Sundays

Today has actually been a pretty nice day, for a Sunday. For a long time, as long as I can remember, I've really disliked Sundays. When I was a kid, Sunday was always the day my mother would (undoubtedly tired of having us around and perhaps dreading her own work week) start yelling at us about cleaning our rooms etc. It was also a day when everything was closed: in a small town in the Midwest, the mall was closed on Sundays -- up until I was maybe 14 or so, when most of the mall (and Target, which was nearby) started being open, although the department store was still closed because of religiosity. Not that we went to the mall that often, but it was the idea that everything was closed and that there was no escape from the fact that it was Sunday that bothered me. Plus, of course, I dreaded Monday's return to the tedium of school.

Now, I still loathe Sundays. There's always the pressure of the weekend's house/life tasks still undone, plus the academic workload -- the reading for the week's classes, the papers to grade. Which, combined with the fact that neighbors and people out and about are doing things like going to brunch and shopping and relaxing, often makes me grumpy. (I know, it's not rational, especially since I should be grateful I don't have their get up at 5 a.m. kind of schedule during the week.)

I try to have one day each week that is totally off from work (writing and teaching and department stuff). In past years it's generally been Friday or Saturday: Friday when I've had an exhausting long Thursday schedule, Saturday years ago when I was dating and had a fairly exciting social life. But my day off has never been Sunday. Maybe I should try that. But that would require working a lot on Fri and Sat.

At least this semester I'm on a Tues-Thurs teaching schedule, which I prefer to MW or MWF. But my grad seminar is on Tuesdays this term, which will put a lot of pressure on the weekends. (Of course, I could start prepping the next week's class on, say, Wed or Thurs of the week before, but that would not only require nearly superhuman will and organization, but also a review on Sun or Mon, since I do my best teaching after a fairly fresh rereading of the texts.)

Since I worked on putting together my new course syllabus yesterday, I wound up taking today off (although that wasn't exactly a conscious decision). Though it's hard for me to say exactly where the day went. Some time in the yard with the dogs, some computer time. Cooked a nice lunch. Cleaned the kitchen. Lots of laundry. Weeded out part of my closet, although I didn't really follow through on the whole job. But I've been pretty relaxed about it all today. I'm going to go to the park with the dogs soon, and then we're having dinner with my gf's father. If I can just keep the nervous Sunday grumpiness at bay, it will have been a good day.

a blogger question

Can anyone explain to me the reason for this problem I've been having lately? Whether you write the link http://infavorofthinking.blogspot.com or http://www.infavorofthinking.blogspot.com, it should work either way. But lately sometimes I'm having problems with the links without the "www" -- for my own and other Blogger sites. I get an error box that says "the file is not available on this server." From within Blogger, for instance, after I post, if I click on View your Blog, I get the error.
I'm using Firefox, if that makes any difference.

would appreciate any ideas. I can work around it, by changing the format of my links etc. But it's irritating.

what I've been watching lately

My gf returned to a more normal schedule this past week after several months involved in her art project -- so our shared domestic life is beginning to return to something like its usual schedule too. One nice thing is that we've been able to go to the movies a couple times this week as well as watch some at home.

• Open Water -- I'm not a big fan of horror movies -- but thriller/suspense is sometimes OK. You already know what's scary in this film -- and it's completely compelling. The whole scenario freaks me out to begin with (I'm way too claustrophobic and paranoid to do something like scuba dive) even before the sharks show up. But what's really interesting is that it's a relationship movie -- that's where its strength is. Whether you sympathize or are irritated with the couple, you understand them -- they are ordinary people in a relationship trying to be on vacation -- the sharks are, in a sense, just an literalization of the issues in their marriage. Bring your sweetie to the movie, though, you definitely need someone to hang on to in places -- the whole theater was filled with couples squinching closer and closer to each other.
  
• A Home at the End of the World -- Read The Book. No, really. The novel (by Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours) is complex, emotionally subtle, a rich and full reading experience. It follows the intertwined lives of four individuals over three decades -- with chapters from each character's point of view, Cunningham deftly plays with your readerly expectations. It's also wonderful in its dealing with US cultural history, late 60s thru 80s -- largely through music, which is an important thread in the book. The screenplay was also written by Cunningham, so I can't do the usual "bitch against the adapter missing the point of the whole novel thing." In order to fit the story into film format, he had to cut out so much. All the emotional complexity of the book gets telegraphed in obvious dialogue and truncated to fit the Hollywood arc. It is a beautiful film -- and for me, who'd read the book, there were parts I enjoyed just to see them realized on screen. But the richness of the novel doesn't come through -- my gf, who hadn't read it, found the whole thing fairly flat. So, let me reiterate: read the book.
  
• Sweet Sixteen (we saw on DVD) -- from Ken Loach. Good, if kind of bleak and depressing, focus on an almost-16 year old boy and his attempts to build a new life for himself and his mother, who's about to be released from jail. Note: we had to turn on the subtitles because the Scottish accents were so thick. Thank goodness for DVDs with those options.
  
• The Magdalene Sisters (DVD)-- another sort of depressing movie, this one in Ireland. Based on true accounts, the film follows several women incarcerated at a Magdalene community. Many of these women were put there by parents after having a child out of wedlock. It's pretty horrifying -- especially to remember that this was in the 1980s. Not the 1880s.
  
• Secret Window (DVD) -- Johnny Depp, John Turturro in a Stephen King thriller type of thing. Creepy in places but it had that short story feel to it ultimately.
  
• I've finally gotten hooked on Queer as Folk after several friends kept talking about it. I'd watched disk 1 of first season maybe a year ago or more, and hadn't gotten into it. But I started again a few weeks ago and am totally hooked. I watch almost no TV in regular life (we don't have cable, so all we get are Fox, WB, and PBS) but I love being able to get DVDs of TV shows thru Netflix. Perfect for when I have too much work to watch for 2 hours; perfect for when you want to know that you'll have a satisfying viewing experience. (Unlike starting a film that turns out to be not what you expected.) Sure, it's a soap opera -- and that's why it's fun.

mentoring

New Kid on the Hallway posted today about the Chronicle article on mentoring. It's an interesting piece, with examples drawn both from the humanities and from the sciences, as well as the corporate environment. Ultimately, the author strikes a middle ground -- neither for or against mentoring, but pointing out the differnet forms it takes, and the different effects it can have. New Kid's discussion, and the comments there, usefully highlight the complicated terrain for mentees. She suggests some of us have to learn how to be mentees, as well as mentors for future generations.

My own experiences with mentoring are pretty mixed. As an undergraduate, I was fortunate to find two outstanding faculty who really pushed me intellectually and supported my wish to go to graduate school. One of them later became a friend, in part due to geographical proximity for a while after I'd graduated -- we had to really work to transform the student-prof hierarchy, but it did eventually happen. The other has remained a sort of mentor figure to me, although we are rarely in touch now. I'm still intellectually very much in his debt -- and only wish I could have studied with him as a graduate student rather than just as an undergrad. This kind of mentoring was (and sometimes still is) exciting, challenging -- but also gives me butterflies in my stomach even now, when I think about sending him a current article of mine. I wish I didn't care so much about what he thought, but I do. I suspect that response is in part because I was so young when I met him -- but it feels uncomfortable now as I'm nearing my own middle age.

My first experience with graduate school didn't provide me with any mentor figures. I found a couple people willing to write me letters when I left that program for a different one. If I'd stayed past the MA degree things might have been different.

At my PhD institution, the politics of mentoring seemed far too bound up with the politics of bootlicking. There were several Big Egos in the department only too happy to have crowds of grad students to stroke them (figuratively but also occasionally literally). Never being a good follower or bootlicker, I walked a different sort of path. My diss committee was formed because of my intellectual interests, and basically left me with only one person to be my advisor. He suited me just fine -- of an older generation, but up on current scholarship, he let me develop my project pretty much free of his influence. He answered questions when I had them but didn't interfere with my choices. He was instrumental (in a subtle way I only recognized years afterwards) in getting me to submit a proposal for my first major conference -- something which set me off on the right foot in my field but also let me feel that I was doing it at least partly on my own merits, not his.

There were other faculty I admired and worked with in one way or another during those years, but none of them quite reached what either of us would consider "mentor" level. I think in part because I was a lousy mentee -- bad at what I perceived to be sucking up; awkward and unsure about what they expected from me; interested in pursuing my own project and my own professionalization as a teacher. I was busy teaching classes, working in a non-academic job, and training new TAs. I wasn't interested in playing the subservient role in what I saw in a lot of the so-called "mentoring" relationships around me.

With more distance (and perhaps clearer sight) from my graduate school experience, I'm able to better evaluate some of those examples. For myself, mentoring at the graduate level ought not to be about bootlicking. I'd like to think it was about introducing the profession; helping someone figure out his/her own viewpoint and goals; and eventually assisting with the transition from "student" to "colleague." But for some people bent on becoming star players themselves someday, some of that social grooming in the clique system might be exactly what they need.

During Large Urban's general Faculty Orientation, they issued each of the incoming faculty a book called Mentor in a Manual. I guess they figured that would take care of the issue. My department chair tried to start a mentoring program for junior faculty, but it never really took off. I think there's a sense that we all should know what mentoring is, and be good at it already -- but no one exactly knows what that would entail. Is it about the content or methodology of your work? is it about navigating the politics of the institution? is it about figuring out what academic life/work is all about? It could be any of those things -- but I imagine that it would be the rare "assigned" mentor who could provide those kinds of support. Gradually over time I developed friendships with some members of my dept who were able to advise me on some aspects of life within our department etc.

The idea of mentoring as it is often taken up in corporations or academic institutions assumes the old-style hierarchy: that power and knowledge are passed down from the elders to the newly-initiated. I'm not convinced that this model entirely holds true today in all aspects of academic life. Certainly, I can learn about the politics of my institution from its senior members. But because of my training and experiences as a graduate student, I actually know a lot more about the current state of academic publishing than someone who published their book 10-15 years ago. Large Urban U is not a top-tier institution; but increasingly, like many other mid-level or low-level research universities, it is staffed with people with degrees from top-level places. This is changing the landscape of knowledge in ways that the conventional mentoring dynamic doesn't address.

The Chronicle article mentions peer-mentoring dynamics as an alternative model, and I think that's really important to consider -- not as a replacement, but as an accompaniment to the hierarchical model. I learned a tremendous amount from someone who was only 2 years ahead of me in the tenure system -- and I'm trying to do the same for someone we just hired a year ago.

Why the long essay? Our blogs offer a way to make sense of our own experiences, but also offer them up as part of a way to change the knowledge landscape of academe. Academic institutions vary tremendously, as do the disciplines; but overall one consistent factor is that a lot of the "rules" of professionalization go unsaid. By the time you've learned how things work, you forget that you didn't always already know that stuff. I made a commitment when I was in graduate school to try and not forget what the experience of being a PhD student was like; similarly I've made the commitment to not forget what the experience of being a junior faculty member is like. Only by remembering can I hope to create some positive change in the system for people after me.

yesterday

Well, my no-blog-at-the-office rule meant that I didn't post at all yesterday -- because I was actually being productive at my office at the U. Not only did I finally sit down and wrestle with my ideas for my new course, thereby making it slightly less daunting, but I cleaned my desk. For the first time since I was hired at Large Urban (this will be my 7th academic season here) I completely emptied every drawer. This is part of my plan to Make the Office Seem New and Inviting to Work In: I've rearranged the furniture and am reorganizing and purging stuff. Among the strange/useless items I found in my desk (an old metal thing circa 1961, like most of our furniture -- Large Urban is woefully underfunded by the state):

• Large Urban promotional items that I must have received at Faculty Orientation my 1st year, although I have no memory of them: a tie tack, a letter opener, and a mug
• thank-you cards from 2 secretaries for gifts for their wedding & baby showers
• at least 3 different little bottles with echinacea capsules in them -- obviously from 3 different cold/flu seasons
• a box of chalk, which I've never ever used and which is now worthy of museum placement, since our building is completely whiteboarded now
• some sad-looking teabags of indeterminate age
• at least 50 interoffice envelopes, thereby proving that they breed in dark corners and are still never available when you need them
• worst of all: the Aged Cough Drop which had, like a spider, divested itself of its essence, leaving only its still-twisted wrapper glued in place like a discarded exoskeleton. The right side of my middle drawer is now declared No Man's Land for the In-Service office supplies: one brave little stubby pencil already got glued down from the cough drop which managed to spread itself over quite a lot of territory.

I'm feeling so much better having done this. Next week, if my syllabi are done, I'm going to tackle the file cabinet.

current reading

Since I really enjoy learning what other people are currently reading, I'll join in. After gulping down Gibson's Pattern Recognition, as previously noted, which I really enjoyed, then I had terrible luck with my library picks. Got only partway through various mediocre things.

But now I'm on the upswing again, after a better trip to the library. I just finished Greg Bear's Darwin's Children, which continues my recent history of picking up sequels, which really sucks. If you read #2 first, #1 is not nearly so satisfying, since you've already read the recap of its events. (C J Cherryh's Cloud's Rider was thoroughly enjoyable, but then I tried to read Rider at the Gate, the first one, and couldn't even get past chapter 2.) I liked some aspects of Darwin's Children, which describes the political and scientific ramifications of a new kind of human being born (due to viruses) -- but the quasi-spiritual elements didn't really fit very well with the anthropology, sociology, etc.

I just started Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing. I love Powers, although I can only read him at certain times of year/certain times of day: I have to feel smart enough. He's received one of those McArthur genius awards, and certainly seems to merit one, based on the novels I've read. I've avoided this one until now because its ostensible subject matter seemed too daunting: classical/opera music, race relations in the 1960s, identity, family. But I'm giving it a try, and his always-compelling language is drawing me in. But if you haven't read any Powers, I'd recommend Operation Wandering Soul or Galatea 2.2 as a start. The latter if you like metafiction/SF, the former if you're less inclined that way.

For my fluffhead minutes of the day, I'm reading Slim Chance, a fairly weak chick-lit book. I've read a lot of what I'd call the good stuff of the genre and this isn't it. But it's readable enough. It's the book version of Pringles. Tasty, not particularly good for you, but not heroin either. (Besides, I sort of have an ulterior motive for reading chick-lit brewing in the back of my mind. In case you care.)

Stephen Cope's Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, which I've been slowly and intermittently reading for a couple months.

Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement. More on this later.

E M Forster's Howard's End which is only still on the list as a "should." I'm finding it horribly bitter and dyspeptic.

Julie Morgenstern's Organizing from the Inside Out, an old favorite which I pulled out for inspiration as I tackle my home study and school office.

why I read blogs

I've used up almost all of my afternoon "blogtime" reading and commenting elsewhere. There's been lots of interesting discussion going on in two related threads -- one the Stephen Krause - Profgrrrl conversation; the other begun by Apt 11D reviving the question of personal vs political blogs (and the gendered assumptions about the value of each.) There are lots of good comments happening everywhere in these links.

As I've commented elsewhere, I don't really see the utility in declaring that one way of blogging (or writing, or teaching, or living) is the One True Right Pure Way and others are Weak Irrelevant Effeminate or Dumb. Yes, I'm exaggerating. A bit. But the arrogance and defensiveness that comes up in a lot of these conversations suggests that there are much deeper cultural issues at work. Some of my hypotheses & observations:

• it is threatening to those who are invested in the system to realize that there are participants in the system who are criticizing it (or perhaps not even talking about it or them at all)
  
• because a myth of meritocracy is rampant throughout academic hiring & promotion practices, the most expedient way to attempt to shut down criticism is to claim that the critics are not articulate or not smart or not qualified enough
  
• much of this conversation continues to reinforce, rather than deconstruct, the binary between personal and public identity and voice, precisely because those who are invested in the maintaining the system the way it is are threatened by the political implications of the personal. Yup, basic feminism 101.

So, bypassing the many reasons why I write this blog, why do I read blogs (both pseudonymous and nym'd)?

• so-called "academic blogs" offer me understanding of a range of experiences and points of view (female, male, untenured, adjunct, tenured, senior, administrative, etc) from within academia in the largest sense. Most of us in our day-to-day interactions deal with people from one department, or one college. Maybe the whole university, but that's rare on a daily basis unless you're a top administrator.
  
• blogs create new possibilities for community and dialogue -- within and beyond our professional identities. Understanding your own experience and its larger significance improves by comparing it with that of others.
  
• many individuals are in departments, fields of study, or institutions that are not especially supportive, welcoming, or open to change. Blogs offer them support and encouragement. Even though my own department is fairly congenial and has been fairly supportive of me personally, there are many issues that I want to discuss that I don't particularly feel like sharing with the office grapevine. Seeing outside the particular institutional box one finds oneself within is often really clarifying.
  
• blogs offer ways for academics to communicate beyond our own little ivory tower world. I read non-academic blogs, too -- because my identity encompasses so much more than my PhD.
  
• blogs are one of the most lively forms of publishing currently going on. Blogs are all about reading writing. Not only have I learned about other people's lives -- I have been daily impressed with the style, verve, thoughtfulness, and pleasure to be found in reading the words of so many diverse minds. The more the merrier.

credit where it is due

I realize that in my last two posts I have inadvertantly adopted a mannerism of one of my favorite blog reads, Mimi Smartypants. (the use of exclamation marks! in series! etc!)

Let it be widely known that Mimi Smartypants invariably makes me laugh, often out loud. She is way funnier than David Sedaris (and I mention this only because she has a book deal in progress based on her blog). I thought I was the only person who had ever spilled a whole bottle of olive oil -- but I was certainly not nearly so funny about it.

You could start almost anywhere on her blog -- and since she frequently cross-references, you can jump back a year or more too with no apparent loss of fresh humor ingredients.

But here's a good sequence:

1. start here
2. next
3. third

(these are consecutive so you can also just click to the next one yourself)

So, I may not be able to eradicate the exclamation marks because I really kinda like them . . . but I wanted to provide adequate citation for the habit.

Mel goes to the mall

So, yes, I did go shopping. I actually went to one of the malls, which I very rarely do -- I get most of my clothes at discount places (TJ Maxx, Loehmanns, etc) or at Old Navy, none of which are in malls. In fact, I think the last time I was shopping in the mall was Dec 23, when my gf and I went to do some last-minute errands for the holidays. (Not exactly the best time to go to the mall.) So it was fun today to just browse around and explore the current state of mall fashion culture, which is not something I'm in touch with always.

I tried on a lot of things, but only bought one pair of black jeans marked down to $15. Not exactly what I was looking for (teaching clothes), but too good to pass up. I'll just have to go check out the stuff at TJ Maxx sometime as a reward for good behavior.

Along the way, I saw a lot of clothes I would have loved when I was about 14 or so. The 80s really are back now, with the worst bits of the 70s sprinkled in (pink polyester crocheted ponchos???). But I definitely remember the flounced/tiered mini-skirts and bright-colored tights, the pointy shoes. All these little layered and shredded t-shirts, so Flashdance. But I'm sure I'm not really reading the semiotics correctly. For instance: when I was in high school, if you wore a black belt covered with those pointy metal studs, it meant you listened to the Sex Pistols, you drank cough syrup to get high, and you pierced your own ears with safety pins. But I suspect the studded belts (which now come in baby pink! and powder blue! and pearl white!) mean something different today.

It's chastening to realise how much this makes me sound like an old fart. Whenever I see girls with an armful of black rubber bracelets, I want to sit them down and tell them how I vividly remember the first time I saw a picture of Madonna. I was sitting in the public library of my hometown, where I would avidly read all the fashion magazines, even though they were kept behind the desk and you had to ask the old drooly librarian guy for them (please, could I see the current Mademoiselle? or Seventeen?). They didn't keep the "guy" magazines behind the desk, except for the SI swimsuit issue. Anyway, I had a deeply ambivalent relationship to dominant culture even then, and I had very little money, so I preferred to read them for free where I could maintain my ironic proto-punk distance but still scoop up important tips about acne prevention and eyeliner application. Anyway, I think it was Mademoiselle, but maybe it was Glamour -- I don't remember which magazine any longer -- Madonna served as the model for a spread on denim, which she wore with her own signature look -- circa Lucky Star, so tons of jewelry, the rubber bracelets, lingerie, eyeliner, big hair. The text said something like "Model is up and coming NYC singer Madonna." I was blown away by the picture -- it made a huge impression, though I never tried to imitate her (except for some rubber bracelets and a bunch of rhinestones at one point). I'd love to see that magazine spread again, although I'm sure it's stronger in memory.

Sure, there were some elements in 80s style that were recycled -- shoulder pads from the 40s, the skinny ties & the zoot suit style some of the New Wave bands had -- the New Romantics/Adam Ant pirate look (!), of course -- plenty of fashion quotation happening then. But it seemed that some things were uniquely 80s: plastic (bracelets, earrings, shoes); neon (everything); the hair, the eyeshadow. I just wonder what 14-year-olds today will remember 22 years from now. I'm sure it's nothing I could see at the mall today with my nearly-middle-aged eyes.

But everything is so much more multifaceted now too. Pre-MTV, it was a lot harder to get your rockstar duds down at the mall. You had to order Doc Martens out of the back of Rolling Stone (at least if you lived in a smallish Midwestern town). I was really happy today to see a place called Torrid next to Hot Topic, which where all the young mallGoths get their stuff -- Torrid is basically the same but for sizes 12-24 -- they had three awesome looking big girls working in there, making life a lot better for a lot of adolescents than it used to be.

So, even though I didn't buy much, I had a good time.

list misc

There's this thing called del.icio.us which describes itself as a "social bookmarks manager". Basically it lets you share your bookmarks with other people, which I find completely incomprehensible as to why I would want to (sorta like downloading songs on my cell). But I understand that other people enjoy, maybe even need, to do this.

But today, as I'm catching up on blogs (being more than 12 hours behind, gasp) I'm thinking how comforting it is to see everybody's lists. Maybe this is the academic equivalent of bookmark trading.

So, which of these many things shall I actually do today?

• go to afternoon yoga, having got up too groggy to go to the morning session [No, but I went to the gym instead]
• go shopping for some new teaching clothes because my old favorites are showing their age
• work on the massive reorganization project in my home office
• think about syllabi? [a little]
• laundry & vacuuming
• take dogs to park
• work even a little bit on current research/writing project
• read blogs, comment, post some more
• cook something good for dinner since I've been eating weird miscellaneous food the past 2 days

I really, really want to go shopping. There are back to school sales! it's that time of year! get in the spirit! Damn, I'm just a slave of capitalism. But I haven't bought any new teaching clothes in a very long time. And the jeans and t-shirts I wear all summer just won't cut it in 2 weeks. The question is whether I just get off my ass now and go before it's mid-day, or force myself to "do work or chores" first. Which might mean I never go.

word!

I know, that's so old-skool. But I like it.

You know how it is when you learn a new word, and all of a sudden you see it everywhere? Which is probably nothing more than your attention being sharpened to what was already in front of you. The universe is full of unrecognized connections.

Well, that word for me this week isn't just a word, but a person -- George H Williams -- who I don't know IRL -- and whose blog I occasionally look at (link in my list to the right). I wrote in response to an item on his blog 2 days ago. And then yesterday, I'm reading the Chronicle of Higher Ed (yup, sad to say it's one of my main sources of interesting info) and there's an article with a picture of the aforementioned GHW (in the 8/6 issue) detailing his involvement with Skin.

Now, all the cool kids obviously already knew about this amazing project begun by Shelley Jackson (author of the hypertext Patchwork Girl and many other things). She's written a story called Skin, and is publishing it, one word at a time, on the skin of volunteers who agree to get tattooed in a classic book font with the word she issues them. These volunteers are then called her "words", functioning as the embodiment of her text. According to her website she's behind in her correspondence due to an RSI -- there are approximately 350 words left to be issued, but it's not clear whether they will all go to people who've already written to her, or if she's still taking applications.

There's a post with many comments on GHW's site, including his thoughts about how the project exposes "cultural anxieties about permanence and impermanence, and that these anxieties are heightened in a digital age, where words seem to vanish from the screen as soon as we shut down our electronic reading devices." What I also find compelling about it is the way it makes evident the interconnection of multiple agents and a single author in the construction, distribution, and manifold interpretations of a text. Every text inevitably means more, or in different ways, than its author "intended"; every text has many hands at work in shaping it.

Do I want (to be) a word? Yeah. Though of course that also raises issues of another sort. Saram's essay on waiting for her word (which turned out to be "the") captures many of my own thoughts: what if you get a word you don't like? not just in terms of content, but there are words that are disturbing in their sound or shape. You have right of refusal, but then you don't get a 2nd word. You're either in or out.

Plus, my first tattoo (and my plans for a 2nd one) was all about signifying something to me, marking a specific time in my life. My idea for the design, selection of a model, my choice of an artist to modify it and create the tattoo, the placement of it -- all under my control. To be a word in this project would remove some of that control. But it would also be pretty amazing.

my pirate name

I saw it first from Jimbo: the quiz to determine your pirate name

My pirate name is:

Captain Ethel Flint

Even though there's no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you're the one in charge. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Captain, and Flint, I can go for. But Ethel? I guess that's what happens when you type in Mel. Sigh. I mean, Arr!

what do we do, anyway

Three related questions -- one a long time ago, two today:

1. In an elevator, late in the evening at an MLA convention, a bewildered drunken couple obviously in the city for vacation, not realizing that they'd be sharing the hotel with several thousand literature and language professors, accost me and ask "what is it that you people do anyway?" (I first mumbled something about it's a conference, we read papers -- getting blank stare in response. Then I said we meet to talk about teaching, and he at least nodded because that made some kind of sense to him.)
   
2. Today I was talking with a friend who's reading Middlemarch who asked "what is it I'm supposed to be looking for? how do I know when my ideas make sense?" (my answers on that later)
   
3. George Williams has posted one of his goals for his blog: "making clear to people who are not scholars of language and literature what scholars of language and literature do for a living." His excellent post, with good links, responds to a variety of conservative attacks on the profession of English (at, for example, Erin O'Connor's and Joanne Jacobs's sites) in part by pointing out that although the right wing likes to criticize what they think is happening in college classrooms, there are very few accounts of what it is that we actually do, or should do.

I don't usually visit the conservative academic-bashing sites because I'm not really interested in rehashing age-old debates that I don't really see as debates (i.e., the status of "the" canon, etc). But George is right that the rest of us who blog do have an opportunity to claim part of the conversation by representing what it is that we do. Of course I model that every day in the classroom, and sometimes talk about it in conversation with non-academics. But, for the record, here are some of my thoughts about what it is that I do:

• I introduce students to ideas, texts, and modes of analysis that they have not encountered previously (how to read a poem; how to read a Victorian poem; how to write a persuasive essay describing an interpretation of that poem; etc)
  
• I introduce students to texts that they may find beautiful, troubling, perplexing, sympathetic, difficult, annoying, exciting, or any other sort of response. I don't limit, praise, or criticize their response; I focus on teaching them to articulate and explain that response by reference to specific passages of the work in question and/or other relevant texts.
  
• I teach my students skills (of research & analysis) to understand the language, form, and cultural context of works from other historical periods and/or cultures.
  
• I introduce students to concepts in history, philosophy, art/aesthetics, politics, religion, geography, scientific thought, and anything else that is relevant to the particular text under study so that they can have a richer understanding of both the pool of allusions within the text and the culture which produced the text.
  
• I teach my students to listen carefully to the interpretations of others -- whether the comments of their peers, the published scholarship, or my own comments -- and to engage in dialogue with those different interpretations. A text only gets richer and more complex once you've explained why it means what it does to you.
  
• Because many of my courses deal with materials from the 19th century, I also introduce students to the basic history (political, economic, cultural) of the period so that they can begin to draw connections and make distinctions between that historical moment and our own.
  
• I introduce students to the many different functions literature played in 19th-century society, and encourage them to make comparisons to the functions of literature and other forms of art and popular culture today.
  
• I don't presume that my students will remember particular poems or novels ten years from now -- maybe a couple will, maybe a couple will actually have recommended a book to someone else, or re-read it years later. But what I do hope they take from my class:
  • an increased interest in how texts work;
  • an increased ability to analyze any text -- literature, advertising, political speech, television, film -- to discern not just its overt message but also its rhetoric and its larger cultural implications.
  • a belief that reading, writing, and communicating ideas are worth the time it takes.

I'm sure there's more but that's a start.

I Robot U Robot

Last night I finally got out to see I, Robot -- I'd loved those Asimov stories when I was younger. From age 11 to about 14 or so, I only read science fiction -- which meant I read everything -- good, bad, indifferent. Much of it doesn't stick with me at all now, but I remember the robot stories -- partly because in addition to being about robots (always a plus) they involved ethical quandaries and logical puzzles. The movie of course emphasizes the thriller/detection parts -- the robo-psychologist character, who's really strong in the book, is unfortunately diminished (because how would you sell a movie about a smart woman psychologist instead of a male action hero?). But it was enjoyable enough in the watching.

I would expect that we'll see more movies about robots in the next few years as the technology begins to catch up to the SF (these stories are from the 50s). A couple of years ago, there was Spielberg's beautiful, if too long and too Oedipal, meditation on boundaries of the human. A bit ahead of the curve. The presentation of the robots in this film, however, is probably a bit closer to what will eventually happen -- robots used to assist humans with tasks, rather than emulating personalities. But then eventually the code evolves. Plus, humans impart personalities to their robots, as I mentioned before with the Roomba.

Why more movies about robots? Sure, there's the general anxiety about technology run amok, wired culture, the death of human values, etc. But robots are an excellent analogue for fascism or slavery or even the corporate enslavement of underdeveloped nations. This movie made a few gestures in that direction -- enough to make me want to reread the Asimov stories to see their political echoes. The film was also glaringly filled with product placements -- his futuristic Audi car, his "retro" converse sneakers, FedEx, and many others. The reason the dangerous robots can have power in the film's story is largely because of consumerism -- people encouraged to trade in their old models for new -- the film nicely encapsulates the double-edges of late capitalism -- consumerism for identity (his much-commented on sneakers) and consumerism as threatening identity (the consumers trading up & the army of robots marching in the streets). Humans make the robots but also are the robots.

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.