21 days

Urgh. Our heat index is in the triple digits, I have only 21 days left before classes start, and I'm feeling especially brain-dead today.

I never like these last few weeks of the summer -- too many hopes for things to squeeze in, all the anticipation and flurry of activity for the new term, regrets over what didn't happen in the summer. That's partly what my August experiment was designed to counteract -- with good results -- but today it's just me I'm talking to, and repeating that the summer was great isn't really cutting it.

Things I did this summer:

• Spent a lot of time with the dogs -- ours and various others we've had to babysit for the past few weeks
  
• Took on all the household duties so my partner could create art
  
• Watched movies
  
• Read for pleasure
  
• Agonized about an overdue essay
  
• Admitted I have depression and re-started therapy
  
• Started taking a supplement that's altering my brain chemistry for the better, but I'm still trying to get the dosage right
  
• Did a lot of yoga
  

Things I'd still like to do:

• plan my courses, set up reserves, etc
  
• read some more novels for fun
  
• skim some possible novels for spring's courses
  
• write an article
  
• reorganize my home office
  
• purge and reorganize my school office
  
• make all my handouts, & prepare all my slides for the whole semester (or at least 1/2 of it)
  

Making a list does always make me feel better. That's the benefit of the academic calendar -- we get to start everything fresh 3 times a year. No matter how terrible a semester is, it always comes to an end. And each one begins with bright new hopes and possibilities.

Well, it supposedly only takes 21 days to start a new habit. Guess I just have to pick something to improve and get started.

signs seen yesterday

At an elementary school: Are you enjoying your summer vacation? August 16th will be here before you know it! Now, who on earth is that aimed at? Is it an ironic nod to stressed parents eager to hand over their kids in 2 weeks? or some kind of sadistic dig at kids able to read it as their family car passes by the place they're dreading having to return to?

Painted on a van: A sleek looking M and www.muzak.com. Now, although I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that Muzak was indeed a trademarked company name (one of those words that's been promoted like Xerox to a general word) I didn't realize we had a local office (though I suppose all big cities do). The website is really sleek looking -- and for the brave of heart, allows you to listen to a feed of muzak while you browse. General ambient doesn't bother me (having spent years listening to Brian Eno etc when I was younger) but it's the watered down orchestral arrangements of pop songs that I find insidious. Worst for me was the time I was in an airport and heard Muzak'd Cure. A sad sad day.

A billboard: beautiful young girl out in nature, with the slogan Inspiration Shining Through. Any guesses as to what this was for? That slogan seems appropriate for a sports team, a teacher-training institute, even one of those huge scary suburban Baptist churches that have billboards along the freeway. But no. It was for Blue Cross Blue Shield. (Disclaimer: BCBS is my health insurance provider, through the state's higher ed employees program.) There must be a handbook of "good-sounding but meaningless" adjectives for ad execs to pick and string together for all-purpose signage. Frankly, I don't want my insurance company to be gleaming with inspiration. Efficiency, maybe even compassion. But they're not painting pictures -- they're just supposed to process my provider statements.

more handyness

We rent our house -- from friends, who are also our neighbors. I'm happy to be renting -- on my salary, we can't afford to buy a house in any of the neighborhoods we'd like to live in -- so for us, it's worth it to pay rent and not have a 2-hour commute to work, or to good restaurants/movies/etc. But the terms of our renting this house (at a substantial friend discount) mean that we repair everything ourselves, short of some major appliance breakdown (i.e., if the water heater rusted out or something). So yesterday I spent most of my day cleaning and fixing stuff. I'm most proud of replacing our shower arm (the metal pipe that come out from the wall and holds the showerhead) -- the old one had developed a crack and was dripping onto the drywall. I was nervous about it, because I've discovered a lot of non-standard things about the house in the past 2 years -- and once I removed the old one, if something was wrong with the pipe in the wall, I'd be in trouble -- there's no access panel, so I'd have to cut the drywall, and do a lot of stuff I'm not yet experienced with. But thankfully, that wasn't necessary. I never realized, when I bought my pipe wrench many years ago, how handy it would be. I only bought it because in graduate school, I lived in a beautiful old apartment building from about 1900. The radiators were probably not original, but probably 1940s-ish -- pretty primitive. The only way to adjust them involved a pipe wrench. But now somehow I've turned into a plumbing-fixing handygirl. (Although my caulking skills still need work -- redid the bathtub caulk yesterday -- it always looks easier than it really is, somehow. Guess I never frosted enough baked goods when I was a kid.)

Discovery from yesterday: tea tree oil really does remove mildew & mold -- I'd read this somewhere but hadn't tried it. Mix 1 tsp tea tree oil into 1 cup water, put in a spray bottle. Spray on disgusting grout, let it set for a few minutes, and rinse. Much safer for us and the planet than all the chemicals you can buy at the store.

"smelly"?

Now, smelly is a word you just don't see in advertising very often in the US. London transit authority have removed posters that asked Underground passengers "Please don't eat smelly food" after people complained that the image unfairly targeted Italian people and foodstuffs:
see it here.

This seems so, I don't know, last century -- Not a ban on all food, just a polite request to avoid smelly food. Smelly, smelly, smelly. The word gets sillier the more I say it.

All this seems relevant to my current reading -- Forster's Howard's End, which is all about codes of conduct, cultural capital, and shame...

revenge of the spuds

So perhaps instead of silly diet slogans, bags of potatoes should be marketed with an accompanying alarm that would go off if you didn't use the potatoes within a few days. I swear, I bought the potatoes with the best of intentions. (I'd used up the previously blogged sack right away, and figured I could do so again.) But one thing and another intervened, and now, a couple weeks later, I just found the most disgusting thing in our pantry. Semi-liquid, semi-pasty, extremely malodorous, and oozing out of the airholes in the plastic bag to infect everything else on the shelf. Truly horrible.

Well, now I've cleaned out one shelf of the pantry, anyway. But the smell from the potatoes is clinging to my fingers no matter what I do. Ick. Fit punishment for ignoring them I guess.

more on gender

Two great posts about gender and blogs (via Pedablogue):
Gendering the Blog 1
Gendering the Blog 2

I find "inconsequentiality"'s comments about diaryland/livejournal vs other blog formats very interesting. I wonder if Blogger's increasing range of templates etc (and increasing visibility b/c of merger with Google), plus the membership changes at typepad, are causing some shifts in the blog world. But clearly, in her terms, I'm a blogger rather than a diarist. (NB: I do keep a journal, in ink and notebook form, and have for years. This space is something altogether different.) Whenever I read diaryland blogs, for instance, I feel more like I'm eavesdropping than when I'm reading a Blogger-formatted blog. Which is interesting, given the faux privacy of any of this: the conversations between commenters, for instance, which look like (and indeed function like) dialogue -- yet performed in front of a potentially infinite (but realistically much smaller) audience.

hmm

Well, the Chronicle has just put up a list of links to academic blogs. Some are familiar, others I haven't seen before. And some of my favorites aren't yet on the list.

Not sure how I feel about this. Because it's in the Chronicle, even if only the online version, it's somehow different than the list of favorites many people have on their own blogs. Too much like a canon.

Though, research suggests that a very very small percentage of internet users read blogs, and an even smaller percentage write them.

And I came to the world of blogs because I read this article, which mentioned Barely Tenured.

So maybe this will bring other interesting folks to the table. That's a good thing. So why am I ambivalent?

"so what do you do?"

I had an interesting conversation last night at the park where I took the dogs to run -- I was chatting with a couple who I've seen with their dogs before, but for whatever reason last evening we got to talking more about ourselves. When I explained that I taught at Large Urban, Doug got all excited and explained he'd taken English classes there 25 years ago as part of a journalism degree. He asked me about various faculty (now all retired) and reminisced about reading "The Waste Land". Then came the inevitable question: what's your favorite book? although he gave it a nice twist, which was I think what's your favorite book to teach?

Anyway, since I've been flummoxed by this question in the past (uh, my favorite book in which category -- to read for fun? to write about? to teach to undergrads? in my specialty? or in general? etc) I have now settled on an answer: George Eliot's Middlemarch. Is it a great novel? yes, undoubtedly. Is it a great novel to teach? sometimes, anyway. Is it a good answer to the question? yes -- because people have heard of it, even if they haven't read it (unlike many other Victorian novels). Is it my favorite novel? I don't know if I even know what that question means. But now I have an answer.

But then, to my great surprise, we had a nice chat about why he'd not liked Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner -- he said Eliot was too difficult for him -- I suggested that now that he was an adult he might be ready for MM. Turns out he's a huge Thomas Hardy fan (who would have guessed?) and so we talked about him too.

I'm so used to one of stock responses once I've revealed what I do that I was really caught off guard, pleasantly, by his enthusiasm. (#1: "Oh, I hated English. You must have really good grammar." #2: "Oh, you must like to read. What's your favorite book?" #3 is some variant on "which campus do you work at?" followed by tales of difficulty in getting transfer credits, a cousin who attends a suburban branch campus, or other bureaucratic issues. Since Large Urban is just that, there are probably a million people in the city who have taken classes at one time or another.) He's probably the first stranger in years who actually knew what 19th-century literature was, and remembered reading some. (I've been asked questions about Shakespeare SO many times...)

Do people in other academic fields get this sort of response? "Oh, I hated math. You must be really precise." or "what's your favorite law of physics?"

dream analysis

So I had this anxiety dream last night. Now, I very rarely remember my dreams -- I would say I don't have them, except that scientists claim we all do. So when I remember enough to make an impression, it's significant.

Starts with walking up some stairs with other people -- the feeling is that I am going to a meeting, or a conference, or something like that -- an air of intellectual engagement, interest, no nervousness. The building is standard institutional Gothic.

Wind up in a large room filled with academic types. It turns out that this location is "NYU." (NOTE: I am not, nor have I ever been, associated with NYU in any way. Nor is anyone I know. I have never even been inside a building on its campus. This is pure symbolic.) So, there are a bunch of intellectual-looking academics -- dark-framed glasses, turtleneck sweaters, whatever my brain produced as the "NYU" crowd.

And there are also approximately 20 women in red dresses (different fabric and cut, though most of them satin, slinky, evening or party dresses). As I note this to the person sitting next to me, I realize in horror that I am wearing a red sleeveless satin dress. Egads! (NOTE: in real life, I never wear dresses. And certainly if I did it wouldn't be red, it's be black.) I look down at my legs and think, geez, I would have at least shaved if I'd known.

Then somehow the focus changes (my dreams are often shot like movies) and the camera zeros in on the main guy at the seminar table which has suddenly appeared in the room (who I suspect represents Leading Critic who I met once (and who was funny and pleasant) -- I saw an announcement for his latest book yesterday and wrote down the title to look for at the library next time I'm on campus). He says, "well, maybe you should just look at the entertainment industry." Snickers from all around the table. "You're just not right for us. This is not what we're looking for." I don't get a chance to defend my research, which is suddenly the topic of conversation -- nor to even explain that I was just there for the conference, not for the job interview.

*************
Summary: Why is it that feeling like you belong in academia is so fricking difficult?

my favorite

My favorite vegetable is kale. It used to be broccoli, but then a few years ago I started eating kale, and it quickly moved to first place. But I think a lot of people don't know about kale. At least 80% of the time the check-out clerk at the grocery store has to look up the code # for it (and probably 50% of the time I have to identify which vegetable it is). The other day, as she was looking up the code, the woman behind me in line started asking me what it was, how to cook it, what it tasted like.

So, in the hopes of introducing more people to this lovely vegetable:

Kale is full of nutrition -- tons of vitamin A & C, plus calcium and antioxidants. It's actually related to cabbage, and some varieties are grown as decorative plants.

Most of the kale sold in stores here is curly kale -- dark green leaves with ruffled or spiky edges. Sometimes you'll also see Lacinto, or "dinosaur" kale, which is smoother, darker, and bumpy (like dinosaur skin? not sure where that nickname comes from). Curly kale has a nice kind of sharp or peppery taste. Lacinto is sweeter, and usually more expensive. Both are good.

My favorite way of cooking it is super easy. Wash & tear the leaves away from the center ribs, which are tough and bitter. Steam until dark green and tender. Season with umeboshi plum vinegar, which you can find in the Asian section of a large market/health food store. Other good seasoning options are tamari or Bragg Amino Acids. You can also saute it with garlic and olive oil, Italian style. And here are some other recipes. Enjoy!

yet more about pseudonymity

Reading over the many (59 last time I looked) comments at Leuschke.org in the discussion about pseudonymous blogs, I'm struck by what seems to me a certain smugness in tone from some of those bloggers who keep their blogs under their own name. For instance:

It seems to me that one of the main reasons why people keep anonymous blogs is so they are free to bitch and/or complain. This strikes me as a bad reason to keep a public blog in general, and perhaps a good reason to keep an old-fashioned journal or diary. Perhaps with a lock. link

I feel able to be completely honest on my own non-anonymous blog but at the same time, I admit that its non-anonymity means that there are some things which are interesting to me, that I think about, which relate to academia, which I do NOT feel I can talk about. Most of those it would be self-indulgent to talk about in the first place, and so the world need feel no sadness at being denied such petty self-absorption, but there are probably a few issues which would be interesting to a wider audience that I can’t talk about in a non-anonymous context. But at the same time, I don’t feel any less honest, forthright or self-confessional simply because the world knows it is me. link

What bothers me about these kind of remarks (and these are just examples from the discussion -- I don't know either of these particular individuals online or IRL) is that they replicate what I see as one of academe's most insidious structures: the attitude that if you criticize something, or if you have difficulty with something, then you must be either not smart enough, not working hard enough, or just plain not good enough in any of many different ways. The illusion of academia being a meritocracy tends to get more heavily invested in, the longer an individual's participation in it and/or the higher an individual's status within the institution.

I also don't think it's an accident that both of these writers are male, and that their choice of censorious adjectives (bitch, petty, self-indulgent, diary with lock) are often coded feminine, whereas "honest, forthright" sounds brave and masculine. Sure, "self-confessional" can go either way. But in the context of this larger discussion, the gender politics seem extremely important to me. What these writers seem to express is the institutionally sanctioned view: the only thing worth saying is something serious, non-personal, crafted for a public audience. The corollary to this is that if you feel alienated from the institution, or if the rituals and mythologies of that institution don't fit your own worldview, then you are crazy, insufficient, silly. (See, for instance, Paula Caplan's excellent book Lifting a Ton of Feathers .)

That's precisely why I've been so glad to see the arrival of several new blogs this summer which give voice to doubts, questions, problems within academic culture. Blogs offer space for alternative modes of discourse, kinds of speech -- and kinds of community -- that don't often exist within insitutional frameworks.

you are not imaginary

YelloCello has some interesting comments about anonymity and blogging, including:

This is a community of molecules — few of us really responsible to or a part of each other’s lives. Okay, let me amend that: What I read on strangers' sites does become a part of my life, in an imaginary, and not insignificant, sense. Because I am affected by the choices and observations of others. And, naturally, I begin to care about them and their lives. But blogging, and especially academic-world blogging, is necessarily a masked ball. (I dislike that hackneyed metaphor, but it applies here.) In real life, those dearest to me will be the keepers of my history, and I the keepers of theirs. In blog life, there’s freedom in forgetfulness.

In part, I read her discussion as questioning what kinds of community are available or possible when some are anonymous and some are known -- or when those knowledges are unevenly distributed. (For instance, one regular reader of my blog is a friend IRL but she's careful to respect my wish for pseudonymity in this space.)

For me, just because I think of individuals by their blog-name rather than by the traditional First Name Last Name we use in this culture, doesn't really change what I think of them. Over time, in reading someone's blog, I develop an idea of who they are -- their interests, preferences, and sense of humor. Sure, I might have different ideas about you if I met you F2F, but then again, my assumptions or preconceptions based on physical appearance, age, etc etc could easily prevent me from ever finding out some of those things that are revealed on a blog.

A lot of my Real Life friendships are largely virtual too -- people from college and graduate school who I'm still in touch with, for instance. Phone, email, maybe dinner at a conference once every few years or a long weekend visit. Some of those relationships change or diminish with time; others don't. My best friend and I talk every week on the phone, and have done so for years. It's great when we can see each other and go to a movie or something -- but a lot of friendship is taking the time to connect and communicate.

Now, blogging isn't exactly friendship (or not necessarily, or not always) -- but for me a lot of the same things hold true. Communication makes community. And since I'm just a big nerd underneath the surface, communicating via keyboard suits me just fine.

There's a wonderful novel by Sylvia Brownrigg called The Metaphysical Touch. It's one of the few novels I know that adequately captures both the richness and complications of relationships, both virtual and otherwise. It's a long novel but really engrossing -- perfect if you've got some summer vacationing left . . .

thoughts from the mat, part I

In many styles of yoga, sivassana, the corpse pose, is performed at the end of a practice to produce a deep relaxation that allows the body and the mind to integrate the lessons or experience of the day's yoga. Sivassana is a very difficult pose, although it looks a lot easier than arm balances or handstands: you lie on your back, heels touching, arms at your sides, palms up. And you are completely still, focusing only on the breath. As soon as most of us try this pose, the mind starts running around like a crazy monkey, chattering about the grocery list and due dates and did I remember to bring socks . . . the challenge is to figure out how to let the monkey go and to just be there for those minutes.

In Bikram yoga, we also do short sessions of sivassana in between each of the floor postures in the last third of the class. It is believed to help the body relax and return to homeostasis in between postures that detoxify the internal organs and open up the energy centers of the body. At the obvious physical level, if done properly, a one-minute sivassana can induce deep relaxation: the pulse slows, the breath deepens, all muscles soften.

This practice of short sivassana makes a lot of sense to me based on other forms of meditation and bodywork I've studied. I came to yoga only a year ago, after ten years of studying taiji and other Chinese martial arts. The first move of the taiji form -- from wuji to taiji -- from stillness/nothing to movement/presence, is incredibly important and subtle. Learning to feel stillness is the basis of understanding movement. In Feldenkrais bodywork, which I have found incredibly helpful for correcting knee/hip alignment problems and for relaxing my "computer shoulder," the enire practice consists of deep relaxation on the floor interpersed with small, gentle movements designed to reprogram your central nervous system.

American culture in general has little acceptance or patience with rest and stillness: we work hard, play hard. To sit and do nothing -- and especially to intentionally do nothing -- is very difficult. Yet it is in rest that healing and growth occurs: think of weight training. You work a muscle to the point of exhaustion, and then you have to let it rest for a couple of days so that it can grow new fibres. Training more frequently doesn't build more muscle, it actually tears it down faster than it can grow back.

Academic culture, in my experience, tends to fetishize the summer as a time of intense productivity -- yet no one I know ever accomplishes everything they had hoped. The ritual conversations ("how was your summer" "oh, I just didn't get enough done") are already happening in the hallways here at my department. But we need some rest and relaxation in the summer in order to recuperate and grow and be ready to face the new throngs of students in the fall.

Saying things repeatedly tends to make them seem more true. Last August, I tried this little experiment, which I'm going to repeat this year. Whenever someone asks "how was your summer," I just say "great." I might add "very relaxing." It kind of stops people short in their tracks, but then they smile and say "mine too." Which makes us all feel a little better. My closest friends might know more details about the full reality of my summer, which is a bit more complex. But why not repeat a good thing over and over in casual conversation in the hallways, instead of the usual self-deprecating criticism?

what's up with the post office

You may not be able to tell this from my blog design, but IRL I'm not very tall. In some parts of the country, I'm definitely shorter than average (i.e., in the Midwest where I grew up). And I never was tall -- I know some people who were tall in 1st or 2nd grade and then lost their advantage. Me, I was always the short kid who read a lot of books and would be publicly humiliated in things like the Presidential Physical Fitness test (where the teacher had to lift me up to the bar we were supposed to chin-up from, since I couldn't jump up that high.)
But now as an adult living in a more diverse part of the country, I rarely encounter situations in which my height is the object of derision or an obstacle to my daily pursuits. Maybe the last time I thought about it was at Target, where the item I wanted was at the back of the top shelf and I had to climb a bit on the lower shelves to get it.
In the past few days, I've had occasion to use the drive-through mailbox at two newish post offices in the city (the parking lot of my neighborhood PO being a pain to negotiate at certain times of day). At both of these branches they've installed super-tall mailboxes aimed I guess at the drivers of SUVs. I drive an 11-year-old little Toyota. The mail slot is actually taller than the roof of my car. Requiring me to stop, put it in park, open my door, get halfway out and mail my letter, feeling like I accidentally shrunk like Alice. What I'd like to know is whether this is now standard at all new post offices, or if they calculate the density of SUVs in a particular area? Or is it the SUV and truck lobby?

acadblog questions

I've been delighted to discover new/newish academic bloggers over the past week or two (Playing School, Bitch PhD, and Learning Curves to name a few). Only a couple of months ago when I started poking around in the blogosphere, I felt somewhat alienated from a lot of the academic blogs that I was finding. So it's great to discover some additional voices in the mix.

Graham Leuschke cites this blog and others in questioning why so many academic bloggers choose anonymity/pseudonymity. I've already commented on his post (and discussed my take before), so I'll save that for now. But his post, and the discussion we've been having about personal appearance (edgy or not) and gender raises the following question for me. It is my impression -- purely anecdotal at this point -- that a greater number of non-pseudonymous academic blogs are by men; it may also be the case that a greater number of pseudonymous blogs are by women, although that's not necessarily a corollary of the first.

It would seem to me that, just as women academics are subject to greater scrutiny and commentary about their personal appearance than men are, women academics might feel themselves to be under greater general scrutiny than the men do, and hence more likely to opt for pseudonymity. What do you think?

Another version of this question: do you know any male academics who would say that they have had a student (male or female) who has "tested their boundaries" in a way that felt threatening or inappropriate or disturbing? Do you know any female academics who haven't had such an experience? (I'm trying to be careful in my wording here -- because it's not a question about teaching styles, classroom personae, or pedagogy -- but rather about the gendered assumptions students bring with them into the academic space.)


UPDATE: There's lively and interesting conversation still going on in the comments at Leuschke.org

dinner with my pack

I really love watching the dogs eat their dinner. They're so focused, so happy, and communicating so many things in their body language that we humans of the pack (who also enjoy our dinner) don't always remember to communicate in our laziness of having verbal language.



(I don't have a picture of them eating, but here they are doing yardwork.)


I started preparing the dogs' food myself a little over a year ago. I started doing this for basically the same reason that I cook most of the food that I and my gf eat -- to know what's in it, to make it as healthy and tasty as possible, and avoid as many chemicals as possible. You don't have to look very deeply into the ingredients of most commercial pet food to be horrified. Wendell and Gracie eat a high-quality vegetarian packaged food once or twice a week, when I'm too rushed or my gf is feeding them. And they eat the vegetarian kibble as supplemental food during the day. But most nights, they get food that I cook for them -- food which is very similar to what the humans eat: brown rice or other grain, tofu or legumes, vegetables. (If you're interested in preparing your dog's food yourself, the standard reference is Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs & Cats , which includes both carnivorous and vegetarian meal plans. If you want to go the strict vegetarian route, I'd also recommend Jonathan Dune's Vegetarian Dogs which has excellent recipes and information on doing your own nutritional composition calculations using the USDA database (available on the web).)

Although I started doing this because of my concern for their general well-being, it's really enriched my relationship with them in unexpected ways. Because they eat a varied diet, I now understand their individual preferences and habits in ways that I wouldn't if I was simply feeding them the same packaged food every day. Wendell prefers rice, and Gracie prefers oats; Wendell will always eat all her broccoli first, whereas Gracie nibbles from her vegetables throughout her meal. If Gracie comes across something particularly tasty or large, she'll take it off to the backyard to eat it -- a holdover from her days on the street. Wendell likes crunchy food; Gracie likes it when there's broth or thin sauce in their bowls. They'll both eat almost everything I give them, though I've learned that collards or broccoli will always win over zucchini, and pinto beans are not big favorites. If we've had a stressful day, I'll fix something special that I know they'll like. And I think they appreciate the variety, as well as the fact that they're eating the same kind of food we do. If you had to eat pop-tarts every single day, you'd be bored, even if you did have minimal basic nutrition. How is dry kibble any different?

Sure, sometimes it feels like a hassle to cook for them -- just as it sometimes feels like a hassle to cook for myself. But more often than not it makes me really happy to see them eating food I made for them, with good nutrition and love mixed in.

On edginess

I love that two of my readers suggested that my new color scheme says "edgy" (along with other nice adjectives). It seems really appropriate, if you know the following story.

When I first came to Large Urban University, my first full-time faculty position, I was routinely irritated by people insisting "you don't look like a professor" or "you're not old enough to have a PhD." I was 30, and that felt plenty old enough to be treated as a full-fledged adult. It is true that our campus enrolls a large percentage of adult students, and so the difference between faculty and students in terms of age is less pronounced than it might be on other campuses. But I was hearing this not from my students, who were more curious than insulting, but from clerks at the library, at the bank when I opened my checking account, etc. And of course after I indicated my age or proved my faculty status (2 forms of ID and 2 phone calls were necessary to get my faculty parking tag) then I'd be told "well, you'll be grateful when you're older that you look young." Does that excuse rudeness now? Hardly.

In addition to being chronologically younger than all of my colleagues, even the "young" cohort, it was also the case that I had a different look. It's not hard to appear hip or stylish in academia, when you consider what you're being compared to.

So, at the end of my first year, I was asked to lunch by one of my senior colleagues, a woman whose extremely business-like approach to the profession is matched by her Talbots wardrobe -- neat tailored dresses, pearls, that sort of thing. We were discussing a graduate student who'd been having trouble on the market -- he'd get interviews, but never get past that stage. I'd done a mock interview with him, and could see that his embittered attitude and lethargic affect basically ruined his chances with potential colleagues. Plus his hygiene wasn't the best. So Professor B. and I are discussing Student X and I told her what I had told him about trying to improve his body language and appearance for the interviews.

Professor B: Oh, I'm so glad you talked to him about his scraggly hair. I'd wanted to, but I thought he'd take it the wrong way.
Mel: Mmm-hmm.
Professor B: You know, I'm so bourgeois. And you, you're . . .
[Mel waits with bated breath as Professor B. scans her from top to bottom, seeking the right adjective.]
Professor B: . . . edgy.

I thought that was very generous, coming from Professor B. And so the word edgy became my personal mantra -- whenever someone criticized my youthful appearance, I simply thought to myself: no, I'm not too young -- I'm edgy.

And I think it must still be working. I recently heard from a former student that they had bets running as to whether or not I had tattoos completely covering my arms, thereby explaining my habit of wearing long-sleeved jackets to teach in. (The answer is no, not yet. Just one.)

now it's paying off

A little-known fact about me: I actually don't mind, and sometimes even enjoy, answering surveys. At one time I worked for a social science non-profit group that designed a lot of surveys, but it's actually not just my sympathy for the people whose job it is to design, administer, and analyze them -- I like the chance to make my opinions known. Lately I've answered a couple of market research type surveys on the phone. Of course, half the time I'm the last person they want answering their questions -- I don't watch much TV, and we don't even have cable, so I rarely know what they're asking me ("which automobile advertisements have you seen in the past 7 days").

But now it's paying off. I've been asked to participate in a study of magazine reading: they're going to send me a copy of People and then call and ask me some questions about it. And pay me $35. Whoo-hoo! I'd read a junky magazine for free if it was in front of me. And, for what I figure will be an hour's time (reading the mag and answering 10 mins of questions) I'll get paid more than double what my salary comes out to in hourly terms. (Don't do that math unless you want to be depressed.)

movies

I will see almost any film, however lame, that deals with schools/students/teachers/etc --I'm always interested in how those institutions and relationships get represented on screen. Lately I've been noticing how larger anxieties about standardized testing are making their way into films. Better Luck Tomorrow tried to debunk all sorts of stereotypes of young Asians, including a plan to sell test answers (although that's not the main plot of the film). A recent MTV-produced movie, The Perfect Score, pokes fun at the importance placed on SAT tests -- the standard motley crew of highschool stereotypes (the stoner, the jock, the outcast) band together to steal the answers so that they can each go on to pursue their respective dreams (college ball, a girl, etc). It's not a great movie, but it is interesting in terms of how the pressures on middle/upper-class students today to apply to/get into college are being acknowledged, parodied -- though ultimately upheld as well.

Far more interesting -- Cheaters, which I just watched the other night from Netflix. Based on an actual case in Chicago, it follows an academic decathalon team and their coach from Steinmetz High School, an underfunded public school, as they compete in regional academic competition. They are the underdog team -- no one at their own school expects them to do well, and they don't even believe in themselves initially. They make it into the state competition -- and that's when the film gets interesting. It's not simply the usual "teacher motivates underprivileged kids" or "underdog team wins out over the preps" plot. They obtain a copy of the questions for the state competition and prepare their answers ahead of time; after their scores are challenged after winning the state competition, they deny having cheated. Their lawyer defends their right not to retake the test, and the media is all over it. The film suggests that their cheating was only exposed because of a disgruntled former team member who knew about it -- I don't know if that was relevant in the actual case.

So the film tries to make the following claims:

1. schools in lower-income / racially diverse neighborhoods are underfunded in comparison with other public high schools. (often true, certainly in city like Chicago)
   
2. Neither students from lower-income/immigrant backgrounds or their parents know how to "work the system" to be able to attend a better public school. (often true)
   
3. the once-common ideal of working hard to succeed (in this film linked to German and Polish immigrants) is no longer relevant, since corporations can't be trusted to take care of their workers (certainly the ideal of the benevolent paternal corporation of the turn of the century has been shredded in recent decades)
   
4. the "system" only rewards winners (probably true)
   
5. winning is so beneficial to students' self-esteem that it doesn't matter how they won (WHAT???)
   
6. for these students to cheat in the competition was a victory for underserved schools and immigrant students against the wealthy, white, preppy students whose school always won (and, it was implied, may have had access to answers since the decathalon offices were housed at their school) (I'm all for championing the underserved -- that's in part why I teach at Large Urban University. But cheating isn't the way to do it.)
   
7. the teacher/coach wasn't responsible, because he let the kids vote on it. (WHAT???)
   

This film raised lots of issues for me. I'd have to see it again to really be precise about the director's beliefs/arguments -- but this was not a simple "caper against the evil system" kind of movie. As much as I wanted to (and did) sympathize with the English teacher teaching the uninterested, the nerdy kids trapped in a hellhole of a school, and their desire to prove themselves -- I think what they did was wrong, and there's no way around that.

Part of what makes the film so problematic is that basically it's a sports movie -- the team that cheats in the big game. It's not really a movie about academic cheating of the usual sort, in the classroom, or even on the SAT. When I was in high school, there was no such thing as academic decathalon (or at least not in my semi-rural location), mathletes, or any of these other attempts to make academically-oriented students fit the Always Compete model that's so prevalent today. (Back in my day, the nerds just got beat up a lot by the jocks, and ignored by the teachers.) A film trying to defend a sports team who took steroids because they were ignored by the system wouldn't get very far, I don't think, despite all the scandals that remind us that sports are not an arena of honesty either.

At the film's close, statistics are run on the screen reminding us that 80 percent of high school students admit to having cheated on a quiz or test, and over half of them don't think it's wrong. But this story isn't really about those students. This story is something else -- and the film tries to blur the lines for added "relevance". Giving, I think, the false sense that it's ok for some students to cheat because there's no other way to make it in the system.

I think our academic systems and institutions are definitely in need of overhaul -- the over-reliance on standardized testing is one thing that's having dreadful effects on the average high school student's ability to think and communicate. And this film is right to point out some of the racial and economic politics that get played out in the competition between schools for scarce resources. But it's deeply problematic in other ways.

because I needed to lose 90 minutes from my day

...I finally changed the colors on my template. I never was a big fan of the orange anyway. Not sure if this is what I'll stick with, but it suits me for now. So you tell me: does my "voice" seem different now?

thoughts from the drive home

(1) driving past the high-priced hand car wash and detailing place, a sign that says "Brazilian Wax." Now, I've never heard of this for cars before. What's next, cars that need pedicures?

(2) at a stoplight, I look over at the blond girl in the silver convertible in the lane next to me, and she is mouthing/singing the words to the song that is playing on the radio in my car (that Divinyls hit, on the all 80s station). Now, statistically speaking, hundreds/thousands of people in our metro area must be listening to that station simultaenously, but I've never before known for sure that my neighbor was sharing the listening experience.

(3) there has been a small snail perched on the lintel over our front doorway for two days now. I think about her/him quite a bit. (assuming snails have gender, though I realize I don't really know). How did she get up there, and how long did it take? Is she going to get anything to eat, or is this some kind of hunger strike to draw to my attention the snail like pace of my work? Or is the message something else, like slow down and appreciate the small things of the summer?

these people run our visible world

This is a fabulous article on the Color Marketing Group -- the cabal who every year determine what the dominant marketing palette should be -- not just for clothes, but for everything -- housewares, furniture, cars, little plastic items, notebooks, etc. In case you were wondering, here's the forecast: "According to the CMG, color is becoming clear, therapeutic and nurturing . . ." and we can expect to see "optimistic and genderless colors." There's a long list of prescribed 2004 colors and their descriptions that have no clear visual referents -- for example: "Tickle--A happy red--tickle makes the whole word giggle." This is where catalog-speak comes from. (anyone besides me remember that late 80s catalog Tweeds? they had the best color language, delicious in its excessiveness). And here's the 2004 color fashion forecast -- which claims "Color can help us go back in time, and many of the shades suggest the pretty pastels of the 1950's, and the autumnal reds, oranges and browns of that decade, when gender roles were more carefully defined." (Well, this palette does remind me of Far From Heaven.) And how, exactly, is that supposed to mesh with our newly optimistic and genderless colors?

The secret: just wear black. Always. Forever. It's always appropriate.

movies

Yesterday I saw My Mother Likes Women, a Spanish film that our local free citypaper had described as Almodovar-like -- I'm not sure about how strong that influence was, but it was an enjoyable film. Three adult daughters are forced to confront their own issues when their mother gets romantically involved with a woman. It's not entirely comic, in part because the pacing between drama and comedy was not pat Hollywood. But it has, ultimately, a generous spirit. And visually it was a treat -- the clothes, their apartments, Madrid, Prague -- everything was fabulous to look at. And in a nice touch, the mother is a concert pianist, and their divorced father an author/intellectual -- which in a Spanish film doesn't come off seeming so unusual as it might for something set in, say, Chicago. (NY, maybe. In the era of Woody Allen. But today?)

I tried to watch The Office, the British TV series I've heard so many things about. I made it through one episode, but couldn't bring myself to attempt watching another. Maybe it gets better. But watching a complete boor embarrass himself and others just isn't my cup of tea. There are enough boors in the world as it is, need we celebrate them?

Brokedown Palace turned out to be something rather different than I'd expected based on the trailer. The imprisonment/rescue plot is just a vehicle for an interesting depiction of close female friendship, it's strengths and difficulties. And it's nice to have a movie with a flawed heroine/narrator. There are some psychological twists and turns I didn't quite expect.

And in the total fluff category: Freddie Prinze Jr is charming as the nerdly character in Boys and Girls. Since he's usually the high school stud, it was a nice change. It's not in my top percentile for the fluff romantic comedy genre, but it had some good moments. It's sort of When Harry Met Sally for Gen Y.

federal marriage amendment

The proposed FMA, a divisive election-year strategy, did not pass the Senate.

So that's good. Although the future of equal civil treatment for all partnered individuals looks pretty bleak, since it's being turned over to the states, most of which have made same-sex unions illegal.

more thoughts on research

Apparently (at least to one commenting reader) I guess I came across as more conservative than I had meant to in my last post. Which is part of the problem with all of the nuts-and-bolts sort of courses I guess: as soon as you start saying "this is required" or "this is important" then it is assumed that you're consigning the rest to oblivion.

But I do think that there is little consensus within the large category of English studies (which in many depts encompasses Eng/Amer literature, theory, creative writing, maybe linguistics, sometimes lit in translation, etc...) about what constitutes "research." And that is a good thing. Even if it makes my job difficult in teaching a course on "Research Methods." I wouldn't want to be in a dept or profession that mandated one kind of research necessary for every project, every text, every approach. A deconstructive close reading doesn't draw upon the same kind of sources as an historical argument. And that's not just OK, but good.

So what I hope to do: equip these students with enough basic tools that they can later decide, based upon the text, approach, question at hand, what kinds of research they might do and how to begin doing it. Whether that would be reading Heidegger to understand Derrida, or using the Short-Title catalogue to learn about the distribution of Marvel's poetry. For students like ours at Large Urban University, neither of those tasks might seem obvious or easy.

research methods

This fall I'll be teaching our Bibliography and Research Methods graduate course for the first time. It's been long regarded by both faculty and students as something of an artifact -- in part because of the individual who's been teaching it for many years. But also, I think, because in many subfields of literary study, the past 20 years have been focused on different hermeneutics that often have nothing to do with history. This is not simply my own observation: see the work of McGann etc. But now it's taking on a much more concrete specificity in terms of my course planning. I always want to fit in more than can actually be accomplished in one semester, but I'm fast realizing that I'm trying to meet several distinct goals in this single course.
At the simplest level, my course goals are these:

• introduce students to basic theories in bibliography and materialist textual study (what are books? why does it matter which edition you're looking at? etc)
  
• give entry-level graduate students the basic research skills they'll need (MLA, WorldCat, print sources, etc)
  

That's doable in a semester. But along the way, I will also have to:

• convince them that research actually is part of the advanced study of literature. I'm afraid many of them don't really believe that.
  
• help them define appropriate research questions and topics (although this is not a research writing workshop)
  
• teach them how to evaluate the most basic sources in their field (how do you know a first rate journal from a fifth-rate one?)
  
• introduce them to the range of approaches in the profession, since this course is the only gateway for the MA students.
  

It's forcing me to confront in a very specific way the large differences between my own training and that which our students have received prior to entering our program. I never got a research course at either my MA or PhD institutions -- it was assumed that we already knew this stuff, or would figure it out on our own. Our students are frequently capable enough, but they don't have that kind of professionalization coming into the program to even know what it is that they don't know. In addition, I suspect that even in many good undergraduate programs these days, many students don't necessarily write sustained independent research projects.
So I do think it's an important course -- many times in my seminars I've suggested to students that they look something up in OCLC and get only a blank stare. So I can try to remedy that. But it's not a respected course -- by students or teachers. Some of my colleagues probably don't use OCLC/WorldCat very often, if ever, either. Being one of the few historically-minded people in the department is in part why I was tapped to teach this one.

my finger's on the pulse

So now after a couple of days, I'm thinking that I'm going to try the Roomba. So I sat down at the computer to look over the different models once again -- and, as of today, IRobot has announced a new line of Roombas set to ship in September. So you can expect to see the old ones on sale. But I'm thinking I might wait for a new one -- bigger dustbin, faster charging time, and they can take themselves back to their charger when the battery runs low.

it is still summer

It is still summer. It is.

If I repeat this phrase often enough it will seem true, yes? Actually I'm feeling better today despite the fast slippage of my summer away from me because I took yesterday off. I realised that since it's summer, and I'm not on a teaching schedule, I also haven't been paying enough attention to time off. Everything is more relaxed in summer, thankfully -- but unless I specifically say a certain day is off, then I have some nagging anxiety about all the things I ought to be doing. So yesterday was my first intentional totally off day, and it was great. Went to the downtown library and stocked up on some free reading. I'm currently slurping my way through Gibson's Pattern Recognition -- this indeed feels like summer, to be able to gulp a book in a couple of days. I haven't read any Gibson in several years, and I'm enjoying this one so far (though Scribblingwoman's comments about the end are lurking in the back of my mind, pressing the brake pedal as I get closer to the finish). It's all about pop culture, internet subcults, the semiotics of fashion -- loads of fun. Weird tic, though: he's used the word "scrim" at least three times in the first 157 pages. In a novel where none of the other words stick out, that's kind of odd. Perhaps intentional; I can't say yet.

30 second diversion

Alien in 30 seconds, done by cartoon bunnies. (via Miscellaneous Heathen) They also offer The Shining and the Exorcist.

Room-inating

I am tempted by the Roomba, the first mass market robotic vacuum. There are others (some available only in Europe) that are no doubt fancier, sturdier, smarter -- but this is the only one even remotely within my price range (and that only because I have a store credit from returning a well-intentioned relative's gift that I couldn't use).

In favor:

1. It's a robot. I mean, come on. Of course, I think it was on the Death Star where they had those cute little vac bots, but still. It's a robot. In the first half of my lifetime (just barely). At Target.
   
2. We have two active dogs (sometimes 3 since we babysit my would-be father-in-law's* dog frequently) and a yard that has, um, a lot of dirt where more fastidious folks would have grass. We do have a fair amount of grass, don't get me wrong. But where the rotten deck was ripped out is basically just dirt. Dogs go outside; dogs come inside; much sandy dirt on the floor, no matter how much I sweep.
   
3. I Swif frequently. But unless I do it every day, then it also means getting out the dustpan and broom to pick up the piles of hair and sand.
   
4. I don't really enjoy vacuuming and tend to put it off. So having a little robot to do it while I'm cooking or, even, reading, would be great.
   

Against:

1. I don't know anyone personally who has one. So it might suck (by not sucking, as it were). User comments on Amazon and Epinions seem generally more positive than not, but everyone has different tolerance for ease of use, efficiency, etc.
   
2. Maybe I should wait a couple of years until the really good new robots come out.
   
3. The dogs might freak out about it. Especially since apparently people are treating Roombas like pets. None of us are ready for a new member of the pack, even if s/he spends much of the day recharging. (actually, that does sound kind of like the dogs: sleep...charge outside barking at squirrel...sleep...)
   
4. If I have the robot to vacuum the floors, what will I do when I need to procrastinate when I'm writing?
   

*"would-be father-in-law" -- that is, he would be my father-in-law if my gf and I were allowed to marry. The discussion of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment started today in the Senate. I know some people think this is just about party politics, and that it can't actually pass, even in the Senate. But it feels like a hostile cultural moment to me.

tenure, briefly noted

A good defense of tenure at Cliopatria (via Joseph D.)

FrankenWendell

Wendell is recuperating from her surgery very well -- thanks, everyone, for your good wishes -- she is sporting a line of metal sutures across her chest, giving her a kind of monstrous look for a week. After an evening tripped out on morphine, she's doing very well, her usual alert self. She's currently barking at the thunder hoping to prevent another rainstorm.

the way we eat now

If you saw (or read about) Super Size Me -- here's an article that provides an informative overview of the evolutionary perspective on nutrition and the current rise in obesity in the United States. Good range of sources, and written in a fairly well-balanced way. (to my mind the political critique could be much stronger (i.e., how the current administration spoke out against the WHO's plan to combat obesity), but you can find more on that elsewhere)

Wendell update

Wendell's surgery went well, although the tumor isn't as well defined as one would wish (this might mean cells have spread elsewhere). She's waking up right now and I can go pick her up in about two hours. So that's a huge relief.

think good thoughts

Think good thoughts today for Wendell, who is in surgery to have a mass cell tumor removed. Her third tumor this year.





Right now I'm waiting to hear from the vet about how the surgery went. I should be able to pick her up this afternoon. We won't know the full biopsy results for a few days -- what grade of tumor it is (i.e. which kind of cancer).

She has a very strong constitution and hopefully it's going OK. But I'm an anxious dog mom right now.

food ads

I've never really seen the point of those ads that are not for a specific product, but for a category of food: eggs, milk, pork. I understand that our government is highly invested in promoting Agriculture (more so than in regulating food safety) -- but do they really think that these ads will affect people's actual eating habits? For instance, in our city we have many billboards for avocadoes -- the most bothersome one says "We also have a support group called AA." I think I find this kind of offensive, on the part of people who are in the real AA (which I'm not) -- and it certainly doesn't make me feel like eating more avocadoes. Does this strike anyone else as odd?

Even more pointless are the ads that are stamped across the actual food packages (as opposed to billboards or magazine ads for milk etc). I was at the store a couple of days ago and went to pick up a bag of potatoes -- across the plastic sack it proclaims "A DIET FOOD". The old man next to me also getting potatoes snorted and said, "Ain't no such thing as a healthy potato." Now that just seems to illustrate the problem. Potatoes can be healthy, or not -- depends on who's eating them, in what quantities, and most importantly, how they're prepared. But it's not like anyone is going to see that slogan and think, "well, I'm going to pick up two sacks today, since they're a diet food." It'd be far better to put money into educating people in how to cook the darn things. Reminds me of a few years ago when low-fat was all the craze -- I bought a bottle of vinegar that said "NO CHOLESTEROL." Anyone with any sense would know that there is no way that vinegar could possibly have cholesterol.

nanowrimo

Somehow I'd never heard of National Novel Writing Month until today. At the most basic level, it's kind of inspiring: basically a bunch of people pledge to each try to write a 50,000 word short novel during the month of November. Quantity, not quality, is the goal. Not everyone makes the word count, but along the way there are local meetups of the participants, t-shirts, discussion boards and other community support -- something writers can always use. Just in terms of all those people actually sitting down and writing -- getting past the fear of the blank page, the endless procrastination that so many of us know so well, this seems inspiring. Sure, many of the novels written during that month might be junk, but so are many first novels written over the course of ten years.

Every so often, a curmudgeonly critic will opine something along the lines of "the book is dead, people don't read anymore, it's all the fault of tv/movies/the internet." Print culture changes every century -- as do most other aspects of human culture -- and we are in the midst of a profound technological transition. Undoubtedly there were people who complained when the codex book (what we think of as a physical book: pages stitched/bound together that you turn to read two sides of each leaf) began to displace the previous form of the book, scrolls (like the papyrus scrolls of the Egyptians, or the traditional form of the Torah) (one long piece of writing surface that can only be read from one end to the other -- difficult to find a specific place in the middle). There are similar profound changes in the ways that people read now, with the increasing presence of digital texts and electronic formats for accessing those texts. But because of digital technology, many people are reading -- and, even more significantly -- producing/publishing texts every day. That's what's really exciting to me -- blogs, fan fiction, and all sorts of other venues that are something more formalized, more like publishing writing than, say, chat forums. I hope someone has written a study of the word processor's impact on writing over the past 15-20 years -- I know as a writing teacher I've seen a lot of changes in the way my students compose, and in my own writing habits.

So, who cares if November's novels might not be the best works ever? what a great boost for the participants -- and as any writer knows, getting started, and getting in the habit, can make or break a project. If only my Novembers weren't always so filled with grading and conference preparation, I'd try my own hand at it. Who knows, maybe I will someday.

movies part 2

So last night I finally saw Michael Moore's latest. And, as I expected, had sort of mixed feelings about it. I'm totally on his side and usually agree with his message, if not his methods. My issues with the film mostly were about rhetoric and craft. He's grandstanding for our laughs and our attention -- which people on the left don't do nearly as frequently it seems (or maybe not as visibly in the larger pop culture) as those on the right -- which to me sometimes comes across as sloppy, or simplistic, or just cheap. For instance: it's really easy to find pictures of W looking stupid. But Saturday Night Live has been doing this for years -- you can do this for any public figure who's frequently in front of the camera. Moore intersperses these images to punctuate his critique with our laughter -- and I laughed too -- but it's not argument, and it tends to reduce his message to the simplest common denominator. Ditto for his use of music in the film -- again it gets the laughs from the audience (since the film is playing mostly to people who already agree in advance (at least in my city)) but it weakens the power of the facts exposed in the film. Most glaring omission in the film: any mention of religion. A month or two ago, I happened to see a really powerful Frontline piece on Bush's religous beliefs that offered compelling lines of interpretation that many journalists aren't willing to open up. It's called The Jesus Factor and can be viewed online.

I wish, too, that there had been something else at the film's close. Moore defends the working poor (although with no mention at all of the increasing Hispanic presence in the US and how that may affect political and military outcomes) and skewers the "haves and have-mores" (that's a Bush quote) who run everything. But the middle class is virtually absent from his film's representation of class warfare in the US. He shows us military recruiters in depressed Flint MI combing the mall for young men who have very few other options, asking them to fight a war that Moore shows to be directly increasing the wealth for some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the country. But what about the middle class? it's middle-class people's willingness to vote for Republicans who really don't have their interests at heart that are at least partially to blame for the mess things are in. And it's also educated middle-class Americans like many of my friends who vote Democratic but feel largely disenfranchised because in our states our votes don't really count, except on the local level. Moore's film does little to help his viewers figure out what to do with their frustration with the way things are. Good exposure of problems, no suggestions of solutions. At the film's close, to list a few websites like Move On would have been something. (Even if, again, most of his viewers already know this stuff.)

movies

There ought to be a rule for young filmakers not to have a main character who's an artist, writer, or filmaker. It's just so easy for the writer/director's surrogate to take on far more existential suffering than the character can really sustain. Or when that's not the issue, then it's the problem of how do you represent the creative process on screen. (At least in the Kunstlerroman you get hundreds of pages to try to show the growth of the Artist -- but it's still potentially tiresome.) Watched Washington Heights a few days ago on DVD -- it's a good enough film all in all -- warm but not too cheesy in its portrayal of the Washington Heights neighborhood in NYC, and the lives of first-generation young people struggling to define themselves in relation to their parents' culture and their own. The always watchable Manny Perez plays the main character, a cartoonist who has to take over his father's bodega. So far so good. But the parts of the film that deal with his drawing are just so predictable, and so unrealistic. He's a good artist, but his comics aren't great comics (i.e., Art) until he starts to write about his father, and the immigrant experience. Since the filmmaker is already doing that, it just seems like a heavy-handed lesson. Then he's able to sell his comic right away, to the hot Latina executive who just happens to be newly single... Actually I'm making the film sound much worse than it is -- which is precisely my point. Without the strain of the "Art" theme, it'd be a more solid film.

Yet, watching him draw his comic isn't half as painful as, say, listening to the god-awful prose supposedly written by the Jenny character on the L-Word series, which thanks to a friend who'd taped it, we just got to see. It's positively embarrassing to watch her "write" her short stories which are supposed to be so artistic and thoughtful. Argh. Overly Romantic in the capital R sense -- navel-gazing about her feelings, talking about ripping her bleeding heart out. Ugh.

I'm trying to think of a movie where I liked the artist/writer character. I'm sure there are a few but the negative examples are popping up faster.

superagent? -- uh, no.

One of the bits that stuck with me from the film of The Bourne Identity (didn't read the book) was a twist on the usual amnesiac story: he wakes up not knowing who he is, but realizing that he has these amazing skills of observation, martial arts, escape, and all sorts of other things that show him that he's really a superagent. (I'd wake up and what skills would I have to deduce my original identity? I know what pentameter is, I have a lot of black clothes in my closet, and books by Foucault on my shelf: aha, I must be an English professor!)

Well, I would suck at being a superagent. For all sorts of reasons -- but among them apparently I have lousy observation skills when in a difficult situation. (As do most people -- basic sociology and criminology experiments show this all the time.) I got rear-ended yesterday -- I'm fine, and my car isn't too badly damaged -- I was stopped at a red light, and the car behind me was stopped. Then a fourth car hit the third car which hit the second which hit me. So I got the least amount of impact, thankfully. My neck was sore last night but after ibuprofen and a nice hot Bikram class this morning I'm feeling fine. (Which I think has to be due in part to the yoga -- my neck having been in better alignment to start with, after 8 months of yoga.)

We sat there for 90 minutes in the rain waiting for the police officer to come and file the report. You'd think I'd have every detail memorized. But, no. Talking to the insurance guy this morning I was like: we were in the right, no, the left lane. No, I don't know what make of car the third car was -- but I have his DL number. Etc.

The other weird thing is the intimacy an accident suddenly creates among total strangers. I have all their names and phone numbers (and more) -- we were sharing our frustration at the slowness of the police to arrive -- bonded in some small little way. Thankfully no one was hurt, we weren't really stranded, we weren't far from civilization --so the forced bonding was limited. But kind of a weird experience nonetheless.

oppose the FMA

The Human Rights Campaign has a form to make it easy to contact your senators to indicate your opposition to the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which will come to a vote in the Senate in early July. Perhaps useful for some readers to note: many conservatives also oppose the FMA (see quotes) for a variety of reasons.

tenure celebration part 1

I've got tenure!



(got it pierced on Friday)

community

I didn't blog at all over the weekend because my friend M was visiting from out of town. Somehow my blog life and my real-time social life haven't yet fully intersected. Probably because most of my close "real-time" friends live in other cities. One such friend is also a blog pal who's recently posted some good thoughts about rediscovering the good qualities of the internet through blogging. I kinda feel the same way.

About a year ago I was really involved with Fotolog, which is a community for people to share a daily photo -- a blog without words. It was an amazing thing -- for a few months. Then as word spread (via NY Times and others) then the numbers expanded phenomenally and the sense of a knowable "community" all but vanished. It's based on a simple system of favorites lists -- so you can browse from one person's pictures to see those of people who they like -- which does still create small clusters of like-minded individuals (or rather, like-aesthetic'd individuals). But a lot of people spend a lot of time bemoaning the loss of the good old days when Fotolog was only a few thousand people. I share a lot of those feelings -- though I've also spent less and less time on Fotolog for other, more personal reasons. But when I go back, I can still visit some of the same people and learn from their photographs -- which for an image novice, has been an amazing resource. But it serves in my mind as an example of both the very best of the internet and the worst -- and how they can coexist, and shift, within a few months. The best: connecting people who would never otherwise meet, and tapping in to basic human generosity -- people's willingness to share advice on photo technique, hardware, software, etc. The worst: abuse of the comments system, people trying to post porn, etc (as if there weren't already plenty of places to see and share porn on the internet).

So it's been nice to start reading and writing blog and find the good parts of the internet again. To be fair, there are other good parts: the VICTORIA listserv for people involved with Victorian Studies (my field of specialization) has been an active, helpful, and mostly thoughtful community for over ten years. As someone working in a department with limited 19thc colleagues, it's been very sustaining to have this virtual group of colleagues to draw on for advice and ideas.

I realised recently that I haven't really "come out" as a blogger to very many people in my real-time life -- Tony Pierce's list of blogging do's and don'ts says:

5. dont tell your mom, your work, your friends, the people you want to date, or the people you want to work for about your blog. if they find out and you'd rather they didnt read it, ask them nicely to grant you your privacy.

I know everyone has different opinions on this, but I basically agree. My gf reads my blog, and a couple of friends do who also blog. But most of my real-time friends don't blog, don't read blogs, and besides, I talk to them in real time. And I started my blog to give me a different kind of space in which to think about things -- something other than my already-defined professional work which seems to easily take over almost all reading and writing. I like having my blog life separate -- it's a space of freedom that way. Especially as an academic -- the academic world has only two or three degrees of separation, which can get really claustrophobic. (Like what happened to Tracking Tenure, who discontinued her blog because a colleague started reading it and writing his own copycat version.)

so, yay for blogs. Now I have to go catch up on my reading.

hangin' at the Depot

So I'm the one wearing the butch pants in the house today: I replaced our bathroom faucet, which had been leaking from the base for probably 8 months. The final straw was that one of the plastic handles cracked, making it inoperable. So it was time to do something. And I think I succeeded: no leaks so far. It's actually not that difficult, if your house is pretty modern and things were put in correctly the first time. Neither is true of our house, so it did require a couple extra trips to Home Depot (only six minutes away, another good thing about our neighborhood!). (also replaced the drain/pop-up assembly and the P-trap-- which before today I didn't know what it was).

The internet has increasingly become for me the handy parent I never had -- neither one of my parents ever fixed anything in our house, that I can remember, except for torn book pages, and the occasional hem. Nothing mechanical. But you can learn how to do almost any home repair online. Which at least gives me enough to go on when I go to the HD. I'd much rather ask the guy "I need a basin wrench, right?" than just have to blankly ask "how on earth do I do that?" I don't have any idea what the working conditions are like at a place like HD, but I hope it's satisfying to at least some of these people who work there who know a heck of a lot about their particular area. People come in, you help them, they get what they need and learn something too.

Now if only there was an Article Depot for my now overdue writing project:

"Well, you see, I have these two ideas that have to fit together -- yeah, I've got about 20 pages of space."

"You just need this idea connector. Comes in plastic, brass, or surgical steel. How long you want this thing to last?"

"Well, up until now, it's been held together with sentences, but some of them are kind of fraying around the edges...I don't know if they're strong enough for the pressure of publication."

"Oh, you got an antique style article? You want to use sentences? That's more work. But you do get a nice effect when you're done. I can show you some adverbs over here..."

Clearly, I need to get back to work.

the hierarchy of fantasy

So we just finished watching Underworld on DVD tonight -- fully enjoyable for its genre. Sort of Matrix + Lost Boys + The Hunger + X-Men -- stylish and stylized battles between vampires and lycans (werewolves). Easy on the eyes (Kate Beckinsdale in hypertight leathers) and on the ears (the industrial soundtrack not quite as cool as Bauhaus in the Hunger, but good).
In this film, vampires are the aristocrats who formerly had the Lycans enslaved. Centuries of Lycan rebellion and warfare ensued after a cross-species romance was forbidden and punished. Now, a hapless human gets caught in the battle...
And of course, it's the vampires who are cool, sexy Eurotrash Goths. The werewolves (when they are not transformed) look like Eastern European mobsters. And there are no female Lycans shown in the movie -- but plenty of sexy vampire babes... And it's nearly always that way -- in Stoker's Dracula, and J.S. LeFanu's Carmilla (a great lesbian vampire story published in 1871-2 that inspired Stoker as he planned his novel), vampires are sexy. Their power over their victims is seductive, enthralling -- thus Stoker's novel so easily melds with our society's concerns about invasion, infection, and the blurring of social boundaries. My students are usually shocked when reading Stoker's Dracula to realize his Dracula is old and kind of repulsive -- our film versions are usually so slick and suave.

Most fantasy worlds have similar structures -- vampires are sexy-cool, werewolves are not; elves are cool, dwarves and hobbits are not. Etc. It's the same old idealization of the upper classes, remapped. (ever seen a fat elf or vampire?) It's worth remembering that most of us would have been dwarf-equivalents in previous centuries...

At its best, SF/fantasy offers new ways of thinking about social structures, gender categories, the meaning of intelligence. But the versions most popular in our current culture rely on the same old binaries. I'm as susceptible as the next viewer -- who wouldn't want to be a cool elusive elf? Go ahead, get your own Crappy Little Elf Name from Rum & Monkey. I'm Tealeaf Horsebeard. That's Mistress Tealeaf, to you...

seen on the way home

We now have a Spam billboard in my neighborhood. With a huge picture of "Huevos Spamcheros." Ugh.

Nearly every week in the Chronicle of Higher Education there's an ad from Xerox asking readers to please not use "xerox" as a generic verb -- making the point that although their trademark is casually used in this way, it's not technically correct. (there must be a specific linguistic term for such words, right? but I don't know what it is -- like "let's get a Coke" when you mean any soda.) I wonder if the makers of Spam are similarly upset by everyone calling junk email spam.

movies

I actually haven't seen that many movies over the past few weeks -- too much else going on. But Curtis's comments about Super Size Me , along with many conversations I had about it while I was on my trip, reminded me I wanted to write a few notes about it. My expectations were probably too high for the film -- you already know basically the whole thing before you go in there -- and it's been at least 15 years since I ate anything at a fast food restaurant, so I'm not really directly affected by the topic. My impression is that the film (like a lot of documentaries) is preaching to the choir anyway -- the people who probably should see this film aren't likely to. I enjoyed watching the physical, visible changes as he went through the experiment -- and his doctors' surprise at how rapidly his body fell apart. But a lot of the film was repetitive -- as well as somewhat mean-spirited and simplistic in its critique -- lots of unnecessary shots of obese people in bathing suits for "humor" -- implying that all obese people eat fast food all the time, which isn't actually the case. I'm all for critiqueing the fast food industry, the meat industry, the dairy industry -- but this film isn't quite smart enough to fully make those arguments. Read Fast Food Nation or John Robbins's May All be Fed.

I also recently saw Venus Boyz, a wonderful documentary that's just been released on DVD. It follows a number of drag king performers -- some performance scenes, though much of the film is more interested in interviews, and behind-the-scenes. Some are straight; some are lesbians; some identify as transgender; some refuse any gender or sexual identity. All are amazing, charismatic, fascinating artists who deconstruct and challenge most ideas about gender and sexuality. (I've seen Mo B. Dick perform live, and some others -- definitely worth seeing if you can -- loads of fun and simultaneously intellectually powerful.) Includes some coverage of Diane Torr's Drag King Workshops -- which I think also appeared in one of the early seasons of Sex in the City (I've seen only a few episodes but somehow got to see that one)-- very interesting to see how easy it is to change someone's gender appearance. And for many women it's really transformative to learn male gestures, etc -- because it's all about taking up space in the world. Del LaGrace Volcano gets lots of screen time -- I knew his photographs, but was really charmed and impressed by his interviews in this film. Smart, thought-provoking film -- and a good counterpoint to Paris is Burning.

Finally: The Day After Tomorrow. What's not to like, if you like B-style movies: heroic nerds, weather disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and overstated themes? But seriously, it was really refreshing to see all the Hollywood spectacle marshalled in service of ideas I believe in about preserving the environment and the current administration's culpability. Who cares if it wasn't totally believable -- this is the opposite of Super Size Me, in that I imagine some people will see this who otherwise wouldn't be thinking very much about the planet. (And, as a print culture historian: how many other impassioned speeches about the importance of the Gutenberg Bible are there in film? or action films set in libraries? Thumbs up for that, even if they did have to burn a few books.)

INTJ redux

My Bloginality is INTJ. No big surprise there. But what is interesting is to glance through the comments column -- tons of blogging INTJs have taken the test on this site. There are definitely some Myers-Briggs types who like tests better than others. Based on my reading of blogs, my guess would be that there are many INTJs on the internet. (thinking about who has the patience, interest, time for this sort of thing.) There's no way to have a more scientific survey, I suppose, but it'd be interesting to know how that will change/is already changing for younger people -- for whom technology is harnessed in the service of social interaction rather than substituting for it... (phones, text messaging, dodgeball, friendster, etc). Using computers means something very different now than it did 20, 10, even 5 years ago.
On a semi-related point, I read an interesting piece in Wired on the plane about the online gaming industry focused not on gambling or multi-user roleplaying, but on plain vanilla things like checkers and hearts. I've always found those things incredibly addictive -- a quick game of reversi on yahoo (what was called Othello in the board game) is excellent for a 5 minute break during a long writing session. But apparently there are retired folks busy playing for 6-8 hours a day. That's where the internet is really changing the daily texture of ordinary people's lives. I've never had much patience for social critics who said the internet would be the death of social interaction -- and this shows how social connections actually grow with new technology. To be able to play a game of checkers any time, with someone anywhere across the globe -- that's cool (albeit in a subtle French Vanilla kind of way).

rental car radio

During my trip I was forced to listen to a lot of Midwestern radio -- the rental car had a CD player but now that I carry all my music on my iRiver, that was no help for me. So I spent a lot of time in Illinois and Indiana hitting the "seek" button.

Today's Christian pop music has become very skilled at the chameleon effect -- I'd hear something and think "ok, this is Sheryl Crow-ish" and listen for a minute before realizing it was about Jesus. And then there was Christian death metal music, standard guitar rock, etc. I have not yet heard Christian house music but I'm sure it's out there. (not that it'd be played on Midwestern radio -- I was astonished by the lack of any music with a decent beat).

There was a very weird timewarp effect. I kept hearing songs that I thought had long since fallen out of rotation. And these weren't retro stations, either. Among the memorable ones: "Ebony and Ivory," "Aqualung," and "Freebird." I am not kidding.

Unbelievable but true.

I'm really glad to be home.

reconnecting

after I got back from my travels late Thurs night, our DSL was out -- network circuit problems in our geographical area -- didn't get restored until this morning -- only now do I realize just how anxiety-provoking it was to be unconnected. Especially since during my visit to my mom's I could only get on for brief bits of time -- I haven't really read anything online for a week. Much catching up to do ...

random misc

I saw an ad two days ago for "extreme whitening" toothpaste, whose flavor was "empowermint." After that, where else can "X language" go?

Even post offices in small towns don't have appropriate signage. I guess the assumption is that if you're driving there, you already know where to turn. I keep winding up driving off the edge of town by mistake and having to loop back through what seems awfully countryish.

I've had to make some rules for my mom, which she keeps trying to circumvent. I've said that she cannot move with her:
(1) scrap paper
(2) broken items (dishes, vases, lamps)
(3) pieces of cardboard, string, or cloth that are not actually being used for packing.

Does that seem so unreasonable? I'm not even going to be here for the truly miscellaneous stuff...

This is my last day of packing my mom's house. Then tomorrow I get to go visit some old friends for two days. And then finally I get to go home. I'll be glad to be back with my family, my routine, my computer. Maybe my brain cells will reawaken.

in the middle of the country

I spent yesterday travelling -- I am visiting my mother in Midwest College Town for a few days of heavy lifting. I am here to pack up her house -- she is moving to a smaller place without stairs, which will be much easier for her to manage. But she has not moved in over 40 years. You cannot imagine how much stuff there is to weed out and pack up. And she's deeply attached to most of it.

a few notes from the drive from the airport (about 40 miles) -- visible from the highway were:
17 churches
5 church billboards
4 tanning salons
4 gun shops
1 Starbucks

Starbucks is a really new feature in this landscape -- I was really surprised to see it there.

life imitates fiction

Thanks to Curtis who pointed me to the article at Boing Boing (which I'm really going to have to start reading more regularly) about Pringles preparing to put advertisements on individual potato chips. I feel like I have read something like this in a novel by Gibson or Sterling. Certainly in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age , which I highly recommend for anyone interested in the fate of print culture, animated advertising crawls on every surface and holographically chases passerby in exactly the ways some people predict RFID tracking may do in the near future. I just can't remember whether the ads were so literally ingested. Talk about cultural interpellation.

It also seems especially weird that the first advertising planned for Pringles is for a Trivial Pursuit game. Which will probably subconsciously appeal to people -- if you eat the facts, then maybe you will learn them.

It might be interesting to go back to late 80s science fiction and see what was being suggested for the "future." Remember when disposable cameras first came out? All I could think about when I first saw them on display in Target was The Man Who Fell to Earth, a great Nicolas Roeg cult fave of my teenage years. David Bowie plays the alien who comes to Earth in search of a way to bring water back to his home planet. He's got more advanced technology than Earthlings, and leaks it out bit by bit to raise a fortune to try to build a spaceship that can take him back. One of the key things he introduces were disposable cameras. There's much more in the film -- including one of the most memorable scenes I know of involving contact lenses...

naming

Somewhere, I know there are people whose entire job consists of appropriately naming things: products, streets, television shows, etc. Sometimes that seems like a fantasy career but other times I just have to wonder what they think they are doing. My yoga studio is in Wealthy Cultured Neighborhood, which is adjacent to Private University #1. Some of the people who live there are connected with Private University #1 (since their faculty make way more than those of us at Large Urban U) but others are the upper economic percentile of youngish professionals who are establishing families. It's maybe not as wealthy as some other neighborhoods in the city, but prides itself on the university atmosphere which is supposed to waft over the boulevards, infusing everything with cultural capital equivalent to the financial capital evidenced in the large houses and immaculate lawns. (In my neighborhood, most houses have 1 or more dogs, many of which are German Shepherds, Rottweilers, and Pit Bulls, often kept in the yard behind a fence to scare off intruders before they come too close. In Wealthy Cultured Neighborhood there are no fences, and no dogs visible. All you see are lawns and little signs that say "no dogs" with a slash through a picture of a pooping pooch. The security systems are silent, invisible, omnipresent.)

So, anyway, on the way to yoga I keep driving past a site of new home construction: a group of what they're calling "carriage houses" arranged around a central green space. Basically these are townhomes built over and around garages. What causes me to notice this particular site: it's going to be called Cheyne Walk. Now, Cheyne Walk, a street in the Chelsea neighborhood of London, is famous for many of its former residents -- but the one that comes first to my mind is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived at #16 for roughly ten years after his wife's death in 1862 -- ten years of incredible artistic productivity in both painting and poetry. Rossetti is one of the greatest poets and artists of the 19th century. He's also famous for an eccentric bohemian lifestyle: chloral addiction, numerous mistresses, exotic animals in the house, and much carousing. Hardly the sort of association you'd expect in Wealthy Cultured Neighborhood. So I have to wonder, do they have any idea who lived at Cheyne Walk? Or is it appealing just because it's a London street name?

absence

There's nothing like manual labor to remove all publishable thoughts from your brain. I've been reading blogs, but just couldn't come up with anything to add to the overwhelming amount of stuff out there.

Though it was satisfying to calculate that my gf and I purchased, hauled, carried, and installed close to 2,000 pounds of cement blocks over the weekend. Now the yard really should be escape-proof, even for terriers who like to dig.

create your own avatar

thanks to scribblingwoman for this link to online software to design your own avatar bit by bit. Creepy fun to look over pages of mouths, noses, etc...

zing in a glass

beverage of the day: green tea lemonade. (if you just soak the tea bags in cool water for a while you get a light, non-bitter tea -- then just add lemon juice and sugar)

question for the week

Last Thursday I talked to my colleague R. We both were up for tenure this year, and we both got it -- his case was more painful than mine, because he'd actually been up last year, but due to procedural mishandling by malevolent administrators, went up again this year. We both made it, which is great.

He asked me whether I'd been congratulated on this achievement. Pointing out what is an odd social failing in a department that actually is fairly civil (as English depts go). In some past years, the chair has announced tenurings at our last faculty meeting of the year; that didn't happen this year, I think as an oversight rather than deliberate snubbing. But in my dept people routinely manage to organize baby showers for faculty and staff; we can't manage a little reception, or even an email announcement, for people who've gotten tenure? (and don't even get me started on the heteronormativity of quasi-mandatory showers -- )

I'm not really concerned for myself personally, as I actually don't desire the limelight. To be fair, my chair said congratulations one on one to me when I told him I'd received the provost's letter (the final stage of decision-making at Large Urban U.). Those colleagues I'm close to already know I got tenure; the others might figure it out over the next few years. But I think it's significant in terms of what it says about academic professional/social culture. So my questions, for any readers who are associated with academic departments: does your dept mark tenure in any kind of way? or is it the great unspoken event? and why is that? no party because some people might have voted against the candidate? no party because we don't want to think about people who didn't make it? no party because there's the implicit (hypocritical) assumption that if you made it you should have and so it's not a big deal?

well, it is a big deal. So I'm just wondering if academic culture in other locations sustains rituals of some sort around this.