It's official!

I received a wonderfully fat envelope from the Journal of Urban History this afternoon. After seven long months of waiting, I finally heard back and the result is...

is...

revise and resubmit!

This is not as bad as it sounds. It was actually the best response I could have realistically hoped for. The alternative was a straight decline to review, which happens to most people, most of the time. This same paper has been declined without review at my ultimate publication destination, but this journal is a very close second. I am so pleased!

At this point, my article has already been peer reviewed and I have received extensive comments and suggestions from my two amazingly dedicated anonymous reviewers. The reviewers had a lot of suggestions, but nothing that will require an extensive re-write and nothing that I can't handle with a few months of work. Once I revise according to their suggestions, I resubmit to the journal and hope for the best. Sometimes a second revision is needed, sometimes it is taken at that point for publication, and sometimes it is declined and the process starts all over again with another journal. This can all take a very, very long time. I'll be lucky to have more than one article published before I get my degree (!).

On a previous note, more ideas for a paper for my Death and Dying class: an examination of urban roadside death memorials, an analysis of the rhetoric of cancer (is it seen as a war or as a misfortune?), or something about the life-threatening levels of urban healthcare options for the poor and working class. Or something having to do with the imagination of death, how we think of it in various forms as brought by various causes, similar in methodology to how we understand the imagination of nation and community. This would have to be much, much narrower. I don't feel any closer to a decision than I did earlier in the week. This is difficult. I haven't thought enough about death to have many ideas that sing.

Sigh.

Death and Taxis

Above is an amazing photo J took at the Obama rally last weekend.
I love it.

So, I spent a lot of time today thinking about topics for the two projects I have to (somehow) complete by the end of this semester: a documentary video and an article. The article is for my Death and Dying in American Culture class and I have no idea, not even a kernel of an idea, of where to go with that one. Death is such a huge subject, and there are so many cultural manifestations of how we as individuals and as cultural subjects feel about it, that I can't seem to narrow anything down. All my ideas feel tired or monumental, neither of which are characteristics of a managable, interesting project. I've thought about doing something with the death penalty, or something having to do with images of cancer patients (think Susan Sontag as captured by Annie Liebowitz), or the cultural nuances of condolence cards...none of these inspire me completely. I will keep working on it, while I shower.

Showers, as if you haven't noticed, are great places for ideas. Every piece I have written in grad school has come to me either in the shower or while on a run. Something about the quiet solitude, the ways both of these situations allow you to tune out from visual stimulation and go rummaging around in your head.

So, while in the shower tonight I thought about making a documentary about taxi drivers for my class on globalization. St. Louis has a diverse immigrant population and, as is the case in many cities with diverse immigrant populations, many of the cab drivers are not native-born Americans. Not sure where this would go, but I like the aesthetic of shooting film from the back seat while conducting interviews. Not everything would be shot in the cab, of course - I don't have enough spare change to spend too many miles riding around town - but it would be a fun way to establish connections for out-of-cab interviews.

I'm interested in the drivers' experiences: whether they encounter overt racism, why they took a job driving a cab, whether there is a network of friends who get each other jobs driving cabs, whether there is division between immigrant drivers and native-born drivers, whether they bring friends or family over from another spot on the globe and get them into a cab as a first job, whether driving the cab provides spatial relief from the phobic spaces described in many globalization narratvies, and whatever else I land on.

There's something very interesting about the metaphor of immigration (as movement) and cab driving (as movement) and the felt lack of permanence in both. This could be good.

The Man We Know as MLK...

...isn't exactly the man you learned about in grade school. I know it's more than a week after MLK day, but part of the problem with giving the man his own day is that most white folk tend to only think about him on the third Monday in January. And considering that many white folks situate thoughts of Civil Rights and race relations on the body of that one man, one day is not enough.

So, in grade school, they get you thinking that King was a man who liked to be posed with American flag, a man who often wore a pensive facial expression, a man who eternally inhabits the space behind a podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. They tell you that he had a dream about white children and black children playing together, about a color-blind America. And they tell you that he was shot.

What you don't learn (unless you attend some pinko lefty school for the children of bohemian intellectual New York Times subscribers) is that King was an anti-poverty, anti-war, anti-corporate radical. He spoke openly against the Vietnam War and American global arrogance, he decried liberal reticence on the subject of poverty, he railed against politicians who claimed to have the best interest of the people (whose people?) at heart and yet still allowed poverty, discrimination, and an endless war to endure. In 1963, he wrote a little paperback manifesto entitled Why We Can't Wait, in which he urged immediate action to cure the immediate crisis of poverty in America. The epigraph reads,

"Freedom is never granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed."

Indeed.

While definitely a man of great peace, King was also one of this century's most vehement rabble-rousers. Check out this great clip from the good people at the video blog, Ill Doctrine.