un bond, ce qui, à la faveur de l'apologue, nous est indiqué comme le charme exotique d'une autre pensée, c'est la limite de la nôtre: l'impossibilité nue de penser cela.

Good luck, codehounds!

Psst. The fun is elsewhere.

For those readers who have been missing the fun at Fosco Lives! over the past few days, here's the tip: check out the strange comment thread currently going on here.

Apparently, Pat Buchanan is the way to spice up a blog (or your marriage? Hmmmm.).

Sunday Reading: "My Favorite Book Is... Magazines."

This begins a new weekly feature at Fosco Lives!

It wouldn't be Sunday without my favorite column in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the musings of "Crazy" Dan Harper. Every week, I count on Dan to say something both banal and insane.

Who is Dan Harper?

Dan Harper is an Aptos photographer, journalist and former English department chairman at Cabrillo College.

While I've never seen Dan's photography, I've read plenty of his writing and I'm not too optimistic about his work with a camera.

Today's gem:

I'm sorry but this is not a column about heavy petting. Magazines are nothing more than little books, so for the sake of this argument I will include magazines with books.

Learn more here.

One More Blog

Fosco's sister, Maggie Tulliver, has decided to take that hiatus from a life in retail that we like to call "graduate school in the humanities." (Fosco is no exception--there is a sales associate position at Sephora waiting for him upon completion of his PhD in Literature.) Sister Maggie will be attending the intellectually intimidating University of Chicago and just moved to a small studio in Hyde Park. As part of her grad student life, she's got a new computer and a new interest in all things internetish. She wants to start a blog, but she doesn't know what to name it. Let's help her, shall we?

Good Names for a Blog by Fosco's Sister

• Everybody Poops
  
• A Taste of Chicago
  
• The Bob Loblaw Law Blog
  
• Fish Tacos
  
• Being Singular Plural
  
• Hyde Park Serenade
  
• Everything That Rises Must Converge
  
• The Hammock District on 3rd
  
• Lohaniana

Getting to know me...

Fosco's been tagged again. As far as blog memes go, "Seven Things You Don't Know About Me" isn't a bad one (although it does raise some epistemological questions that I really don't know what to do with... I mean what do "you" really "know" about me anyway? But let's bracket those issues). It's certainly a preferable meme to

• Ten Things I Hate About You. (N.B., #3 is the way you always try to embarrass me at cocktail parties.)
  
• 8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter. (N.B., #5 is not to make me angry, as I have a congenital heart defect.)
  
• Five Places to Dig Up Family Treasures. (N.B., #2 is my pants.)

But anyway...

1. I don't really like movies. The last movie I went to in the theater (excluding art installations) was in calendar year 2005 (hint: there was "no day but today"). There are indeed movies I love (and I do tend to follow which movies are in theaters), but I can always think of about 15 things I'd rather do than watch a movie (including making out with Lindsay Lohan).

2. I've met Pat Buchanan not once, but TWICE. Let me insist that I am not proud of this fact. You know how some people use college as a time to experiment with drugs and lesbianism? Well unfortunately, Fosco experimented with fascism. I have since repented and am working on my redemption--redemption is a long process. I wish I could say the same for Buchanan. And what is that stuff he's covered with? Banana cream?

3. I have been to 41 of the 50 US states. And by "been to," I mean "spent non-trivial amounts of time in." What am I missing? Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas. Luckily, at least five of those states will be worth visiting (guess which won't be).

4. My favorite flower is the grape hyacinth.

5. In one of his former academic incarnations, Fosco published a journal article and a book chapter about nonverbal behavior and deception.

6. In January, I sat next to Florence Henderson at the bar at Jean-Georges in NYC. She looked lovely. At first I thought it was a woman who looked like her, but when she spoke to the obsequious maitre d', it was clearly her.

I guess that was before she started dating that handsome-looking ear.

7. In college, I once worked for an entire summer at Au Bon Pain. Remember: it's not fast food--it's good food fast.

Here's hoping that this list doesn't become "Seven Things You Now Hate About Fosco."

Fosco tags... no one. Unless you want to do it. Then consider yourself tagged.

The Kooch Is Back!

Fosco thought the local vegans looked especially excited this weekend (one of them may have even been smiling, although it's so hard to tell with vegans). But now Fosco knows why: local favorite Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was back in Santa Cruz!

Kucinich's earnest pro-peace progressivism is a home run in Hippietown USA. (And, all snarkery aside, Fosco does appreciate Kucinich's politics.) According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the Kooch is back in Santa Cruz to take his rightful place as the local fundraising leader:

While Kucinich had ranked eighth in Santa Cruz County for fundraising in the 2008 presidential race, Friday's event had a chance of putting him up with Barack Obama as the local fundraising frontrunner.

C'mon Santa Cruzers, let's take Barack down!

But seriously, can you imagine what a Kucinich fundraiser must look like? Let your cynicism run free...

With Monterey Bay behind him, Kucinich spoke to a typically diverse Santa Cruz crowd: some in attendance were barefoot — including Kucinich's wife, Elizabeth, 29.

Ummm, barefoot? And wait, the Kooch has a 29 year-old wife?

Yep, it's true. Sixty-year-old DK is married to a redheaded British giantess less than half his age. Fosco will withhold judgment on the hotness of Ms. Kooch until he hears from his favorite connoisseur of redheads. But even so, if Fosco were a vegan, apparently he could date a sixteen-year-old. Eeek! That's just not right.

Actually, it appears that the love story between these two is pretty sweet. Read a sympathetic account of it here. Is America ready for a First Lady with a tongue stud? I bet you know how FoxNews feels about that.

Fosco plans to spend the afternoon baking some hemp peanut butter cookies. Mmmm, sustainable.

From the Annals of Not Blogging

Why was Fosco absent from blogging for so long? He has promised some explanations. Here's one now.

Fosco couldn't blog because he was busy... writing student narrative evaluations. Here's the thing. When it was created by a bunch of hippie academics, UC Santa Cruz did not use letter grades! The policy was described in an assessment conducted in 1994:

UCSC opened in 1965 during a time of unprecedented university growth, student protest, and introspection. The founding faculty, dissatisfied with traditional forms of grading, opted for a system that was intended to provide a better understanding of what a student had achieved in a course, while downplaying the competitive aspects of learning. Faculty-authored narrative evaluations were adopted in lieu of letter grades. UCSC instructors would write a personalized narrative evaluation of each student's academic performance in all courses in which the student earned credit.

How progressive! How admirable! How... much work for the instructors!

Because, of course, guess who writes the narrative evals...

If you answered "the TAs," you are correct.

Wait. It gets dopier. In 2000, UCSC added mandatory letter grades for its undergraduates... in addition to narrative evaluations. So, as a TA you have to prepare TWO different types of evaluation for each student: a letter grade and a written narrative evaluation.

Now Fosco hates to complain about life as a TA (after all, isn't it all part of the apprenticeship process?) But it does take a remarkable amount of time to sum up the performance of a student in a narrative, especially since an evaluation has to

• contain enough detail about the student's work in the course to make it clear that you know who he or she is.
  
• follow a specific format (there must be a sentence describing each major assignment in the course).
  
• avoid making any reference to personal attributes of the student or your impressions of the student's behavior. You can only talk about the work itself.
  

In the end, you write extremely formulaic evaluations that you attempt to enliven with novel adjectives. The Thesaurus is a good friend during eval writing.

What makes this process even worse is that throughout it you have the gray feeling that no one (not the student nor any prospective employer of said student) will EVER read this evaluation.

Are you curious? Here's a sample:

Lindsay's performance in the course was generally quite good. She attended lecture and section almost without fail and occasionally participated in section discussion. Her first paper, a comparison of Captain Singleton and Oroonoko, showed good close reading skills and evidenced room for improvement in argument development. Her second paper showed great improvement in extending a close reading; however, the thesis was not as strong as it could have been. Lindsay’s final exam was her best work of the quarter and showed a deep understanding of the course material.

This one took about, say... 30 minutes to write. Ouch.

Boo!

I mentioned in passing in yesterday's (new, improved, and expanded) post that ghosts and haunting are hot, hot, hot right now in critical theory.

But what is doing all this haunting? As a service to my non-theory-head readers, I offer a primer that I will call

What's Haunting Us Now

• history
  
• queer things
  
• Marx
  
• the postcolonial
  
• gender
  
• bees
  
• our childhood
  
• pre-modernity
  
• Enya
  
• the academic job market

Feel free to add your own...

Fosco's Professor Crush of the Year

You know how some professors are just so brilliant and eloquent that you develop a huge crush on them? Like when George Michael Bluth had that thing for Ms. Baerly (incidentally, one of only two good performances in Heather Graham's career)?

Meet David Marriott, Associate Professor of History of Consciousness here at UCSC. He's both a theorist and a poet. His "French Hegel" seminar was one of the two greatest intellectual highs of Fosco's life.

You know how ghosts and haunting are hot in the humanities right now? You should check out David's book Haunted Life.

Here is a poem from David's collection Incognegro:

Bridge

laws of the city for nothing gets lost,
the unwritten laws of the dead for the dead,--

I feel old here, defeated,
lean, unshaven, sick and limp,

surprised at the flesh sagging,
reacquainted with my indifference to sex:

too old to change, too young to love anybody but myself--
listen, then, to my story:

of how the streets are narrower, the buildings smaller,
than remembered; of how a tree in a park was rescued

from the developers of mainland classical culture.
Who are they, standing around doing nothing?

Ten years of my life lost to the weight of things,
the constant reversals, the humbling taste of glory,

and think of the rooms, the tiny shared rooms where family gathered,
a loss barely glanced at in the light of day.

Amazing, huh? I recommend checking out the whole collection. Instead of blogging during the Spring quarter, I served as co-president of the David Marriott Fan Club with my friend Juliana (a distinguised poet in her own right). We're having a bake sale this fall to raise money for our activities.

Rumors of Fosco's death..

...were slightly exaggerated.

I'm back, baby!

In the next few days, I'll be posting a series to help you catch up on Fosco's life since mid-February.

I'll tell you

• what Fosco has been doing instead of blogging.
  
• what it was like to finish year one of literature grad school.
  
• about some exceptional meals I've eaten recently.
  
• who to contact if you'd like to buy property in lovely Bonita Springs, Florida.
  
• where Fosco went on his summer vacation.

Oh yes, and I'll continue the tradition of music criticism, cultural commentary, and snarkery.