A Handful of Half-Baked Ideas
My Fellow Shennyer:
Last week, Election Day was the rainiest day of the year, and it was hard not to think of it as a metaphor—Wash all the scum off the streets, etc.—in a city about to elect another ‘tough on crime’ district attorney. But San Francisco is, like much of the West, in Year 22 of a megadrought. As much as the rain made walks out to our city-provided port-a-potty a drag, and caused unexpected rush-hours of voters during the few sunny stretches, the metaphors I preferred were about nourishing and thirst.
The team at the fire station we were assigned to (below) included a Chinese American in her sixties who lived down the hill in one direction, a Latinx guy around 20 who lived in the other direction, and a 50something white woman who lived 5 houses down from me. They were the best folks I’d ever worked the polls with; all of our ballot tallies came in exactly right,1 and we were done with our closing procedures before 9pm.
‘I wonder how long until all this is electronic,’ the young guy said at one slow point in the afternoon, and it prompted me to wonder, too. San Francisco spends so much time and money informing the electorate and giving them multiple options and means to vote, and while it’s made me proud of my city,2 it does seem like letting everyone vote by mail, and at City Hall for two weeks, would be a fair, accessible, and much cheaper way to hold elections.
But I don’t want in-person voting to go away. Showing up together, massed bodies grouped toward something outside partisanship: these processes are crucial. I liked every neighbor I met last week, regardless of their party affiliation—even the woman who looked at me like I was a slug and said, ‘I’m 89 years old. I’ve been voting for longer than you’ve been alive. I don’t need your help.’
I mean: good for her. Our girl showed up, just to drop in the official Red Bin the ballot she could have put in any mailbox in the city. We have so few things that bring the public together by choice. As much as Election Day creates anxiety about its results, I love that we have those 13 hours to remind ourselves who we are.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. Clockify
In or around March of this year, I started clocking in to work. What made me embrace such capitalist drudgery? Like most folks, I wear a lot of hats at my job: I prepare my classes as a teacher, I do service for the MFA program as academic director, I do service for the College. And I write my own stuff. All of those things comprise half a dozen projects at any given time. My good friend Beage works at a law firm, where everyone bills their time in 7.5-minute increments, and after he showed me their in-house app that labels each increment with the appropriate job/client, I wanted to give it a try. Two minutes of poking around online turned up the unfortunately named Clockify. I’m endorsing Clockify for two reasons: (1) it gives a quantified record of the time I’ve spent on projects, to gauge which ones are taking more time than they deserve to. (Data I’ll never let the dean’s office get its hands on.) And (2) it’s a good accountability measure when I say I’m writing but I’m really poking around online. I’m clocked in right now. Turns out I’ve spent 32 hours on Shenny this year.
2. Applying Scholarly Naming Conventions to Far-Right Celebrity Politicians
The problem with talking about far-right and fascist politicians is that you give them exactly what they want (and need, to retain power). This is inevitable; evil needs to be named before it can be fought. News headlines use just surnames, which is just fuel on the fire for people looking to become brands. This is why, for a while now, ‘house style’ at Shenny has been to write ‘D.J. Trump’ and ‘M.T. Greene’ and ‘R. DeSantis’ and so on. This convention I stole from APA style, used in reference lists at the end of a paper:
It is, as a nomenclature, depersonalizing—humbly within academia, but (I like to believe) humiliatingly within politics. Greg, after all, is not the only Abbott. And it goes without saying that I’d never in my life use ‘Gov. Abbott’. I can’t strip the office from that fascist,3 but I can do it in my language, and if the right has taught us anything in my lifetime, it’s that the public, on all political sides, will adopt your language if you repeat it hard enough.
A Handful of Half-Baked Ideas
How do you know when an idea is done baking? I guess it’s when they’re not yet ready for consumption (as good a metaphor for my blog as any), but is that a matter of public health or a matter of taste?
I’ve been thinking lately about opinions, and the old adage Opinions are like assholes: everybody’s got one. (A v. heterosexual idea.) If you’re the sort who’s able to eroticize the asshole, this adage becomes a different kind of true: each of us has something kept private (in our minds, in our pants) which holds the power to attract others.
Now: the adage is often continued with …and they all stink, only adding to the body misanthropy. But opinions are like pheromones, in that they waft out through the air between us and other people, hitting each of them differently, and finding, serendipitously, another receptive mind inside which to spark the same fire burning in our own.
What’s hotter than that?
The disparaging of opinions comes, I think, from a misunderstanding of what they offer. Opinions are not avenues to facts. If I write something like ‘D. Trump was a bad president,’ I haven’t said anything about the truth of his presidency. Not a word. If I write, ‘Coppola’s Dracula is a masterpiece’? Ditto. All I’ve given you is a sense of my values, and maybe a little bit of how my mind works.
This is not unuseful information. Loving opinions, as I do, means to value the relation between the opinion and the opinion-haver’s mind over the relation between the opinion and ‘the truth’. Call it an aesthetics of opinions. Some are shapelier than others, more useful in applying to problems of the present.
That’s the theory. Here’s the practice. Some weeks ago a social media friend posted about having watched Coppola’s Dracula for the first time, and one of the comments called it a ‘turd of a movie’.
This is a bad opinion.
Dracula is never a movie you’ll see endorsed in Shenny, but in the October weeks when all N & I want to watch is gothic horror films, Coppola delivers. Sure, he allows Keanu Reeves to keep his Point Break hairdo while playing an English estate agent with an accent he can’t quite keep up with. Is that a bad thing the movie does? Surely not a good thing?
Well, it’s a fact, a thing the movie did. Opinion-havers looking to deliver their listeners to something of The Truth can learn a lot here from MFALand’s show don’t tell mantra. What happened with the subject at hand that’s generated this opinion in you? Show me that, and you’ll risk my not sharing your opinion, but at least you and I will be on the same page.
Facts are facts and opinions are something else, so what makes ‘Dracula is a turd’ or even ‘D.J. Trump was a bad president’ such lousy opinions? Maybe it’s that they smell like nothing, pheromoning a mind engaged in manila-folder acts of evaluation, sorting, ordering, and my aesthetics glom on to minds engaged in herby exploration. (This ultimately is why I’m a sucker for contrary opinions: they give my mind something to do.)
Your mind, of course, may vary. Another way that opinions are like assholes: their beauty lies in the eye of their beholders. I try, when I form mine, to land on new terrain. Here are some I’ve had lately over at the blog:
[Herein once lay blog posts, back when I had a blog.]
Likely you’ve got some shapely opinions of your own. One of the reasons I switched to Substack was to better engage with readers, so if you’d like, please take a moment to share your thoughts:
This week’s natatorium is ‘the Nat’: Boise’s historic swimhall that was once the 2nd largest pool in the US.
Neither as easy nor as worrisome (if you’ve been told to worry about election integrity) as it sounds. At the end of the night, we need to count the following numbers: (a) how many people voted using the ballot-scanning machine, (b) how many people voted using the assistive ballot-marking device, (c) how many people who were registered to vote at our precinct showed up and signed the roster, (d) how many people not registered there voted with provisional ballots, (e) how many people dropped off the vote-by-mail ballots sent to their home, (f) how many people brought their VBM ballots but didn’t have their specific envelope and so chose to vote provisionally, (g) how many people made a mistake while marking their ballot cards, (h) how many ballots we came with at the start of the day, and (i) how many ballots we had left over by the end of the day. H - (A+G) = I, is one of the important equations (also: A + B = C), and it all happens only with very careful accounting during the 13-hour process. Last night, for the first time since I’ve been working the polls, we nailed it.
I originally wrote ‘proud of my city, in a country where people often have to wait hours to vote,’ but in searching for a good source to link to, I found this study from the Nieman Foundation: Election coverage that shows generic ‘long line’ images may discourage voting, new research finds. So while long lines do happen all over the country, maybe this is one story we don’t need to keep repeating.
Please believe I’m using this word purposefully, informed by history.