Vaulting and Vellum

This May Seem Like a Strange Question...

2012-02-01T15:33:00.000-05:00

Someone asked me the other day, and I really couldn't come up with a satisfactory response:

"Why, in English departments, do we write book-length works of "criticism"?"

Oh, in the past, I think it was because there were essentially two options: small things, that is to say, articles which could be compiled in paper journals or book-length publications; or monographs of book length, for book-length publication.

Maybe it's only a question to me because I can't at this point imagine having a book's-worth of analytical things to say on a single topic, or perhaps because, being raised in the digital age, I feel a peculiar affinity for middling-length pieces for which there never used to be any applicable publishing medium. Or perhaps I've read too many book-length works of analysis that really could have been two or three short papers but felt the need to expand themselves to the size of a book for economic (or other?) reasons.

This isn't to imply any sort of value judgement. I'm just throwing this out there.

What do you think? That is, if a) there is a you reading this, and b) you have thoughts.

A Message from the Past

2011-12-20T20:18:00.000-05:00

The Ghost of Christmas Past sent me an alumni relations letter today. I think it's a jpeg from the early 90s. I was tempted to dust off my old 386 and see if it would look any better in Windows 3.1 - what do you think, readers?

Is this a sign that my overseas alma mater is so short on cash that they've gone back to their old store rooms and unpacked the old Apple IIs? Should I be sending them whatever I can spare out of my below-the-poverty-line stipend? Only time will tell.

Liege

2011-12-13T22:22:00.000-05:00

I read this article about the attack in Liege today. Not that I think anyone over there will ever find their way to our little corner of the web, but first let it be said our thoughts are with you.

But I study language, and the language in the article said something I couldn't ignore:

"The latest victim to die was an 18-month-old girl whom doctors had fought for several hours to save."

They fought for several hours.

It's a common enough phrase. When doctors work all-out, we say they're fighting to save a life. But who are they fighting?

I think it was Laurence Lessig who pointed out that in Western culture, we wage war on everything. In America especially. War on Drugs. War on Poverty. War on Homelessness. War on crime. We're fighting hunger, fighting sickness, fighting inequality.

So when we say the doctors were fighting to save an 18-month-old girl, who do we say they were fighting? We don't say it out loud.

I'm not sure why we don't. Maybe it's out of fear, respect, or wonder at our own tenacity. Those doctors, if they were fighting at all, were fighting the one thing some people might say we have no right to fight: death itself.

I don't say that.

I'm not saying I want to live forever. But I sure wouldn't mind pushing back the inevitable for a few hundred years. Maybe even a few hundred years past that. You never know, we may be the last generation to ever have to die. Technology's progressing. If the singularity arrives I'll give you a call.

Talk about a bottom-of-the-ninth home run that'd be: the real shot heard round the world.

Sprint to the Finish

2011-11-27T20:07:00.000-05:00

Sorry we haven't been posting more, dear readers. Who would ever have thought teaching and taking classes (while, in Vaulting's case, holding down a full-time job to boot) to take such time? Nevertheless, as we all enter the home stretch, the sprint to the finish, we'd like to take a moment out of our schedules to wish you all the very best. Unless a miracle takes place, you'll hear from us some time after the 21st of December. Good luck to you all.

Best,

V & V.

"Happy Veterans' Day"

2011-11-11T18:21:00.000-05:00

Every now and then I'm struck by a major cultural difference between the United States and my home and native land. November the 11th is certainly one of those times. Today I spent half an hour watching the services going on in Ottawa, because there wasn't anywhere here paying attention. Judging by one comment I saw on Facebook today, I feel as though perhaps I wouldn't have wanted to go anyhow.

"Happy Veterans' Day" it said. I think that's missing the point.

Today isn't a day for flag-waving, for patriotism, for nationalism. In Canada we call it "Remembrance Day," and it's a time for just that: remembrance.

We remember those who served: those who died and those who lived, forever changed by the service that we asked of them. We remember that war is not glorious, it is not heroic, it is not fair. We remember that those of us who have not fought are ourselves in some measure responsible for the suffering of those who have. We remember that there is no price we can pay, that there are no words we can say, that can make up for their sacrifice. We cannot repay that debt with simple gratitude. We remember that war is and should be a measure of last resort, and we weigh its consequences with heavy hearts.

But it is right and necessary that we do this. Attention must be paid.

We do not say "happy" anything.

We say "we remember."

We say "Je me souviens."

"Medieval" my foot: a rant.

2011-11-10T19:06:00.000-05:00

You know what really irks me? What really gets under my skin? When people can't be bothered to think about the words they're using. Most specifically (and thoroughly unsurprising), for me, it's the improper use of the word "medieval". It's a word near an dear to my heart.

So that said, what's got me rolling is this paragraph from an article linked to today by Boingboing.net:

It's a blog post called "Medieval Marketing" by a fellow named Grant McCracken, a research affiliate at MIT, and the author of a book called Chief Culture Officer. The problem with this article isn't that it's wrong. That I really can't say. Mostly, I think the article was about modern advertising techniques. Or perhaps post-modern ones. Past "form follows function" to the enticement of a mystery. Lovely.

But as far as I can tell, it's got nothing to do with the medieval. The only place the word even shows up, apart from the title, is in this paragraph:

The medieval world took for granted that the universe was filled with secret messages, placed there by God and the correspondences on which the world was built. What did not come from God or nature was made by man in the form of emblems, icons, and insignia insinuated into public life. The home of Sir Francis Bacon was covered with arcana. Only people with a keen eye and a university education could make sense of it.

Take note of those links in there, too. I preserved them just for you. Have you looked? Do you know what I'm going to say next? Please, allow me:

Elizabeth I was not medieval. Sir Francis EXPLETIVE Bacon WAS NOT MEDIEVAL. A book called "The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-page in England, 1550-1660" is not nor cannot be in ANY WAY ABOUT THE MEDIEVAL because one of the ways we've decided where the modern era begins is WITH INVENTION OF THE EXPLETIVE EXPLETIVE PRINTING PRESS.

deep breath

Look, I don't know if this guy's ideas are valid. The ones about marketing and culture probably are. But come the heck on: if you can't use the word "medieval" right, just leave it to the experts, will you? And please, leave the Dan Brown schlock out of it too. Sub Rosa my ass.

This rant has been brought to you by the Foundation for Stress-Free Graduate Students, the letter 3 and the number Q.

Dispatch From the Department of Redundancy Department

2011-11-08T08:48:00.000-05:00

Regarding a minor but persistent annoyance:

"Compare and contrast" -- let's stop saying this, shall we?

The former means to examine similarities and differences, and the latter means to merely examine the differences.

Unless you really want the differences twice, please stop asking your students to do both. I'm tired of having to explain to smart-alecky students that yes, it is completely redundant (if agreeably alliterative) to use both.

Sincerely,

Vellum
Chief Pedant
Department of Redundancy Department

Quick: write about something that isn't politics!

2011-10-23T00:21:00.000-04:00

I've been having trouble not posting about political things recently, as you may have noticed. So instead, I'm going to post about a book I read recently: Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story". I'm going to try not to include snark, but I'm sorely tempted.

See, the thing is, the book is an absolute darling to the critics. The New York Times called it "a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts he demonstrated in his entertaining 2002 debut... but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality." Salon.com said it is "a high-wire act, pulling off a novel that’s simultaneously so biting and so compassionate... Shteyngart, while unfailingly shrewd and funny, wasn’t always this tender." Ron Charles, writing for WaPo, says "This may be the only time I've wanted to stand up on the subway and read passages of a book out loud."

And I really, really didn't like it. At all.

And I've been trying to figure out why.

Shteyngart has created a New York of the (supposedly) near future, where consumerism, techno-centrism, and solipsism rule. The story follows the day-to-day life of one Lenny Abramov, son of Russian Jewish immigrants, living in an America on the verge of economic (and moral) bankruptcy. Dollars come in two varieties: regular and Yuan-pegged; a cheerful cartoon otter decorates the US embassies of the world, with the caption "The Boat Is Full, Amigo!"; people of all creeds and colours spend their time glued to a device called an äppärät (read: more engrossing iPhone) ordering clothing from clothing stores named "JuicyPussy" and "AssLuxury"; the "younger generation" speak in abbreviations like JBF (Just Butt-F*cking) and TIMATOV (Think I'M About To Openly Vomit); books, sorry "bound, printed, nonstreaming media artifacts", are only for the old, because the kind of literacy needed to enjoy Tolstoy is over.

It's satire, though, and so this is supposed to be okay.

...Except.

See, the way I think satire is supposed to work is, well, take my favourite example: Swift's "Let's Feed Irish Babies to the Poor" (known more properly as his "Modest Proposal"). In it, Swift adopts a point of view opposite to his own and magnifies it to the point of absurdity to make it clear how batsh*t insane this idea is. So he's not saying "hey, let's take those Irish babies and feed them to the Irish poor -- it'll kill two birds with one stone" he's saying "this is this kind of crap you d*ckheads are proposing and it really has to STOP." See also: Steven Colbert.

And if that's the way this book were operating, I think I'd be more on board with it. This book takes all the things that old, curmudgeonly people are afraid of about the current pace of progress, all the "get-off-my-lawn" crap like "kids these days don't know how to read", "kids these days have no attention span", "kids these days are too sexualized", and "kids these days are crude disgusting excuses for human beings", and turns them into a reality. Turning those dials (as Nigel Tufnel might say) "to eleven" makes those criticisms seem ludicrous.

Because, let's face it, they are ludicrous. The future is scary as hell, but it's also promising as heck. Thanks to the primarily text-based web, more people read than ever before. And if it's not the classics, then it's in new modes of literacy -- in the creation and distribution of videos, images, memes -- hell, we're even crowdsourcing science-fiction storylines and selling them to movie-makers now! We're remixing, redistributing, reinventing ourselves every day and it's not shallow, it's not coarse, it's not in any way a lessening of ourselves as a culture. It's bigger, it's better and it's way the hell scarier than that. It's NEW. And that doesn't always mean "out with the old," but it does sometimes mean a shift away from it.

Which is, I think, the problem I have with this book. You see, I don't think it's satire. I think I wish it were satire. But I've met Gary Shteyngart, and I don't honestly think it is.

I think the way the creation of this book went was that he took all the things he didn't like about our culture -- the misogyny, the consumerism, the solipsism, the growth in what only a member of the New York Literati could call "illiteracy" -- and yes, he turned them "to eleven". But he didn't do it to prove the absurdity of fearing them. He did it to try to show that the misogyny, consumerism, et al. were absurd. He's not saying that being afraid of change is absurd; he's saying that the direction our culture is headed in is absurd.

And I like the direction our culture is headed in.

Because I don't think we're anywhere near as consumerist, misogynist, technology-addled, over-sexed, and terrified of human contact as he seems to. Having seen him speak in person I believe he actually links technological culture -- blogging, vlogging, tweeting, facebooking, and so forth -- with a crippling, world-changing solipsism, and with the consumerism, misogyny, and "illiteracy" that accompanies it.

But I don't think his book can ever support it.

In person, he spoke of the death of journalism, of how something great was being lost. He spoke of how, in his book, everyone's a broadcaster -- but they're broadcasting inane garbage to nobody, because everyone's so involved in their own lives that they never actually listen to other people.

In the book, there are "Media" people (always with a capital-M) who broadcast in real-time from their äppäräti to tens of thousands of viewers. But try as he might to suggest that this is about too many broadcasters and not enough viewers (or, as he repeatedly said to us, too many MFA-endowed novelists and not enough readers) the novel shows something different. To me, anyway. To me, it shows a digital world where news has been democratized. Where the censors can't stop local news about local protests getting around, because they can't block every feed. Where an ordinary schmoe can get the eyes and ears of ten thousand viewers with a glorified iPhone for five minutes to rant about politics, society, or culture.

I guess what it comes down to is that I'm optimistic about the future, and this book couldn't be further from it. I guess I don't find it very funny because I think it's over the top for the wrong reasons. And I guess I feel like even Shteyngart can't paint a picture of a future I won't like.

"On the Eve of Change," or, "What I Wish I'd Hear From The Mouth Of A Politician In America"

2011-10-16T21:15:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, when I'm bored or frustrated, I take a little time to practice my rhetoric and polemic. I think to myself, in a perfect world, what would my ideal political candidate say in a speech? And then, because I'm me and not someone sensible, I waste an hour of my life writing that speech. As Vaulting has said (even today) "You have some weird hobbies." And so, without further ado, a political speech by no-one and to everyone, promising the world and asking for patience.

*Our hero, the POLITICIAN enters STAGE RIGHT. S/he stands at the podium before a crowd.

POLITICIAN: When soon-to-be president John F. Kennedy took to the podium in 1960, he spoke about a “new frontier,” and also about the old one. On a July night, he stood in Los Angeles accepting the Democratic Party's nomination for the presidential candidacy, and he tapped into something beautiful and something brutal, something that at once spoke of the proud age of the country and of its future: the very myth of America.

*The POLITICIAN pauses, then continues.

POLITICIAN: He said:

“I stand tonight facing west on the what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West.”

He called upon all Americans, who he said “stand today on the edge of a new frontier... a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats... For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand on this frontier at a turning point in history.”

He was talking about the long and sometimes regretfully executed “twilight struggle” of the cold war. For Kennedy the forces that posed the danger were external. The forces of communism. The forces of dictatorship. The forces of despotism.

*The POLITICIAN looks meaningfully at the crowd, and continues.

POLITICIAN: But today we stand on a different precipice. We stand at another turning point.

Today there are two visions of the West fighting for supremacy. On the one hand we have fear, and we have greed, and we have the relentless individualism that characterizes not only “what's mine is mine” but also “might makes right”. We have the idea that we don't owe anyone anything because we did it all ourselves, on our own.

On the other hand we have an older, more dignified vision of the American Dream. We have the America of the last century that said to the world with open arms, send us your tired and poor, send us your huddled masses yearning to be free. Give them to us, because they are like us. Give them to us so that we might help.

For Kennedy, the forces that posed the danger were external. But today things are different.

Today the new frontier we must bravely face is inside ourselves. Today the new frontier is one of compassion. Compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves. Compassion for the sick, the old, the tired, the unemployed. Compassion for a broken America yearning to be fixed.

And we can fix it.

But it can't be done in half-measures. We can't just put a patch on things and say “that'll do”. We've done that too many times of late. Fixing America isn't something that can be done overnight. It isn't something that can be done with a single bill or a single election.

Kennedy was asking America to gear up for a long twilight struggle, and so am I. But this isn't a struggle that can be won with backdoor deals and tradecraft, not with guns and not with fear. Today I'm asking you to settle into the trenches and fight for the restoration of a Compassionate America. An America that sets the bar higher for what its citizens can expect. An America that treats the downtrodden with respect. An America that asks more of itself. An America filled with good, honest, hard-working Americans that says with open arms to each other and to the world, we're in this together.

*The AUDIENCE breaks into applause, and the POLITICIAN puts up a placating hand before delivering a final line.

POLITICIAN: It's time to face that new frontier. Let's do it together.

*There is much APPLAUSE and also HEAD SCRATCHING.

*EXEUNT OMNES, pursued by A BEAR.

It's been a long day.

Liberty is one of the 99%

2011-10-15T20:51:00.000-04:00

Today, you may have noticed a lot of stuff going down in a city near you, all tied up with the We Are The 99% movement. So I thought I might share something I learned recently.

When the Statue of Liberty was being built, there wasn't a lot of support from the people up top. They desperately needed 100,000 dollars to build something for the statue to stand on. Grover Cleveland, then mayor of NYC, vetoed a bill to provide half that money. Congress couldn't get its act in gear. The next bit is actually from Wikipedia:

The New York committee, with only $3,000 in the bank, suspended work on the pedestal. With the project in jeopardy, groups from other American cities, including Boston and Philadelphia, offered to pay the full cost of erecting the statue in return for relocating it. Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, a New York newspaper, announced a drive to raise $100,000 (the equivalent of $2.3 million today). Pulitzer pledged to print the name of every contributor, no matter how small the amount given. The drive captured the imagination of New Yorkers, especially when Pulitzer began publishing the notes he received from contributors. "A young girl alone in the world" donated "60 cents, the result of self denial." One donor gave "five cents as a poor office boy's mite toward the Pedestal Fund." A group of children sent a dollar as "the money we saved to go to the circus with." Another dollar was given by a "lonely and very aged woman." Residents of a home for alcoholics in New York's rival city of Brooklyn (the cities would not merge until 1898) donated $15; other drinkers helped out through donation boxes in bars and saloons. A kindergarten class in Davenport, Iowa, mailed the World a gift of $1.35.

As the donations flooded in, the committee resumed work on the pedestal. In June, New Yorkers displayed their new-found enthusiasm for the statue, as the French vessel Isère arrived with the crates holding the disassembled statue on board. Two hundred thousand people lined the docks and hundreds of boats put to sea to welcome the Isère. After five months of daily calls to donate to the statue fund, on August 11, 1885, the World announced that $102,000 had been raised from 120,000 donors, and that 80 percent of the total had been received in sums of less than one dollar.

There are two competing visions of the American Dream right now. One says from the tops of the skyscrapers and from the ignorant masses hiding behind their television screens: "I have what's mine because I earned it. I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps, and if the poor are too lazy to do it themselves then they have what's coming to them".

The other proclaims in the poet Emma Lazarus' words, as she has done since 1886, at the very gates of America: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I don't know about you, but I stand with Lady Liberty and the 99%.

A little Amazon Kindle Bleg

2011-10-14T15:08:00.000-04:00

Look, Amazon, we're friends, right? You and me, we go way back to when you started offering paper books for free delivery while I was a poor student. Love the random crap I can buy from you, and the stupid but entertaining ways we netizens can use your feedback columns for ironic and/or comedic hyperbolic ends.

BUT.

Stop trying to get me to buy a kindle by "improving" it. I don't care. I don't want an always-on cellular modem on it. I'm not too picky about touchscreens, though I guess they're nice. You want me to buy a kindle, here's what you have to do. It's pretty simple:

1. Let me read in any format I choose and buy books for it from wherever I want.

2. Agree that when I buy a book on a kindle it becomes MY property, not YOURS under license.

3. Don't use it as an advertising platform. When I put down a kindle, I don't want it to decide this is an opportunity to sell me something. Anything. Even if it's the BEST. NEW. WHATEVER.

That's about it. Until such time as you can announce these things in a way that causes me to believe you, stop sending me the ads. They won't work.

Sincerely yours,

Vellum

Religion, Emotion, and Sex

2011-10-12T22:14:00.000-04:00

It's the end of a rather long day. Mostly good, but long. And I ended my workday about ten minutes ago* by anonymously editing a student essay. I work as an online tutor, helping kids with their essays. It's all legit, we don't edit for them, we just offer suggestions and draw examples from their work to illustrate it. We try to make them better writers, rather than to improve their one specific paper.

But anyhow, I sometimes get personal response narratives that are very, well, personal. And for me, the most freaky kind is when they write about a personal religious experience. I was trying to put my finger on why while responding to this student, trying to come up with a reason to tread more lightly when talking about the personal salvation offered to him/her by Jiminy Cricket**, when it hit me:

Writing about personal religious experience is like writing about sex.

The reason it makes me uncomfortable isn't because I study the devil all the time and have begun to sympathise; it isn't because of the rampant hypocrisy inherent in so many iterations of the religion that always go unmentioned and uninterrogated in these types of narratives; it's that they're so. damned. intimate.

Learning about someone's faith is like learning what they look like naked. For some people, profoundly good, intelligent people who nonetheless are still strong believers, it can be like seeing a classical nude. For people who are major religious figures it can be like seeing the pin-up performativity of a porn-star. For raging hypocrites like the TV televangelists it's like looking at a nude by Lucien Freud.*** But for people who obviously haven't given it a lot of thought, but who nevertheless feel like sharing their profound truths, it's like catching some poor unsuspecting sod with his pants down. It can be a little embarrassing.

The challenge with writing about personal religious experience is the same as with writing about sex. If you're going to be earnest and truthful, it's going to be like sex between two normal, non-moviestar people. It's not a bad thing,**** but to the outside observer it's going to be very intimate, and probably more than a little too much information. The challenge is to provide enough information for your readers to follow along, even to emotionally engage, without strapping them down six inches from the action and forcing them to watch.

So, next time you feel like writing about your Road To Damascus moment, just try to use a bit of perspective, a bit of tact, and a whole lot of circumspection. Otherwise we're going to have to start an award ceremony for you, too.

*9:35pm - don't let anybody tell you students don't work hard, I've been up since 6:00am and working since 7:30am.

**Not his real name.

***To me, anyway. I really hate his paintings. He really knows how to make naked people look ugly.

****Indeed, I do believe sex between non-moviestars to be a Very Good Thing.

An Announcement

2011-10-10T19:42:00.000-04:00

Before the announcement, a note:

As many of you know, Vaulting and I cherish our pseudonymity. We don't hide our real identities flawlessly, by any stretch, and many of our friends in the land beyond the internet know who we are. We think of it as an agreement between friends -- and so many of you are our friends that we very much want to share this news with you. That said, this announcement will in all likelihood let many more of our readers know who we are. If it does, you probably know us well enough that we've decided it doesn't matter that you know. But please: if you do figure us out, keep our little secret. The last thing we want is to have to moderate our opinions on here to protect our future job prospects.

And without further ado:

After nearly four years and many travails (and travels) together, the lovely Vaulting and I have agreed (on no set timeline, and after a customary exchange of jewelry) to become partners of a most intimate fashion. That is to say: we're not entirely sure when or how, but we're definitely getting hitched! :D

The 99%: Not just the tip of the iceberg this time.

2011-10-06T21:25:00.004-04:00

@JeffreyJCohen from over at In The Middle (among other places) asked yesterday how medievalists and early modernists could "show their support" for the #occupy movement taking place now in many cities around the US. We decided on a hashtag or two (#occupythemiddleages and #occupyhistory) and decided to post on them.

~~His post~~ @KarlSteel's #occupythemiddleages post is up here and actually has something to do with the middle ages. Mine really won't.*

Mine's trying to answer the question: "Why a hashtag?" Or, if you like "Why not change your facebook picture, for all the good it'll do?"

Well.

First, I think a hashtag is about communication of more than just a single monolithic idea. Certainly it moves the way a solidarity meme does on facebook profile pictures -- everyone turn your picture green to support... a free.. Palestine? -- but it carries with it more meaning.

Take the symbol of the cross in Anglo-Saxon England (yeah, I went there): the cross itself is a symbol, like a hashtag. You can carry a cross, put up a cross, bury a cross, paint a picture of a cross -- and the weight of the monolithic idea behind it will make it symbolic. A really great cross, of course, will be something like the Ruthwell or Bewcastle crosses, that is to say, covered in "texts". (I have to use the Derridan Scare Quotes (DSQ) because I firmly believe that everything is a text, including the images on the R'well & B'castle Crosses.) Take them as a crude metaphor for the difference between a fb picture meme and a hashtag: the fb picture meme can only carry the monolithic idea, it acts as publicity without nuance. The hashtag can carry links to in-depth analysis, that is to say, to the other 99% of the story.

What I'm getting at is that we're not just interested in the headline, because that's what part of the problem has been all along.

This is the first time I've seen a protest movement like this one. It's got nuance, subtlety, and no central focus. The general idea, the headline, is that the American population who are in the lowest earning 99% (that is to say, not the mega-rich) are a little sick of all the rules, all the laws, and all the interest, being geared toward the top earning 1% of the population. But if you want more, you're going to have to talk to just about everyone concerned. That's why I'm not going to try to explain to you what Occupy Wall Street is about. Because I can't. But here's something I can do: I can set up a hashtag, and we can all use it to link to things that help us understand, help us make meaning out of the growing discontent.

Here are just a few:

The movement's (semi?)-official tumblr feed, "We Are the 99 Percent"

Occupy Wall Street
Occupy San Francisco
Occupy Houston
Occupy Boston
Occupy Seattle
Occupy Los Angeles

Religion In American History's post on the phrase "Church of Dissent"
Mother Jones' Occupy Wall Street Protests Map
boingboing.net's Occupy Everywhere post
A Clever Guy's Response to Fixed News' Attempts to Entrap Him
A News Story On Los Angeles Giving OccupyLA It's Official Support

And, as always, the ever-updating Wikipedia Entry for Occupy Wall Street

Educate yourselves. The symbol is only the garden gate.

*much?

UPDATE: it also occurs to me that an unfocused hashtag is the perfect reflection of a movement with no center. Life's like that sometimes. :)

UPDATE 2: originally this post claimed the link was to a post by J J Cohen, when in truth it was one by Karl Steel. Mea culpa.

UPDATE 3: added two more links: one to the movement's semi-official tumblr feed, "We Are the 99 Percent", and one to Religion In American History's post on the phrase "Church of Dissent"

On Methodologies, or, Trying To 'Make Up' With Theory

2011-10-02T20:51:00.000-04:00

It's a Sunday night, and I'm frankly out of things to read until my visit to the Library tomorrow (I know, I should have planned further ahead, mea maxima culpa). So instead, I'm going to bleg about how capital-T theory and I have never really gotten along, and how I'm trying to make up with it.

Friends of mine know that, as a medievalist interested in the written word (and one who doesn't currently blog at In The Middle), I've had trouble with what I call Capital-T Theory. At first I thought it was because it wasn't necessary. I mean really: did we already know so much about the so-called "middle ages" that we had recourse to fall onto reader response criticism or psychoanalysis? We didn't even know how it was responded to when it was written, let alone know enough about who confronted it to bother trying to psychoanalyze them.

But, live and learn (and get forced into Theory classes during grad school) and you find yourself in awkward positions. No, I don't know what Agamben said about it. And when I tried to look? He lost me by trying to redefine the word "gesture" as something other than, you know, a gesture.

So of late I've been trying to get back in Theory's good graces. Our Theory, who art in the English Department, etc. etc. be thy whatever. Forgive me Theory, for I have sinned. And so forth. Genuflection, prostration, et al.

Because that same professor who made me rethink the word "criticism" has made me rethink Theory.

What I want, the thing I think I need more of in order to teach, is tools in my toolbox. And my lack of knowledge of Theory has always been a spanner to my plans, if you will (talk about mixing your metaphors). And this professor of mine has got me realizing that without Theory, I'm cutting myself off from a lot of useful tools.

What she's said is simple: take Theory, use it, and bury it as far under the surface of your writing as you can. It enriches your arguments, underpins them -- but the Theory isn't the point. Theory is a means to an end, and unless you couple it with language that allows for easy communication, that end isn't reached.

This isn't to say that Theory that tries to break out of the current paradigm by redefining language itself isn't useful. I mean, it might be; I have no idea. I haven't figured out how to understand it just yet. But I won't come out and say it isn't useful just because I haven't figured out how to use it.*

Take Authorship Theory, for instance. In 1968 Barthes declared the author dead. And I get what he meant. I get what he was reacting to, and if you hold aside the broad, sweeping generalizations Theory likes to make, I can even find it useful. He pointed out (for you medievalists who don't know) that "Lo," and I'm paraphrasing in quotation marks, so sue me, "Lo, we cannot ever know the authorial intention, and who gives a F**k, anyway? All we can know is the reader's reception."

And then the next year, in French, I think, Foucault pops up and says "Well, I mean seriously guys," and this is a direct quote. No really. "Seriously guys, like, what is an author anyway?" And so he redefined the author as something we can't really reach. But since we still try, he said we should think about the author in terms of the way we ascribe authorship to texts. The "author as function" or, if you will, the "author-function". The thing we create to take the place of the unreachable author. Fair enough.

About twenty years later a fellow named Alexander Nehamas pops up and says "hold on, dude. The author can't just be anybody. He's got to be plausible, at least." Basically, the author has to be someone the writer of the text could actually have been. For example, we can't just say Jesus wrote everything. That would be weird. And, you know, hard on Jesus.

So what does this mean? If I'm writing about the Beowulf-poet, how does any of this matter? Well, on the surface, not a heck of a lot. We know we don't know who wrote Beowulf.** We know, thanks to the peculiar integration of history and literature found in Anglo-Saxon studies, that any trait we ascribe to the poet is more a reflection of ourselves and what we need in a Beowulf-poet, than of the actual person (or persons) who wrote the damn thing. But it can help in that, through Theory, we can become aware of our own modes of thought, and more accurately render a reading of the poem and of the poet, knowing full well that what we strive toward isn't the poet him- or herself, but the closest construct we can manage. It can help us in thinking about the audience, in the recognition of the unknowability of the audience of the poem. By calling them the author-function and (as per Kathy Cawsey) the audience-function, we can more accurately name what it is we construct around the few relics of the past we have left for study.

Foucault seems to have been worried that when we read a poem and know that it's by Shakespeare we imbue it with a meaning, or at least a potential for meaning, beyond what we might otherwise ascribe to it. The same, I think, is true of Anglo-Saxon authors: from assuming the texts in Junius 11 are by "Caedmon" (as has been done in the past) to creating a persona for the Beowulf-poet, we must be cautious in our creations so as not to alter the fragile remains of the texts we have left.

And so that's why I'm trying to get along with Theory these days. Because sometimes -- when I understand it -- it gives me an insight that helps. Something that helps me to get at the text in a way that lets me get out of my own way. And God knows I need as many of those as I can get.

*I'm still working on questions like: 1) Why are we still using Lacan's psychoanalysis in English departments when people actually working in psychology wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole even when it was written? and 2) how are you supposed to get through to the paradigm you're trying to change if you opt out of it and thereby sever communication with it? But these are questions I'm trying to deal with. If you know the answers, comments below, please :)

**Thanks Rumsfeld. Known Knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns... probably the smartest and dumbest thing the man ever said (at the same time).

Funding drama

2011-10-01T12:48:00.003-04:00

This is a long post; I apologize.

Those of you on Twitter may have seen yesterday's ridiculous drama. In trying to comment on it today, I realized I need more than 140 characters to adequately describe the situation (as best I understand it). Basically, as you may recall (I know, it's been a while since I've made an appearance on the blog), I started my PhD program last month. I'm taking one class as a part-time student, working full-time at my admin job on campus, and - here's the sticky part - working part-time as a teaching assistant.

The TAship was given to me as merit-based funding. Funding is hard to come by - I believe I'm the only first-year to receive a TAship this year, and it was one of their best packages. I was offered a GAship for the 2nd semester, too, but since it only offers tuition remission (no stipend), I turned it down. I was encouraged to take the TAship, though, and was told that I could absolutely do part-time coursework, TA, and work full-time. Since I really wanted (and still want) the experience, I accepted the TAship.

At the time (and, to be honest, even now), I felt a certain amount of guilt in taking the funding package. As I said, it was a rare offer, and the fact of the matter is that I don't need it. I have a job that pays me well and covers my tuition, and I'm only a part-time student; I don't need the TAship's stipend and tuition remission. But they made the decision to offer it to me, knowing my situation, and so I put my own ambition first and accepted it. (though I will point out that I would have gladly given up my job to be a full-time student and dependent on said funding if they'd given me two semesters of stipend, instead of just the one)

So despite the challenge of juggling what amounts to two full-time jobs, all of which require significant amounts of brain power, I've been managing it and everything has been going well. So, of course, it all blows up.

I spoke to the dept admin yesterday since I hadn't seen a paycheck yet. She spoke with the admin of the college, who Flipped. A. Shit. Apparently, it is absolutely 100% not allowed for a student employee to also be a regular employee. I knew this was technically true, but I figured they'd work around it. No. So now the shit has really hit the fan, and by mid-afternoon, the dept head is calling me and warning me that I'm about to lose my TAship.

Whoa, hold on.

When this all started (only yesterday morning), it was a logistical problem: it was a case of the uni physically not being able to pay me both as a regular employee and as a student employee. There are ways around that. But before we could get to that solution, the entire matter had escalated, and suddenly the dean is involved and saying that we're going to have to wait for the provost to decide.

Decide what? Because now this isn't a problem of logistics, it's a problem of "we shouldn't have given funding to a full-time employee who doesn't need it." Moreover, they've given one of their best funding packages to a part-time student. Bad PR all around. So, as far as I can tell, now they'd like to fix this error. Even if they can't manage a complete fix, they’re certainly not going to pull any strings to get this sorted out in my favor.

The major problem for "fixing" this is that I've been teaching since the start of the semester, and that even if they could give the funding to someone else, that someone else will likely be in a similar position: a part-time student, working full-time somewhere else. And that's assuming they can even find someone who's in a position to accept the TAship.

Once it became clear that this was a more serious issue than just logistics (about the time the dean got involved), I made it clear that I was TAing for the experience. If it comes down to it, I'll TA without the stipend. The response was "Thank you, but that doesn't solve the problem."

How does that not solve the fucking problem?

There are so many angles to the situation that I think it'll be weeks before anyone is able to make a decision. There's the fact that they can't pay me as a student employee; there's the fact that they gave the funding to someone who doesn't need it. There's the issue of pulling a TA from a course well into the semester; and there's the issue that they can't separate the funding (the stipend and tuition remission) from the service (TAing).

There’s an entire other part of this story, having to do with my work supervisor, but I’ll cover that in a separate post. But as things stand now, I'm waiting to hear back from the provost about whether I'm "allowed" to work full-time, be a part-time TA, and do coursework. As I said on twitter, how is this anyone's decision but mine?

It's fairly likely that they'll refuse to pay me as a TA; it's quite possible that they'll refuse to let me continue as a TA at all. But from my perspective, those are the most complicated solutions to the problem. So simplicity might win out in the end. But I promise: if the provost tells me I’m not “allowed” to continue, s/he and I are going to have a serious discussion, and they’re going to have to explain to me how the politics of this justify taking away my funding, taking away my teaching experience, disrupting my students’ education, throwing another PhD student into the position mid-semester, and leaving the prof and other TAs to clean up the mess.

A Few Thoughts on "Criticism"

2011-09-25T09:15:00.000-04:00

I've been mulling over this idea for a while, and it resurfaced recently when one of the professors at Gothic Revival U brought up the tendency of scholars -- especially younger ones, but not solely -- to feel as though they have to tear down other scholars' work, and not just in order for their own to be heard. Lord knows I've been guilty of this myself in the past (especially when it comes to the nebulous, sometimes solipsistic fringes of capital-T Theory land, where I tend to react out of frustration).

But it occurred to me again that it's built into the very way we think about secondary and tertiary analysis in my discipline: we call it Criticism.

It's come to mean and in many ways be synonymous with analysis, but it also seems to carry the connotation, at least emotionally, of being critical, as in a negative, claws-out, destructive manner. We have two meanings for the word critical, of course. We call it "critical thinking" when we mean "analytical", but it may be telling that we now as a culture have to use the word "constructive" to qualify criticism as the helpful kind.

And so I wonder if maybe we can decide, en masse as it were, to change the terminology we use, and maybe in that way, change the way we think about secondary scholarship.

I think I'm going to do my best from now on to use the phrase "Analysis" where others use "Criticism" in my discipline. I think at the very least it'll help me remember that even if I think a piece of scholarship is straight out of Loony-Tunes Land, that I can learn something from it. That doesn't mean there won't be times when I analyze and conclude that an element of an article, or an article in general, isn't helpful to me, but I think it will help me, and hopefully others, to remember that maybe we're not here to be critics. At least I'm not.

I'm here to learn.

So now if you'll pardon me, I have some Literary Analysis to perform ;)

Respect for Alcohol Begins at Home, at School, in Our Philosophy, Horatio.

2011-09-24T13:53:00.000-04:00

Tenured Radical has a post up today about "Twelve Steps that institutions could take to reverse student alcoholism", which is interesting, but I think misses a few things.

First, there's the mention of a couple of terms that I'd like to contest:

I remember a young friend telling me about a category at a women’s school they called “LUGs,” which meant “Lesbian Until Graduation.” We might add to that category “AWACs,” translating to “Alcoholic While At College.” Although only a few of these students will go on to be genuine, professional alcoholics, this period of alcoholism still has a dramatic impact on their ability to learn, remain organized, be healthy and mature as intellectuals and workers.

I think that "AWAC", just like "LUG", is a very problematic term, and the very fact of its coining bothers me. Alcoholism should not be equated with irresponsible drinking. The two are very different things. To suggest that "when they realize that holding down a job and being a drunk is a skill few can master" an alcoholic will recover is, I would think, offensive to the people who actually struggle with alcoholism. While alcohol abuse is a hallmark of alcoholism, not all alcohol abuse is alcoholism. I would go so far as to say that if the realization that being drunk affects your livelihood is enough to stop you drinking, you're probably *not* an alcoholic, and never were.

This isn't to say that I don't think some of the things TR is suggesting are good ideas. I think asking responsible drinkers to counsel irresponsible ones is a great idea. But I think we need to not only look at it as a campus problem, but as a fundamental flaw with the way the United States deals with intoxicants.

First: the age of majority. It's patently absurd to suggest that a person is mature enough to vote, be in pornography, and own a gun years before they can consume alcohol. It's patently absurd to ask anyone caught within that space of time to respect that space. They don't, and they won't. "Under-age" drinking will continue until some logic is applied to the age of majority in this country. It gives drinking a social cache that makes drunkenness a sign of adulthood.

Second: making drinking illicit drives it underground and prevents any kind of education about responsible approaches; as well as education about catching alcoholism-like behaviour early. As far as I'm concerned, telling young adults that drinking is bad and banning it until the age of 21 is about as logical as abstinence-only education -- and about as effective, too.

So yes, do those twelve things on campus. Do your best to reduce problematic drinking. But don't call it alcoholism, and don't really expect it to change until you stop making it sexy by outlawing it.

Reader Recommendation

2011-09-19T10:16:00.000-04:00

Hello early semester readers!

Just read a review over at Religion in American History of John Fea's new book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? and it definitely sounds worth reading/assigning to young historians. My favourite part?

"The Christian nation debate is not really an intellectual contest between legitimate contending viewpoints; it is instead a manufactured controversy akin to the global warming debate. On one side are purveyors of a rich and complex view of the past (including most historians who have written about the founding era). On the other side is a group of ideological cranks who have created an alternate intellectual universe based on a historical fundamentalism."

Go check it out. Even if you're not interested in the book, it's a good blog :)

A Note to Those Attempting Old English Pronunciation

2011-09-11T15:17:00.000-04:00

In fact, only to you who hail from parts of North America prone to palatalization and nasalization of your vowels:

While the pronunciation of "Hwæt" does rhyme more with "cat" than with "what", this is only the case if you speak like Dr. Gregory House. If your normal pronunciation of "box" resembles in any way the spelling "bee-ax" suddenly Old English epic poems seem to begin not with "What!" but with a sound more fitting for a millpond than a meadhall. I promise you, that though there may be much in Old English study open to interpretation, no Anglo-Saxon scop ever called to attention a horde of drinking men by quacking like a duck.

Sincerely yours,

A Concerned Party

postscript: One day, I will have internet at my home again. For now, I'm in a cafe next to a laundromat, blogging while Vaulting does more productive things.

Radio Silence

2011-09-03T10:32:00.002-04:00

The Casa de Vaulting and Vellum is picking up and moving across town today, to a place without internet until Thursday. Just in case you start to worry.

Wish us luck.

In Case of Hurricane...

2011-08-27T12:45:00.000-04:00

I have always lived inland. By which I mean that the idea of a hurricane has always been Something That Happened To Other People, and usually to Other People South Of Me. And yet Vaulting and I live just far up the coast enough that I'm decidedly unsure if my complete lack of concern about the impending Augustpocalypse is because I'm right (it's going to be a bit of a brutal storm, one not to go out in, but since we're renters and have nowhere else to go we might as well live it up and have a Hurricane Party) or because I'm wrong (my lack of experience in these matters will get me killed). I'm obviously banking on the former, but I suppose I'll make sure to unplug everything before we reach ground zero -- or before ground zero reaches us, that is.

In the meantime, there's an episode of Project Runway I haven't seen yet -- and I don't want to die with PR left unwatched.

See you after the party.

On Tenure in America

2011-08-24T09:29:00.000-04:00

I warn you, this is a bit of a long post for me, but I think more relevant to the academic world than most of mine, so:

Yesterday, Dean Dad over at Confessions of a Community College Dean published a post about the cumulative load of student loan debt. One, you should read that post and also check out the worrisome chart.

Two, he said something that irked me.

"Among the blogs, you’d get the impression that the biggest problem facing higher ed was its overreliance on adjuncts. Put differently, you’d get the impression that colleges are too frugal. The preferred alternative usually offered is a dramatic and sustained increase in labor costs. From whence the money to pay these increased costs would come is usually left to the imagination. "

I responded in the comments thusly:

"Come now, you know this isn't what we're griping about, nor a fair description of the solution. The problem is not an over-reliance on adjuncts so much as the replacement of full-time tenured positions with underpaid adjunct ones. We just want the number of full time with benefits teaching jobs to remain the same, not decrease in favour of part-time, no-benefits jobs. This shouldn't be described as a "dramatic and sustained increase in labor costs" so much as "keeping up with inflation" -- tough, I know, but certainly not as outlandish as you're making us sound.

Now I'll admit, I may not have spent more than five minutes responding, but today I have more time, and lucky commenter "Anonymous" at 6:11am gets that time spent on her or his response.

"Vellum: what I'd like to see is some statistics. Which schools have lost faculty positions, and how many? At my own institution, I can say with certainty that no faculty have been "replaced" with adjuncts. In real terms, the size of the department has increased significantly in the last ten years...just not as significantly as the number of adjuncts. DD's assumption (which seems in the main correct) is that more people are going to college and instructional loads are increasing, and that we can meet that increased burden with either expensive tenured faculty or inexpensive (in the short term) adjuncts. That's not "replacing;" that's just not increasing. If you can point to a department that had 20 full-time faculty a decade ago and only has 10 today, of course--in a discipline that hasn't seen drastic reductions in students taking classes; The Classics department at SUNY Albany, for instance was clearly not the victim of the contingent labor market--that might help ground this discussion in the facts."

I can't believe I never looked this up for myself. That's lesson one. You read statements like "the percentage of tenure and tenure-track faculty has shrunk to almost a quarter" and "the trend of tenured and tenure-track faculty lines being replaced by adjuncts will likely continue" and you think that across the board, retiring tenured faculty aren't being replaced with new tenured faculty.

That isn't exactly the case.

Yes, I'm sure it's happening in some places, but it's not the whole story. The whole story is both better and worse.

According to these data from the AFL-CIO, between 2001 and 2009 in the US, the total number of tenured faculty, that is, the total number of people with tenure at an institute of higher education, went up in every named category: Professor, Associate, Assistant, Instructor, Lecturer. That's the good news.

The bad news is that untenured and non-tenure-track jobs are becoming a larger part of the whole. While the data seem to only show a slight shift in the population as a whole so far, from 32.6% of the workforce in non-tenured/non-tenure-track jobs in 2001 to 35.9% in 2009, the discomforting thing is where the new jobs are being created. Of the roughly 87000 new teaching jobs reported from 2001-2009, nearly 60% (58.6%) were in non-tenure/non-tenure-track jobs.

Now, I'm also dubious as to how many "temporary" (read: adjunct) staff the Universities would report for this survey, and I can't find much data on that. It could well be that these are only non-tenure-track "full-time" positions being charted, which would leave all the tens of thousands of adjuncts unrepresented in this study.

This doesn't mitigate the way adjunct faculty are being treated. Nor does it really address the decreased quality of education when the economics of the situation are driven by such a lack of government funding that tuition is actually seen as a major source of budgetary income (seriously, in the rest of the western world, that idea is just loopy -- but then in the rest of the western world, you don't have to pay $20,000-$40,000 a year in tuition for a BA, either).

What it does suggest is that even though the pool of qualified PhDs is getting larger by the year, and even though the job market is getting more intensely competitive such that only the very, very top candidates get tenure-track positions, there are more tenure-track positions created in the US every year.

And that should be some small comfort to us all.

Even while we prepare to flip burgers with our non-Ivy PhDs hanging behind us on the wall.

The Mid-August "We're Still Alive" Post

2011-08-16T09:30:00.000-04:00

Hello, you few kind and gentle readers who still bother to have us in your feeds. Hello, hello.

It's August, and that means the terror of September is starting to settle in: I'm scrambling to conquer all the reading I meant to do this summer, and Vaulting and I are mentally preparing ourselves for our first semester of "TA-ing". Meanwhile we're trying to fit in seeing all the friends we haven't yet at the weekends (I haven't done so much wonderfully touristy stuff in North-East Metropolis in the past year as I have in the past two weekends!) and today I start packing for the move across town. That's right, even though things are lovely and wonderful in this apartment, we have to move (through no fault of our own). But at least we have a place, we've managed the down payments, and we have flatmates. Anglo-Saxonist Flatmate is remaining with us, although since Chaucerian Flatmate went off and got married (and give up living with us? silly man) we've since replaced him with a new character, who I suppose, seeing that she doesn't study history in any way, we shall call Present-Tense Flatmate. Present-Tense is cool and of-the-moment, and aside from occasionally making Vaulting and I feel somewhat old and boring (while she goes out clubbing and we sit at home playing skip-bo or watching Sports Night on Netflix) she's quite nice and we're happy to have her.

As for the blog and social media, I'm trying to stay on top of my Twitter feed, but I feel as though I've let my google+ account fall by the wayside. I couldn't be bothered with facebook, I'm not sure I'll be able to be bothered with the new facebook. Such is life. Finally, because I found them interesting once I figured out where to look, here are the top ten search terms that directed people to this blog. Some making more sense than others.

In no particular order, they are (with commentary):

1. a world lit only by misconceptions
(one of my finer ideas)
2. afghanistan one bullet costs $80,000
(not sure if that's accurate but that sounds rather pricey to me)
3. are bruce greenwood and sam neil related
(a damn fine question if you ask me)
4. badass canadian logger
(aren't all Canadians badass loggers?)
5. badass vols pic
(...no idea what they were looking for... maybe a picture of badass voles? though to be fair, I've no idea if a vole can even be badass. Maybe a skink or a stoat...)
6. bsg stands for
(Big Scary Giant - the BFG's douchebag cousin)
7. christianity survived depite medieval christians not because of them
(I think you mean "despite")
8. diana gabaldon movie
(oh god, I hope not)
9. hyperbole world lit only by fire
(that wasn't hyperbole, I really believe it to be the worst book ever written by a mammal with thumbs!)
(okay that might've been hyperbole)
10. museum salary negotiation
(and rounding out the final spot, someone looking for practical advice from Vaulting. Well they sure as heck weren't going to get it from me.)

Hope all your Augusts are going well!

On Angry Blogging and the Use of the Second Person

2011-08-07T23:04:00.000-04:00

Vaulting and I had very different reactions to this post about street harassment over at feministe. I wanted to explore why.

(A note for readers: I'm not certain why I reacted so negatively to it, but I'm pretty sure it's not because I think the lousy excuse for a human being who said "nice legs" while running over her foot was in the right. Just saying.)

See, Vaulting said I should go read the post because it encapsulated well the frustrations some women experience with their treatment on the street. There is (in my understanding of things) a problem in our society whereby many straight men think it's somehow their birthright to comment on a woman's appearance, usually in a way that claims a space and makes a woman (or, indeed, all women) into trespassers, welcome or otherwise.

Nevertheless, I couldn't read the post.

I started, but by the fifth-ish paragraph the animosity started to get to me, shortly after that I started to skim, waiting for the author to address me-- or, indeed, address anyone who wasn't the douchebag who ran over her foot. But it didn't happen. It left me feeling upset. Right to the very end, "you" meant "him".

And that's where I think the problem lay. There's a danger, I think, in using the second person when you're angry and blogging. Think of anger as a gun: when you're blogging, "you" is your reader -- the problem is, in this case, "you" is also who the gun is being pointed at. So even though the article was addressed to the fellow with his head so far up his posterior that he was wearing it as a hat, I had a hard time dissociating that "you" from the one that meant "me". That meant every bit of anger meant for him hit me, and resulted in my inability to continue reading the post long enough to empathize with the writer.

Maybe I'm "thin-skinned"; maybe that's it. All I know is that by the time I was halfway through, I felt done with being sworn at and blamed, and stopped reading. Maybe the blogger actually thought that the chauvinist-bicyclist was an every-day feministe blog reader, but I doubt it. I think in this case, and perhaps in many cases of angry blogging in the second person, our author has shot her arrow over the house, and hurt her readers.

What do you think, dear readers? Have you ever second-person angry-blogged? What were you aiming at? What did you hit?

Maybe I'm a little late to the party but..

2011-07-16T13:49:00.000-04:00

I only just read this description of Congress, supposedly by Samuel Clemens. After seeing their actions over the past two years, I'm fully prepared to describe it as "accurate":

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. Simply suppose you were a member of Congress. And suppose you started-up what you believed to be your faculties, and worked out the draft of a law to cover the needs of some industry or other which you did not know anything about. What would you do with that draft - submit it to somebody who did know something about it, and get instruction and advice? Yes?

It is natural to think that; but the member of Congress proceeds differently. He drafts that law to cover a matter which he knows nothing about; he straightaway submits it to the National Asylum, who are similarly ignorant concerning the thing; they amend-out any accidental clearness or coherences which may have escaped notice; then they pass it, and it presently goes into effect. It goes into effect. and of course it begins to confuse and hamper interested parties, because they do not understand it. But this has been foreseen, and has also been provided for - in a most curious way. Each public department at Washington keeps a minor asylum of salaried inmates whose business it is to invent a meaning for laws that have no meaning; and to detect meanings, where any exist, and distort and confuse them. This process is called 'interpreting.' And sublime and awe-inspiring is this art."

Anyone know anything more about this passage? I'd love for it to actually be by Mr. Twain.

Congressional Cowardice

2011-07-13T08:13:00.000-04:00

Kevin over at Lowering the Bar has a hilarious but accurate explanation of what congress is planning, so that nobody but Obama will be blamed for raising the debt ceiling -- something regrettable that nobody disputes needs to be done.

The long and short of it? Well the phrase "approval-by-veto" should probably ring alarm bells, anyhow:

In other words, Congress would approve a resolution of disapproval in order to force the President to disapprove that disapproval, which would turn it into an approval, one that Congress knows it would be unable to re-disapprove. That would leave us with the interim approval-by-veto, so that the limit would somehow end up being raised even though neither branch would have actually cast any vote in favor of anything.

Oh America, this is why nobody takes you seriously anymore.

I think you mean "pro bonobo"

2011-07-07T09:20:00.000-04:00

Just for fun: Legal Questions Raised By Success of Monkey Photographer at Lowerin the Bar.

Happy Thursday, everyone!

Nostalgia

2011-07-01T07:49:00.000-04:00

In his latest post, Dean Dad says: "I was a denizen of college radio in the late 80’s, just before the music we played broke out as “alternative.” In those days, a new release by R.E.M. or The Replacements was a Very Big Deal. (I vividly remember the disappointment when Don’t Tell a Soul came out.) It was a blast, but it was the kind of blast that relied on a specific historical moment." It's not the point of his post, but it reminded me that I hadn't listened to the Replacements since High School.

You know what?

I'm still in love with that song.

Also, Happy Canada Day, all you lucky Canucks :)

And I quote: "Jeezus Motherfucke" (i.e. Rage Post)

2011-06-29T08:40:00.000-04:00

Because I lack the appropriate language for the rage I feel as a cyclist in this city, may I direct you to this somewhat dated post by Comrade Physioprof. In my case, substitute "parking in, double-parking in, standing around in, jogging in, or otherwise obstructing the bike lanes" for the bit about slides, and those who perpetrate such crimes (with appropriately colourful descriptions) for "electrophysiology douchefuckes". Also, add appropriately vibrant metaphors for cyclists who can't, it seems, see the colour red.

That is all.

Mondays, and imagining funding

2011-06-06T10:16:00.003-04:00

Monday mornings at the Vaulting workplace generally aren't a lot of fun (as my twitter feed will tell you, given my copious use of the sarcastic #happymonday). All those things I put off dealing with on Friday are waiting to be resolved - and usually much less patiently than they were the week before. Further, it seems that everyone else I work with views Friday afternoon at 4:45 as the perfect time to send out urgent requests for information/changes/crisis resolution. I'm sure as hell not in my office at 4:45 on Friday, so this leaves me with a build-up of urgent demands in my inbox on Monday morning.

tldr; Mondays suck.

Every once in a while, however, the weekend will serve its purpose, and I'll arrive at work on Monday morning with a fresh perspective and renewed incentive to get shit done. This morning was one of those mornings, kind of - though the get-shit-done motivation was more of a get-this-out-of-my-hair motivation. This morning's drama, which has been hovering over me since a grant closed last week, was salary relocation.

Scientist Boss has a lot of grants. My entire job is managing his grants, and only his grants. To compare, my admin colleagues all manage grants for at least 5 scientists, and usually more, versus my 1. The sheer quantity of SB's grants makes for a lot of work, but it means the one thing we don't worry about is money.

It does make for a royal pain in the ass when it comes to salaries and stipends, though. For every grant that provides enough money for a postdoc salary or a grad student stipend, there are a whole host of issues. Grants, even multi-year grants, end. The grant that just closed was only a grant-year end, so there's another year coming. That money was supposed to show up on the first of the month. Like all grants, however, it hasn't shown up yet. So I'm left with several salaries to relocate until said money appears - which could be this week, or August.

As I mentioned, this morning was a get-shit-done kind of Monday, so I've resolved the issue for now. But every time something like this happens (which lately has been at least once a week), I'm reminded of the distance between funding in the sciences and funding in the humanities.

To keep things simple, let's just look at PhD students. In my science dept, every student (there are a dozen in my lab alone, to give you an idea of the number) gets a full funding package - tuition and an RA position that pays more than I was ever paid prior to getting this position. In the art history dept that I'll be entering this fall, one student a year gets a full funding package - and it's for about $10,000 less than the sci students get. The rest of us are given one of a very few TA gigs or an unpaid RA position that covers tuition.

I know there are many reasons why there's so much funding kicking around the sciences, and why sci grad students are paid so much more than their counterparts in the humanities. But I do wonder what we could do in the humanities if we had access to even a fraction of what sci folks get. Imagine having regular, realistic access to grants that provide $10,000/yr for travel, and allow for you to have two well-paid PhD students as research assistants. What could you accomplish? What research could we get done in a year? How much more would we have to show?

SB's salary comes from grants, so I suppose it makes sense - but his teaching load is less than 1-1. What could we do with that extra time?

On the other hand, as humanities folks, we don't have to worry about getting enough grants to support our salary and the stipends of all our students. And one year of weak research/publications/grant applications isn't an unmitigated disaster. But it's an interesting thing to consider.

Good Points and Straw Men (Or, The Rhetoric That Reduces)

2011-05-23T10:23:00.000-04:00

This originally started in my head as a response to an e-book vs. paper book post on Historiann's blog, "Codex Rules, Kindle Drools. (And I told you so)." I posted a comment responding to it, but cut myself off because I could go on all day. Digital publishing is a bit of a hobby horse for me, so I thought I'd continue here. But now I'm here, I think I've said it all before. What's interesting to me right now as I think of it is the way we approach arguments here on the interwebs (and, sometimes, in scholarship). It's the question of posturing that shows up in disputation from Plato down to the present: how do you restate your opponent's argument?

See, when Historiann wrote this: "The only good argument for e-books that I’ve seen recently was from my commenter Susan, who noted their usefulness to people with failing eyesight. That’s not a trivial usefulness, to be sure–but for most scholars, codex [her term for paper publishing, I'm assuming] is still the superior technology. Plus: they aren’t fatally damaged if you take them to the beach or try to read them in the bathtub, and they’re still supremely easy to annotate with a pen or pencil and awesome Post-It technology."

My thought was this: "What a straw man argument is this. But lovely rhetoric."

There's a trope in argument (the source for which I've just spent an hour looking up -- I assume it's in the Rhetorica ad Herrennium, but I can't find where) where one seems to agree with one's opponent on a minor point in order to show that the major point is untenable.

This is something that rhetoricians have been doing for thousands of years. If you go back to read Plato's Symposium, you'll see that it's all about restating your opponent's argument in such a way as to control the outcome. Control the definitions, control the argument, control the outcome. To a degree, we do this instinctively; it's a part of our process of analysis. In reading an argument, we make judgements and react -- not to the initial argument, but to the judgements we have made of it. But sometimes in restating our opponents' arguments in order to refute them, we restate them in such a way as to make them easier to knock down.

Intentional or not (and it can and is used intentionally by some) it can also have a tendency to reduce the scope of an opponent's point of view to something that can be easily overcome: for instance, reducing all the arguments for e-books to "well, they're good for people with bad eyes". Straw men don't fight back.

So that's what this post was going to be about. But I realized as I was writing it that it's just as much about how we treat each other here in the blogosphere.

Case in point, this post, by Larry Swain. It's sparked a lot of debate, during the course of which feelings were hurt and misunderstandings abounded. Most of it, I think, has to do with not what was said, but how and where, and the the ways in which the things that were said were understood and reframed for comment.

Larry's post, if you haven't read it, was well-meaning (and, as it would seem, easily misconstrued) advice to both graduate students and professorial types alike in the wake of K'zoo 2011. I'm going to try to stay away from commenting on the content of the post, because it's not what I want to discuss. Part of the problem with the situation was that a long discussion of the post went on here, at In The Middle in the comment thread to a response by J. J. Cohen. And, as sometimes happens on the interwebs, nobody thought to inform Larry that a discussion that, while ostensibly about his post was in many ways about him, was taking place in a public forum.

Vaulting pointed out to me this morning that the same thing happened re: medievalists.net a while back, and my response was that they didn't have the option of commenting on that site because (if I recall correctly) comment threads weren't enabled there. To me this seems more like a certain post I wrote in 2009 which touched a few nerves. While I meant to discuss a trope in scholarship, a reference to Jeffrey's phrase "originary geotemporality" gave it at least the impression (unintended, I hope you'll believe) of a personal attack. Especially because it was in my own blog, and not in the comment thread to his.

Which leads me back, by a circuitous route, to my main point: as bloggers, where we choose to address a point can be as meaningful as how. Starting a new discussion on one's own blog (as I suppose I'm doing right now) is a way of reframing an argument. Whether we mean it or not, it has an effect on the discussion that can be taken in different ways. Without the full text to which our posts refer, our readers are left to interpret based on those reduced parts of it we have selected to discuss. That's why this post isn't about what Larry said, or what the commenters on Jeffrey's post said he said, or what Larry's follow-up post said they said he said. I'm reframing the issue as about reframing the issue, or at least I'm trying to.

I, of course, would urge that we give each other the benefit of the doubt (and the benefit of rebuttal) but that won't always happen. But as recent events show, it's at least important to remember that the blogosphere (such as it is) is a discussion -- sometimes a heated, frustrating discussion, but a discussion nonetheless -- and that there's a whole new rhetoric of (dare I say it?) geotemporality that comes into effect. Where and when we post is a rhetorical choice in itself.

Post-Kalamazoo Roundup!

2011-05-18T10:42:00.000-04:00

Now that Vaulting and I have returned from an excellent Kalamazoo (and had time to recover. Slightly.) there are a number of things I'd like to address. And I'll get to those in good time. But first, I just want to say thank you to everyone who made it fantastic: the presenters in Vaulting's session and my own, the random people who asked all the right questions, the old friends we saw and perhaps drank too much with, and the Richard Rawlinson Center, the University of York, Early Modern Europe, and the mead brewers (sadly now defunct) for providing a proportion of that "too much" free of charge :) I'd also like to blow a great big raspberry at those who lose all interest in you once they realize you're nobody special: to borrow a phrase, "bitter kittens, you ain't so special yourselves." So, here's a brief list of highlights, lowlights, and othermoreconfusinglights of the conference, some or all to be covered at greater length later (I'll leave it to you to decide what's what):

-Doctor Who audiobooks
-The astounding, insane price of petroleum products
-Sharing a bathroom with someone you *actually know* (and like)
-Ethernet (for one) in cell block H
-American Continental Summer for two days followed by English Winter for two days
-Books I can't afford because I'm poor
-Books I can't afford because the used bookseller thinks none of us have heard of abebooks and amazon
-Books I can just barely afford and must buy because it has a chapter that replicates almost exactly what I'm doing OMGWTFBBQ (and now he's writing self-help relationship books.... O_o)
-Very Cheap Amazing Books
-Free Swag
-Sessions run by Venerable Scholars
-Sessions run by Venerable Scholars in part as a 3-day roast of Patrick Conner
-Sessions run by less-venerable scholars who are my friends
-Sessions run by my friends
-Sessions which piss off the Society for Stuffy Old Art Historians (would you like to run a session? Please send us your CV)
-Eminent Scholars who ignore one's nametag
-Eminent Scholars who read one's nametag in order to learn one's name (and not one's social status)
-Eminent Scholars who ask if they can accompany you to lunch in order to further the conversation you're having with them
-Young scholars who engage one in conversation in order to (obviously, blatantly) chat up one's friend
-Drinking in strange (and possibly illegal) places
-Really, really, *really* hilarious waitresses
-Really nice people who show one where to print things before the computer lab opens (which happens to be at the same time as your session)
-The Dance
-Jon Jarrett and Heptarchy Herald headbanging to Bohemian Rhapsody at The Dance
-Half-price books at Powell's on Sunday morning
-Goodbyes to people you saw
-Apologies to people you didn't
-Days of recovery

As I said, some of this will be written about, some not. But it all really happened. I think.

The 5am Post!

2011-05-11T05:07:00.000-04:00

I'll tell you what's amazing. Everything. Everything's amazing at 5am.

Well, no, probably not really. But trust me, get little enough sleep and you'll think so too!

Time to head off to Kalamazoo!

Wait, where's my coffee...?

Good news

2011-05-05T11:43:00.005-04:00

As some of you saw on Twitter, I was accepted into a PhD program last month. I'll be starting at Northeast Metropolis University (NEMU) in the PhD in Art History program this fall. I am, to say the least, delighted.

I'm in the extremely fortunate position to already be an employee of NEMU, so it didn't actually matter if I got funding or not - worst case, I do my PhD part-time for free (thanks to NEMU's 100% tuition remission for the first course/semester. The 2nd course, should I ever be so brave, is 90% covered).

In the end, I received what amounts to a good funding package for NEMU humanities departments, but which is unfortunately still a shit deal. I'll be TAing this fall for a pretty nice stipend, but the spring semester funding is only a graduate assistantship for 10 hrs/wk in exchange for tuition remission - no stipend. And there's no guarantee of funding in future years (and it sounds as though there definitely won't be any TAships available for my second year). So, for obvious reasons, I'm keeping my job and taking classes part-time - except for this fall, when I'm somehow going to juggle a full-time job with a 20 hr/wk TAship and a graduate course.

Assuming there are enough hours in the week, this is probably the best possible outcome. I like my job, but more importantly, it pays very well - more than I'll make in academia for the next 10+ years. I don't mind keeping it and studying part-time, but I had been concerned about what this would mean for teaching experience. However, now that I'm TAing a semester, I'll be at the top of the list for future semesters. I'll also be able to teach summer classes. So if all goes well, I'll have a few strong courses under my belt by the time I have to confront the job market.

In the meantime, I'm focusing on saving as much of my income as possible. Once I start the program, my loan payments will all be suspended, and the interest on all but one will freeze. (Can I just say how excited this makes me? My only monthly payments will be rent and my car!) The one that will keep generating interest is, of course, the largest one, but by this fall, it will be more or less equal to my fall stipend. And that's where my stipend will be going. By Christmas, my unsubsidized loan will be gone, and with it, my highest interest rate. And I will have paid off more than half of my MA degree.

Not bad for a first semester PhD student.

Credit Cards

2011-05-04T09:03:00.000-04:00

This started out as a comment to Tenured Radical's post, "A Graduation Guide for the Age of Living in Debt". It got a little long, so I've moved it here. But you should go read her post first.

On the topic of credit cards, I'd like to add my two cents: namely, that with a little self-control, a credit card really can be a good thing. Without a credit rating, you can't get cable. You can't get internet service. You can't get a cellphone plan (pay-as-you-go is an option though). You can't get electricity. I know these things because as a Canadian coming to the US, I had to rely on others for these things. Oh I had a Canadian credit rating, but that means diddly south of the border, it seems.

This is what happens when you have a Social Security Number, but no credit rating, and you try to get, say, internet, electricity, etc.:
VerComStar: "What's your SSN?"
Me: *gives SSN*
VerComStar: "Hmmm.. is there anyone else in the household?"

At this point the options are "yes" and you go get them, or "no" and you don't get service.

I had been working in the country legally on that SSN for eighteen months, but because I had no US credit cards, I had no US credit history. Then four months ago the lovely folks at CapitalOwned offered me a parasitic high-interest mastercard, which I took.

I proceeded to use it for one purchase a month, setting aside the money to pay the bill the moment I spent it. When we switched internet providers a month ago, lo and behold: I suddenly existed.

Here's the thing: you don't need to carry a balance to get a credit rating. If you buy one thing on it a month (preferably something you were going to buy anyway, like groceries) and pay it off each and every month, then voila: easy credit score. You exist.

Of course if, as so many young people today, you think that credit cards are for "buying now and paying later" then please, for your own safety, don't get one. And for everyone else's safety, maybe don't leave the house.

Canadian Elections (My Bully Pulpit)

2011-05-03T08:35:00.000-04:00

Well I'd say I'm surprised, but I can't, because I'm not. For those of you not in, from, or familiar with Canada, they just had an election. Here's the rundown, out of a parliament of 308 seats:

Conservative Party: 167
New Democratic Party: 102
Liberal Party: 34
Bloq Quebecois: 4
Green Party: 1

On my Facebook wall this morning I woke up to comments like this:

"Just remember for the next 4 years that we are not hostages, we are not victims and we will be neither silent nor polite. We will scream."

and

"momentous day for the NDP, and yet still a sad, sad day for Canada"

Let me say this now. The Conservative Party went from a minority government to a majority one, because of the same arrogance you can see in these posts. Me, I vote Green. I'm dead chuffed Elizabeth May (leader of the Green Party, for those of you who don't know) got her seat. But neither will I weep for a democratically elected party winning a free and fair election. I'm not arrogant enough to think that just because I don't share the prevailing political opinion (yep, that's right: they won; they prevailed) that it's a "sad day for Canada."

So the rich will get a little richer, the poor will get a little poorer, and we'll waste a little more money than we otherwise would have on the military. And even then, it was the Liberal Party who bought those broken-down diesel subs (yeah that's right, diesel-powered submarines) from the British for an arm and a leg when they last had a majority, so wasting money on the military isn't just a Conservative trait, I guess.

For those of you in the US, just remember: this is a Conservative Party that cannot help but espouse single-payer healthcare, has admitted that it was wrong to push for entry into the Iraq conflict (which we didn't join despite their best efforts), and who has given me, a poor student, money every year because I'm poor. Which is to say that every political party in Canada makes your Democrats look insanely right-wing. The Conservative Party just less so. Oh and most of them don't hate gay people, either.

So I'm taking a wait-and-see approach. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not going to like the bills that come out of Ottawa for the next few years, which is why I didn't vote for them. But the Conservative Party just won a fight it didn't start, because the leader of the Liberal Party made the same mistake as those people who are shocked by the outcome this morning: they confused their own political beliefs with those of the country as a whole.

I don't like it, but I can live with it.

Guess I'll just be writing more petitions for the next few years.

...

And I may have a drink to the bloody nose the separatists got last night, too.

Let Us Rise Up As One

2011-04-29T09:49:00.001-04:00

Let us gather under a single banner, a great nation of people with dignity, self-respect, and education. Let us band together and unite! Let us all, now, rise up and in one voice, unilaterally declare to the world this single, unalterable, unassailable fact:

LEGGINGS ARE NOT PANTS!

They really aren't. Please, if all you have on from your waist down is leggings, wear a longer shirt. Anyone who's that interested in that level of detail regarding your physiology is probably not the kind of person you want to be sharing it with.

Just say it with me people.

Salary negotiations

2011-04-12T18:59:00.004-04:00

In honor of Equal Pay Day (the day to which women would have to work to make the same amount that men made in 2010), I thought I'd share my negotiating experiences. Dr Becca wrote an interesting post on the topic, and I think it's worthwhile to share our experiences.

My first experience negotiating wasn't really for a starting salary. I had been working at now-defunct museum. The situation was messy, because the woman who had hired me was long gone. When I was hired, I had agreed to shit hourly wage for a 90 day training period, with the promise of a shiny salary after that.

It was a pretty good deal until she left; then, simply raising the 90 day issue was sticky. However, I was in the best possible position to negotiate: I had nothing to lose. I was living with my mother and tearing through my savings as I tried to pay the bills with my $10/hr, 28 hour/week job. There was no way I could continue there, essentially running the museum, without a substantial raise.

With that in mind, I decided that my finances required about $35,000/yr. When I suggested this, I was told flat out that it wasn't possible. Considering that the museum closed barely a year later, I believe it. They offered me $24,000 instead. Honestly, that would have paid my loans but there's no way I could afford rent on it.

So I wrote a letter outlining the many things I had done for the museum and the many plans I had for the future. I told them that, given my financial commitments, I simply could not accept their offer. I could compromise to $29,500.

If they couldn't give me that, then please consider this my letter of resignation.

Needless to say, they agreed to my terms.

But for a full week, I felt sick every time I thought about my negotiation. Dozens of times, I had nearly decided to take the $24,000 - even though it wasn't really an option. But my need to be "nice" and agreeable was at such odds with my demands that it was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

Surprisingly, it was much easier to negotiate the second time around - for my current job in academic administration. I had been doing the job as a temp before Scientist Boss decided he wanted me permanently. I had an informal meeting with my supervisor (we didn't even close the door), wherein he examined the salaries of everyone else in the department, calculated the importance of my job vs theirs, and announced that he could offer me the very nice sum of $xx,xxx/yr. (you'll forgive me for not waving my salary all over the internet)

My first temptation was to accept and run; I'd been living on what amounted to half that, without benefits, and here was literally double my salary with benefits up the wazoo.

Fortunately, I'd done my homework: I knew what the salary range was, and where my starting salary should fall. However, I'd also spoken with HR, and they'd quietly informed me that I could expect the very lowest value in the range - probably because they actually saw my disturbingly empty resume, which Scientist Boss and my supervisor never did.*

Anyway, I was sorely tempted to accept immediately. Instead, I said, "I was going to suggest Offer+$1,000." There was a moment of silence; then Supervisor nodded and said "We can do that. I'll tell HR to offer you New Offer."

So that was that. I figured HR would lowball me and we'd negotiate a little, so I was ready to play hardball when they called. Instead, they offered me New Offer and asked if I would like to accept, deny, or think about it. "I'll think about it," I told HR-man cheerfully - simply because I was taught never to accept immediately. Let them sweat a little. Unfortunately, it was poor HR-man who did the sweating. "Oh. Um. Ok. Is there any reason... why?" he asked. I think he honestly feared for his job - probably because this was supposed to be a done deal, and I was being hired at the behest of Scientist Boss, who is kind of a big deal. "Oh, I was just thinking more like New Offer+$1,000," I told him. I'm still not sure why I did, except that... I could. There was no "lose" in the situation.

So HR-man spoke with Supervisor (who probably wondered at my strange negotiating strategy); Supervisor approved the New New Offer; and I accepted (to the almost laughably intense relief of HR-man).

And that's how I negotiated a $2,000 increase in my starting salary. And I've got to tell you - if I could do it, as a temp who completely lucked into the position in the first place, without experience, a safety net, competing offers or even a reason why, you can too.

Of course, I had Scientist Boss behind me - I probably could have successfully negotiated for even more, given that he wanted me and he's the top scientist at NEMU - but I never had to play that card. All I did was keep a calm, neutral attitude, and say that I expected/wanted more. I could have given a lecture about the reasons why I deserved that extra $2,000, but all I actually had to do was ask - and then wait for a response.

Knowing that it's all right to ask, and knowing when to keep your mouth shut, are damn useful life skills.

*For the record, though my resume is shockingly bad, my academic CV is pretty kickass. Also, Supervisor did eventually see my resume, but all he had to say about it was "Seriously? You have a degree in Medieval Studies? That's kind of... cool."

Things to Read

2011-04-06T08:59:00.000-04:00

A new book is out by Professor X. Not the one from the X-Men comics, but rather the author of an essay in the Atlantic in 2008 entitled (as is the new book) "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower."

The essay, in case you missed it when it was first published (as I must admit to having done) is about the problem inherent with pushing everyone and their mother into college: some people can't do it. Professor X is an adjunct who teaches evening classes to the unlikeliest of college English students, people for whom an argumentative literary analysis is so far removed from what they'll ever be asked to do that it's almost comical. Does he think that society benefits from our policemen having read Of Mice and Men, our social workers having read Plath's poem "Daddy"? Perhaps not so specifically, but yes.

And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone.

Yet he can't shake the feeling that something's wrong with admitting to college courses the students whose existence many wish to deny: those who simply cannot pass -- who cannot even acquire the skills to pass. The students for whom it is, in all honesty, a complete waste of time. Yes, they exist. And he laments it:

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

To stop me from citing the whole goshdarn thing, here's a link to the article.

And for as long as it works, here's a link to the NYT's review of the entire book. From the sounds of it, it's probably a worthy, if depressing read.

And of course I can't go without citing what may be the most wrong yet giggle-inducing simile from the NYT article, so here it is in full.

Yet many reacted angrily to Professor X’s article (he prints some of the nastier letters he received here) as if he were proposing — to paraphrase Paul Fussell in his book “Class” — the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals. [emphasis mine]

I think that a) I need to read Paul Fussell's book "Class"; and b) I need to read Professor X's book "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" -- if only to read those letters.

Have a pleasant day, all.

Remembering

2011-03-30T11:12:00.004-04:00

This artist, probably best known for this painting at the Whitney, died Sunday.* He was a fantastic and unique artist who combined modern inspiration with medieval techniques to great effect. He was also an absolutely lovely man, and I'm greatly saddened by his passing.

I had the opportunity to meet George on several occasions during my time at now-defunct museum. At 89, I'm not sure he was entirely present, but I think that part of the reason I felt that was due to his sheer lack of understanding as to why anyone would want to meet him or discuss his work. He was nonplussed by the public's interest, both in his art and in himself. At the same time, I don't think anyone (even George) could deny that it pleased him, as well.

By the time I met him, he'd stopped painting; a combination, I think, of not feeling that he had anything left to say, and his own declining health. He rarely left his home and rarely had visitors. He had even stopped attending his church, where thirteen of his works still grace the sanctuary.

However, through a combination of enthusiasm and probably some sort of bribery, George agreed to do a book signing last year. As we seated him at the table in the museum, he looked blankly up at us. "You want me to do what?" It was simply beyond his comprehension as to why anyone would want his signature - especially on a book that he'd never seen before. His doubt was quickly forgotten, though, as he gawked at the massive crowd that lined up around him, smiling and eagerly holding their books and prints. The many visitors were delighted to meet him, and he couldn't help but be delighted with their smiles and tears as they explained what his work meant to them.

He resumed painting that week.

He also ventured from his home more often than had been his wont. Several months later, I was shocked to find George at a meeting of local artists. He sat cheerfully and silently in an arm chair as his colleagues flitted about the room. From time to time, another artist would come to sit beside him and engage him in conversation. There were several who utilized the same techniques, and more than one who identified him as an inspiration for their work. I think their enthusiasm and respect for his work took him by surprise - but he couldn't help but be pleased.

"Unassuming" doesn't even begin to describe him.

George lived a long and, I believe, full life. I'm glad that the revival of interest in his work came while he was still around to see it and wonder at it. And I hope he was still painting up until the end.

* Apologies for awkwardly avoiding his name, but Google would out me almost immediately if I included his full name in this post - I make more than a few identifying statements here.

Chris Bray Describing William Cronon

2011-03-26T23:22:00.000-04:00

Professor at a public university, known for his smart scholarship in the field of nineteenth century U.S. environmental history, writes a blog post attacking a contemporary political initiative undertaken by his governor. The governor's political party tries to embarrass and intimidate him, and he scrambles onto a pedestal as he shouts for them to stop. You can't attack me, he says. I'm a scholar.

I suppose that's a fair description, if you replace "writes a blog post attacking a contemporary political initiative undertaken by his governor" with "writes a blog post pointing out the machinations of a well-funded and influential conservative vested-interest group and the possibility that it is unduly influencing the political decisions of the dominant political party in his state and its currently out-of-character policies". Then yeah, I can see where you're coming from.

You can "change the tone and the nature of the question" all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that the reason the Wisconsin Republican Party is trying to take on Cronon is because he's hit a nerve.

Wisconsin Republicans Vs. William Cronon

2011-03-25T15:39:00.000-04:00

If you haven't yet heard, the Wisconsin Republican Party, in response to an unflattering (but otherwise objective) blog entry by the AHA's President-Elect, William Cronon, has decided to try to intimidate him by fishing for ammo to use against him from his @wisc.edu address. They're using a FOIA-type request, which to me (and more importantly, to Dr. Cronon) seems to be a politically-motivated misuse of an otherwise exceptionally good law. For the full story, the full text of the Open Records Law-based fishing request from Stephan Thompson, and some fantastic analysis by Cronon himself, go here:

Abusing Open Records to Attack Academic Freedom

To say that this reflects poorly on the Wisconsin Republican Party is one hell of an understatement. The name McCarthy shows up a few times in the article, and though I think it's a stretch, I don't think the comparison is wide enough of the mark to be completely baseless. And that in itself is scary.

Happy reading.

Standardized Testing

2011-03-24T09:22:00.000-04:00

via Historiann.

"They get paid money to put scores on paper, not to put the right scores on papers," he says. "They have a bottom line. Why anyone would expect anything else is beyond me."

Terrifying.

Procrastination by way of genealogy

2011-03-15T20:00:00.008-04:00

My hobby recently, in an effort to both avoid writing my paper for PSU and distract myself from the hell that is waiting to hear back on my PhD apps, has been genealogy.*

Genealogy is one of those rare hobbies that even other genealogists simply do not want to hear about. No matter how fascinating your family history is,** or how many of those family members were alive in recent memory, it's simply not interesting to anyone other than yourself.*** Even other genealogists in the family start to glaze over after 10 minutes. My grandmother will go on for hours about the family, and even though it's my family too, I quickly start wondering exactly why anyone cares.****

I've discovered why: it's addictive. You may nod in agreement, but I don't think you understand. I've barely been at work on my tree for a month, and I've already added 1,800 people who are somehow related to me.

1,800.

Clearly, genealogy is the best procrastination device ever created.

Part of the attraction is that my grandmothers (yes, both of them - I really didn't stand a chance) had already done a fair bit of genealogical work. On my mother's side (the less obsessive side of the family), this mostly took the form of the back of shopping lists scribbled with names and dates taken from gravestones, along with a couple cheat-sheets created by my mother. (wait, Duffy was whose mother? So who are the O'Learys, then?) On the obsessive side of the family, I had access to 6 stapled reams of paper detailing each ancestry line back either to 17th century Massachusetts or to the 19th century immigration from Ireland (usually the latter). Both these things were useful for laying the groundwork, and after that, ancestry dot com was happy to provide me with census listings and birth certificates and the like.

I found my grandparents' marriage license. How cool is that? They'd probably rather I didn't, as it was only 6 months before my mother was born. Oops.

What I find most fascinating, however, are the glimpses of average life from the 19th and early 20th century. My great-great grandmother married to save herself from the almshouse - which is where her mother spent 50 years, because neither of her two children were ever settled enough to take her in. I wondered why she didn't get a divorce when her husband left her in 1900. But how could she have, with 12 children at home, and her mother waiting in the poor house? Her sister married three times for the same reason - but even that wasn't enough, for after her death, her own daughter ended up in the almshouse as well.

My god-knows-how-many great grandmother, Mary, stated in 1900 that she was a mother of 13, but only 4 were living. All but one survived infancy. Two died before they reached 13. One died in the Civil War. Three died around 1880, between the ages of 14 and 18 - presumably from the same disease. One died at 41, and one died in prison.

Granted, Mary lived to be 80, so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that she outlived so many children. But it really is quite sobering.

Oops, sorry - I think I just did what I complained about at the start of the post. (are you glazing over yet?)***** But there's the point: genealogy isn't necessarily interesting. History, at least as far as I'm (and probably you're) concerned, is. But history, especially modern American history, tends to, by necessity, gloss over the majority of people. While I was the curator of the now-defunct colony museum, I researched and exhibited about the wealthy, famous artists who lived there. The ordinary, working class people, however, only showed up when they did something notable for the "important" people - when they were their housekeepers, or their models, or their mistresses.

The flip-side is the attention that we now pay to the lowest in society: the immigrant girls working in the mills; the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire; the slums. With such extremes, it's easy to forget that there was a middle ground, especially in the rural areas where there weren't factories or wealthy artists.

Out of all 1800 people that I've found in my tree, only one young woman ever worked in a mill. Only one was an artist. Most were farmers, laborers, furniture makers, lumberjacks. Most did absolutely nothing of note, whether that be producing artwork or fighting for humane working conditions.

It's nice to be reminded of that once in a while. History is written by the victors, but it's made up of the millions of people of little-to-no note.

Maybe that's why genealogy is so dull: it's just the ordinary people, without the historic struggle or the glamour. Some days, though, I think I'd rather talk about the woman who watched 9 of her children die than the artist who produced triumphal monuments, using his mistress as the model.

* You can add "avoid writing a new blog post" to the list. It's been 5 months since my last post, but I'm going to pretend it hasn't been nearly that long. Blame Twitter for my prolonged absence.

** Do you know how many Mehitables are in my family? More than 5, and that's already more than 5 too many.

*** Worse than Mehitable, if you can imagine such a thing, is Mindwell. Seriously, who names their kid that? It practically guarantees she won't mind well, if only to spite you.

**** I'm not sure about Brainard as a name, either. Brainard's almost as popular in my family tree as Glen(n), which is rather nicer - but I'd actually recommend the former, as all the Glen(n)s in my family took off and left their wives and children. Seriously - Glen(n) doesn't have a good track record among the Vaulting ancestors.

***** Patrick, on the other hand, is a lovely name, but with 2 Patrick Duffys, 3 Patrick Costellos, a Patrick Byrne, a Patrick O'Leary and a Patrick Magee in my family history, I'm going to recommend against.

Dare to Compare?

2011-03-12T18:27:00.000-05:00

These are the "offices" we've made for ourselves. Above, Vaulting; Below, Vellum.

So yes, our "offices" are the North-East and South-East corners of our bedroom, but somehow Vaulting's seems so much classier than mine. Maybe it's the shiny black desk and Apple laptop on her desk and the laminate table with an old Linux box on mine. Maybe it's the glass and brushed aluminum lamp on her desk, or the plastic halogen lamp broken and fixed with construction putty on mine. Maybe it's the nicely framed print of the School of Athens on the wall over her desk, or the bras and radiator behind mine, I'm not sure. O_o She's always been the classy one, I guess.

Transitional Generations

2011-03-09T13:06:00.000-05:00

Dean Dad has another spot-on post up today about Generation X as transitional. But I think he's missed something. I'm in no position really to judge his statements about Generation X, but I can say that we Millennials (of which I'm just about the leading (read: oldest) edge) are transitional too.

DD writes: "Those of us who went through grad school in the 90's probably remember when “post-” was the prefix of choice. (For younger readers, it was similar to the use of “e-” ten years ago or “i-” now.) It started with “postmodernism,” but quickly grew to become a cultural habit. “Posties” were those who couldn't stop proclaiming the “death of...” whatever. The cultural mood at the time was that we were at the end of something, but the next thing hadn't arrived yet. We were late to the party, but didn't really have one of our own."

He goes on to productively apply this line of thought to administration in post-secondary education (as you might well expect from a blogger in his position), but I got stuck on the very idea of a generation as transitional.

If gen-x caught the tail end of a party, what's the party me and mine caught the leading edge of? Well, we tend to view "post-"anything with skepticism, that's for sure. We have the internet, well, after a fashion (at 12 or 13 I was impersonating an adult on newsgroups and chat rooms -- remember those? chat rooms? mIRC anyone? -- so that I could gain instant access to that automatic respect that being an adult seemed to confer in a discussion). We have PVRs and MP3 players, we're blamed for everything from the death of print journalism to the death of movies.

But I guess what I'm getting at is that we're in a period of non-stop transition now. There may never again be a time like the first half of the 20th century where people could do the same thing their whole lives and be secure. It's certainly not true now, if in fact it ever was.

Dean Dad writes that "being the transitional group can kind of suck. You fight like hell to board a sinking ship." Unfortunately, this could be the metaphor not solely for Gen-X, but also for every generation hereafter.

The new "party" seems to be the Kurzweilian pace-of-change party -- in which things will from here on in change faster than they have before. That means faster sinking ships, faster ship building, and generally faster ships. The new rule is transition, and the new currency is adaptability.

And so I suppose in a way yes, Gen X has got the brunt of it -- they've gone from the illusion of stability (which was just slower change) to faster change, and they're the first to have to deal with it. But it's a new reality for me and mine, and it's not going to get any better. From here on in, we're going to have to be one thing above all else, and that's "flexible."

First They Came For The Bigots (and then they stopped there, and nobody really minded...)

2011-03-02T22:37:00.000-05:00

Oh, America. America the Free.

There are a lot of things I love about this country. But there are some oddities I can't quite figure out. As a Canuck south of the border, there are some things that just seem off: the demonizing of the word socialism; the insistence that gun ownership be protected by the state; the no-holds-barred attitude to freedom of speech.

That last one is what's come up in my news feed twice recently, in differing ways.

On the one hand, we have this: the upholding of the "no lying on the news" law in Canada that's essentially preventing the spread of Fox-News-Style-Insanity north of the border. Canada has put a limit on freedom of the press, though it's not one you should really concern yourself with. It just says that it's illegal to lie on the news.

On the other hand, this: the US supreme court has said it's okay for right-wing bigots to picket funerals. America the Free won't curtail the Westboro Baptist Family's noxious hate speech because, as Chief Justice John Roberts says, we can't curtail "even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."

I'm just not in favour of absolutism, I guess. I believe, strongly and wholeheartedly, that there is indeed a definite time and place for the curtailing of freedom of speech. Incitement to violence is one good example. Hate speech is another. Lying on the news? Yeah, that should be illegal too.

Incitement to violence is fairly obvious - speech that calls for violence can and will be listened to, and making it illegal holds culpable for the violence those who called for it. Hate speech is violent in itself: is society improved in any respect by speech whose sole purpose is to promote hatred? No. And the deliberate misrepresentation of facts in a medium that is trusted (read: lying on the news) does violence to one of the most cherished institutions of western society -- the democratic process. It should be no more legal to lie on the news than to lie during an election campaign (which should be, and sadly is not yet, illegal).

Do these curtailments of freedom of speech harm society? Is there any social good that could come from allowing hate speech, calls for violence, or lies on the news? My answer would be no, what about yours?

It's not a slippery slope. Healthy debate should be protected -- but the key word there is healthy. A debate with someone who refuses in their argument to acknowledge the basic dignity and humanity of their opponent isn't a healthy argument, it's a racist/sexist/homophobic screed. Nothing useful is produced.

Reporting of the truth -- with whatever point of view you wish to report it -- should never be banned. Truth is the cornerstone of western civilization and I stand behind it. The truth will out.

Lies, (not different opinions, those are fine, but lies) on the other hand, should be banned from any media purporting to deliver truth. I'm all in favour of left- and right-wing news stations, so long as they tell the truth. We hold legally to account advertisers who make false claims -- why not news stations?

As for the Westboro Baptist Family, they do nothing but spread hatred of a minority group at the expense of society. It is not healthy debate, it is hate speech.

So anyway. That's why the Canadians ban them entry to the country.

Problematic Theory

2011-02-13T18:00:00.000-05:00

When did the use of the word problematic as a noun cease to be merely the substantive use of the adjective (meaning, thus, problematic [things]) and start to be an object in its own right?

Also: what does this sentence mean?

"It is this context that I want to allude briefly to the problematic of seeing/being seen."

Can one really allude a context to a problematic? I don't think I speak this kind of English :*(

Help. Please.

Theory: For These And Other Reasons...

2011-02-09T11:25:00.001-05:00

So a few days ago I was in a ranty mood and started writing a post that Blogger in its bloggy wisdom decided to share before it was done. It was part of a process I've been going through trying to deal with some readings on literary theory that I'm slogging through. I've been trying to figure out what it is that gets my back up about them, what frustrates me so much, and I think a recent post by Sisyphus over at Academic Cog started me down the right path, along with a recent post I did myself here. At least in part.

I come from an increasingly lonely planet where the author -- though he or she may have died a thousand years ago, though we may never have known his or her name -- is still very much alive. At least, more alive than in much of the theory I'm reading. On my home planet, literature is, first and foremost, a communicative medium. It is the process of conveying information (intended and unintended) between two people, the writer and the reader. The writer transmits information, and the reader receives.

Of course it's more complicated than that. The reader interprets what has been written based on whatever social or literary conventions s/he is familiar with. The writer tries to anticipate what the reader's toolbox of conventions contains in order to convey the right meaning. Or maybe s/he doesn't, but her or his writing is grounded in societal conventions and the un-thought-of assumption that the readers have the same social understanding. But the fact remains that every word in a book is the product of a writer in a society, and every time a reader picks up a book s/he is interpreting that.

And from what I'm reading, it's like the writer doesn't matter. Anything you can read into a text is okay. Anachronisms, outright confabulations even, and everyone smiles and nods. I feel like I'm watching the naked emperor wandering down the street.

And yeah, that's fine I guess, but it isn't how I understand the function of literature. It speaks to me of an incredible narcissism on the part of the reader to believe that he or she is living in isolation. That only the reader's response matters. It's a two-part process and we're increasingly focused -at least in the readings I'm wading through- on only the receiving end.

So there's that. I have other beefs, but that's the big one, I think.

There's also the tendency of theorists to make grand sweeping generalizations that have no plausible provability. Like the idea that all art originates in ritual (Benjamin), or that all photographs encode death (Barthes). There's also a pervasive "now-centeredness" of opinion, a feeling that we were all functionally illiterate until the linguistic turn. And of course there's my perennial favourite, the tendency to use high-brow jargon or conveluted sentence structures to obfuscate* the fact that what's being talked about is really very simple.

So those are, I think, the issues at the heart of my resistance to capital-T Theory. I'm still reading the stuff. I'm still trying to get something positive out of it. But damn, if it doesn't automatically put me into a confrontational mood, then nothing does.

*read: "hide" -- haHA irony.

Bruce Greenwood or Sam Neill?

2011-02-08T23:54:00.000-05:00

I have, I learned tonight, been mixing up these two guys for years. Sam Neill and Bruce Greenwood. I'm not even sure I see the resemblance anymore. What do you think?

Crap. They look nothing alike. O_o What is wrong with me?

Kinds of Literacy

2011-02-06T22:51:00.000-05:00

A few days ago a commenter named Josef brought up an interesting point (Hi Josef! Glad you're reading!). He'd been reading A World Lit Only By Fire and somehow found his way to my slow but ongoing feature A World Lit Only By Misconceptions. He writes (after some caveats):

I found your discussion regarding literacy bias to be jaw-dropping. Maybe I am just a biased, blinkered individual, but to argue that one should not find literacy to be objectively better than illiteracy strikes me as really, really silly. I am not saying that everything about the Greeks, the Romans, or modern culture is fantastic and the epitome of human development, but reading and writing and recording are clear, obvious positives, no?

And the answer is, it depends:

First, I think we're a ways off from proving that textual literacy rates were higher at all points in Classical Antiquity than in all points in the Middle Ages, so let's not assume that.

Second, widespread literacy is a great thing. It allows a society to record its innovations in a way that preserves as well as transmits. It allows for greater and more frequent improvements on previous ideas. It allows for more general societal understanding of disparate topics. I'm not ever going to say that increased literacy isn't a good thing.

And of course today textual literacy is important, very important, to someone's livelihood in what we typically refer to as "western democracies" (let's just ignore the potential offenses a term like that might cause and move on). Because the literacy rate is so high, if you're not able to read and write, you're at a serious disadvantage.

In Anglo-Saxon England, the same was not the case. Reading and writing of text were only necessary for people in certain occupations, and in those occupations it was of course widespread. If I'm not mistaken the translation of the first books of the Bible into Old English was the first instance of its translation into a vernacular since the general incorporation of the Christian church, so they were doing pretty well, all things considered.

Anyway, the reason I keep saying "textual" literacy, versus other kinds, is because there are other kinds of literacy. We're very good, today, at reading text. But we're also increasingly good at reading visual imagery in a culturally specific way. Internet memes are a fantastic example, but movies and TV are also very good: we understand them, we can draw meaning from them, because we know what to look for. We're familiar with conventions that allow us to interpret them in the way intended by their creators.

Reading can be viewed in many ways, but when we're talking about literacy, we're primarily talking about one half of a two-part process of communication. Person one transmits information and person two receives it. If you as the "reader" don't know the conventions, then the information transmitted is going to come out garbled at best.

Take the Ruthwell or Bewcastle crosses, for instance. We can really only guess at their iconography, because that's information that's been to a great extent lost over the years. We can deduce it to a degree; but, because these are public works, one can only assume that they were meant for some form of public consumption, and that at the time these were made, the general public would have had the literacy skills necessary to read it.

In addition, the Anglo-Saxons had a thriving oral culture, in which stories, legends, poetry, were all passed from person to person, remembered and adapted and created without ever being written down.

Basically, in addition to textual literacy, the people of the Middle Ages were also possessed of a nuanced and complex visual literacy that rivals our own, and a unique and creative oral culture the likes of which the English language hasn't seen in hundreds of years.

To assume that any culture is inferior to our own merely because it is different is dangerous, even when it concerns something so seemingly obvious as literacy. Even though textual literacy is advantageous in many ways, it isn't the only way for a culture to operate, and isn't by any necessity superior.

Hope that clears up things a little bit? :)

Tech Troubles, or, I Hate Blogger Right Now

2011-02-04T16:22:00.000-05:00

To anyone following us using an RSS reader: sorry about the completely unfinished, unedited, still-being-thought-through and badly titled piece that went live a minute ago. Blogger decided of its own accord to publish it before it was done. It will be reposted in a short while, finished, and with likely substantial changes.

-Vellum

An Informative Unicorn Chaser

2011-01-31T17:27:00.000-05:00

After that rant I felt the need to post something pleasant, so here it is: a lovely five-minute explanation of the peculiarities of The United Kingdom, Great Britain, and the former colonies.

How polite!

Why Evolution Can Be A Deal Breaker, And Why It's Not About Belief.

2011-01-31T09:36:00.000-05:00

Over at Historiann there's an epic comment thread in which netizens far and wide have been bringing to light their most catastrophic interview experiences, and it's really worth the read if you have the time. But one thread of the discussion has prompted me to write this. The issue of the diverse beliefs of job candidates came up, and one commenter suggested that discussions of "belief" in evolution should be avoided.

Well, if you don't "believe in" evolution (and I'll explain the scare quotes in a minute), I'd strongly advise that you keep that to yourself during any kind of interaction that may affect your hiring. I know that I am not the only person in academia for whom that could be a deal breaker, and here's why:

Depending on your variety of skepticism, I might not be able to trust you to teach.

Modern academia rests squarely on the shoulders of a rational process: hypothesis, evidence, examination, conclusion, repeat (with occasional switch-ups, like new evidence, new hypothesis, new examination, new.. uhm.. repetition, I guess, too. Anyway.). The only way to rationally reach the conclusion that evolution is an invalid theory is to present scientific evidence which indicates that that is the case.

And let's be clear: you don't get to be a part of the debate if you haven't studied evolution. If you can't state how the theory of evolution accounts for the present-day existence of both humans and monkeys, you don't get to be a part of the debate. If you confuse abiogenesis with evolutionary theory (this isn't about the spontaneous generation of life, it's about evolution) you don't get to be a part of the debate. These are the absolute basics of the theory, and if you're not familiar with them, you haven't done any research or critical analysis.

And that's the point: this isn't about freedom of/from religion, it's about critical thinking. Analysis, the ability to think critically about evidence, is the single most important skill an academic possesses. If you said something, anything, that led me to believe that your critical thinking skills were in question, then I couldn't in good conscience recommend you to a hiring committee.

Evolution does not require belief. Scientists don't "believe in" evolution, to them it is the process that best fits the evidence that has been amassed (and yes, there is a Metric F**kton of evidence). Scientists don't "believe in" evolution any more than they "believe in" gravity, atoms, magnetic fields, or any of a hundred other not readily visible things you need to rely on evidence to prove. If good, solid evidence surfaced tomorrow that atoms didn't exist, and that rather than atoms we were composed instead of tiny, tiny cheesecakes, scientists would reassess their theories and come up with new ones. That's what it's about.

If you refused to accept the existence of the process of evolution in totality, then no, I couldn't recommend you. If you understood how the theory of evolution works, but took issue with some minutiae of the theory, I'd suggest writing a paper and entering the academic discussion.

Otherwise, here's the deal: if you will accept that, based on the evidence, evolution is a currently existing and ongoing phenomenon, and that, again according to all evidence, homo sapiens (a misnomer if I ever heard one) shares a common ancestor with other primates, then I will consider it a possibility -- however unlikely -- that the world is in fact only 6,000 years old, and its accompanying understanding that there exists a god with one weird as hell sense of humour.

The reason this isn't about belief is this: if your response is "current scientific consensus is that evolution is the best fit for the evidence" then I don't give a damn what you believe. If you accept that all the evidence seems to point to evolution, but think there's some very powerful being or beings who are pulling the strings to make it just seem to any rational human being that that's the case, then who am I to judge? So long as you accept that there is evidence and that for the time being it points in one very specific direction, you could believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all His Noodley Appendages for all I care.

But if your response, on the other hand, is that you "didn't come from monkeys," then Houston, we're going to have a problem.

Wherever will we find the cash? Oh wait.

2011-01-28T09:42:00.001-05:00

So I just read this lovely piece by Philip Pullman about the approaching closures of libraries and social services all across England because the British government is being run by a whole host of burkes. He says it much more politely, but I have to admit, every time I hear about the cuts to education, public welfare, LIBRARIES for Chrissakes, it makes me just a little more incensed.

They keep maintaining that there just isn't enough to go around. "We're sorry," they say, "but we can't afford to subsidize education/community/society."

Meanwhile, they have increased spending on "defense" by One And A Half Billion Dollars.

Let me just say that again: in the midst of huge government cuts to things that affect the daily lives and future careers of millions of UK citizens, not to mention the future structure of British society, they have increased government spending on the military from £35,165,000,000 to £36,702,000,000. This is, as far as I can tell, after the 8% cut announced last October. I'm not really sure where that 8% is coming out of (perhaps that was originally going to be a bigger increase?), but you'd think that three months would be enough for them to update their website, so I can only assume that these are the right numbers. (God, they're good at squirrelling away funds for the military, though -- did you know that an additional £9.5Billion has been spent since 2001 in Afghanistan that isn't recorded as a part of the defense budget? It just comes from the Treasury Reserve. Can we get a billion to fight the war on ignorance, TR?).

Thing is, I have a lot of respect for the military. I think they do a good job. One that I couldn't do. My question is, how can it cost so much? Military spending is the most incredible thing. For the same amount of money as it costs to buy 16 fancy fighter jets (which they were, before the cuts, scheduled to buy over 130 from the US, at around £75million each) the UK could provide £9,000 tuition to 170,777 university students.

Thing is, the £3.25 billion shortfall they expect in the budget this year that they're taking out of public services like libraries, tuition subsidies, the AHRC, arts funding, and so forth, is chump change when you think about the costs of waging war.

The US does the same thing, probably worse. They just never really funded education in the first place, so people are used to it. You just can't question the spending on the military, because that would be un-Amurrican. Socialist, even.

...You know I was right-wing in the country I'm from.

So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't get it. I don't understand the priorities. I don't understand the costs. I don't get it, but it leaves me with a strong feeling of unease, that my education (undergrad, masters and doctorate, including tuition remission) costs about as much as a well-aimed missile. That it costs $80,000 in bullets alone to kill one Taliban fighter in Afghanistan. That an unmanned Predator drone costs the same as sending over 300 students to undergrad for a year.

But the UK can't afford to keep its libraries open.

Impolite things.

2011-01-24T21:58:00.000-05:00

An open letter to Routledge, and secondary sellers of the book I want:

Dear Routledge,

I realize that the book I want from you was published all of nine years ago, and perhaps the price that you charge for it was just as high then. Perhaps that's why not enough people expressed enough interest in it for you to bother publishing a cheaper, paperback copy. But here's something I have to tell you, Routledge:

Unless that collection of essays LAYS BIG SHINY GOLDEN EGGS, I WILL NOT PAY $125 FOR IT.

That is all.

Sincerely,

A STUDENT WHO CAN'T AFFORD A $125 DOLLAR BOOK, YOU FREAKS.

WHAT THE HELL? O_O

"Academically Adrift" or Just Learning to Swim?

2011-01-18T08:56:00.000-05:00

In an article published today in the New York Times, under "The Choice: Demystifying College Admissions and Aid" is an article titled "How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?". It's about a new book and study being published by professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, called "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." Now I can't speak to the quality of the book, but the content of this article does raise, for me, some cause for concern -- and not concern about the quality of education the students are receiving.

Instead, my concern is for the alarm-ringing, flag-waving, media-friendly BS that passes for scholarship these days.

The study, as you might guess from the title, purports to be about the "fact" that in their study of "undergraduates at two dozen universities, [they] concluded that 45 percent “demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college.” "

I kid you not.

Why isn't this cause for concern, you may ask? Why am I not worried that nearly half of undergrads aren't improving "significantly" (whatever that means) their "broad analytic and problem-solving skills" in the first two years of undergraduate study?

You're here reading, so I'll assume you want me to tell you.

First, the study was done on 2300 undergrads at 24 institutions. Let's round that up to 2400 to be generous, and to make the math easier. That means that on average, at each of two dozen campuses, they studied 100 students. Not a bad sample size, all things considered. Except that at my undergraduate institution, that would be 0.2% of the population. I don't know if they take into account the differences between type of institutions (Community Colleges, R1s, SLACs, etc.) but I should like to know what statistical differences they found between them, as well.

Second, the study was done using the "Collegiate Learning Assessment":

...a standardized test that is essay-based and open-ended. (It is worth noting that in measuring broad analytic and problem-solving skills, the exam does not assess how much students concentrating in particular majors — physics or psychology, for example — have learned in their respective fields of study.)

It's a standardized test. Standardized tests do not, in fact, measure anything except the ability of a given student to take that particular standardized test. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner this country learns that, the better. Moving on, that little caveat (you know, that minor bit about not measuring the development of field-specific skills?) isn't so little.

One of the hardest parts of undergraduate learning is the steep difference in standards between even well-performing high schools and first-year university classes. There's a reason that most students can expect to have their marks drop by a full letter grade when they first enter undergraduate study: it's harder. That the first two years are spent trying to get up to speed in a new environment (both academic and social) alone would be enough to account for the fact that the lower-performing 45% of the students taking a standardized test don't show "significant" improvement in broad analytical skills.

That doesn't even take into account that a huge number of undergraduate programs are specialized from the get-go, meaning that the first two years are the first two years of a psychology program, or of a business program, or of an electrical engineering program -- where those years are spent, specifically, on learning to operate in a specific discipline.

Maybe a student in second-year economics won't see much improvement in broad analytical skills just yet, but I'll bet s/he'll see a pretty major improvement in her/his ability to understand economic systems.

The study purports to address this problem that "almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get [to college]? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no." (From the University of Chicago Press site)

Are they learning anything? Well, they aren't getting better on this one standardized test. In the first two years. Well, a little under half of them aren't. And we didn't take into account the time it takes to adapt to a new learning environment, or that what they might be working hardest on isn't broad analytical skills, but rather discipline-specific skills we don't measure. So I guess our answer is no, they aren't learning anything.

Face, meet palm.

Of course, this can all be fixed (because it's broken, don't you see?) by having students do more work:

for example, they found that 32 percent of the students whom they followed did not, in a typical semester, take “any courses with more than 40 pages of reading per week” and that 50 percent “did not take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages over the course of the semester.”

My God, a third of students don't take courses that require more than 40 pages of reading a week? And fully half didn't write more then twenty pages in a single class in a single semester? Sacre Dieu! It's like half of the students they polled are in the sciences or something.

Of course it's the institutions' fault. The study asks "What if at the beginning of the 21st century many colleges and universities were not focused primarily on undergraduate learning, but instead had become distracted by other institutional functions and goals?"

Yes. What if.

I have another "what if" -- what if, at the beginning of the 21st century, academics were given financial incentives to pass off this kind of alarmist pap as significant research?

This is, from what I can tell, a poorly put-together argument that loosely associates poor research findings with scapegoating accusations. It begins, like all bad science, with an intended outcome and a reason for it (read: our schools are failing us and it's Your Fault) and then uses water-thin evidence to attempt to substantiate its grand sweeping claims.

If I'm completely off-base about this book, then I wholeheartedly apologize. At this point I can only operate based on the claims made about the book by the NYT and UCP. But if I'm wrong in my assessment, and, in fact, this is a well-written study whose authors understand all of the above and have included caveats throughout explaining such... well, if I were professors Arum and Roksa, then I would be positively livid -- not only with the New York Times for painting my study in such a ridiculous light, but also with the University of Chicago Press for the patently absurd copy accompanying the book.

Why do we need to always be alarmed by the state of education today?

Linkspam Monday!

2011-01-10T09:52:00.000-05:00

Not that this is going to be a regular occurrence, but I felt the need to share a few links, so...

Dr. Crazy defends the MLA, Dissent Magazine asks the ludicrous question "Are English Departments Killing the Humanities?", Keith Olbermann issues a Special Comment about violent rhetoric (via HuffPo), and so too does our own Matthew Gabriele.

Happy Monday everybody :)

AHA Meet-up?

2011-01-06T08:40:00.000-05:00

Any readers interested in meeting up for drinks sometime during the AHA? It's not every day that thousands of historians descend on (something that is close to) your hometown. Leave suggestions for where/when in the comments :)

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T22:56:00.001-05:00

Vaulting and I are back in New England Micropolis for Christmas for a few days before heading up into the white wild yonder (Canuckland) to see my associated people. Might post in the next few days about an article I read in the journal Science. Might not. I'm not making any promises. :D

Have a great Christmas if you celebrate it, and if not, enjoy the time off while you can!

Merry merry!

Today in WTF? Liam Neeson and the Moronic Right edition

2010-12-23T08:48:00.000-05:00

So, Liam Neeson is doing the voice-over work for the part of Aslan in the latest Narnia movie. Aslan is the big-ol' Christ-figure lion in the subtle-as-a-brick-through-a-window Christian allegory put together by C. S. Lewis. So the other day, Neeson says this:

"Aslan symbolises a Christ-like figure but he also symbolises for me Mohammed, Buddha and all the great spiritual leaders and prophets over the centuries... That’s who Aslan stands for as well as a mentor figure for kids – that’s what he means for me."(1)

I added in the bold for a reason.

Today in WTF? We have, in response, this batsh!t-insane article from Ken Blackwell at the HuffPo, in which he calls Neeson's comments a "craven effort" to use "his social, cultural, or political position to smooth the path of sharia, the law they have in Saudi Arabia."(2)

Blackwell writes "This is the reason that Hollywood so often is linked to the Looney Left!"

Really?

Really, mister? This is the reason? One man's personal statement about what a two-dimensional character from a poorly-written set of books turned CGI-heavy movies means to him. That's why Hollywood is the "looney left".

Well, I'm glad we got that cleared up.

Let's just not talk about what things like this say about the right, then, shall we?

*facepalm*

1. quoted from here.

2. go look, I'll wait here.

The (Honorary) Professor Badass Award, vol. 1

2010-12-21T22:22:00.000-05:00

It's time for something new. So as a decent excuse for posting this de-motivational poster I swiped form the internets (9gag.com) as often as possible, I will henceforth be honouring random individuals with the temporary moniker "Professor Badass."

This week, it goes to Charlie Brooker, over at the guardian, for a Swiftian, eat-Irish-babies-type article about how hard all of this "edumacation" stuff is, and how really, completely unnecessary it all is:

Instead, let's focus on giving young people the skills society will be crying out for in the years or months to come. Practical vocations such as water-cannon operator, wasteland scavenger, penguin coffin logger, Thunderdome umpire, dissident strangler, henchperson and pie ingredient.

You sir, for the week of December 20 to December 26, 2010, are the honorary Professor Badass.

And a very merry Christmas to you too, sir.

A World Lit Only By Misconceptions: On Time

2010-12-19T18:50:00.001-05:00

Yes, now that I've finished and handed in two completely non-medieval term papers, it's about time for a little more debunking and public mockery of everyone's favourite book: William Manchester's "A World Lit Only By Fire". In this episode: why the statement that in the "medieval mind" there was "no awareness of time" is, for want of a less polite term, utter poppycock.

"In the medieval mind there was also no awareness of time, which is even more difficult to grasp... Life then revolved around the passing of the seasons and such cyclical events as religious holidays, harvest time, and local fetes. In all Christendom there was no such thing as a watch, a clock, or, apart from a copy of the Easter tables in the nearest church or monastery, anything resembling a calendar. Generations succeeded one another in a meaningless, timeless blur. In the whole of Europe, which was the world as they knew it, very little happened..." [emphasis mine](Manchester 22-23).

Some of these claims don't even merit discussion. That very little happened in medieval Europe is, well, it's the dumbest damn thing I've heard this week. But there is something to be said about time.

No doubt Manchester got this hyperbolic drivel by lightly skimming some of the last century's worth of writing on the subject of time and perception in the Middle Ages. There is a kernel of truth behind what he writes: the mechanical clock,* in the form of the communal, "town clock", didn't become widespread until the early 1400s. We have evidence that almost a century earlier than that, however, in Italy, there was some kind of a 24-hour mechanical clock, though it mightn't have worked so well. By the time of the early Protestant Reformation in England people had been talking about "such-and-such hour of the day" in the sense we would for some time. People started counting minutes later, during Pepys' time (or thereabouts). Huygens' invention of the pendulum clock pretty much brings us up to now.

There is also a very prominent theory, as seen in Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" and based on Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," that a major sea-change took place in the understanding of time in the west between the medieval and the modern periods. The idea is pretty complicated, but basically has to do with the suggestion that in the modern conception of time, we pass along a timeline, with space on the line between the dots that represent events. So the idea of "empty" time with events "in" it (and more importantly, with space between the events) is the current one. The "medieval" time is what Benjamin calls "messianic" time, and that's where things get really theoretical and beyond the realm of a blog post. Suffice it to say, it's not the way we think of time, and it's a lot more metaphysical. It has to do with prefiguration (think Isaac & Christ) and a simultaneity that exists through the perception of the divine. Just, bear with me on this.

The point is, that yes: in the Middle Ages, time was understood differently than it is today. But that's a bit of a no-brainer, isn't it? It doesn't mean that they had "no conception of time," or that, more than that, all life was "a meaningless, timeless blur."

"No mechanical clocks" does not equate with "timeless existential dread," Mr. Manchester.

Before the mechanical clock there was the sundial. There was the water clock. The sand clock. The canonical hours were rung on bells in England from somewhere in the middle of the 600s.** There were medieval astrolabes which could (guess what) be used to tell time.

The word "hour" doesn't enter the English language until the 1200s, sure. But other words for time-keeping do: "morn," "even," and "day" have been in the language since before we have written evidence to prove it. "Noon" might not have come to mean the middle of the day until the 1200s, but "on midne dæg" is written in the Blickling Homilies, followed shortly by the compound "middandæg". Certainly the periods of time people were concerned with were larger than the hour and the minute, but this doesn't reduce the diurnal and seasonal foci of their timescales to "meaningless".

The people of the Middle Ages didn't view time the way we do today. But they did perceive it. To impress upon that a value judgement is nothing short of social darwinism. More than that, doing so "writes off" another, different perspective. If you can't stomach a perspective that's different from your own, Mr. Manchester, might I suggest you get the hell out of the study of history.

That is all :)

For further reading on time in the middle ages, please consult the following:

Cipolla, Carlo. Clocks and Culture 1300-1700. 1967. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. Print.

Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard. History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.

Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Print.

Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form 1660-1785. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.

*from a very very old root, as evidenced by its similar appearance in both old Gaelic forms as well as old Germanic ones, meaning something like "bell"
**well, Bede says they imported a bell around then, anyhoo.

Lost Books

2010-12-06T09:55:00.000-05:00

This post is a shameless recommendation of a book of poetry by a good friend of both Vaulting and myself. It's shameless because I can fully endorse the buying of this book for yourself, your friends, and pretty much anyone you know that likes good poetry. I'm also posting because I want fans of poetry to know that it's up for the People's Book Prize, a voter-based book award. It's usually won by novels, because they're generally more popular than poetry in this day and age, but I thought I might try to mobilize the vote a little. She is also a medievalist, if that will encourage you :) Chances are good, if you went to Kalamazoo last year, that you even heard her speak.

So here's a sample, from Adrienne J. Odasso's "Lost Books"

Iconoclast

He said there were eyes in the trees, and roses
in the bush, which might sting if I touched
their leaves. Upon the stone wall, which we didn't
build, branches overladen curl
to the sky—
persimmon, pomegranate, nettle.

I'll fight for the words, for the names,
which are mine, and I'll touch the rose-leaves
if I please. In my veins is the picture already,
the chance of paint, the scraped hide: the eyes
in the trees become eyes in the vines

of the dance, of the blooming
and the sting of remembrance;

I am the woman asleep
in the branches.

Go Here to register and vote.

Go Here to buy Lost Books from Amazon.com.

This is what happens...

2010-12-02T21:01:00.000-05:00

...when you have too many un- and underemployed PhDs.

the hits of the ancient world:

all set to the tunes of the 1980s, 90s, and beyond.

O_o

click if you dare.

(thanks JJ Cohen)

A Novel Gift

2010-12-01T09:19:00.000-05:00

Well I think this is very cool. "Readergirlz and First Book are partnering to give away more than 125,000 brand-new books to low-income teen readers." They're looking for schools, community groups, pretty much anybody that works with their target demographic, so that they can give them free books. Just thought I'd spread the word.

Why Medieval...?

2010-11-26T13:32:00.000-05:00

So it's the day after Turkey Day, and now that the L-Tryptophan- & carbohydrate-induced coma has passed, I'm making good on a pre-Thanksgiving promise: explain to the world why I'm a medievalist.

I'm a little shocked that I haven't done this before, really. And maybe I have and I just can't locate the post. But either way here it is. It's not really the story of how I chose to be a medievalist; it's more like how medievalism chose me. I just stumbled into really -- as, I think, do many of us. We don't really have conferences. We have support groups. :)

When I started undergrad, I wanted to be an English teacher. High-school level would have suited me just fine. I enjoyed high school English, enjoyed seeing the way the kids learned. I was the guy the other kids turned to to explain what Shakespeare meant, I tutored younger kids in how to spell phonetically. Anyway, I figured I could make a positive contribution that way (not to mention have a great pension plan under the OSSTF, which I will now at some point envy considerably). So the plan was to go to undergrad, get a BA in English, minoring in history, and then apply to teachers' colleges.

The plan was going just fine until third year, when I took a course on Old English. I've always been a fan of other languages, and at the time I was taking my second year of Mandarin (which I can only assume that I passed solely by the grace of an instructor who felt great pity for me, on account of what I then called my unbearable whiteness of being). I'd been taking courses on English history for the previous few years, too, because of the aforesaid history minor and an interest in England.

So I suppose that's where it started. A love of languages and a historical bent for the country my parents came from. I didn't really register it at the time though. I just drifted on in.

The next year, my fourth at undergrad at Northern Megalithic, I enrolled in first-year Latin, and tried to come up with another medieval English course to take. There weren't any, so on the advice of my Old English instructor (now known as @Alliterative) I approached Eminent Beowulf Scholar about supervising my senior essay on what I now realize was an incredibly tired and overdone topic: Beowulf and Christianity. I know.

So that was fourth year. And because of a mixture of things (a masochistic desire to do at least second-year Latin, as well as a missing elective from my course totals) I ended up doing a fifth year of undergrad before applying to one (yes, that's right, only one) MA program. That year I took a brilliant course of the history and development of the English language, and it was at that point that I think I really got it. Getting from "Eyren" to "Eggs" because of the vikings? Yeah, I guess that's when I was hooked.

So, Highly Organized Sister of Mine will attest to what is now becoming my habit of flying by the seat of my pants without backup plans, as not only did I get into the one program I applied to for my MA, I also got into the one program I applied to for my PhD. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Said MA program was actually an MA in Medieval Studies. Not incidentally, this is where I met Vaulting and, not long thereafter began this blog. Longtime readers will know the rest: a couple of years in Shakerland and a false start or two and here we are. I'm doing a PhD in English at Gothic Revival U and fretting (fretting, I tell you) about the workload. Which still isn't enough to get me to do that work instead of posting this.

So that's it. There to here. As I said, it's not really a post about why I chose Medieval Studies as more about how Medieval Studies ended up choosing me. But there it is. And I can't wait until the next support group meeting -- Kalamazoo 2011. You should come.

Anyhow, I think now Vaulting and I are going to go decorate a Christmas tree over in Shakerland. There are more stories of how people became medievalists over at medievalists.net.

Have a happy rest-of-Thanksgiving if you've got it. And a Happy Friday either way.

Today I'm thankful for...

2010-11-24T08:34:00.000-05:00

I know tomorrow's thanksgiving, but awesome doesn't last on the interwebs forever. So today I'm thankful for the fact that I don't go sunbathing: because two square metres of sunlight can melt rock.

Have yourselves a happy thanksgiving, even if, like me, you're only borrowing the holiday :)

Places not to go.

2010-11-18T13:42:00.000-05:00

So the UN just voted to remove sexual orientation from a list of reasons not to summarily kill people. Well, strictly speaking, it was a list of things deemed "arbitrary" reasons to kill people that member states pledge to investigate and prosecute. For ten years it's been on the list, but this year it's been removed on a 79-70 vote thanks to Benin and the African group at the UN.

Here's the complete article, but for those of you wondering who is and isn't against preventing the arbitrary killing of LGBTQ people, here are the for and against:

In favour of removing sexual orientation from the list:

Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Botswana, Brunei Dar-Sala, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Comoros, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Republic of Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe

In favour of keeping it on the list:

Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bhutan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Micronesia (FS), Monaco, Montenegro, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Samoa, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela

Well, I guess I know where I'm not going on vacation -- not that I was planning a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo anytime soon, but there are some definite places on that list that might lose tourist dollars because of this.

Something Up

2010-11-17T08:20:00.000-05:00

I feel like just posting something shiny today to combat the rain in New England Metropolis. So, if you haven't read it before, or even if you have, go check out Hark, A Vagrant. You'll thank me.

From somewhere beneath the Ivory Tower

2010-11-16T10:43:00.000-05:00

I haven't really had time to digest this yet, but here you are if you haven't yet seen it: An article by a ten-year veteran of an essay-writing service, who may or may not call himself The Shadow Scholar. It's both eye-opening and a little sad. He sounds like he's got a lot of talent, and I can't help but wonder why he hasn't gone into teaching. He's obviously clever enough for it.

Go read it. I'll wait.

I suppose I can see the temptation. The amount I get paid to help students rewrite their own essays (arguably harder than doing it yourself, imho) is chump change compared to what he gets for writing one. And I can certainly see the temptation for students with learning/expression challenges and ESL issues to make use of the services.

Not that I think they should, mind you. I just have a talent for empathy. ;)

In defense of Gothic Revival U, we have a fantastic center for helping out students with learning disabilities and ESL issues, and as far as I'm aware, it's covered under tuition, so if they need the help the only drawback is the time it takes. Which makes it the cheaper option, if not the easier one. At which point one can pretty categorically condemn the use of essay-writing services by any student as lazy and self-entitled.

Oh, and as an update to my last post, Dean Dad did, in fact, respond to Tenured Radical's post about running universities like corporations, but mostly it was a defense of the community college rather than an explanation of the ridiculous sums paid to CEOs of private universities in the US. Ah well. Just call me Huey Long (but please, don't shoot).

...how much?

2010-11-15T15:31:00.000-05:00

After reading this article over at Tenured Radical, I found myself asking a question:

Should any university employee make over a million dollars a year?

Now we're not talking a hundred thousand per year, which sum I fully expect never to make in a single year, though certain people also give me hope in this department, even as they voice their concerns over a lack of raises. This is over a million. That's making the amount of money in a single year that a few years ago investment analysts were saying you should optimistically have in the bank when you retire. At my current rate of pay, it would take me nearly 60 years to gross that amount, let alone save it. Now to be fair, I'm on the low-paying but fair "we pay your costs and you get a degree" scheme right now, and if I don't start making more after I get said degree, well, I'll have to find a new line of work.

So, a cool million.

My answer is a simple, categorical no.

The President of the United States of America only makes 400k. Why should the president of a university make more than double that of the so-called leader of the free world?

And the term "make" is really a misnomer. Why should they be given a million dollars in compensation for their labours? Do they work that much harder? Contribute that much more to the value of the institution? If Dean Dad reads this, I'm sure he'll have an at least half-way reasonable answer from an economic perspective, but me? I just can't see it.

Maybe you have to be a university president to understand why they need to be paid so much.

I just don't understand.

Any hints? Let me know in the comments if you have a good idea.

Aw, Hell.

2010-11-09T16:08:00.000-05:00

Spurred on by my curiosity, after reading that Jonathan Jarrett was going to the seventh level of Hell, I decided to check out where I'd be going.

Looks like for me the elevator's going to ding at the second floor: "Desire, Raging Winds, and Helen of Troy".

If only I could cut down on my lust, I'd make it up to Limbo with the virtuous non-believers. Tricky.

The Second Level of Hell

You have come to a place mute of all light, where the wind bellows as the sea does in a tempest. This is the realm where the lustful spend eternity. Here, sinners are blown around endlessly by the unforgiving winds of unquenchable desire as punishment for their transgressions. The infernal hurricane that never rests hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine, whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. You have betrayed reason at the behest of your appetite for pleasure, and so here you are doomed to remain. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy are two that share in your fate.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Moderate
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Very Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante's Inferno Test

Move Over Jonathan Swift

2010-11-05T07:31:00.000-04:00

Oh Mr. Swift, I'm so sorry to deliver the news: you are no longer the undisputed King of Snark. I must admit, to your credit, sir, that since 1729 and that piece about eating Irish babies you've held a very solid lead, not to mention a special place in my heart. And I'm not certain that you've been entirely dethroned, either, merely that you may need to share.

Behold: The snarkiest thing I've ever read on the internet, a piece by Wendy Molyneux over at the Rumpus.

And so I did that. I tried on all my clothes, and I felt better until I tried on one pair of pants that didn’t fit me anymore. And then I totally started to cry again, because I am so fat. I cried for a little while on the floor while my cats crawled all over me, purring and being symbols of how lonely I am. My cats love to be symbols of my loneliness. Sometimes, I have to be like, “Stop signifying so loudly guys, I’m watching Grey’s Anatomy!”

Oh well, Jon. At least you're being made into a feature film starring Jack Black.

Griggs'd.

2010-11-04T13:34:00.000-04:00

In other news of the WTF varity, Judith Griggs, editor for Cooks Source magazine, thinks it's okay to steal things off the internet, publish them for profit, and then tell the author to feel grateful for it: check out the blog post over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

Then make a post linking "Judith Griggs" to http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/judithgriggs in order to googlebomb. :)

When I grow up, I want to be...

2010-11-03T08:47:00.000-04:00

Prompted by this post by Dean Dad, in which he discusses his son's fourth-grade class' goals (boys=rich, girls=married), I thought I'd briefly wax historical on my own goals as a child. I think in the first few grades, most of the boys wanted to be firemen or policemen or astronauts, and most of the girls wanted to be horses. Yeah I don't really understand how that works either, but there was definitely a cadre of young girls at my elementary school who spent every recess pretending to be horses. Not to ride them. Be them.

My best friend was a girl (though not one of the horse-girls) who used to build forts and run around doing stupid sh*t with me. I don't remember what we used to do. Maybe we played house? Well, we probably used our imaginations a lot. All I can really remember of the first three grades is a general feeling of well-being, a few still embarrassing instances of being a temper-tantrum-throwing little freak, reading a stunning quantity of young adult novels (I think I read the entire catalogue of John Bellairs' books, as well as a fantastic number of Famous Five novels), and watching the Van Damme movie Bloodsport when I was over at the house of a friend whose parents were more lenient than mine regarding what he could watch on TV.

When asked what I wanted to be, I think my answer was usually paleontologist. You show a kid one too many shows on dinosaurs and he'll pick up the lingo, even at that age. I specifically wanted to be Jack Horner when I grew up, but anybody who worked with dinosaur bones would've been okay. I might have wanted to be an astronaut, too, because I can remember learning all about the planets and the moon missions and space in general. Now I just love science fiction -- is that just a sign of the times, maybe?

But this whole "be rich" thing? I don't know. I can't remember ever thinking to myself that when I grew up I wanted to be rich. It just wasn't on my radar. I wanted to do cool things, interesting things -- something to do with space(!) or dinosaurs(!!). I'm honestly not surprised by the students in Dead Dad's son's class not thinking about finishing school (high school, college, or otherwise) because I'm pretty sure I had no idea how much schooling was required to do the cool things. I just wanted to do them. But what gets me is the money thing. What kids want, when they grow up, is to be happy and successful. Everything else they say is about what they've internalized about that. So for some of the girls "horses = happy" and for me, "dinosaurs/space = happy" (maybe I wanted to be a dinosaur at one point, rather than someone who studies them?).

DD's son has internalized (probably because of what his dad does) that "university = success"
and so he wants to be successful like his dad. But the other kids have learned to equate money with success, at least the boys, and the girls have learned that having a family is the ticket to happiness or success. Setting aside the disturbing gender divide there (because I can't remember at all what even my best friend wanted to be when she grew up, but I bet it was something cool. I remember her as being pretty cool.) I'm just a little weirded out by the "money = success" thing, I guess. And at such a young age.

So what did you want to be when you grew up? Don't say "medievalist" unless that was actually the case -- wanting to be a knight is something else entirely :D Did you want to be rich? Married? Both?

The Tea Party and Fascism

2010-10-29T07:46:00.000-04:00

Jeff Fecke, over at Alas, a Blog, has written a cogent, clear, and uncomfortably accurate assessment of the Tea Party. You should go look.

But that was predicted. Sinclair Lewis once wrote, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Well, my friends, fascism has come to America, flag and cross and all.

Frightening.

Crap.

2010-10-26T12:19:00.000-04:00

It's awful because even from here I know it's probably true. Excuse me while I use laughter to cover my existential terror about my choices in life.

Bardiac posts about the decision to go to grad school.

Oy vey.

I'm not a fan of Glee but...

2010-10-20T11:36:00.000-04:00

...if I thought this GQ photo-shoot for Glee were actually in any way indicative of the quality show (and not just indicative of the low class of a certain fashion photographer of ill repute) I don't think I'd want to be.

I know this isn't medieval, but Tom and Lorenzo (of Project Rungay fame*) hit this nail so squarely on the head that I think anyone who even knows what Glee is should read this:

Look, we're not prudes. And these aren't teenagers. There's nothing wrong with a sexy photoshoot for any rising young star. It's practically de rigueur. But putting 3 of the cast members in front of creepy Terry Richardson's lens and dressing them up like porn fantasies?

Of course he didn't dress all of them up like porn fantasies, just the girls. Guys don't do sexy. Guys have sexy done for them. Guys stand or sit fully clothed while girls are meant to writhe and gyrate and spread their legs in their underwear. That's the way of things. Great message there, morons. Knowing that this show has a huge teen and even pre-teen following, whatever person approved the idea of this shoot (TERRY RICHARDSON, people!) should be fired.

If you're new to debates over what is and isn't the patriarchy, let's start with a blatant, neon example: THAT.

*yes I like Project Runway... Yes I Know... Look. Look I know. Just SHUT UP IT'S GOOD DAMMIT.

Ikea, I am disappoint*

2010-10-18T21:23:00.005-04:00

I'm afraid all the brownie points that Ikea earned in this post have been long since lost. As you may recall, my preferred desk was out of stock, so I ended up ordering it online and having it shipped.

Word to the wise: DO NOT DO THIS.

Things went well enough at first. I had it shipped to Former State (no sales tax, hurrah), with the idea that the Mother of Vaulting would bring it to me when she visited the following weekend.

Wrong. Shipping took nearly 2 weeks. Small matter - Vellum and I were headed to Former State to see this fellow in the depressing play about the demise of a man who sells goods, so we were happy to pick up the desk at that time.

Which was great, except that upon loading the package into the car, we realized there was a sizable hole in the box. Well, we decided, it didn't look THAT large. No problem.

Until we returned to NEM and discovered that it was, in fact, a problem. One of the drawer wheels was shattered. Small matter, we again decided, and called Ikea for a replacement. Upon hanging up, Vellum (ever observant) discovered that we were ALSO missing three sides of one of the drawers.

Well.

To be expected, we decided in hindsight, given the hole in the box. So we called again, and requested the pieces. Whereupon we noticed that while we had many pieces of desk, there was not, in fact, anything to hold them together with.

Say, screws. Hardware. Metal bits of any sort.

So, still being on the phone, we requested those, as well. No problem. Ikea offered many apologies, and promised that we would receive the missing pieces soon.

"Soon" being 6 business days. Thanks.

So the missing drawer pieces and hardware arrived. Vellum, having caught on by now, was quick to count pieces, and discovered, LO, WE ARE STILL MISSING PIECES. Apparently, when we pointed out that the desk was suspiciously lacking in hardware, Ikea interpreted that to mean that we were missing a few pieces, and perhaps this handful would make it better?

So back on the phone Vellum went,** requesting, perhaps, the rest of the hardware? Again, there were apologies. Again, we were promised the missing pieces "soon."

The missing pieces, by the way, were 21 long screws and 2 short screws. Remember this.

Some days later (today, in fact), an envelope from Ikea arrived, delivered with much fanfare by Chaucerian roommate.

Would you like to know what it contained?

It did not contain 21 long screws and 2 short screws, as we had been promised.

Two. It contained two of twenty-one long screws. Fair enough, there were also the required 2 short screws. But, as you may imagine, 2 short screws when you are missing 19 large industrial screws is not going to do you any bloody good when building a bloody desk.

So. Awed as I may have been by your warehouse full of furniture and furnishings and cafeterias, and much as I may admire your low prices and glorious, glorious selection - Ikea, I am no longer speaking to you. All I wanted was a desk. To date, after a great deal of waiting and holding-for-customer-service induced frustration, I have most of a desk, and no means for putting it together.

Ikea, I am disappoint.*

-Vaulting

*Know your meme.

**Yes, it is my desk, and yes, it was Vellum doing all the calling. He's a prince among bloggers, I assure you.

One space or two?

2010-10-17T19:46:00.000-04:00

So runs the long standing debate: after the period at the end of a sentence, should you use one space or two before starting the next? I say one, and hate two. Vaulting used to use two, but I think I may have nagged her into submission on this front. What say you, blogizens? Post your opinions in the comment thread :)

Tangentials

2010-10-12T16:51:00.000-04:00

I have to say, I'm starting to feel as though all the work I'm doing at Gothic Revival University is mostly (if not entirely) tangential to my interests. This isn't to say that it's not interesting in and of itself. Nor that I'm not learning things that will be of great use to me when the time comes for me to find a job.

I'm writing a review hopefully for publication for the course on Entirely Tangential National Literature I'm taking, and doing a close reading of a primary source for the course on Mostly Tangential but Slightly More Relevant Time Period Literature I'm taking. And I'm (slowly) putting together an exam in Subject I Should Really Know How To Teach (with some awesome supervisors, I might add, so I'm actually really excited about that one.. shame I don't have more time to work on it).

But despite all that interesting stuff I'm doing, I'm not really doing anything -anything, mind you- medieval right now. And that kinda bums me out.

So I'm starting an Anglo-Saxon Reading Group in January. And I'll be taking a course on medieval things then, too. And I'll be meeting up with more medievalists in a weekly workshop. So roll on, 2011.

If life gives you lemons, by all means go ahead and make yourself lemonade. I'll be over here fermenting the lemons and distilling them down into vodka.

-Vellum

I must be nuts.

2010-10-05T10:12:00.000-04:00

*

So I'm now five weeks into my PhD program at Gothic Revival University. It's a rainy Tuesday morning, and instead of doing readings for courses only tangentially related to my field of study, putting together a reading list for my minor field of study, or scouring wikipedia for medieval absurdities, I'm blogging. There's a lot to blog about.

Since starting five weeks ago, I've read, read, and read. I'd forgotten what it was like to read a book a week for each class, and of course the supplemental readings. Also, having been in a heavily interdisciplinary Medieval Studies program for my master's two years ago (is it really two years? that can't be right... a little over two since it ended, three since it started. oof.), I've had to haul out and dust off my non-interdisciplinary toolbox. There's a lot of "isms" in there that haven't been used since undergrad, and which don't typically come up in studying medieval versions of things. Unless you're writing for Post://Medieval, of course.**

So between two classes (I know, only two. Heaven only knows how I'd fare with more) and my research work, I'm hovering around a thousand pages of reading per week. Add bureaucratic nonsense to the mix, and you've well and truly got a full-time job. I'd forgotten how much work it is to be a student. Oh and did I mention I'm working on language requirements, too?

Of course, I'm whining all the way to the bank. What it comes down to is this: I'm being paid to do what I love, full-time! With benefits!***

This is fantastic.

Sure I could be making more in the private sector. Actually, looking at the math, a full-time job at $13/hour pays better. But I love this.

Plus, everyone in my department is just so darn helpful and nice. It's... actually really odd. I'm not usually the glass-is-half-full guy, and maybe it's just the honeymoon period, but this is great. Of course, I still haven't unpacked fully par-ce que Ikea shipped Vaulting's desk sans screws and the sides of the drawers, et avec broken drawer rollers; I can't walk around without tripping over things; it's only the 5th of the month and I'm already 3/4 of the way through my personal monthly spending allowance; I'm grappling with (apparently common) feelings of imposture; when I get out I have an absurdly low chance of getting a TT job; oh and I've had to get a $9/hour job to make ends meet; but I still can't shake the fact that I'm actually doing this.

And that's enough to make up for a lot.

So if you ever stumble into me in New England Metropolis, and I'm looking a little frazzled, don't worry. For all I'll outwardly show the wuss, on the inside I'll be smiling.

But you're always welcome to buy me a pint ;)

* The gif was found online here.
** I jest, but it really does seem to me to be the crux of the intersection of medievalism and literary theory.
*** I mean sure, it's not Canadian health care, but it's better than no health care, and it's included.

Employment!

2010-09-27T21:37:00.002-04:00

There is nothing like 5 weeks of unemployment to make work look really, really awesome. I have never been so excited to go to work on a Monday morning.

I think I mentioned that I was going to contact a temp agency. Turns out they don't get many qualified applicants, and promptly set about finding me awesome positions. First job was playing with WordPress, building a site for a children's charity. I'm currently on the second one, managing the cash flow for a number of grants in a cutting edge biology-related lab, which also happens to be part of the bio-related department at Major City University.

Most of the time, I have no idea what's going on (either in the lab or in my spreadsheets), but it's still very cool. And I suspect a good part of my job will be sorting data and organizing spreadsheets - good OCD stuff that makes my brain happy.

Best of all, I get to be the personal administrator for one of current science's most amazing innovators. I'd tell you more about his work, and what area he works in, but given that he sort of invented the field, it's probably better that I don't. Suffice it to say, it's very exciting and futuristic.

Also refreshing is my return to the standard work week. I work 9:30 to 5:30, Monday to Friday. This means I have weekends. Weekends! Two days off! In a row!

Sometimes, museum work is completely soulless. See: the work schedule.

Anyway, this position is almost certainly temporary. I'm signed on for a couple months or so, and there is a possibility that they will offer me the position permanently. We'll see how it goes. The person I'm replacing thinks they're looking for an actual bookkeeper in the long run, which I most definitely am not. For now, however, work is good.

And weekends!

Why Are Colleges So Selective?

2010-09-14T11:43:00.000-04:00

Wow.

I just read this four-parter at the NYT online, after reading this criticism by Dean Dad. I had been hoping he'd been a little bit wrong.

Nope.

In a four-part (four!) piece by four different authors (four!) about why colleges are getting more selective, the words Community College did not appear once. Community Colleges: you know, the ones that more than half of America's undergraduates attend? The ones with open enrollment and therefore no (read: zero) increase in "selectivity". Good god, it's like college only means one thing to these people.

One of the respondents, Jane Wellman, at least acknowledges that "[students are] there because they need a job, and they need to get the credentials – and, one hopes, the knowledge and skills behind the credentials – that will get them into the labor market." -- And yet the schools most geared toward the labor market? Completely absent.

Go read the articles and then Dean Dad's response over at Confessions of a Community College Dean.

Remarkable.

Settling in

2010-09-12T18:02:00.003-04:00

We're slowly settling into our communal abode in New England Metropolis (NEM). Vellum and I have been spoiled by having our own place. There was a certain amount of trepidation regarding our move, which returned us to the land of roommates.

There are four of us living in our charming 1850s apartment, and by "four of us" I mean four of us - we're all medievalists. There was a vague concern as we moved in that the entire apartment might collapse into the ground floor from the weight of our combined books. So far, so good. Vellum and I have 7 full bookcases; early insular roommate (we'll have to come up with some appropriate pseudonyms) has another 4 or 5, and Chaucerian roommate hasn't unpacked his yet, to the best of my knowledge.

We've already had an entertaining round of "how many duplicate books do we have?" The Ornament of the World and A Distant Mirror seem to be the forerunners (though none of us have actually read of either). And, of course, Harry Potter.

In the pursuit of desks and kitchen counters, we ventured to Ikea yesterday on an apartment field trip. It was life-changing. Being both broke and from the rural lands, I'd never actually been to an Ikea. It was rather terrifying. Why is there an entire cafeteria in the middle of the store? Who are these hundreds of people who found their way into the middle of nowhere to shop in a store full of illegible Swedish goods? What are we doing amongst this throng?

However, I confess to being impressed with the free twine offered in the parking lot for strapping your purchases to the roof of the car - as we unexpectedly found ourselves doing.

Unpacking is slowly progressing. The books are away, which is a miracle in itself. The clothes are mostly unpacked. It's down to the strange odds and ends that don't really have any good place to go. Picture frames, notebooks, binders, boxes of spare buttons and paperclips, a dozen scarves, etc. Some of this will be better once I have a desk (the one I wanted was out of stock, alas), but I suspect most of the rest will find homes wherever they happen to come to rest.

Tomorrow I'm heading to a local temp agency in search of some sort of employment. I still have a number of applications to send out, but strongly doubt that they, like the ones that came before, will come to anything. Vellum is getting back into the swing of classes. And, given that it's autumn once again, I have to decide whether to attempt PhD applications again or not. Expect a post about that later.

-Vaulting

Success!

2010-09-07T15:51:00.002-04:00

We have our own internet access! We're back!

We have arrived

2010-09-07T11:16:00.003-04:00

Vellum and I have arrived in New England Metropolis. I have decided that I am never ever moving again. Nothing like a bookcase full of hardcover coffee table books to make moving a royal pain in the ass. We're slowly unpacking and settling in. Internet is profoundly spotty (apparently our neighbors turn off their wireless router when they're not using it), but our connection goodies should be arriving in the near future. Expect more posts then.

Now to get back on the job hunt and unpack some books.

-Vaulting

Liftoff in T-Minus 12 Hours and Counting...

2010-09-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

We're moving tomorrow, from Rural New England Micropolis to New England Metropolis. Should, hopefully, have internet by middle of the week. In the meantime we'll be trying to get jobs, unpacking, assembling furniture, exploring, and otherwise trying to get into the spirit of things. I'll also be visiting offices, filling out paperwork and doing readings for the first classes of my new project. I'm calling it: A PhD for Vellum, Year 1. I even heard word that I may get (shared) office space on campus at Gothic Revival University, where I'll be for the next five or so years.

So if I survive the next five days, I think it'll be a good time.

I'll let you know.

Or Vaulting will, if I don't survive.

But if the site goes dead for two weeks, don't just assume we've both died. We could be fine and internet-deprived, or very tired, or something. Distracted, maybe. By kitties.

This Is Your Brain on A Series Of Tubes

2010-09-01T12:22:00.000-04:00

I was going to call this post "OMG The Intertubes Are Ruining Everything Forever: The Nicholas Carr Story", but I dialed down the snark a little. Just a wee bit. Hardly any at all, now that I think about it, given that I included that other title regardless. Hm. Oh well.

The reason for this post is this article over at New Scientist. It's a brief interview with Nicholas Carr, author of a new book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

The basic tenet of this book seems to be that the internet is ruining our capacity for extended concentration. As the article at New Scientist says, "by reshaping our minds, the internet is robbing us of the ability to think critically and creatively."

The problem seems to be that the majority of his evidence is either anecdotal or nonspecific.

Anecdotal: "A few years ago I noticed I was having trouble concentrating. When I sat down to read a lengthy article or book, I'd find it difficult to maintain focus for more than a few minutes. My mind wanted to behave the way it did when I was online: juggling lots of things and digging around for bits of information instead of focusing on one thing. The book is an attempt to get to the bottom of this."

Nonspecific: "Unfortunately, there's not a lot of physiological evidence to show how the net affects the brain - but there's some, and it is compelling. One study from the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, shows fairly extensive changes in patterns of brain activation from moderate use of search engines."

I can only believe that the UCLA study he is referring to this one (reported about here), as there aren't likely to be two groups of people at UCLA studying the effects of search engine use on the brain.

Basically, the idea of the study was to scan the brains of two groups of people: "net-naive" (people who hadn't had much previous use of search engines) and "net-savvy" (people who had). First they scanned their brains while they were reading text, then they scanned them while using search engines. Then they did the scans a week later, after the "net-naive" folks had been using the internet for a week.

What they found was that the brains lit up the same way when they were reading text, and it was in the search engine task that things differed. During the first scan, the "net-naive" subjects' brains lit up the same way as if they were reading text. The "net-savvy" subjects' brains had those areas lit up plus other areas. After a week, both groups had the same readings, as the "net-naive" subjects had, in effect, become "net-savvy".

According to the study: "the Net Savvy group demonstrated significant increases in signal intensity in additional regions controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision".

So back to Nicholas Carr. He calls this evidence "compelling" and implies very strongly that it supports his theory that the internet is ruining our ability to "focus on one thing". What it says to me is that not only is your brain focusing while using the net (to the same degree as when reading text), it's also making decisions, reasoning, and making visual distinctions (ones presumably not being done during the reading of text alone).

Does this mean we're more distracted? I don't think so. Think about it this way, as two different skill sets, say, fixing a watch and juggling. If you can fix a watch or juggle, that's great. If you can fix a watch while juggling, that's something else. But I have a hard time understanding how being able to fix a watch while juggling would negatively impact your ability to do either on its own. In fact, your brain would probably find it easier to do each alone, without the distraction of the other.

If he wanted a study that backed up his claims, he'd need one that showed that after internet use, the parts of the brain associated with focusing on a single task were activated to a lesser extent than they were before. And this study doesn't do that.

In fact, what this study does is the following:

It shows that "internet searching may engage a greater extent of neural circuitry not activated while reading text pages but only in people with prior computer and Internet search experience. These observations suggest that in middle-aged and older adults, prior experience with Internet searching may alter the brain's responsiveness [read: increase the speed of the brain's responses] in neural circuits controlling decision making and complex reasoning."

What the study doesn't do: shows that the internet is ruining our attention spans.
What the study does do: shows that the internet is helping us make decisions faster.
These are not the same.

Enter me, editorializing:

Every now and then someone trots out another article or book talking about how technology is ruining everything forever. TV is rotting our brains; video games are making us violent; the internet is giving us ADHD. But like all things, it's a matter of circumstance and degree. Just as some tv shows are mind-rotting garbage, some video games look as though they were designed by Ted Bundy, and some parts of the internet are, well, "goatse", by the same token some tv shows are edifying, some video games can stimulate the imagination, and some parts of the internet are actually about the spread of intelligent discourse (not here so much, but some parts).

I guess what I'm saying is, if the internet were really ruining our ability to focus, then as someone who spends a stupid amount of time on it, I should be a prime candidate.

And I just wrote a thousand-word response to an article I stumbled upon this morning. How's that for focus?

Why I Love Living With Vaulting

2010-08-29T21:16:00.000-04:00

Vellum (searching for antacid tablet): okay, step one-
Vaulting (from the other room): cut a hole in the box?

Language and the Mind

2010-08-29T12:45:00.000-04:00

Twitterer @mwidner pointed me in the direction of this NYT article, called "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" by Guy Deutscher, an honourary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester (UK). He's just released a book on the same topic, which I'm now quite interested in reading, called "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages".

My favourite part was this:

...some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense.

Imagine what the world would be like if this were true of all of us. Instead of saying "god is like this" one could only ever say "I believe god is like this", and instead of saying "you're going to hell", they'd only be able to say "I believe you're going to hell".

"That is sinful" becomes "My culture views that as sinful".

I think it would be a positive change.

Generational Differences II

2010-08-28T21:39:00.000-04:00

"Maybe it's because we've been hopelessly coddled and our brains, with their flaccid synapses, have been massaged into thinking we could land our dream job at 23. Or! Maybe it's because the world changed, and it doesn't make sense to start a family at 24 in the shadow of $15,000 in debt with a thimbleful of jobs that don't provide health care or the promise of stability." [emphasis mine]

The Atlantic has a brilliant response to all the garbage about Millennials. Short answer: It's the economy, stupid.

Anti-Catholicism

2010-08-26T15:21:00.000-04:00

Ash Wednesday posted this, from here: an article in the guardian called "I'm an atheist but this anti-Catholic rhetoric is making me nervous". It's worth a read, though not living in the UK I can't tell whether these people are really over-the-top with their anti-Catholic rhetoric or not. He cites Richard Dawkins calling Catholicism "the second most evil religion" in the world, and wonders about the first.

Is he overstating the case? Citing Richard Dawkins as an example of over-the-top anti-Catholic rhetoric is, after all, a little like citing the works of Stephen Hawking as an example of modern scientific thought. Two or three years ago, I'd have sided with the anti-Catholics. Bear with me on this, I'll explain.

I had always viewed Catholicism as a religion, a large and often unwieldy version of Christianity, which, at present and I believe to the detriment of its followers, preaches against the ordination of women, preaches the sinfulness of homosexuality, hides pedophiles rather than bringing them to justice, and asks its followers not to use condoms or, indeed, any method of birth control save abstinence.

Yet despite my reactionary views (which I have, unfortunately, at times allowed to become private dogmas for reasons I'll get into in a minute) Catholicism does do a lot of good in the world, and I firmly believe that the vast majority of Catholics are not the bigoted old white men that continue to enforce the socially retrograde policies. I think the article in the guardian does a good job of pointing out that Catholicism is, in fact, made up of real people, and not the caricatures many of us allow ourselves to form whenever we hear about the latest sex scandal or the equating of the ordination of women with pedophilia by the Vatican.

See, I have always viewed Catholicism as the Big Dog, and the rest of the world as the underdog. This is, in part, why I allowed myself to form these caricatures. It felt as though I wasn't doing any harm because Catholicism was so big that it was like tossing pebbles at a brick wall. It wasn't until recently that I realized that some parts of the world (the US, the UK) have long histories of persecution of Catholics. Did you know that at one time (1732) it was simply illegal to be Catholic in the colony (not yet state) of Georgia? And that the KKK were not only anti-African-American, but also anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic? Plus I heard a rather disturbing rumour just last week that Catholics in North Korea sometimes just "disappear" in the night.

Individual believers in the Roman Catholic version of Christianity have, I think, a pretty hard time of it, and are not the megalithic force "the Church" had always been in my mind.

I myself will never be a Catholic. Taking my cues from Paul Tillich, and his "The Courage To Be," I view myself (at present) as a kind of christian-existentialist-agnostic. Raised as an Anglican, I still light a candle in every cathedral I visit. I can recite the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd psalm from memory. If I get married, I'll probably want to do so in the presence of a minister (though for the rest of the trappings of weddings I have no great desire).

But I now view Catholics in a different light than I used to. Not only do they have to struggle with questions of faith, but the truly faithful also often have to struggle with questions of dissent, which, not really belonging to any church, I have never had to do.

Vaulting made a good comment to me as I was writing this post. She's a confirmed atheist, and she still believes that we should let others believe as they wish. She blithely figured that if we don't let them venerate who they like, they'll probably just start killing those they don't -- and as a student of history I can see her point.

Does this mean I'm going to stop railing against the problems with Catholicism as I see them? Hell, no. I will always be a firm believer that being gay isn't a sin, that discrimination against women is morally wrong, and that the teaching (and official sanction) of the "ABC" method of preventing AIDS would prevent more suffering than just the "A" method (Abstinence, Be faithful, Condom use). Like Stephen Fry said in his Intelligence² debate on whether or not the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world -- despite an 8 minute speech about what is wrong with the organization itself -- he says:

I have no quarrel and no argument and I wish to express no contempt for individual devout and pious members of that church. It would be impertinent and wrong of me to express any antagonism towards any individual who wishes to find salvation in whatever form they wish to express it.

But I'm still going to press for what I see to be improvements in the message the organization sends to its members and to the world. Is this an example of "hate the sin and love the sinner" turned back on itself? Maybe. I'll have to think about that.

As for the anti-Catholicism, to return to my initial point, I suppose I still support peaceful opposition to the Catholic Church's policies, but I would advise those who would, as the guardian article does, to respect the worth and dignity of all people, regardless of their choice of religion.

Tosh.0, or, Another Sign of the Impending Apocalypse

2010-08-26T00:10:00.000-04:00

First, let me say this: I'm way too young to be doing "get off my damn lawn! kids these days, grumble grumble" rants, but wow.

On the advice of some of Vaulting's smaller family members, I didn't flip past a tv show called "Tosh.0" the other day. Yesterday in Time magazine I read that he is now second in popularity on Comedy Central only to South Park (that, in itself, says something, I suppose). But while South Park is offensive to all and in a generally comedic way, the five minutes (that was all I could stand) of Daniel Tosh were nothing like it.

A brief rant follows:

Let me say this right now: the disgusting, hateful, misogynistic screed that came out of that man's mouth genuinely astounded me. Funny? I could hardly believe he could say those things in public. I thought I'd heard some awful things on Fox "news" in the past week about Islam, but my guess is if you got Mr. Tosh on the subject he'd come up with something worse. I am, in no uncertain terms, disgusted by the man. All I can hope is that the five minutes I saw were the five minutes he went off the rails into horrific bigotry posing as humour, but somehow I doubt the likelihood of that.

That's enough of that.

Can you believe my parents wouldn't let me watch the Simpsons, growing up? I'd rather the kids were watching South Park than this.

What Has Been Seen...

2010-08-25T13:49:00.000-04:00

...cannot be unseen.

Rod Blagojevich and Justin Bieber have the same hairstyle. Why has no-one else noticed this?

Now that, my little trolly friend, is an inane blog post.

The Kobo Has Landed!

2010-08-24T23:43:00.000-04:00

If you've been following my new-fangled twittering, then you may already know this. I'm a Linux user, and I took a big chance, getting an e-reader today. It's called a Kobo, and out of the box, it doesn't exactly play nice with Linux, specifically Ubuntu. But you can make it work. OH YES, you can make it work.

(That's said in a triumphant tone of voice, by the way)

If you don't like to hear little boys geek out about their new little toys, then maybe this isn't the post for you. But Karl: Fellow Ubuntu user, this might pique your interest a little.

So out of the box, what it does is twofold: first, it'll charge; second, it'll ask you whether you want to install in Windows or Mac OSX.

You see my issue.

So I thought, well, I don't need their software, I'll be fine with open-source. But here's the thing: you kinda DO need their software. Well, a little. If you want to buy new books you do. The reason? DRM. I suppose if you want to strip the DRM from your purchased ebooks (not impossible, I'm told, though I've never tried) then you won't need their software. But if, on the other hand, you want to read, say, the latest Stephen King book without being at odds with the DMCA (which, frankly, is just hard to do. I mean everything is illegal here. Boy.) then you need their software.

Guess what isn't released for general use? Their Linux version.

Guess what I got? Their Linux version. Found it online. If you're a Kobo user, who uses Linux, and you hate running their software through a Windows emulator like WINE, then leave a message in the comments and I'll get you the .deb file. It works in Ubuntu 10.04, anyhow.

But the problem with their software is that it only lets you read things that you buy (or download for free, they do have a lovely selection of out-of-copyright books from Project Gutenberg) from Kobo. And I wanted to read some things I'd gotten from Google Books. Maybe some JSTOR articles. So back to open source, and enter Calibre.

I'd read that Calibre, an open-source ebook management program, had gotten Kobo compatibility working, but try as I might, I couldn't convince it to recognize my reader. Long story short, the version of Calibre you download through Ubuntu's Synaptec Package Manager is an OLD OLD version, and you have to go to their website and get it by using the terminal commands provided there.

And boy does it work. Not only does it read epub format, you can just drop .pdfs on there (JSTOR articles, anyone?) and go to town. I liked it before, but now? Now I officially love this little thing.

The detriment (and you'll find it true of all e-ink devices for now) is the delay between page turns. I'm no speed-reader, in fact I'm downright slow at it, so it doesn't bother me a bit. But Vaulting? Hates it. I have a friend in the publishing business who's the same way. For them I'd suggest an iPad or, you know, paper. For now, it's keeping me from printing out all those JSTOR articles, and giving me a reason to read a lot of out of copyright material.

For tonight? A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court.

Generational Differences

2010-08-23T00:14:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the "new" warfare, ladies and gentlemen: Generational.

Just for reference, when I talk about Gen X and Millennials, typically I mean that if you grew up thinking New Wave was cool you're Gen X, and if you got into rock after Soundgarden broke up, you're probably a Millennial. To put it another way, if you grew up thinking Divo were cool, you're Gen X; if your first introduction to Divo was via Weird Al Yancovic, you're a Millennial.

Historiann has a good post up called And your music... It's just noise! about the current wave of articles by Real Journalists (you remember them, right? the people polishing the brass on the Titanic?) about how OMGWTFBBQ the new generation is coming and it's going to Screw Up The Baby Boomers Something Fierce. You should go read her post, maybe read a couple of these articles.

Just to give you an idea of their tone, they're named "What Is It About 20-Somethings?", "Generation Y Bother?" and (the more flattering, I suppose) "A Generation Collision Is Coming". The basic theme is that people in their 20s right now, that's Millennials*, are super-different (my term) from Baby Boomers, don't like to put in the hours of hard work to move up the ladder, want more from their employers than just a paycheck, and won't stand for hierarchical bull$hit based on time served rather than ideas and innovation.

I have two things to say about this: One, they're a little bit right. Two, they have only themselves to blame -- hey there, Baby Boomers, we're your kids, and your culture taught us everything we know.

To the first thing, I say a little bit right, because I do empathize with some of the depictions of my generation. Tom Downey writes, "Advice to put in your time and work hard so you can move up the ladder means nothing to this generation. That approach is based on a monetary contract. If management only gives a Millennial a paycheck, the company's return will be limited to the task performed." Ruben Navarette, Jr. writes that "they [Millennials] tell reporters and survey-takers that they want to be assured they won't spin their wheels in a dead-end job."

Amidst all the generalizing of a generation and judging from the outside, one thing sticks out to me: the fact that not one of the writers got around to noticing the lessons they'd been teaching their own kids.

As I was growing up, one thing became stunningly obvious to me over the years: once upon a time there was a magical land where people could work for one company their whole lives, feel that even if their part was small they were still a part of something larger, and feel as though if they gave their company their loyalty that that loyalty would be repaid -- by the time I was born that land had turned to so much ash under the constant radiation of greed.

My father, a professional in IT, went through probably a dozen jobs as I was growing up, with the concomitant fear of poverty, or at the least of the whole family being uprooted and moved to new places. What I saw was a man who got up every morning, dressed as though he were going to church (though we stopped going ourselves when I was young) went off to work early and came home late, working the whole time. Now he doesn't wear his Sunday best every day, but the rest hasn't changed. He still works hard, he still "puts in his hours" -- getting to work at an ungodly hour just so that he can get some work done before someone comes in and wastes his time (my description, not his. My father is, if nothing else, extremely polite and respectful).

My father received awards for his hard work. He ran projects and received high commendations for their efficiency and the cost savings. We still have the certificates he was given at ceremonies (even a little plexi-glass trophy, too). Yet time and again, the company he worked for would be eaten by another, someone with seniority would be given his job, and he would be out looking for another one. One company he worked for decided it didn't need a Canadian branch to its IT department any more, and so they fired them, to a man. My father was a VP at that time, and it still counted for nothing.

No, what growing up in my household taught me about work was one thing, and one thing only: companies want nothing from you but the bottom line. They have no sense of loyalty, and you should pay them nothing but what gets you, personally, somewhere. Always be looking for a better opportunity elsewhere, because your current employers will, without compunction or guilt, fire you if someone cheaper comes along.

And this is my second point: a lot of us grew up in households like that. While Baby Boomers' parents may have worked for one company for their whole lives, Baby Boomers themselves largely tried and failed to do so themselves, mostly because loyalty to workers went the way of all things non-profitable.

I'd be lying if I said part of the reason why I'm interested in academia is not the idea of a field where there still (for the time being) exists such a thing as tenure -- a commitment on the part of the employer not to fire you, because you have proven you work hard and well and are an asset to the organization.

And this ties in, I suppose, to the ongoing "what about tenure?" discussion that is a perennial favourite on IHE and the like. For what it's worth, here's my two cents: not everyone deserves tenure, but to have it as a possibility for years of hard work and dedication -- not a right, but a possibility -- is something that ALL professions should adopt.

Because right now, there's no reason for any Millennial to do anything but think of hirself in the business world. We're nothing if not a product of (y)our generation.

*I prefer that term, which is derived from those who graduated from High School in the year 2000 or later, over Generation Y, which is derived rather dim-wittedly from the fact that Y comes after X.

Twittering

2010-08-22T16:34:00.004-04:00

Victory! Vellum has joined the dark side. Follow him on Twitter, MedievalVaulting.

(if you missed it, I'm Medievaulting)

Also, check out medievalists.net's 60 Tweeters for Medievalists. Hours of entertainment and procrastination.

-Vaulting