I needed to install poretools, but the setup instructions assume you have sudo priviliges. After combing through 879868070879 posts on stack overflow, the R-help mailing list, serverfault, etc., I finally arrived at solution using the nuclear option. There may be a better way, but this worked for me.
First, nuke and rebuild your own R from source. First, remove your existing installation (as usual, rm -rf with caution...)
rm -rf ~/R