Inactive until after the New Year

Sorry for not posting this sooner, as I kept hoping I would be able to get more online. However, this blog should start posting new content shortly after the start of the new year. I hope everyone is having a great winter break.

This blog is banned for hate speech

I was talking to the debate coach at a certain Mass. public school, and she informed me that my blog is banned by her school's internet for 'hate speech'. I understand that such internet censoring software is relatively crude and oversensitive. So, I wouldn't be surprised if this blog was banned for obscenity or whatever. But hate speech? I've been trying to figure that one out all day.

I'm back

So, I know it has been almost exactly 4 months since I updated this. Sorry about that. It was a very whirlwind time for me, and I will get to that in a moment. However, some maintenance issues first.

(1) I know I missed responding to several emails. It wasn't personal (more on that below!), but if you have an outstanding email from me, let me know. I will get back to you this time (promise!).

(2) At some point I stopped reading other blogs, as well (sorry!). When I checked it again I had over a thousand blog posts unread, so I just told it to restart. What did I miss? Any great new blogs to read? Anybody release new books or important articles? Anybody got new jobs? Any massive wars? As always, self-promotion is encouraged.


Now, what I have been up to. I got married. I went on a honeymoon. I dealt with some serious family existential crises. I dealt with some family health issues. I moved. Three times. Seriously, I did three moves since I last updated this blog. Okay, I am not going to expand upon the wedding and other such things. It will be pretty saccharine and self-indulgent. So, if that isn't your thing, if maybe you decided to watch the Republican Presidential debate tonight and are afraid for our future, you might want to stop reading now. For the rest of you, don't say I didn't warn you!

The wedding was wonderful. It was held in the Cuban Club in Ybor City in Tampa, FL. The Cuban Club is a gorgeous building, which a rich and interesting historical past. Also, even more importantly, according to Ghost Hunters, it is haunted. I saw no personal signs of this, but I was a little distracted. The ceremony was presided and written by HJM from Prodigies and Monsters. It was beautiful, and included readings from Judy Grahn and Audre Lorde. To give you a taste, here are our vows:

SCU: I, James K. Stanescu, take you, Sarah Wright, to be my best friend, my most trusted confidante, my favorite being, my love, from this day forward. I promise to always be kind, patient, attentive, caring, gracious, and mostly good-humored, even in the midst of grading finals. I promise to never take our relationship for granted, and to daily renew the commitment we make today, straight into the hereafter.

SARAH: I, Sarah Wright, take you, James K. Stanescu, to be my best friend, my most trusted confidante, my favorite being, my love, from this day forward. I promise to always be kind, patient, attentive, caring, gracious, and mostly good-humored, even in the midst of my residency. I promise to never take our relationship for granted, and to daily renew the commitment we make today, straight into the hereafter.

Yeah, pretty awesome.

Also, Sarah's younger brother is a professional actor, and he performed Mike Birbiglia's hilarious D-U-Why?! from This American Life. You can hear the original here.

The reception was all vegan Latin inspired menu, with a 17 piece big band, the Cigar City Big Band. The groom's cake (that's a thing, just in case you didn't know. Grooms get their own cakes, it seems) was a chocolate, peanut butter, and banana mousse. It was decorated to look like Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Click here to see a picture of it. MLA of P+M set up a twitter account as if I was live tweeting my own wedding, and several of the people involved with the wedding added their own mock tweets. Feel free to go laugh at me over here. Actually I am thinking of using it as my own twitter account now.

The honeymoon was awesome (except for some weird drama some of you know about), and I don't really feel like going into all the other stuff. But, my new plan is to return to regular schedule blogging. Hope you all have been well.

I'm happy to be back, back again.

They're not errors, they're invitations

You might think I make a lot of errors in my posts. Typos, misspellings, grammatical snafus, etc. You might think I should rethink my belief in hitting the publish post button before any editing on a post. But as Peter Gratton proves-- they're not errors, they're invitations.

And yes, that is exactly what I meant to say. Even the metaphysically confusing parts of the first person actions I might not have done. I meant to say all of it.

I highly suggest reading the original

Ever since I put up a statcounter for this blog, the thing I have enjoyed most has been looking at what search terms have gotten people to find Critical Animal. Without a doubt, the single most common search is some version of Foucault Society Must Be Defended Summary. In which case, you end up with this rather old essay I wrote. I have no clue why so many people look for it (at least a few a day, every day). But, if you are looking for a summary, that's fine. But you should read the whole thing. Not only is it awesome, it is also very, very readable.

Oh, and for those of you looking for a summary of Michal Pollan's "An Animal's Place", seriously? It's an essay, and it is relatively short. Bite the bullet.

I've joined the dark side

For the last couple of years I have resisted adding a site counter for, I dunno, fear of being neurotic about it or having my blog be in danger of audience capture (as if I have enough of an audience for me to worry about that). However, tonight I randomly decided to add in a counter. I probably should have asked for suggestions. Right now I am using sitecounter.com.

Life Update

I wanted to wait till I had signed the forms, but you are now reading the blog of the Director of Debate at Mercer University in Macon, GA. This is certainly exciting news for me. Not only is this a chance to do an enjoyable job and academically rich job while avoiding adjunct hell*, but I also believe debate is an important activity and am glad to be able to continue working in that area. I've been involved in competitive academic debate in some form or another for 14 years now, and look forward to this opportunity.

However, it has meant that I've moved again (for the last decade I've moved every summer except one. I'm getting a little tired of it). I also recently had a root canal. That's why things have been and will be a little quite around for a bit.

Anyway, here is a bit of music for the occasion.



*Adjunct hell doesn't refer to all adjuncting. It refers specifically to jobs that do not provide adequate funding and no benefits, and frequently requires teaching many courses across multiple universities.

Don't Tell Them Ybor City Almost Killed Us Again

I spent most of last week in Tampa trying to find a wedding venue. While no money has exchanged hands, it looks like it will be at El Circulo Cubano de Tampa in Ybor City, and I am pretty excited about the whole thing. However, that means I basically didn't follow blog posts for the last week. It looked like the Dundee conference was a big hit. Otherwise, if there is anything I missed, let me know. Self-promotion is always encouraged.

Blogging will remain light for a while. I need to finish up a conference paper, and then am leaving town for a couple of conferences. I will be at the ICAS conference at SUNY-Cortland this Saturday (if anyone is around, let me know), and then I will be at the PIC conference the following weekend. I had originally planned to be at the Cornell Theory Reading Group conference the weekend after that, but they rejected my proposal. No reason was given, so I'll assume they had enough papers that addressed their theme from the theoretical traditions of decolonial philosophy and critical animal studies.

Also, if anyone is interested in having a platform to share their ideas for the next two weeks, let me know. I'd be glad to have a guest blogger while I'm gone. (Basically no one ever takes me up on that offer, but it is sincere).


Oh yeah, just in case you didn't get the reference of the title of the post:

Spam

So, my blog has increasingly been over run by spammers. I haven't wanted to do this, but I have increased comment security because of this. Now you have to fill in word verifications (which are very annoying, I know), and older posts are moderated.

If anyone has better suggestions, let me know. I hate word verifications, personally. But I am not sure what I should do, and I am getting about 3 or 4 spam comments a day.

New blog

So, I've not really felt the academic blogging bug since getting back. I have, however, realized recently I wanted to blog about debate. So, instead of boring you all that don't care about debate, I've decided to create a blog for my debate chatter, Wrong Forum.

I'm sure I will be back to academic blogging shortly.

Two weeks off, anyone want to blog?

My parents are in out of town visiting, and then I have a wedding to attend and will see a lot of my college friends, some of whom I haven't seen in a long while. Anyway, this blog will probably be basically dead for the next two weeks. Unless, someone wants to guest blog here. Great for people who read blogs but are not sure if they want to keep one up themselves. If so, drop me a line.

Anyway, take care blogosphere. See you in a few weeks. Don't implode while I am gone.

On my pseudo-anonymity

I post under the name "Scu" which is a nickname that many people call me in real life, and I've had since I was 15. Anyone who exchanges emails with me sees my real name, and I never care about any of that stuff. Right now this is mostly because any future job chances I might have (assuming I somehow get an interview despite going to a non-major named public university), I am not sure it is a good idea for someone to be able to google my name and suddenly bring up all my blogging adventures. Not because I think I post embarrassing things here, but because I post almost exclusively unpolished things here. I basically treat blogging as chatting in a bar, except with less cursing and more sobriety. I have firm rules about not rereading or editing posts before pressing the post button, and in general not being concerned about seeming the fool, caring about spelling or grammar, etc.
So, would have a long term, maybe interesting, academic blog help me at all for future job stalkers? Or potentially hurt me? My guess has been no and yes respectively. Am I wrong?

Sorry for the lack of updates

Hopefully though, a big announcement (well, medium sized at least) will be forthcoming in a few days.

Critical Animal gets a new look

Thoughts? Is it more readable? Do you take me more seriously now?

No more OOPs?!

Graham Harman has purposed a new name for what he does, Ontography. Nice, but it might means I have to stop making my OOPs joke. Promise me, if you ever create an official group for what you do, to call it the object-oriented philosophy society, or OOPS, okay?

I am about to catch a plane, but there are at least two more blog posts I want to do (I'm telling you all about it so you can harass me to post them if you are interested).

One is that I read Shaviro's little research project, and it reminded me of the work he was doing about a year ago arguing that Hardt and Negri inverts Marx's metaphorics in regards to the monstrous. In the time since he wrote those posts, I've read a very interesting essay by Negri, "The Political Monster," that specifically addresses that charge.

The other post is exploring a bit of my problems with Heidegger, particularly with my problem of Heidegger's notion of philosophy, and his notion of being and doing philosophy. These things, more than any philosophical argument themselves, has been what has repulsed me from Heidegger.

See you all later.

Being gone, and a couple of links.

I had meant to be able to post more from the interesting comments from my becoming-vegan/vegetarian post, but that is going to have to be put on hold for a couple of days. I'm traveling to Boca Rotan, FL to find a place there to move to (if anyone has any suggestions of what I should do there or where I should eat, let me know). I should have internet at the hotel room, so some blogging should still get done. However, between searching for a place, and actually moving later this month, I am going to be gone a lot. If anyone is interested in posting blogs from here, you should drop me an email. I don't keep track of hits, and have no clue how many people actually read my blog. But, if you are interested (or just want to drop me an email anyway) thescu[at]gmail[dot]com

Before I forget, Levi made a post responding to my earlier post. Also, Greg has a post, responding to my post. Both of their posts are great, so if you haven't already, check them out.

I'm back, thanks Greg, and Sen. Chambliss goes after Cass Sunstein over animal rights

I am finally back. Southern funerals are strange events in general, particularly in my family. If for no other reason than dietary. A good number of us are at least vegetarians, but those that aren't are all old-school flesh eaters from the south. For example, on the day that my Grandmother died, someone called my Aunt (with whom my grandmother had been living with), and said she was going to bring over a ham, because, "Hams are easy to make, and everyone likes hams." And that was just the first of the many flesh offering made in condolences to the family after my Grandmother's death. It was particularly sad for me to that my Grandmother's death became a time to also add the deaths of animals. I don't have much more to say on that subject, except if you are Nashville there is a great vegetarian Indian restaurant named the Woodlands, I was really impressed. The food was a great, and easy enough to be made vegan.

Speaking of being back, hats off to Greg for doing such a great job in my absence. I've invited him to keep blogging here as long as he wants, but you all should encourage him to keep blogging somewhere! I think we can all agree on that.

Lastly, we talked before about Cass Sunstein, whom Obama appointed to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Well, now it seems that Saxby Chambliss (senator from the state I grew up in, GA), has decided to place a hold on that nomination because Sunstein supports rather moderate animal rights. I don't really have any immediate comments, except this clearly highlights that animal rights is still far from the mainstream. But we all knew that, anyway.

A Guest Blogger!

I'll be gone over the next two weeks, and I won't have access to the internet for a lot of that time. However, someone stood up and is willing to keep this blog going for the next two weeks. So, don't forget to keep checking in.

Greg will be here, a fellow scholar in critical animal studies, and I hope you bring him the same level of insightful comments and keeping him on his toes that you bring me.

Maybe the experience will be positive enough for him that we convince him to keep blogging, as well.

Taking a break

I'm taking a break for, well, winter break. I'm not really sure how you would know the difference, except this way I will have an excuse for my lax blogging.

I believe I have finally answered everyone's comments, if not I apologize. Also if I haven't, post and tell me. Sometimes, especially when people write thoughtful and long responses, I feel the need to give their posts thought before I respond. Then I end up writing a response in my head while commuting or washing dishes, but I don't get around to always writing those responses back down. However, comments is what makes me keep posting, and my keeping posting is, at this point in my life, rather useful. Thanks to everyone.

And now, for a quotation to leave everyone on for my break,

“One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.” – Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.