Thinking in air

Getting Ready to Teach Science Writing Again

2011-12-27T21:09:00.000-08:00

Just a year ago, I posted here about my new online class in Science Writing. Actually it went fairly well, I taught it on campus this fall, and am now updating everything for winter. That made me think of book reviewing, a new assignment that went well and which I will continue. And that started me looking for resources, which somehow sent me to Blogger, which I discovered is now owned by Google -- and the access to which I had lost when my old computer died. Luckily I remembered which email I had used with it, so I was able to get in again. Science in action!

I was telling my students about the bald eagles I see in the mornings, perched in the high bare branches of a locust tree (this is Linn, County, Oregon). Actually not that rare here. They eat lambs. After a long dry spell (which meant that our area was socked in under heavy fog), we are back to a more typical Oregon rain.

Food and Art and maybe Science too

2010-12-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my brother, the Smithsonian Magazine brings a fascinating variety of articles every month -- science, history, art, travel. Here's an article about the Renaissance artist Arcimboldo, a wonderful combination of Food and Art and one could say Science as well.

Science Writing - Communicating Science to the Public

2010-12-15T20:15:00.000-08:00

Since I last posted, I have been inventing new courses to teach at Oregon State. This fall, I piloted Science Writing -- communicating science to the general public -- and am putting it online through E-Campus distance learning for winter. See the cool image by artist Santiago Uceda from Terra.

Why is Science Writing so important? Well, for me it's fascinating to learn more. Consider Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss from our own OSU Press - It's an amazing group of essays that teach a great deal about the mostly overlooked mosses.

For scientists, learning how to explain what they know and do is crucial -- they need to learn to speak clearly. Consider Dean's Am I Making Myself Clear: A Scientist's Guide to Talking to the Public, Or Schulz's Eloquent Science: A Practical Guide to Becoming a Better Writer, Speaker and Scientist.

So scientists need to learn to communicate - as Randy Olson says Don't be Such a Scientist, learn how to communicate, not just to share cool ideas, but to help the world.

See Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Then think of the climate change debate or the evolution debate.

So, part of my class is teaching science students to understand journalism and the rhetoric of the general public. The rest of the class is helping writing minors learn enough science to write an accurate and engaging article.

Stay posted!

Rainy Sunday Looking at Paintings by Winston Churchill

2010-01-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

My brother was talking about Winston Churchill's painting, so I did a quick search and was delighted to learn more. Apparently Churchill's paintings are not much sold outside Britain, which might explain why fewer people are aware of his strong talent. See article. Isn't this a great photo of him painting. When I retire - which of course will never actually happen, a writer always writes (not that you could tell that from the scarcity of posts here in the past year) - I shall paint more. Lovely boats. (photo by Bettman/Corbin)

Polysyndeton and Parataxis

2009-12-19T17:13:00.000-08:00

In a brief search to see if I could find a copy of Joan Didion's "Goodbye to all that" online (I didn't, at least not yet), Google offered me a reference to an article about Didion's essay: "Place and Polysyndeton in Didion's "Goodbye to All That"By Richard Nordquist,which of course piqued my interest and which turns out not to be an article as far as I can tell so much as just an excerpt (but with links to other excerpts and the tantalizing topic of "participial phrases in Momaday" , and so I looked up polysyndeton itself and found not only a definition but more interestingly, some examples from Hemingway and others, and which, in the way that grammar and sentences have of going on and on, led to parataxis and some examples of parataxis in Steinbeck's piece on the American Dream (which I could use for WR 222 Argumentation and WR 323 Writing with Style), and interestingly, it would seem that both styles were popular in the 1930's to 1950's especially, and would be a natural for me, fond as I am of more. However, Noah Lukeman's book A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation seems not to mention either as far as I can tell and without an index - imagine, no index. So, anyone teaching WR 330 Grammar could have lots of fun with this. What got me to thinking of Didion was reading Zinsser's On Writing Well, in which he calls Richard Burton's sentence about rugby the longest he (Zinsser) had read, at 183 words, but that's nothing compared to the famous "when" sentence in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" at 302 words, built in a series of when clauses, or hypotaxis. Well, it's fun, isn't it.
Didion photo from http://grammar.about.com/od/shortpassagesforanalysis/a/Didiongoodbye.htm

After months of neglect - a post on the death of Toulmin

2009-12-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

It's just plain been too hectic to think long enough to put something worth reading up here - and thank goodness for Facebook - but today, with grades finished and the break ahead (not exactly a vacation, but working at home) I want to note the passing of British philosopher Stephen Toulmin, whose rhetorical schema I first learned about when I started teaching comp at Rogue Community College in Grants Pass. His claim-support-warrant structure has been widely accepted as a useful lens for understanding arguments in the public realm, though not without some controversy. Pairing his schema with stasis theory helps students think more critically. Prodding them to try to articulate the warrants and assumptions they make about their audiences is challenging. Thanks, Toulmin.

Maps as tools for thinking

2009-05-12T14:06:00.000-07:00

In searching for something else, I found this interesting piece by Atlantic Monthly author James Fallows on maps (which I love - is there such a thing as a cartophile? the little red line under a misspelled word seems to say no) as information and design Fallows is looking at maps and map software tools for thinking. And while at first I was disappointed that the maps he was using were "just" maps of cognition - such as maps of debates and of arguments, to show the lines of thinking - quite fascinating, Fallows ended up with a city map of London which is partly meant to show that a map is easier to follow than written directions -- and yet, there is a skill and an art and a talent in reading cartography, which may be why Google is creating street scenes to supplement their maps.

Learning How to Think

2009-03-27T15:33:00.001-07:00

Having a few spare minutes over break - but only a few - I was reading some New York Times opinion pieces, and found Kristof's essay on "Learning How to Think" about the ways people make decisions. And this reminded me of a recent book review of Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide (chapter courtesy of New York Times) reviewed by Steven Johnson. All of this musing on cognition relates to trying to help students think more clearly about their research and writing processes. And this brought me back to a book still on my nightstand, Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett. Here. As our population of international students rises at Oregon State, it's helpful for me to understand how students think and why.

I need more time to think about this. For now it's a stub, as Wikipedia would call it.

Here's a recent puzzle:
If the plural of DOG is DOGS, how can the plural of AMERICAN be AMERICAN'S as we so often get in student papers. Any ideas?

The long (unending) journey with Information Literacy

2009-03-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

OK, despite will publicized lists of competencies or proficiencies for Information Literacy - the skills a successful student should have (OSU, ILAGO) I don't think we can ever say that someone "knows everything" just as no one is ever a finished and perfect writer. What we try to do in our composition classes at Oregon State - from the first term and through second terms etc - is to continue to develop and guide the writing habits and ideas students arrive with, and likewise the information literacy habits and beliefs. This is a huge topic (see my friend Anne-Marie's blog), of course. Here's a clue into the challenge we face. In the Sunday March 22 Oregonian, Kimberly Melton writes about the lack of librarians (and even libraries) in Portland public schools. When I read this, it helped make sense of why freshmen arrive thinking they don't need any further instruction in how to find and understand information - because they have been managing (sort of, badly) on their own and have little experience with the excitement of the adventure of exploring the continually expanding info lit frontiers. OK, I'm getting a bit carried away, but you see what I mean. And if "life long learning" is a goal that universities endorse (and they should), then lifelong intellectual curiosity (with the tools to keep going) should be nurtured. How to do this, though, is the challenge.

Thank goodness for Facebook (and spring break)

2009-03-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

If it weren't for Facebook I would never get anything posted at all these days - luckily FB does not expect long thoughtful meditations. Short thought bites is all I can manage and all FB wants. So at least folks know I'm still around. Still, I promise more, and now that it's spring break -- which means I can work more leisurely at home preparing syllabi for spring term - updating and recycling last term's "Writing with Style" and the annual spring practicum for grad students on teaching Business Writing, and creating a whole new (to me) course on Critical Reviewing (books, films, food, fashion, art, architecture, etc). All fun of course and all an excellent excuse to read New Yorker, Atlantic, etc. More coming soon.

New Yorker Covers

2009-02-07T20:41:00.000-08:00

While searching for the McPhee piece I just posted, I found this link to New Yorker covers. What could be more fun (for me, anyway) than reminiscing about these images. Look at the June 9 & 16 double issue - the owner of the independent bookstore opening for the day looking at the woman next door receiving a delivery from Amazon.com. Isn't it great - and sad! I used to work at an independent bookstore and we could not compete with Amazon's prices, of course.

This link is just 2008, but you can easily see nearly any year. You can also search with this link to the Cartoon.Bank and search as far back as the 1920'2.

Information Literacy - New Yorker style

2009-02-07T20:29:00.000-08:00

Good to be back online - and hope I can keep with it for a while. Just read a great article by John McPhee - everything I've read by McPhee is good - in New Yorker (Feb 9) on p. 56 called "Checkpoints" about fact-checking. Sorry that the link doesn't give the whole article - just the abstract, but I really encourage you to find it and read it because this is Information Literacy in a whole new light (and by the way, the abstract includes KEYWORDS! Perfect for our first year comp Info Lit assignment this term) McPhee provides several stories of times when the magazine's fact checkers persisted in finding out the truth about the data he includes. He also gives a funny story of when they changed McPhee's story based on comments by an expert on plate tectonics - Eldridge Moores - who actually had a slip of memory, confusing the Adriatic Plate with the Aegean Plate, thus introducing error where none had existed before. The hero of McPhee's story is Sara Lippincott, now retired, who checked facts for years for The New Yorker.

McPhee also reports on the various fact-checking practices of other magazines (variously rigorous) and book publishers (non-existant - it's up to the author to check facts).

All of this is not only fascinating on its own, but especially in connection with the ways we teach information literacy to students at Oregon State. If anyone else reads the article, I would be very interested in reactions.

A new year two-fer -- now Adam Gopnik

2009-01-02T17:46:00.000-08:00

Lately, when I read the New Yorker, I find myself enjoying another of Adam Gopnik's essays. For example, this new one aobut Samuel Johnson "Man of Fetters" which I liked almost as much as his essay on John Stuart Mill which was great.

Apparently Gopnik is so well known that a whole blog about him is available. On the other hand, not everyone is a fan. James Wolcott is less excited. Maybe he's jealous? Or am I just too swayed by Gopnik's prose.

More later.

Welcome 2009 - Books miscellany

2009-01-02T17:33:00.000-08:00

Welcome 2009. I was afraid that my blog wouldn't let me back in, after all this time. So here are some items I have been reading this afternoon.

My Google news alert for books brings me: "Reading Serious Books Challenges Your Thinking."
by Mwenda wa Micheni from the African Business Daily which asks a key question:

Do our leaders have time to read serious literature; literature that engages the mind and offers direction? What literature do they read if they do at all, empty pulp literature?

I think we know the answer regarding Obama, Bush, and Palin. But for myself, I know I'm not reading enough books. Mostly articles and student papers. When invited to join "good reads" I feel very much the fifth wheel, as I have nothing to contribute.

On the other hand, from the UK, we have this: "Poor teachers fuelling 'loathing of books' by Graeme Paton:

The poor teaching of English in schools is leading to a "loathing of books" among children, according to" novelist Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black, Strange Meeting and I'm the King of the Castle. Hill claims to be "flooded with "desperate" emails from pupils struggling to understand her novels because they aretaught "so badly, so dully and so mechanically" that many children were being turned off literature altogether.

I'm wondering how applicable this is to the US? Is it always the teacher's fault? What about No Child Left Behind?

How long does it take for Google Reader to update?

2008-12-04T11:35:00.001-08:00

I was checking my Google reader and it still hasn't shown the post I made a few minutes ago. Does anyone know how long it takes to update?

Why are keywords so challenging?

2008-12-04T11:01:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the long absence. What I wanted to write about - still will - is David Aaronovitch's article from the London Times as found by my students in WR 222. But today I'm writing about keywords and why they are so baffling to students. There is a cognitive challenge here. In all our writing classes we have some information literacy activities that require research and students are surprisingly baffled in their attempts. Yesterday a student said she still had not found any scholarly articles for her essay about the benefits of marching bands (benefits to members or the the school team being cheered on). I said, let's look, opened OSU's Academic Search Premier database, typed in "marching band" and the first two articles were quite helpful. It was so easy. I wondered what key words she might have been using that she couldn't find anything.

Which brings us to our challenge for our campus-wide Information Literacy in first year comp. We are trying to design some new activities that will help teach this concept.

In EBSCO I found an interesting article -

The Effect of Search Engine Keyword Choice and Demographic Features on Internet Searching Success.

The objective of this project was to determine the effect of keyword choice and demographic features on Internet searching success through empirical research. An experiment was done with 1,109 l...

By: Weideman, Melius; Strümpfer, Corrie. Information Technology & Libraries, Jun2004, Vol. 23 Issue 2, p58-65, 8p; (AN 14078902)
which found that while younger and white students tended to be more successful with keyword searching, in fact students are still overconfident of their ability to find articles.

But here's a look at the opposite side that might just be a way to help students understand. Let's look at the other side - if you are the author, how can you help people find your essay. Scholars typically list keywords with their article abstracts. And web designers want desperately for their sites to be found, so they work hard to make a wide range of key words work for them. Karen Thackston devotes a page to "what are keywords and what the heck do you do with them" to help web site owners/designers know how to help search engines find their page. After all Google's algorithms are based - I think - on keywords.

Lorelle's blog on WordPress also addresses the value of using keywords effectively. Her perspective, like Karen's above, is to help bloggers make their sites more easily reached. If I wanted to capture a lot of attention to this post, I need to use the words both as single "keyword" and two words "key words" because people use them both ways. Wikipedia uses the single keyword, though very minimally. In this case, while normally I eagerly refer students to Wikipedia, I don't know if their entry is helpful.

Kevin Sinclair of Cyberindian also addresses Keywords (one word) again from the perspective of the customer. What we hope to do in our activity is help students induce (not deduce) what would be effective keywords to find a particular text without the author or title - such as Swift's "Modest Proposal" so that students can then devise keywords/ key words that would effectively help them in their own research when they are not looking for a particular item.

What Anne-Marie and Dan and I talked about at the library yesterday was the interesting relationship between key words and tag clouds. Just because a word occurs often doesn't make it a keyword, and I don't mean words such as "they". A tag cloud I made of "Modest Proposal" had as one of the most common words "burden" and then "kingdom" - neither of which I would have thought of to find it. Using "burden" and "kingdom" together as search terms in Google did not retrieve "Modest Proposal" on the first two of the Google result pages. However the key words "Ireland poverty children satire" brought up an entry for Swift as the first on a Google search. It would be interesting to experiment with this.

I'm hoping that this post will attract some thinking. Wish I had a good image for this.

Maybe the real challenge is what DavidWeinberger raises: that Everything is Miscellaneous.

ps: my Blogger appears to have lost the auto spell check.

"Let America be America Again"

2008-11-11T09:10:00.000-08:00

A number of friends have recently emailed Langston Hughes' wonderful poem, "Let America Be America Again," which is so inspiring with Barack Obama's election. I just wanted to add to the swelling hearts and share it, too.

As Hughes says:

Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
Let America be America again.
And while it was sadly too often true for Hughes that: "(America never was America to me.)"

Now, I hope, Hughes would find that America could be America for him.

Have you renewed your poetic license?

2008-11-09T09:33:00.000-08:00

I had a delightful laugh yesterday when reading last week's (11/2) Sunday Oregonian with Brian Doyle's "Modest Proposal for Poetry Inspectors." Nice wit and lovely variation of elastic and elongated (but not excruciating) sentences with tiny tasty tidbits. "Wouldn't that be cool?" I agree that Oregon's poet laureate Lawson Inada should be police chief and Ursula LeGuin should "speak directly by Web camera to every child in every school in Oregon."

Doyle's essay, does, however leave me with a slight distaste in his parodying of teen girls and their poetic habits. Just as many teen boys suffer with poetic angst. Does Doyle imagine that none of these boys' girlfriends dread their interminable poetry readings?

However, I enjoy Doyle's essays, and now I see he has published a book of poems, so I should check it out. Here's another of his essays.

Way Cool Tool

2008-11-07T21:46:00.000-08:00

My brilliant colleague Anne-Marie (Info-Fetishist) has updated my class library page with this extremely cool tool called Newsmap, which shows a "tree" or collage of all the biggest headlines, whether in the US, UK, China, etc or around the world drawn from Google news. I wanted to get a screen shot but somehow that didn't work. Check it out.

"In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it" says Thomas Friedman

2008-11-07T21:23:00.000-08:00

My writing students have been analyzing essays and book chapters for 2 weeks now. Quite a few were attracted to Thomas Friedman's excerpt "Revolution IS U.S." from his book Lexus and the Olive Tree, and just tonight the current New Yorker arrived with a profile of Friedman: "The Bright Side: The Relentless Optimism of Thomas Friedman" by Ian Parker. (I'm sorry that the website only gives the abstract unless one is a subscriber.)

Parker quotes one of Friedman's friends describing him as tremendous at naming concepts:

"He's created a brand for himself. And the Flat World [a reference to Friedman's books The World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded] is also a brand. He comes up with phrases and hooks that people hang on to, sometimes for dear life. I think that's a unique skill. He writes for the masses. His work is extremely intellectual, but it takes the form of a conversation with a taxi-driver."

Students noticed right away Friedman's chatty style and were quite drawn in. Parker says,

"Friedman is not blithe, or without passion, but his career can be seen as one that has redirected left-of-center dismay or unease (about terrorism, globalization, climate change, American political inertia) into a conversation about opportunity and national purpose -- and, to a large degree, has done this through the insistent marshalling of rhetoric. "I don't mind using rhetoric," Friedman said. 'I get criticized for that a lot: It's 'too cute,' too this or that. But I've never had a reader come up to me and say, "that book was too easy to read. That anecdote went down too easily.' To simplify something accurately, you've got to understand it deeply."

Later, Parker says "In a curious way, this rhetorical challenge [of making metaphors to describe the interplay of forces] has become [Friedman's] subject. As Friedman said, "I've always described my books as books about how to think about a problem. Not necessarily the specific detailed answer."

Absolutely Friedman's style is perfectly aligned with his message; in fact it is his message. I would like to read more of his work.

Gopnik again!

2008-10-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

After os much enjoying Gopnik's piece on Babar (see below), I was so happy to find another of his "Critic at Large" reviews in the New Yorker, this one on a biography of John Stuart Mill. It was fascinating and well written. I confess to not having known much about Mill before this - just a vague idea that he was a Scottish philosopher. His strong support for the rights of women had not sunk in. Look at what Gopkin says:

Mill believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind.

And this was written a few years after Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, which surely Mill had read. (and by the way, I can also recommend Frances Sherwood's fictionalized biography Vindication about Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein).

But as Gopnik points out, the real influence on Mill was Harriet Taylor:

Of all Mill’s causes, his championing of the rights of women is still the most heroic, and its heroism turns out to be rooted in a passionate love for another person. Mill said that he had always been a feminist, but there isn’t any doubt that the engine of his feminism was his friend, love, collaborator, and eventual wife, Harriet Taylor

And listen to this:

Harriet’s own writing of the eighteen-thirties and forties on the oppression of marriage has the urgency of immediate experience. A smart woman who had been obliged to be someone’s idea of a wife, she had been at that table with the dumb little dictator: “The most insignificant of men, the man who can obtain influence or consideration nowhere else, finds one place where he is chief and head. There is one person, often greatly his superior in understanding, who is obliged to consult him, and whom he is not obliged to consult. He is judge, magistrate, ruler, over their joint concerns.” Mill and Taylor, in their later writing, most famously in the 1869 “The Subjection of Women,” aren’t content to show that women would be happier if freer; they go right to the ground and ask what reason we have for thinking that any restraint on women’s freedom is just. The arguments against women’s liberty have to do with what is natural for women to do, or what women are capable of doing, or what some men would be offended by. They take each case and show that its only rationale is our slavery to custom. Women are naturally passive? Go tell Queen Elizabeth. They are happy in their lot? All slaves say as much to the slave master. They are “designed” to have children? No argument from nature can ever alter an argument from ethics: if women want to raise children, excellent; if they don’t, there is no natural reason to think they must any more than there is a reason to think that male philosophers should all put down their pens and go out hunting for mammoths.
Mill makes the point again and again that no one can possibly know what women are or are not “naturally” good at, since their opportunities have been so vanishingly small compared with the length of their oppression. Arguing against the notion that women have no talent for the fine arts, Mill makes the shrewd point that in the one liberal art where women are encouraged as much as men, acting on the stage, everyone admits that they’re just as good or better. In any case, nature has nothing to do with what should be done. In his essay on “Nature,” he writes, “Nature cannot be a proper model for us to imitate. Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills; torture because nature tortures; ruin and devastate because nature does the like; or we ought not to consider what nature does, but what it is good to do.” Mill’s rejection of a natural case isn’t that anything goes; it’s that nobody can really know what goes until someone goes farther. He doesn’t believe in a blank slate on which anything can be inscribed; he believes in the power of the chalk-holding hand to change the sum on the blackboard.

Well - really, I urge you to read the actual article. My own copy (in print at home with marginalia) is already marked up. Enjoy! Meanwhile, having enjoyed two of Gopnik's pieces, I shall hunt down more.

Babar

2008-09-28T10:39:00.001-07:00

As a child, I enjoyed the Babar books by Jean de Brunhoff and probably still have some in a box somewhere. I found the drawings charming; the story a bit more disturbing. How could the author open with the mother being killed! I almost had a chance to find out more because in college, I dated someone related to the de Brunhoff family, and almost had a chance to meet the son Laurent de Brunhoff who carried on the family tradition with the stories and drawings.

So, it was great to get the Sept 22 New Yorker, and read a thoughtful article by Adam Gropnik "Freeing the Elephants: What are the Babar Stories Really About" which interrogates the questions of French colonialism and the fascination we have with the "wild" and "nature" versus civilization and "order." I especially liked the way that Gropnik positioned French stories with British and American. He says,

"In London, in children's books, life is too orderly and one logns fo the vitality of the wild; in Paris, order is an achievement, hard won against the natural chaos an cruelty of adult life; in New York, we begin most stories in an indefferent city and the child has to create a kind of order within it."(50)

(sorry, I haven't found the article online, but here's a slide show of images.
And here's an audio interview with Gropnik about the controversy of the elephants.

(Note: On a train across Scotland in 1968, I got in a huge controversy with a friend who claimed that the title was really Barbar. We had no way to check who was right. Very frustrating! Of course I should have entirely let it go.)

Photo copyright by de Brunhoff, print for sale from Russell Rare Prints.

The Time Eater indeed

2008-09-28T10:20:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the first day of classes, and I'm excited to be back with my students - WR 222 - Argument as Public Discourse. Lots to talk about this election season. But up til now, with orienting the new graduate teaching assistants, my time has been eaten up.

Thus, I was fascinated to read about a new clock at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, England, called, aptly "The Time Eater." The grasshopper on top of the clock's "dial"well portrays the way time seems to disappear. According to the article, "The masterpiece, introduced by famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, challenges all preconceptions about telling time. It has no hands or digital numbers and it is specially designed to run in erratic fashion, slowing down and speeding up from time to time."

That is so true. This morning, for example, I thought I would get early to my desk to take care of projects,reports on my conference in Denver, planning for the TA practicum on Tuesday, etc. And now, it's 10:30, and very little progress. Maybe I should refer to my dial-up internet service as a Time Eater too. I guess I am just being stubborn and stingy (my Scottish inheritance?) to not fork out for faster internet service, but usually I do all my internet at work.

I have always been interested in clocks and often prefer an analog for the wall - so I can see how close we are to the next thing, but a digital for my wrist watch.

Digression --do you know how hard it is to find a petite digital watch - my old Timex keeps on ticking - do digitals tick? - but I fear that when it's time is done, I will have a hard time finding a replacement - most digitals are big honking sports watches for people with big wrists. It's not that I'm vain but my wrists are small.

My brother has always collected clocks and watches, and has a great many very interesting ones. I grew up in a house with a tall grandfather type clock, the chime turned off. It had been a gift to my grandfather (so it really was grandfather's clock) from his students at U Chicago. Now owned by my nephew who has a house with tall enough ceilings to accommodate it.

You might like the book Latitude about John Harrison who in 1725 invented the first clock that could tell time at sea. Without a pendulum, it relied on a grasshopper escapement. In fact the clock was invented by John Taylor "as a tribute to Harrison"

With this clock, sailors could compare the sun time of their current position with Greenwich Mean Time, as recorded on the clock, they could know where they were East-West, which is why before this early maps show America as very narrow, because there was no accurate estimate. Which is also why latitude is measured as/shown as hours and minutes. Very interesting to imagine how we try to make linear and logical sense of "time."

Photo, with Stephen Hawking, from same article.

Copy of my article, finally

2008-09-05T09:27:00.001-07:00

I'm very happy to have at last a copy of College and Undergraduate Libraries, vol 15, 1-2, summer 2008, (with this wonderful cover of Whistler's painting!) and the article on Information Literacy that Anne-Marie Deitering (and here) and I wrote (p.57-79) "Step by step through the scholarly conversation : a collaborative library/writing faculty project to embed information literacy and promote critical thinking in first year composition at Oregon State University" .
And what's great is to find the other articles in the journal, all on a similar theme of IL in FYC. Great reading for the weekend.

Whistler painting from Your Daily Art, October 11, 2006

Greek Rhetoric does Matter, even if Cahill omits it.

2008-08-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

Having enjoyed Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization, I eagerly bought his Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, when I saw it on remainder. It is part of Cahill's series "The Hinges of History." Cahill's web page describes the book as showing

"the birth of a new cultural outlook that permeates the West to this day"
and "a magnificent new perspective on the evolution of the Western world. "

I am nearly finished reading, and on the whole, I have enjoyed it and learned. Joy Connolly's review from the New York Times, November, 2003, is generally favorable and in depth, whereas an anonymous citizen reviewer is a bit more critical (and less in depth). Perhaps my favorite parts are the first two chapters, on fighting in the Illiad and homecoming in the Odyssey. The book is divided into chapters about what western culture has learned from the Greeks, such as "how to fight" and "how to think."

I was surprised not to find "rhetoric" in the index, but I figured that the chapter on philosphy and Aristotle would surely mention rhetoric among the cognitive advances made by the Greeks. However, rhetoric is not there - neither with philosophy nor with politics and how to rule. It's an astonishing oversight on Cahill's part. I would love to ask him about his decision to omit rhetoric. In my opinion - OK biased - the ability to persuade (which is what rhetoric is) is fundamental to western culture and an understanding of psychology and philosophy (what counts as evidence, what does the audience value, how do we know what we know). And if you are going to discuss Aristotle's contribution to taxonomies, then his categorizing of appeals and topoi would be logical to mention.

More on Dorothy Sayers

2008-08-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

As a followup to my previous post about Women at Universities and being curious about any links between Dorothy Sayer and her contemporary and better known author Virginia Woolf, I searched and found some interesting items, though not as much about the two of them as I had hoped. Were they friends? Did they correspond?

Here's an interesting piece from the Open Letters Monthly Arts and Literature Review: "Second Glance: Dorothy Sayers and the Last Golden Age" byJoanna Scutts.
And here's another from the Jesus Creed blog called "Before Women were Pastors" by Scot McKnight.

Does anyone know of links between Sayers and Woolf?

Women at University

2008-08-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Williams' interesting article "Teach the University" from Pedagogy, 2008, argues that we at the university should teach our students about the essences, values, controversies, histories, and cultures, etc of what a university is. Sent to me by my friend and colleague Jeremy, now an assistant professor in Missouri, the article also includes a handy bibliography of books, films, etc that deal with issues of university. One book, Moo, by Jane Smiley, I have but haven't read. Maybe one day, as it is supposed to be funny, about an ag school similar to Oregon State.

Another book on Williams' list is Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers, 1936, which I also have and have read but so long ago that I was happy to read it again on our recent vacation to the Oregon coast. The mystery involves a "Poison Pen" who is writing nasty notes and playing nasty tricks on the women at Shrewsbury College (a fictional women's college at Oxford University). The heroine, Harriet Vane, an alum, returns to help solve the crimes, finally calling on her friend and persistent suitor Lord Peter Wimsey for help.

What interested me deeply is the way Sayers tackles the question of women's education. This story is still in the early aftermath of women's. entry to higher ed A quick search on Wikipedia says that Sayers was born in Oxford (her father a chaplain etc). Says Wikipedia,

in 1912, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford,^[4] studying modern languages and medieval literature. She finished with first-class honours in 1916. Although women could not be awarded degrees at that time, Sayers was among the first to receive a degree when the situation changed a few years later, and in 1920 she graduated MA.

Sayers' mysteries are more thoughtful and insightful than light hearted mysteries, due partly to the frequent quotes from Spencer, Keats, etc and the Latin, French, and Greek allusions that are not translated. (According to Wikipedia, she started learning Latin at age 6. ) In fact, the denouement involves a proposal and reply in Latin. Definitely a work of its time period. Very few students today take Latin, though I had three years in my high school - and very useful it has been, too. Her Latin was no doubt helpful when she translated Dante's Divine Comedy.

The gist of the PP's anger is that women don't belong at university, that academic women are shirking their duties to husband and children (indeed their duties to marry and have children), that academic women are taking jobs from men who then cannot support their families, and that academics in general put the principle of truth above personal needs - in this case pointing out an error of fact in a master's thesis that then cost the person his job. (Besides dealing with sexism, Sayers hints at issues of classism that are not as thoroughly explored.) Sayers' feminism is more explicitly dealt with in her essay "Are Women Human" (cover above). If I can find a link to the essay on line I will add it.

I have been thinking of using some of this material for my sample essay #1 for our FYC - on the theme of education, society, and individuals, with readings by Bennett, Gatto, Loewen, Hirsch, et al. I could add my own experience at a women's college, Bryn Mawr, founded 1890's to provide higher education for women.

And in connection with this, this afternoon I plan to watch the film Mona Lisa Smile, which should resonate, considering that my degree is also art history, from a "Seven Sisters" school, about a decade after the plot in the Julia Roberts film. I'll let you know what I think. The film is not on Williams' list, however.

Book cover image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Dorothy_L_Sayers_Are_women_human_web.jpg

Updates on What I did in Denver

2008-08-05T08:55:00.001-07:00

Here's what Greg Zobel of Adjunct Advice reported on the presentation in Denver. It was great that he came because my presentation had a screen shot of one of his posts on "Tips for Talking to the Not so Tech Savvy" which we all are at some point.

Port Orford's New Library - I'll visit in 2 weeks

2008-08-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

This is such great news - tiny town of Port Orford on the Oregon coast has finished its library. Last summer we saw the start of excavation. There had just been a ground-breaking. And less than one year later - according to Margie Boule's article in the July 10 Oregonian - the library is finished and entirely funded by fundraisers and not a penny in the bond measure. We are planning to retire to Port Orford in a few years, so this is great news. If I knew how to put an arrow on a picture I could show just where this new library is. At the top is what it looks like!

Beach scene from I Love Oregon
Aerial from PortOrford.Org
Library image from Port Orford Library Home page

Water, water everywhere -

2008-08-04T17:15:00.000-07:00

Today's article by Jeff Mapes (see photo of the Columbia River) about proposals to sell Oregon's water to LA because, according to state Sen. David Nelson, R-Pendleton, it is "a vital commodity just being flushed down into the ocean," Nelson said, "and we're not getting any use of it" seems pretty crazy. For one thing - "we" ARE getting use of it - We being the animals, the plants, the planet, as well as the humans. Nelson thinks that "Oregon could be a Saudi Arabia of water." Hmm. I'm not buying that idea!

Brian Doyle's lovely writing in the Oregonian

2008-08-02T09:13:00.001-07:00

I certainly enjoy reading essays by Brian Doyle in the Portland Oregonian, and I mean to write and tell him so. For example, he had a great piece on the value of newspapers - I think it was last Sunday July 27 - and now, because one of the values of newspapers is that readers can savor them slowly over a week - I am finishing the 7/27/08 Arts section with Doyle's essay on "The Freedom of not reading a book to its mind-numbing finish" which most of us can relate to. True confessions: Once in college at Bryn Mawr, I intentionally decided not to finish some of my philosophy reading of Plato - first time I had consciously not done homework. Felt so liberated. My roommate was shocked that this was my first liberation of intentionally not doing homework. Well, I was a bit of a nerd then (maybe now too). Anyway, mostly I do finish - but lately I am really bogged down in Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Love, Pray which everyone says is so wonderful - even Anne Lamott, who blurbed the book and whose opinion I totally respect. Here's Lamott's comment from the book's website:

Anne Lamott on "Eat, Pray, Love"
"This is a wonderful book, brilliant and personal, rich in spiritual insight, filled with sorrow and a great sense of humor. Elizabeth Gilbert is everything you would love in a tour guide, of magical places she has traveled to both deep inside and across the oceans: she's wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, hilarious, heartbreaking, and God, does she pay great attention to the things that really matter." -- Anne Lamott

So I "should" finish. Especially as a dear friend gave me the book. But Gilbert seems contrived and Lamott is genuine. I mean, Gilbert so conveniently got an advance for this nifty concept - three "I" countries - Italy, India, Indonesia. That's so cutesy. So, Gilbert - while I may not have put you away forever - you are no longer on the bedside table. Maybe another day - when I retire perhaps? I can now take Doyle as my expert on putting aside books that are not clicking. I just won't tell anyone.

PS: By the way, to sort of explain why my posts are a bit sporadic - when I have time to blog at home on weekends, it's so slow with dial-up modem.

The undending popularity of Pirates

2008-08-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

After the very successful movie trilogy of Pirates of the Caribbean - with everyone going AArgh - even the group in nearby Albany, Oregon, with "Talk Like a Pirate" - and now Leslie Cockburn's article for the Canadian Daily Gleaner about young adult books about pirates - fact and fiction - writes about Long John Silver from the novel Treasure Island. Cockburn writers:

But the ultimate pirate, and one you should introduce your children to as quickly as possible, is Long John Silver, the star of Robert Lewis Stevenson's classic adventure novel, Treasure Island. This is one of the best adventure books ever written. Let me say that while Stevenson didn't have dinosaurs and a multi-million dollar budget, he nevertheless he made his island every bit as dangerous, suspenseful and thrilling as Jurassic Park. No one, I swear, having read the book, could resist the lure of a crumpled map and the siren song of buried gold. It appeals to the absolute worst in us - our heroes steal the gold, kill the pirates, come home and live happily every after. No soul searching, no second thoughts, just a rousing chorus of "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest." Arrrgh!

But here's my funny connection: In 8th grade - years ago - our English teacher assigned an art project after reading Treasure Island. I amde a map showing England, the traverse to the Caribbean, and the imaginary island itself, and my teacher gave a low grade complaining that I had no evidence that Treasure Island was in the Caribbean. Aha - I brought in my grandfather's history of pirates -- Jameson, John Franklin. Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents. New York City: The MacMillan Company, 1923. E195.J3 - see this bibliography - which proved that Captain Kidd - mentioned in the novel - was known to be in the Caribbenn, which then proved that Treasure Island must also be there. My teacher was not thrilled to be corrected but she did change the grade. Aargh, indeed!

PS: Last year's da Vinci Days Kinetic Sculpture Race featured a vehicle called "Pie Rat of the Carob Bean" which was wonderful. Had been Cheesy Rider before and this year it was Rat-Tattoo-Eee! Very clever.

And another - I really like this artist - new to me

2008-07-30T09:46:00.001-07:00

And I should know of this Jac Martin-Ferrieres as I was an art history major. Look at this wonderful painting.

Also from the same Vincent Mann Galleries
http://vincentmanngallery.com/masters.asp

Picture du Jour

2008-07-30T09:40:00.001-07:00

Working on a PowerPoint for the Writing with Style class - to integrate the reading-writng connection with visual reading, Berger's "Ways of Seeing" and found this lovely picture from this website. Perfect! by Jac Martin-Ferrieres, "Paris - Pont Marie" 1932. Apparently for sale?

Paris Boat Scene
http://vincentmanngallery.com/images/JM_parispont_T.jpg

Summer is flying by - - -

2008-07-24T17:50:00.000-07:00

--- and I am slowly getting caught up with teaching and writing, but somehow not getting to my blog enough. Here's an essay by Jill Lepore about children's libraries from The New Yorker that I wanted to blog recently and it's taken me awhile to do it, though my good friend Paula got her thoughts out promptly!

What struck me was the EB White connection. Somehow I was never much of a fan of EB White's children's books. Charlotte's Web made me angry. Why was the girl Fern so unconcerned? Much better - more poignant and poetic, I thought, was White's essay "Death of a Pig." It turns out to be easy to find references to this essay online. Here's an excerpt:

I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. Even now, so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply and am not ready to say whether death came on the third night or the fourth night. This uncertainty afflicts me with a sense of personal deterioration; if I were in decent health I would know how many nights I had sat up with a pig.

This excerpt was helpfully posted for English 5730, a class taught by Dr. Richard Nordquist at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia. Nordquist also provides short passages with attention to diction and metaphors.

In addition, there's some nice biographical material "Not Bad" on Nordquist's Grammar Blog.
And here, interestingly, is Nick Bergus's blog called "Death of a Pig" named for the essay - and a post on the 60th anniversary of the essay. Bergus provides a full-text link to White's essay that happens to go to The Atlantic magazine and its recent issue on ideas, which our class in "Writing with Style" just happens to be discussing today. So - small world and 6 degrees of separation.

And that reminds me of one of my favorite White pieces, his poem "I paint what I see" from The New Yorker, which I think I must have blogged on in the past at some point. Which again brings me full circle.

So, apologies for a skimpy post, but now, on my way home!

Red Leather Diary

2008-07-12T05:34:00.000-07:00

One of the best things to happen here in Denver - among meeting many wonderful new colleagues and learning a lot at this conference - has been visiting with my dear friend Linda (who lives in Oregon, but we haven't seen each other for about 2 years and are now visiting in Denver - go figure). Linda and I had an excellent visit at the Denver Art Museum, seeing Native American aart and Impresioinist paintings, primarily. Plus a very ritzy lunch. But also, Linda gave me wonderful book - Lily Koppel's biography/feature The Red Leather Diary, (link requires flash) a true story of finding an old diary on the street in front of an apartment in New York City and reconnecting with the author, Florence Wolfson Howitt, now 90, and retracing her life story. Koppel first wrote about the diary for The New York Times before making this book. (See also photos of the original book and author). I think my mother had a similar 5-year diary, with each page for a single day and entries for each year. I should go find it in my storage box. Great bedtime reading.

Getting back to a great thought on Wikipedia

2008-07-11T21:36:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting observation about Wikipedia, sent by Paula: According to Games Radar
Wikipedia devotes more pages to video gmaes than it does to history. For example, " Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare beats "modern warfare"... 5,858 [pages] to 2,873." This is due, they say, to the fact that while

everybody has power [because] Information is interactive, knowledge is collaborative and history is open source. [Therefore] The nerdy kid next door has just as much influence as a high school teacher; the dorky dude at the comic book shop has just as much voice as a college professor.
Problem is, the nerds and dorks tend to have a lot more free time - and passion - than the teachers and professors. The end result? A hilariously skewed, terrifyingly twisted view of the world in which all the wrong things are deemed "important" and worthy of serious academic discussion.

The conclusion from this might be that this is one more reason why college teachers are right to ban the use of Wikipedia. However I would argue first that quantity of pages does not mean quality of information. Also, this might be one more tool we can use when teaching students what Wikipedia is. Consider that the TV news devotes lots of time to Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears - more time than they do to more substantive issues - but no one seriously suggests that therefore we should not use TV news - well, this is why PBS is more reliable. I have yet to see Paris Hilton featured on PBS.

Somewhere recently I read about an alleged attempt by one or more groups in the Middle East to make a concerted effort to become 'administrators" on Wikipedia in order to lobby for information and entries slanted to their perspective. If I can find this again, I will add it.

Meanwhile, the WPA conference in Denver is going very well, with lots of useful and interesting information. Outside right now thunder over the Rockies, though I haven't yet noticed any lightning (maybe the ambient street lights outside the hotel are obscuring the flashes) and I haven't seen any rain (which Colorado desperately needs).

Rocky Mountain High - thinking and talking writing programs in Denver

2008-07-09T21:37:00.000-07:00

It's been a great time so far at the workshop for Writing Program Administrators here in Denver, with 3 more days of conference, where I will also have the great fun of presenting on the "Tech Savvy" WPA - which I am, sometimes, with a lot of help from friends. I have yet to stress over my paper (too long of course as any of my friends or colleagues would expect) and my powerpoint which I had such fun making - really, a slide show of 35 (if I remember right) screen shots of the Information Literacy work we are doing at OSU. Meanwhile, Michael is subbing my WR 323 class, teaching them Baudrillard and visual rhetoric this week while they revise and expand their essays on contact zone issues for audiences such as Harper's, Atlantic, New Yorker, or New Republic. First we had to spend some time getting familiar with these magazines in class and even had fun looking at the concept of American anti-intellectualism - which probably connects to Baudrillard as well. The class is great fun even if the 6 students have summer fever and attend sporadically. Meanwhile, Claire and Isabelle are subbing for WR 121, where the many international students along with some NES - Native English Speakers (my newest acronym) - are doing some very nice work with Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, Judith Cofer, Mike Rose and Stephen Jay Gould. I'm so lucky to have such great colleagues who make it possible for me to spend this week here with other great colleagues.

Back again -

2008-06-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time, and I've missed being here. What can I say - just too busy to think -yet I am desperate to think. I have to finish a paper on Information Literacy - Opportunities and Exegencies - for Writing Program Administrators - to give in Denver on July 11. Well, the PowerPoint is coming along, and I have done some of the reading (well, probably a lot of the reading) but have no have time to write. Meanwhile, now it's summer term and I'm teaching WR 121 as usual in the summer plus WR 323, about reading and writing with style. Luckily my friend and colleague Michael is helping out for the first four weeks and will be subbing for me while I'm gone. Here's a great post that he made recently about the course, with some comments. Really, the kind of reading we want students to do is indeed like wrestling with alligators. If only.... sigh.... I want them to grapple with the notion of, the role of, public intellectuals. For tomorrow they read Edward Said's chapter "States" from his book After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives with photos by Jean Mohr. (Here's the cover.)
(cover image source: http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/ce/79/d286793509a04c541c5e0110._AA240_.L.jpg)

Anonymous was a woman -

2008-04-25T08:27:00.000-07:00

Virginia Woolf commented on this fact -- "For most of history, Anonymous was a woman" and Mirra Bank wrote a book about it, and now a new book also outlines the history of anonymity in publishing. John Mullan's Anonymity: A Secret History Of English Literature in this review by Rutgh Wajnryb, outlines some of the reasons women have published anonymously.

But Joanna Russ's classic 1983 How to Suppress Women's Writing, (from the University of Texas press) dealt with the challenges facing women authors quite a while ago. Here's what Adrienne Rich said of Russ's book: (from the Google Books Link)

By the author of The Female Man [(Russ's science fiction novel of the 1970's) -- How to Suppress Women's Writing is] a provocative survey of the forces that work against women who dare to write. "Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer, a writer of real moral passion and high wit." -- Adrienne Rich "

Think PD James?

It's, not my, fault, it's the, epidemic, of commas!

2008-04-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

Although, we think it's, the recent rain, really, commas, are springing up, like, tulips, everywhere! Check out this, credible (incredible!), report!
If I can, find, the great Peanuts cartoon, about commas, I will add a link! Happy Comma Day!

Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere

"Everything I've Never Read" - On Thursday

2008-04-12T18:18:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: I've been meaning to add this image of the "Whithersoever" art exhibit by Lauren Grossman from OSU's Fairbanks Gallery that was up at the time of the book reading performance piece described below. The sheep are on wheels as is each of the mini lawns. Very cool.

Last Thursday, my friend Mary B and I went to OSU's Fairbanks West Gallery to see/participate in an art performance piece by OSU art student Kathryn Cellerini called "Everything I've Never Read." Coming in out of the misty rain, Mary and I found the artist sitting on cushions on the floor amid lovely braided rugs (sorry, I didn't' get the artist's name on the rugs) and strewn with books, some library and some of her own.

We introduced ourselves, chatted with her, and picked out some books to read. Mary found herself on a floor cushion with Dante's Divine Comedy, an 1920's version. Kathryn was reading from an elegant volume of Moby Dick with gilt edges and pale blue satin ribbon bookmark. I settled into a velvet armchair and picked up a paperback reprint of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, with excellent introduction by Lionel Trilling (1952 edition), while holding a 1943 volume of Wuthering Heights with excellent wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg.

This project is great fun because we all have stacks of books waiting to be read - mine piled on bedside table and coffee table. Sadly, one could never read everything! And as a writing instructor, I do feel that I "ought to" have read more. But when?

According to her artist statement, Cellerini sets out her reasons and goal:

Though culturally relative, there is a standard set of literary works that a person is expected to have read. Given my love and admiration for books, sadly I do not read as much as I would like. And the books that I choose to read on my free time are either in the subjects of history, science or art because those are passionate interests of mine. Yet my cultural understanding of what it is to be well-read is based on the opinions of laureates, family, and peers. Even basic literacy works that elementary students might read are only titles to me, not experiences.

The intention during this week-long performance is to not only become familiar with literature that is otherwise foreign, but also to designate time every day to include such a task. My place will be in this space as much as possible..The personal ramification of this project will be life-long as I will be able to engage in a literary dialogue that I couldn't have otherwise. However, this project is of interest to me even more so because it invites the viewer to take an initiative and enter a space of curiosity, vulnerability, and comfort.

Thank you, Kathryn, for helping all of us to reach out to books we have never read.

Happy National Poetry Month

2008-04-06T16:51:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it's April already - National Poetry Month - being celebrated all around Oregon by the Oregon State Poetry Association (OSPA) with their spring conference in nearby Salem and other events around the Willamette Valley. It's a time to read and enjoy poems - well, we should do that all year around, of course.

And what better time to read works by Oregon's own poet laureate Lawson Inada. Inada is a retired professor from Southern Oregon University, who is the subject of a documentary What It Means to Be Free: A Video about Poetry and Japanese-American Internment which I show to my writing classes every term. The video works especially well as an argument of definition, so I plan to show it Friday in WR 222, to go along with their essay #1. For information on getting a copy of this video, check this link for PoetryVideos.com where you can also sample the video and read some of Inada's commentary on the poems.

According to the Inada biography link above, he is also the subject of "an award-winning animated film of Legends from Camp made in collaboration with his son, artist Miles Inada" which I would like to see. I will look into ways to find that.

Meanwhile, to actually sample his poems check out Modern American Poetry and these three poems. And celebrate poetry!

Photo by Tom Peck from Modern American Poetry
6 April 2008

True Believer

2008-04-04T16:49:00.000-07:00

After having enjoyed Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, I took up the recommendation by my friend and colleague Paula (with whom I totally agree that anyone can enjoy "children's books" - after all, consider the success of Harry Potter or Ursula Le Guin's Earth Sea books -- and now I am now reading the sequel True Believer, which is a sequel in the life of LaVaughn, a teen living with a single working mom, struggling to believe that she could even consider going to college. One thing I love about this book is the voice of LaVaughn and how it makes the story sing.

In reading a review online (WARNING - spoiler alert!), I now wonder if I have read this book already, but that doesn't matter. In fact, one measure of a book's success is whether you would happily read it twice. This is supposedly part of a trilogy, but so far, I have not been able to tell what the third book is. Maybe it hasn't been written yet. This weekend, I hope to spend some time with LaVaughn in the pages of this book.

What are you reading?

2008-04-02T16:56:00.001-07:00

Apparently, one is what one reads - or the assumptions are that whether one should be in a relationship depends on what one reads as a sign warrant of one's character, intelligence, status, potential as a date /mate - in Rachel Donadio's New York Times Book Review essay"It’s Not You, It’s Your Books." Donadio quotes many people about problems in their relationship due to apparent incompatibility from their reading. Donadio starts with a great lead:

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

This definitely drew me in. She continues:

Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.

According to one source, Anna Fels,

reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

And here's another aspect:

Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony.

I know I have faced this. When I read books that I suspect might not sound literary enough, I wonder how I will be judged. Friends often apologize for reading mystery novels, thinking that won't sound sufficiently intellectual. My dad, even while reading The New Yorker, claimed he was "no intellectual." I'm always proud of friends who are very open about their reading list, such as Claire or Paula.

However, Donadio's conclusion seems to say that we (or I) needn't worry so much:

For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.”

So, it's good to know that unconditional love can extend past the stack on the night stand!

"Breaking News" - "Out of Print"

2008-03-29T17:57:00.001-07:00

My hard copy of the March 31 New Yorker arrived on Friday March 28, and today I read Eric Alterman's excellent piece "Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper." Searching for an online link to it, I see that already it has been blogged frequently. It's bee breaking news for 2 days, and I am out of date.

There's so much I want to say about this piece. First, I'll admit that I am a reader of newspapers in print. Yes. I grew up with the Washington Post every morning in the 1950's, mostly read first by Dad (news, sports) and Mom (Home, Food, Entertainment) sections, leaving not a lot for me at the breakfast table. But I needed news to take to Phoebe Hearst Elementary school and then Alice Deal Junior High, so I got my chances. Once I recall cutting an article about the Suez Canal from the London Times read by our neighbor across the alley, a Polish man who worked for the World Bank. Our family had no TV, so news came from the paper and we worked hard to keep up. (We also got the New Yorker in those days too, so it's a long affiliation to be reading it, a long loyalty to getting news and ideas in print.

Alterman contrasts Walter Lippman's elitist perspective with John Dewey's democratic goals about what counts as news, who gets to make news, what is the role of the newscaster and the citizen in a democracy. This is exactly my dilemma in teaching students in the argument class (with focus on public discourse) because the majority of my students say they do not follow the news regularly in any form, not in print, not even in Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post and its related blog, which Alterman uses extensively as a comparison to the traditional print news.

One of Alterman's points is epistemology (though he doesn't call it that) - how do we know what we know and what counts as knowledge and how does knowledge get made and by whom. In the "old days " of print journalism, reporters made the news and told viewers what had happened. A good citizen was supposed to consume news in order to know enough to make wise decisions. Nowadays, with the interactive online news, it is people who make the news (at least, that appears to be Huffington's position).

Here's another great and related point that Alterman makes:

[N]ewspapers have helped to define the meaning of America to its citizens. To choose one date at random, on the morning of Monday, February 11th, I picked up the paper-and-ink New York Times detainees—the front page featured a unique combination of articles, stories that might disappear from our collective consciousness were there no longer any institution to generate and publish them. These included a report from Nairobi, by Jeffrey on my doorstep, and, in addition to the stories one could have found anywhere—Obama defeating Clinton again and the Bush Administration’s decision to seek the death penalty for six GuantánamoGettleman, on the effect of Kenya’s ethnic violence on the country’s middle class; a dispatch from Doha, by Tamar Lewin, on the growth of American university campuses in Qatar; and, in a scoop that was featured on the Huffington Post’s politics page and excited much of the blogosphere that day, a story, by Michael R. Gordon, about the existence of a study by the RAND Corporation which offered a harsh critique of the Bush Administration’s performance in Iraq. The juxtaposition of these disparate topics forms both a baseline of knowledge for the paper’s readers and a picture of the world they inhabit. In “Imagined Communities” (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” It is at least partially through the “imagined community” of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.

I can easily imagine this community - my family eating breakfast like everyone else on our street an all of us reading The Washington Post, and getting a clear sense of what it meant to be a citizen of the District of Columbia, a citizen of the capital of the US, a citizen of the world. We all shared the common knowledge. But now -- what happens now? How do people know what it means to be a citizen of Corvallis, Oregon? And where I live across the valley, I read an evening paper, and the ritual isn't quite the same. One doesn't imagine that everyone in the county is simultaneously reading the paper before supper. One doesn't imagine a brother/sisterhood of readers simultaneously partaking in their citizenly duty to become informed. And why will this be a problem? For now, I will leave you with Alterman's conclusion (and recommend that you read his entire article):

Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice. “People do awful things to each other,” the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in “Night and Day,” Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about foreign correspondents. “But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.” Ever since James Franklin’s New England Courant started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of “the dark.” Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of “light” that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey’s tradition may not wish to see answered. ♦

This article will be shared with my students on Monday, and I hope some of them take it to heart. And I imagine I will write about this again.

Image Credit: "Eustace Tilley" classic New Yorker cover, this one Feb 18, 1939 (notice price 15-cents! compared to $4.99 for my March 31, 2008 issue) from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG02/NewYorker/newyorkerhome.html (March 29, 2008), which is a course in the American Studies Program at University of Virginia.

"Ultimate Blogs" by Sarah Boxer

2008-03-28T18:15:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to my friend Mary for sending me to David Kamp's review in the New York Times Book Review of Sarah Boxer's new book Ultimate Blogs. And whether or not these are "ultimate," here's how Kamp describes her project:

Boxer never explicitly explains why she endeavored to take on this project, and in an essay published last month in The New York Review of Books, she indicates that she was put up to it by an editor. “Two years ago,” she writes in that piece, “I was given a dreadful idea for a book: create an anthology of blogs” — her wariness stemming from a gut feeling that the two media, books and blogs, were hopelessly incompatible. I’d hazard a guess that what made Boxer overcome her initial qualms was the chance to play curator — to show, as she puts it in her introduction to “Ultimate Blogs,” that “some bloggers out there actually write good bloggy prose that non-blog readers can read.”

And indeed, my blogging friends do write good "bloggy prose" - check out "Random Reading" by Paula, "Info-Fetishist" by Anne-Marie, and "Collage of Citations" by Michael, for just a few.

I like the way Kamp tells us about Boxer's book:

It’s an aptly eclectic collection. We get some small-timers, like the cutesie-poo 19-year-old Singaporean who calls her blog It’s Raining Noodles and the mock-suave Guatemalan-American dude who blogs from our nation’s capital as El Guapo in D.C.; some mainstream-media guys who’ve found edifying side careers as bloggers, like Matthew Yglesias, an editor at The Atlantic, and Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s classical-music critic; some calculatedly histrionic vituperators, like the London-based woman who calls her blog Eurotrash and the Texas-based woman who calls hers I Blame the Patriarchy; some chin-strokers, like the Nobel-winning economist Gary S. Becker and the federal circuit judge Richard Posner, who share a blog in which they bat serious issues back and forth; some alt-comix types whose work appears in panel form; and at least one heavily trafficked Web site, the Smoking Gun, which is best known for the documents it unearths via the Freedom of Information Act and which, to me [Kamp], doesn’t count as a blog.

This list gives some sense of Boxer's criteria, as Kamp explains:
Her selections could not be inordinately “linky,” she says, because “you cannot click on a link in a printed book.” Nor could they be particularly timely, because most blog posts are pegged to a specific day’s events and therefore get stale quickly. So Boxer has selected 27 blogs whose work is (relatively) timeless and link-free yet somehow still, she says, “bloggy to the core”: “conversational and reckless, composed on the fly for anonymous intimates ... public and private, grand and niggling.”

Kamp generally likes the book, as his comment makes clear:

Some of the stuff gathered in “Ultimate Blogs” does exactly what it’s supposed to do: alert readers to engaging voices they might otherwise not get turned on to. I liked being introduced to AngryBlackBitch, who is not so much angry as comically (if sincerely) exercised about matters of race, and who resists wherever possible using the nominative singular pronoun (“I”), instead referring to herself as “a bitch” — e.g., “A bitch has run the spectrum of emotions about Oprah’s new school.” The blogger behind the curtain is actually a 34-year-old woman named Pamela Merritt who works in sales and marketing at a St. Louis newspaper. (After each excerpt in “Ultimate Blogs,” there’s a page in which Boxer invites the author to reveal his or her identity and chat a bit — as when Johnny Carson used to summon stand-up comics to his couch after they’d finished their routines.)

Creating new publics and engaging readers, is one of the great advantages of the virtual arena for public intellectuals.

But ultimately, Kamp is a bit disappointed with Boxer's book. After I read it, I'll let you know what I think. Or, please, share what you think.

Making or analyzing arguments - according to Stanley Fish

2008-03-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

When I get time (when would that be?) I enjoy reading Stanley Fish's "Think Again" column from the New York Times. Here's what he said recently in his "Why I Write These Columns" post from March 9:

Every once in a while I feel that it might be helpful to readers if I explained what it is I am trying to do in these columns. It is easier to state the negative: For the most part, it is not my purpose in this space to urge positions, or come down on one side or the other of a controversial question. Of course, I do those things occasionally and sometimes inadvertently, but more often than not I am analyzing arguments rather than making them; or, to be more precise, I am making arguments about arguments, especially ones I find incoherent or insufficiently examined.

Says Fish, further down,

The difference between making arguments and analyzing them is not always recognized, and when it is missed, readers get outraged about things I never said.

This is exactly the challenge for our students in the rhetorical analysis essay. They are sometimes busy arguing about the content - what was said - that they cannot see the method - how it was said.

According to the Scrabble dictionary, "za" is a word! - and so is trike

2008-03-20T17:53:00.000-07:00

I didn't realize that "za" was a word until I read Margie Boule's article about a very successful and competitive kids Scrabble team in Oregon. In fact, I didn't know that Oregon had state Scrabble champs, either. In the past, when I played Scrabble, I didn't even have the "official dictionary" but now I do. It would have come in handy the time I played "trike" on a triple word score (the K is a high point letter - maybe 5 points?). My partner had never heard of a trike - where did she grow up, anyway? So I had to get support from the folks in the other room, all of whom had grown up with trikes, of course. But I was thinking of the child's tricycle - like this one, though I didn't have the fringe. And they were thinking of the motorcycle version!

Of course, trike is in the official Scrabble dictionary. Along with lots of words that begin with Q not followed by U - such as QAT. By the way, "za" is officially short for "pizza."

(Even Wikipedia explains about the Scrabble dictionary. But considering that it only originated in 1978 that's no surprise that I didn't have one at first, since I started playing Scrabble in 1960, I think. There's even an online Scrabble dictionary.)

Photo credit for the child's tricycle:
http://www.modernseniors.com/Toys/RadioFlyer/tricycle-j.jpg from Modern Seniors

Photo credit for the motorcycle Trike:
http://www.made-in-china.com/image/2f0j00JMeQdAHBETgtM/Trike-Motorcycle-GS250.jpg

Hosting a conversation --- and maybe entering it as well

2008-03-17T17:18:00.000-07:00

So, in scholarship we usually refer to "entering the conversation" as our approach to following up on and moving forward with ideas from other scholars - the Burkean Parlor - so I'm wondering how that is somewhat enacted in panel presentations at conferences. And here is an insightful (and helpful) essay by Linda Kerber from the Chronicle of Higher Ed on tips for chairing a panel, which is in many ways like hosting a party. In fact I use the "hosting a panel, hosting a party" analogy with my writing students as they are looking for sources and speakers for their papers. I ask them who they are going to invite to their party, who they want to talk about the issue. In other words, I want them to think about the speakers as real people, not just facts to support a preconceived position. As Kerber says

[C]hairing a session can be an art form. A good host can establish a friendly atmosphere in the room, make the speakers feel authentically welcome, and go a long way toward ensuring that interesting questions are asked and a solid discussion ensues. (That last is not guaranteed, but there are ways of increasing the possibility it will happen.) Here are some of the steps a chair can take to encourage an effective session.

Her advice seems wise and helpful. Newcomers to academia (even regulars) could use some of these points.

"A kind word for bullsh*t"

2008-03-16T21:08:00.000-07:00

An academic essay entitled "A Kind Word for Bullshit" drew me in right away as soon as I saw it on the cover of the Feb 2008 issue of College Composition and Communications where Philip Eubanks and John D. Schaeffer write an argument of definition about "academic bullshit":

The phrase "academic bullshit" presents compositionists with a special dilemma. Because compositions study, teach, and produce academic writing, they are open to the accusation that they both tolerate and perpetuate academic bullshit. We argue that confrontings this problem must begin with a careful definition of "bullshit" and "academic bullshit." In contrast to Harry Frankfurt's checklist method of definition [in his Princeton UP 2005 book On Bullshit], we examine "bullshit" as a graded [graduated] category. We suggest that some varieties of academic bullshit may be both unavoidable and beneficial. (372)

As they point out, the work of scholarly academics is "serious, and we naturally take offense at critiques that call our writing and scholarship pretentious (which impugns our character) or nonrigorous (which impugns our minds)" (373). Here Eubanks and Schaeffer set up the importance of their argument, answering the questions we (and Graff & Berkenstein in They Say, I Say) ask our students to answer - "so what" and "who cares?"

Part of their argument lies in distinguishing bullshiting from lying because ""bullshit is disconnected from the truth in a way that lying never is" (375). By definition liars are intentional about saying what they believe to be untrue, whereas in bullshitting the point is less about the truth and more about the image one creates.

Thus, their argument revolves greatly on the way that "bullshitting" is an appeal to ethos, a technique admired by some for the "masculine, aggressive, ludic" (379) style of braggadocio. The technique might even be slyly recommended as in "If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit" (373).

They cite Dave Barry and Isocrates, among others, which is a nice spectrum but somehow they overlook David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University" which argues that we should teach students to be apprentice academics in writing in a scholarly style. What can happen, though, is stilted vague student writing. Anyone who has taught first year composition has surely read any number of student papers that try to "baffle.. with bullshit" instead of making a sincere effort at entering the conversation by critically engaging with sources. As Eubanks and Schaeffer point out, however, "[n]o one, not even the "bullster," would contend that bullshit can really substitute for well-informed and thoughtful writing" (386).

This essay was a delightful break in a weekend of grading. I highly recommend it, and apologize for the too-brief summary. (Great use of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and the neat distinction of bullshit versus chicken shit.)

A frabjous day

2008-03-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

A rainy dark morning (the sun has not yet overcome the jolt of Daylight Savings Time) - but a frabjous day anyway, end of Dead Week, last day of classes for winter term (though my last classes were yesterday) and the start of grading. But today, mostly trying to catch up on many reports that have been progressing slowly. Meanwhile, listening to Berlioz' "Romeo and Juliet" symphony on KWAX - the music more jittery than I anticipated for this love story - maybe I'm just remembering the Zeffirelli film (1968). I'm wanting more the quiet mood evoked in Inara Verzemnieks March 9 essay "Tea and Liminal Spaces" about Portland performance artist Gary Wiseman and his Tea Project. It sounds lovely to gather quietly with strangers on a cold dark morning and sip tea. Reading this essay over breakfast this morning -- I am nearly caught up on left over Sunday Oregonians - was a nice way to finish the term / start the two weeks of slightly less hectic pace - no real spring break but likely a day at the coast at some point (and taxes at some point). Later I will post on 2 essays about America's alliteracy.

ps: It's been so dark these mornings I didn't even realize that pink hyacinths are blooming in my yard - I saw them in the headlights as I drove away this morning. But tomorrow - Saturday - I will be home in daylight to admire all the flowers!

Bathroom wall as original blog?

2008-03-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

Brandon, one of my students in writing class, just had a great idea. He suggests that bathroom walls could be seen as the original blogs because people leave comments and others reply. What do you think?

Source for image: http://www.patsyterrell.com/images/rockbuzz.jpg

On keeping a notebook

2008-03-07T18:29:00.000-08:00

This morning I had the pleasure of re-reading Joan Didion's great essay "On Keeping a Notebook" because one of the grad students wanted to use it for next term's comp class. Of course I love the essay with its stream of consciousness and the great concrete details. I suggested that she have her students keep a notebook during the term - a Blue Book would work, light weight and standard sized, though maybe too institutional? Students definitely need practice in including more specific details in their work, so this is a good model for journaling. It's also a good model for reflection, for putting oneself in the picture - that "what this means to me is - - -" move that we hope for as part of critical thinking. Though it's not a great model for an academic essay, which is the assignment.

So, is blogging is like keeping a notebook? Yes and no. Because for Didion, the notebook (but not the essay) is writer-based, something for herself. She says "we are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees" - which describes many blogs. I would not claim that my postings were graceful pensees, though it would be nice, but I'm sure many fall short. Still I keep a notebook as well - handwritten and always handy the way the blog is not (at least not for me without a wifi laptop and home network). A notebook, says Didion, is "something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker. And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning." Amen to that. Our notebooks, she says, "give us away."

What Johnny SHOULD read

2008-03-06T18:15:00.001-08:00

Now it's dark outside and I wanted to head home earlier, but the library just sent an email that a book is in and since I won't be on campus tomorrow, I should walk over to get it. E. D. Hirsch on Cultural Literacy. I think I don't agree with him entirely, but there might be something good to use for WR 121 in terms of the conversation about what people should know. This theory looks interesting. Apparently the question is "Cultural Literacy: Can it Work for You?"

The conversation has long been whether or not Johnny could or would read, but now it seems the question is what Johnny SHOULD read. I should be reading student papers, so that's what I'll do now.

Blink

2008-03-05T15:38:00.000-08:00

OK, I have been wanting to blog about this really interesting book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell that I borrowed from my colleague Jeremy. The premise of "rapid cognition" is that people have an innate intuitive knowing about things that is sometimes (often? always?) smarter than logical reasoning. Gladwell cites art experts who sensed at a glance that a statue for sale was a fake, despite scientific tests authenticating the age of the marble etc. This is the same way that writing instructors look at a student's draft and know it's not their work - whether too much help from a friend or borrowed entirely. Students ask us what website or database we use to check - such as the infamous and expensive anti-plagiarism site "Turnitin". I think they would not like to know that we can often just tell in a "blink."

10 minutes a day

2008-03-04T17:22:00.000-08:00

I'm shocked and saddened to see that my last post was Jan 21 -- where does the time go? Every day I think of what I want to write, but somehow never manage to even find the 10-minutes a day that my friend Michael says would be enough. He manages much more on his two very smart blogs Collage and Sisyphean. Meanwhile, I feel totally overwhelmed at work reading papers from my students, plagiarized papers by other people's students, proposals and requested essays for next term's first year comp classes, observations and paper sets for the graduate teaching assistants whom I'm observing, etc etc. You don't actually want to know! I did manage to read this week's New Yorker memoir about New York Bishop Paul Moore, by his daughter Honor. (Apparently it's an excerpt from her new book The Bishop's Daughter.) As a child, I knew Bishop Moore slightly in Washington DC when he was suffragan bishop at the National Cathedral where I worked. I didn't know Honor then. Apparently she's a theater critic for the New York Times.
OK - this took me about 10 minutes - so Michael is right! I promise not to wait another month before posting again. I've missed it.

Dear Readers -

2008-01-21T15:32:00.000-08:00

This is the title of Jim Carmin's excellent essay in yesterday's Oregonian about the sad decline of the art of letter writing. Carmin seems nostalgic and sad that email has overtaken the hand-written letter for correspondence, especially as the speed of email and the apparently small window have changed the content from long rambling meditations in one's characteristic (if often illegible) handwriting (heavy on the pathos and ethos) to quick exchanges of data (heavy on the logos) -- little "snippets of prose"stored not in pigeon holes above our writing surface or in drawers, tied with blue satin ribbons and bundled with sprigs of lavender, but kept on "electronic desktops" if they are even kept at all.

And for manuscript librarians as Carmin is -- as my grandfather was at the Library of Congress -- even a hard copy print out of a letter lacks authenticity. Sure, handwritten letters can be (and at times were) forged; but in cyber space, it is much harder to be sure of the original author or words. Much too easy to add, subtract, and change when a letter is printed out. And perhaps the long piece of paper or pretty greeting card inspires someone to write at greater length. I admit that I carry on a letter-length email exchange with two particular friends, sending what many of our pop savvy students might characterize as "tl, dr" (too long, didn't read). But maybe this trend to brevity affects blogging culture. Some bloggers - such as my friends and colleagues Michael, Paula, and Anne-Marie -- write long, thoughtful posts. I wish I did. More often my posts seem to me to be "snippets of prose" sent out like Dickinson's "This is my letter to the world" (though never so poetically!). And I think that most blog readers prefer the long meditative substantive posts - am I right? Maybe it's because I always have so much on my mind that I usually end up with something fairly short and wishing I had gone deeper.

What Carmin laments greatly is that exchange of creative thoughts and especially poetry (to judge from the authors whose work he quotes -- Donald Hall, Barry Lopez, William Stafford, Ted Kooser. And without letters how are we to have published books of letters, such as the one I have of Rachel Carson's letters (somewhat poetic?) or of Chekhov. It's wonderful to read the thoughts of these authors, like entering into their daily lives.

Check out Carmine's article which I hope reproduces in the online version the illustration from the actual newspaper of a postcard sent by Allan Ginsberg to William Burroughs on 1965 mentioning Ginsberg's trip through Oregon (saw Crater Lake & The Beatles). What fun it is to be back in that moment.

Coming attractions -- but first a question

2008-01-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

A pile of printouts of fascinating issues from web articles sits on my desk begging to be blogged about -- I promise I will -- but first - a question for readers:

Why do students feel that they have to be interested in an editorial in order to carryout a homework assignment of summary and response? Several students have complained that they couldn't finish the assignment to find an op-ed or editorial, summarize and respond because they couldn't find one that they were interested in. This baffles me. Where did students get the idea that they have to like or be connected to the topic in order to do the job? Sure, it's great when people are interested - that makes the assignment more fun and more engaged. But, golly, in life and in our jobs how often do we get to postpone work just because we are not interested in the project. We hear this in terms of an assignment for researched argument - "gee, I couldn't find a topic I liked so I couldn't do the paper." Does anyone have any insights here?

Google U?

2008-01-14T12:53:00.000-08:00

Professor of Media Studies Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton (England) is campaigning for information literacy. In her recent lecture "Google is White Bread for the Mind" she argues that

Wikipedia and user-generated content are creating an age of banality and mediocrity by providing consensual information and stifling debate. Students must be trained to be dynamic and critical thinkers rather than drifting to the first site returned through Google... [and] that universities must teach students to question, argue, debate and challenge, rather than accept the 'facts' from Wikipedia or the rankings of Google.

Of course I would agree. Teaching students to be critical thinkers is an important goal in our writing classes. She might object, therefore, that our Information Literacy Portfolio in first year composition should not send students to Wikipedia for their initial research. However, we believe that because students will go to Wikipedia anyway, that therefore it is imperative that we teach students what Wikipedia is and how to use it correctly (effectively, ethically).

According to the lecture announcement,

Brabazon argues that with the decline in libraries, diminishing stocks of books and fewer librarians, media platforms like Google offer easy answers to difficult problems. She wants to see a more subtle relationship between the analogue and the digital.
She says: "I want students to sit down and read. It's not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels – both are fine but I want them to have both – not one or the other - not a cheap solution."

Here, she gets into a deeper point - and I totally agree that students should have the print experience along with the digital. Both are essential. For example, the current political campaign is being carried out on blogs and internet and YouTube as much as in print. Voters who are only proficient in one medium or the other will miss important concepts.

Brabazon is also correct about the essential skill in interpretation. To her point of view,

the education resulting from this age of the amateur [could be called] 'the University of Google', composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments. She argues that: "we need to teach our students the interpretative skills first before we teach them the technological skills."

I don't think we can wait.

Read more here.

How useful are the humanities? - With Update Below

2008-01-07T16:59:00.000-08:00

According to Stanley Fish in his essay "Will the humanities save us?" from this morning's New York Times, the answer - very much oversimplified (better read his essay to get the full argument) - is that the humanities are in fact not very useful - depending of course on how one defines "useful." The 292 people who responded by 3 p.m. take various positions on his essay, most, it seems, disagreeing.

This immediately brings to mind an essay by Dana Gioia (of the National Endowment for the Arts), called "Why Literature Matters" from the Boston Globe, 2 years ago. Gioia's position is not so much the "art for art's sake" but rather that "Good books help make a civil society". This is a different argument from the "well rounded" or "provides cultural capital so you can get a job" argument. And maybe at this point in our civic discourse - with election rhetoric around on all sides - what we really need is a civil society.

According to Patrick Moe, the 293rd commenter on Professor Fish's essay,

To say that there is no social (or, god forbid, business) utility in courses that teach students to write, speak, and analyze better is patently false. These courses expose students to different perspectives on the world, different lenses though which to analyze and critique that world, and to question the hegemonic and normalizing forces that are taken for granted within other disciplines. At their heart the Humanities teach reason in all its different forms.

Certainly it is reason and argument that I am about to teach tomorrow in my writing class, clear thinking for a civil society, for civic discourse. So I hope - and believe - that Mr. Moe is right.

UPDATE: Wed Jan 9 --
I want to mention that my source for Fish's article was Michael, who has a great post on the topic now.

Memory - what we lose

2008-01-06T10:56:00.000-08:00

Because my mother suffered (we all suffered) from Alzheimer's and as I watched her memory fade, I am particularly interested in information / research into memory and how it works. Today's Sunday Parade Magazine, has an article by Martha Weinman Lear "Why do we Forget Things?" that outlines three kinds of memory, and this seems a clue to Mom's decline:

1-procedural memory (how to walk, eat, tie a shoe)
2-semantic memory (what it is? What ARE eyeglasses?)
3-episodic memory (what I did yesterday)

With Mom, she first lost the episodic memory, forgetting what she did yesterday or five minutes ago. Then she lost what Lear calls semantic memory, forgetting what a spoon was. She could hold the utensil but did not recall that there was a concept to the bowl-shape of the spoon that required it to be held a certain way in order to work. Finally she lost procedural memory, forgetting how to walk or even how/when to swallow.

Lear reassures readers that memory loss is normal with aging (ugh) and says:

After all, how important is it (how does it help you survive in the world) to remember the name of that restaurant you ate at last night? What is important to remember is what “eating” means and how to eat.

But isn't the latter exactly what we do fear? It's what happened to my mother, so I know what it looks like. And the lack of knowing how to eat is indeed fatal - leading to aspirated pneumonia, which is what she died of. So -- we can lose a lot. And even if it's normal, that is not as reassuring as Lear makes it seem.

Reading Ulysses . . .or not?

2008-01-05T18:20:00.000-08:00

I admit right out that I have not yet read Ulysses, but it does sound interesting - and because I really like Virginia Woolf's style in The Waves, I'm thinking, based on what I've heard, that I would enjoy Ulysses, too. In college I only read 19th century British authors, so that when I arrived in Dublin in 1971, I was pretty clueless when our hosts wanted to show us all the Joycean spots of interest. I do recall with pleasure, however, a late afternoon "tea" of Irish coffee and sandwiches of smoked salmon on brown bread eaten in a hotel lobby before a blazing fireplace. Delightful.

Anyway, maybe I don't have to read Ulysses just yet, according to Pierre Bayard's new book How to Talk About Books you Haven't Read, in this review by Toby Lichtig from the Guardian. However, I will have to disagree with Bayard's perspective --

Taking it as given that no one actually reads for the pleasure of the process, Bayard proceeds to investigate the meaning of bibliographic cultural capital

-- because the pleasure of reading is indeed at least half of why I read. On the other hand, I can certainly see the point in this perspective:

'Non-reading' for Bayard, is 'a genuine activity'. It implies an engagement with literature and is different from mere 'absence of reading'. A 'true reader' is simply 'one who cares about being able to reflect on literature'. With so little time and so many books, he argues, it is better to spread the net wide and settle for a general sense of the multitude.

in terms of caring about books - and the ideas they include. And Bayard's point about situating ideas is particularly intriguing:

'Relations among ideas are far more important than the ideas themselves,' he insists. Thus, it is only ever necessary to get a rough sense of what any particular book is about - and where to place it in the 'collective library'.

Certainly I'm always telling students how important it is to gain a sense of the conversation about ideas. And isn't that what Bayard is saying here, in part? So, I would agree with the review that the book certainly seems worth reading - both as Bayard says "with so little time and so many books" - I might get to Ulysses first.

When Johnny (& Janey) Don't Read -- then what?

2007-12-30T14:20:00.000-08:00

After reading my colleague Anne-Marie's post about Caleb Crain's New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books," -- getting a head start before my copy arrived in the mail -- I wanted to comment on some parts that seem particularly relevant to my argument class - the struggles to get students to think analytically and critically about what they read. (But do go and read the entire piece, which is excellent.)

Crain says:

More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.

And "comparing viewpoints in ...editorials" is exactly what I want students to do in my class. This term they will be compiling editorials and op-ed pieces into a portfolio and responding. The challenge is for them to move beyond the response of "he's right/wrong" to more critical and analytical thinking. We teach about Aristotelian appeals, and while students always claim to be most attuned to logical logos, in fact they are as susceptible as anyone to pathos and ethos, the essence of television ads, whether commercial or political, even TV shows.

There is something to gain [from watching TV], of course, or no one would ever put down a book and pick up a remote. Streaming media give actual pictures and sounds instead of mere descriptions of them. “Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium,” Marshall McLuhan proclaimed in 1967. Moving and talking images are much richer in information about a performer’s appearance, manner, and tone of voice, and they give us the impression that we know more about her health and mood, too. The viewer may not catch all the details of a candidate’s health-care plan, (emphasis mine) but he has a much more definite sense of her as a personality, and his response to her is therefore likely to be more full of emotion. There is nothing like this connection in print.

And because our students read less in print and watch more on the screen, the effect can be a greater challenge for analysis. As Crain points out:

Emotional responsiveness to streaming media harks back to the world of primary orality, and, as in Plato’s day, the solidarity amounts almost to a mutual possession. “Electronic technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement,” in McLuhan’s words. The viewer feels at home with his show, or else he changes the channel. The closeness makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion. It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

This certainly was true even with the assignment to read chapter 28 of our textbook Everything's an Argument, which contains essays on the topic of America's reputation abroad - "Why do they love us? Why do they hate us?" A surprising number of students were not only shocked to discover that America is not universally loved, but also angry. They had no doubts about their belief. This ties in to Crain's comment that,

[s]elf-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.

And that lack of critical thinking is a real problem. Teaching students to evaluate and be skeptical of what they see and read is, of course, a main goal of a college education. Crain has laid out the history of this dilemma well.

Update on Golden Compass

2007-12-28T12:38:00.000-08:00

I just read this interesting article / interview by Hanna Rosen about The Golden Compass and author Phillip Pullman from The Atlantic, on the question of whether or not the books and film are or are not about killing God and I wanted to update my post of Dec 19. See what they say.

Says Rosen:

When pressed, Pullman grants that he’s not really trying to kill God, but rather the outdated idea of God as an old guy with a beard in the sky. In his novels, he replaces the idea of God with “Dust,” made up of invisible particles that begin to cluster around people when they hit puberty. The Church believes Dust to be the physical evidence of original sin and hopes to eradicate it. But over the course of the series, Pullman reveals it to be the opposite: evidence of human consciousness, a kind of godlike energy that surrounds everyone. People accumulate Dust by “thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on.” It starts to build up around puberty because, for Pullman, sexual awakening triggers the beginning of self-knowledge and intellectual curiosity. To him, the loss of sexual innocence is not a tragedy; it’s the springboard to a productive and virtuous adulthood.

So maybe protesters are jumping the gun or painting a broad brush. Not using a "subtle knife" to make a joke. Nevertheless, I stick by my original assessment that the film lacks a sense of love and compassion, and that I did not find the heroine Lyra to be likable.

Ray Carver - part 1

2007-12-27T10:19:00.000-08:00

I'm calling this part 1 because I know I will want to say quite a lot more on this subject and am running out of time today, but I want to get started. My interest in Carver is indirect and maybe atypical: My friend and poet Jim Sommers (Grants Pass, Oregon) knew Carver and shared a house with him at one point in the 1980's. Sommers is still friends with Tess Gallagher, Carver's widow, so when the collection of Carver's poetry All of Us came out in hard back, I was eager to read and review it. (If I can find a link to that review, I'll add it here). Anyway, I really love Carver's poems much much more than his short stories, which I find depressing, and maybe I have an answer. The short stories I have read are not the full Carver.

This week's New Yorker prints Carver's original version of a short story "Beginners" which Carver's editor Gordon Lish turned into the well known short story "What We Talk about when We Talk about Love." You can see the differences between Carver's original and Lish's revisions in this edited manuscript version. Carver's is fuller, softer.

Says "The Take" (see below):

In Carver's version, the story goes on to describe with some warmth the old man's stories to the doctor about his life with his wife, and explores the man's joy when he's finally well enough to visit her in her hospital room. A nurse previously known as "a tough lot" starts weeping at the sight, and the doctor himself seems profoundly affected by it. It's a touching passage that lends the story as a whole a much more bittersweet flavor, even as we can clearly see what about it felt baggy and sentimental to Lish.

And according to this exchange of letters between Carver and Lish, Carver was beginning to see - and worry about - the extent to which Lish was reshaping Carver's stories into something else - not necessarily something bad or less worthy, but something that Carver felt was not his own.

Now, Tess Gallagher is working to reprint the originals, which some critics, such as "The Take" column in The New York Magazine, are cautiously in favor of, if I read this post ‘The New Yorker’ Publishes Raymond Carver's Original; Is It Better Than Gordon Lish's Edit? correctly. They say:

What's good about this new (old) version? For those of us who find Carver's minimalist despair wearying, his version of the story is much gentler than Lish's scathing edit.

On the other hand, they also say:

What's bad about this new (old) version? Well, we can't say we're particularly heartbroken that Lish edited out this deathless section

(and repeats the long section about the restaurant). As for me, I like detail, digressions, fullness and softness. So I will look for the reprint new/original short stories and see how it goes. Still, I can recommend the poems highly. They are direct, vivid, real.

ps: this version of New Yorker online seems not to have the page of introductory text shown in the paper copy of the magazine before the exchange of letters

Snapshots of our lives

2007-12-27T08:55:00.000-08:00

Over this holiday, there has finally been time to catch up on the New Yorker, and enjoy John Updike's "Visual Trophies," a review of a new book The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978 and exhibit at the National Gallery of Art of 254 snapshots from the collection of Seattle collector Robert E. Jackson. This book/exhibit/collecting urge touches on several interesting points: The history of photographic technology; the history of photographic marketing and sales and how Kodak and Polaroid, among others, changed the way Americans view themselves and their families. What is considered image-worthy? Updike raises some important questions:

It is good times, happy times, that we wish to preserve. In its ads of the twenties and thirties, Kodak insistently pushed its product as the recorder of family life. “I’ll show ’em a real family!” one jubilant snapshooter brags (“He’s something to brag about, that new baby of yours”); another spread shows two commuters on a railroad platform, one of them enviously studying the other’s snapshots and thinking, “I felt ashamed. He was so proud of his children; why hadn’t I taken snapshots of mine?” A third ad simply advises, while a proficient mother photographs her two children in their lunch booth, “Let Kodak keep the story.” The camera both exalted and invaded domestic privacy—“Candid photography is making us human goldfish,” one pundit wrote in the journal Photography in 1938.

And this led to important changes in special events, rituals:

At many a wedding, the hired photographer replaced the minister as the central officiator.

Now, the ones recording the event were also directing the event - we are not living our own lives but only vicariously as actors at the direction of others. And what was the point?

Updike admits he was not immune:

The photographic impulse, as I experienced it in my days as a Nikon-toting daddy, wore two aspects, the creative and the commemorative. The first sought to catch, in the plump snap of the shutter, something vivid and even beautiful in its color and contour; the second aim, more realistic though in a sense grander, was to halt the flow of time.

If the unspoken goal was to halt the flow of time, then what images are considered worth keeping? Well, all of them. But then what do we do with these images once we have them? Boxes and boxes of images, unsorted, uncataloged, often unlooked at again. Updike admits that he is like many Americans with unsorted stacks of photos.

My own shoeboxes of curling, yellowing snapshots derive their fascination almost entirely from my personal connections with the depicted matter—grandparents and parents, cousins and schoolmates, houses I once lived in, vistas and furniture lifted from my private temps perdu.

Like Updike I also have shoe boxes, though most recently my saved photos are in Whitman's Candy Sampler boxes. Portland author Chelsea Cain has plastic storage tubs.

Cain's Dec 19 post "Let's Go: Green Thermos" from the Oregonian, describes what happens when the pictures are left behind for surviving family - in this case, her mother's photos looked at after her mother died:

And then, the photographs. There were boxes and boxes of them. Photographs of her childhood, of mine, of us, of friends, old family photographs, photographs of other peoples' families that she'd bought in thrift stores or at garage sales, a hodgepodge of flashes of lives now gone.
I went through the photographs in the days after she died and put together an album to have out at her service, pictures of her through her life, and pictures of the people she loved.

Why do we do this? Take photos and save them. I think Updike is right - creative and commemorative - a hope to halt time. So our snapshots may not compare esthetically with those of the great photographers, but they fulfill an important role in our lives and give us back the times we have lost. Sometimes, the emotions are too much.

Recalls Cain:

It was months before I started to go through the photographs again. I told myself I was going to organize them. Some were in envelopes, some were in plastic boxes, some were in albums, most were loose. I tried to separate them into stacks. Mom. Mom and me. Mom and friends. Nature. (Thirty percent of the pictures my mom took were of flowers.) But I would get distracted by the images and my memories and eventually give up on the organization and get caught up in the pictures. It's been 10 years now. I've upgraded the boxes from cardboard to plastic tubs. The organization project? Not so successful. I keep trying. Every couple of years, I get those boxes out and start making stacks.

But of course she got sidetracked by memories and the photos remained unsorted. Cain comes right back to the modern problem, the problem that faces the cartoon Cathy character and brings us to the question of why - why take pictures, why keep pictures, what to do with the pictures. The tangible souvenirs, memories, have changed now with technology. Just as social networking online is not the same as a face-to-face visit, so Cain, says, there's a difference with paper versus online images:

A few years ago my sister-in-law got a digital camera from her husband for Christmas. She had it the first couple of times we visited, and then the next time we saw her it was gone, and she had her old film camera again. "What happened to the camera?" I asked her.

"It was fine," she said. "But I missed picking up the photographs." She said that she loved taking pictures, and she loved having pictures, but the thing she loved most was going to pick up the photographs and taking the envelope to the car and opening it up and seeing what had turned out. That moment, that five minutes, that was one of her favorite things.

She'd tried to get used to the digital camera, to embrace all it had to offer, but in the end it just wasn't worth it. Life doesn't have a lot of those moments, those favorite five minutes, and she missed her connection to those images, a connection that just wasn't happening on that little LCD screen, where each picture was vetted, deleted, restaged.

We have a digital camera, and a thousand images, all saved in files on a hard drive. I need to print them out and put them in a box. So my daughter has something to organize.

The pervasiveness of this phenomenon of photographing everything and saving it -- and the frustration -- are often the joke in the Cathy comic strip by Cathy Guisewite. I wasn't able to find a particular episode from the past to link showing Cathy surrounded by thousands of unsorted photos (and now, by thousands of digital camera memory sticks), but today's cartoon jokes about not having downloaded holiday photos etc. Modern technology does allow - encourage? - more immediate selection / deletion / of digital photos (even iPhone photos).

I recall reading that Socrates worried that the new technology of writing would erode memory. Individual memory, maybe, but writing created / aided / institutional memory. Now, I suspect that the same is true for photography. And with the perspective of a hundred plus years, we can see how this image capturing is playing a role in our lives.

I wondered what this Google Friends thing was

2007-12-27T08:52:00.000-08:00

Miguel Helft at the New York Times has helped me understand the new Google Friends feature on my Google blog reader - and I don't like what I hear, if I understand it. Yes, I find the Google Reader very helpful to keep track of blogs by friends and colleagues. But I don't necessarily want to share that with everyone. As far as I know, though, I haven't used the Google Talk feature, so maybe I'm "safe" as Helft explains it. Has anyone else? I certainly see Helft's point that just because I might talk with someone about an article or item, that doesn't necessarily make us friends.

"Writing to Change the World"

2007-12-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

Mary Pipher, author of the excellent Reviving Ophelia, has a new book (July 2007) Writing to Change the World, which is receiving good reviews from some folks but poor reviews from others. Says Amanda at Literary Illusions,

While I recommend Reviving Ophelia to every parent, teacher and social worker I meet, I cannot recommend Writing to Change the World to anyone. It is unfortunate that a writer that influenced a generation of therapists cannot explain to others how to write with passion.

Amanda illustrates her frustration with this paragraph:

The most disappointing moment in the book is a letter Pipher wrote to her city commissioners. The letter expressed her desire to keep a motocross course from opening next to the Spring Creek Prairie that she often walked. She admits her letter was pompous, ineffective and written in the wrong voice. Pipher contrasts her inappropriate letter with a powerful letter written by a friend, and it becomes clear just how inadequate Pipher’s letter really is. While I’m sure Pipher included these letters to show that even a published author may misunderstand his/her audience, her letter was so terrible that it led me to question all her writing advice.

So I will have to read it myself and see. I hope I do not feel as gloomy about it as Amanda does.

I first found Writing to Change yesterday in the OSU bookstore while hunting Christmas gifts for writer friends. Pipher's book looked just right for my WR 222 class which is argumentation "writing to the world" using Lunsford et al's Everything's an Argument. Pipher has a chapter on blogs, too, which is a new addition to the class - not keeping a blog, but reading and commenting on others. Check the Amazon link to see the Table of Contents and an excerpt (which apparently does not allow me to paste a sample here for you.) So, although I have not yet read it, I will read it and I will see what can be usefully shared.

Rain - "The blessed, bountiful, horrible rains"

2007-12-19T08:21:00.000-08:00

Sallie Tisdale, lovely regional author, writes in Sunday's Oregonian about rain. She says she has "become a connoisseur" of rain, and yet

Then there is the rain that drives me mad, the cold and steady rain that falls for days from dark, lowering skies. A gutter slips from its catches, water cascades off the roof, drips down the basement walls, washes away the soil. Suddenly murderous, I break an appointment and refuse to answer the phone. The house feels as damp as the wet street outside my wet window, my wet shoes and my wet coat and my wet heart.

And many of our students - especially those who come from Hawaii, find winters on OSU's campus depressing. For them as for Tisdale,

So, we have gray skies [here in Oregon] -- so does Paris. Why does it feel like so much more than it is? Because there is a certain incessant quality. Because it can and does sometimes rain for weeks. (Our record is 34 days straight.) Because I prefer the sun. Because that one inch of rain on our rainiest days -- that one is falling on me. I am ashamed, cursing at this tender weather, so much easier than many people manage all year round. Imagine the wettest spot on Earth: the lovely Mount Wai'ale'ale in Kauai, Hawaii, where it rains about 460 inches a year.

And here's an interesting fact that Tisdale points out:

The Northwest has several of the world's steepest rain grades, where the amount of moisture drops dramatically in a short distance. In the Olympic Range, precipitation can range from 200 inches in the center of the mountains to about 15 inches on the eastern side. In the 20 miles between Sisters and the Santiam Pass, annual precipitation drops more than 60 inches.

These geographic differences - "orthographic enhancements" - are what contribute to the especially heavy snows we lived through those winters at the rim of Crater Lake when we had our cross country ski business and the weather forecast for snow "locally heavy at times" usually brought us 2-3 feet more than elsewhere. A kind of lake effect perhaps.

Anyway, says Tisdale,

I am mostly used to[the Oregon climate] now. I love the spring and summer and fall. I love the green. And the rains have become the walls of the cave where I spend the cold months. In here there is a fire and family and light.

Nice.

Turning to - away from? - the Golden Compass

2007-12-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

We saw the film The Golden Compass on Monday, our every other year film outing at Christmas time in our little local theater. The last time we went it was Narnia, and these two films make an interesting comparison. In both cases we have wars of good and evil and lots of charming animals, though I thought the characters in Compass were generally more selfish other than the exiled prince of armored bears -- Iorek -- who acts with more dignity and honor and compassion and selflessness than the rest. In reading the plot of the book(originally called) Northern Lights versus the film on Wikipedia, it becomes clearer why some people are protesting the film/book as an attack on religion, especially Catholicism. See ABC News item. Wikipedia claims that the British author Phillip Pullman is an atheist.

An office colleague yesterday told me that she believed that the author Pullman hated CS Lewis (author of Narnia) and created a plot where the children destroy God. I must say I didn't get a notion of children out to get God from the film (though it's only part 1 of a trilogy). However, I did notice that the evil organization, The Magisterium, showed resemblances to the Vatican. But what seems illogical about the protest is that the Magisterium wants to remove free will whereas I always thought that Christianity was founded on the notion that God gives people free will.

ABC news has its own long blog conversation . And check out Technorati which lists 19,076 blog posts on the topic. Many bloggers refered to Phillip Pullella's article from Reuters today (?) on the Vatican's statement about the film. Says Pullella:

"In Pullman's world, hope simply does not exist, because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events," the editorial said.

Now, on this point I agree (rare to agree with the Vatican!) because after the film I said, all the characters are so selfish, whereas in Narnia, there is much more effort to help and give to others.

Obesity ghettos?

2007-12-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

When my students in WR 222 want to argue about obesity rates and causes (going deeper than the obvious - too much food, too little exercise), I have lately been steering them to consider the correlation/causation between poverty and obesity. Now, news from Canada, illustrates this in a new way with an obesity map overlapping regions of obesity with locations of fast food restaurants. This notion of geographic determinism is not new. David Zinczenko's "Don't Blame the Eater" excerpted in New York Times Nov 23, 2002 (and reprinted completly in the They Say, I Say textbook we use) makes this very clear:

Shouldn't we know better than to eat two meals a day in fast-food restaurants? That's one argument. But where, exactly, are consumers -- particularly teenagers -- supposed to find alternatives? Drive down any thoroughfare in America, and I guarantee you'll see one of our country's more than 13,000 McDonald's restaurants. Now, drive back up the block and try to find someplace to buy a grapefruit.

The same notion of healthy food deserts is echoed in Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's June 4, 2004 article for Time "Not too rich or too thin" where she notes:

Processed foods aren't just cheap, tasty and filling. They're also more accessible. One study found that 28% of Americans live in what nutritionists call "food deserts," places where big supermarkets are at least 10 miles, or a 20-min. drive, away. People who live in these places wind up buying much of their daily groceries from convenience stores or gas stations, where they can find Chef Boyardee but not baby carrots. Some communities are trying to remedy this. Philadelphia, for instance, recently announced a $100 million effort to open 10 supermarkets in urban neighborhoods. But for much of the country, says Troy Blanchard, a sociology professor at Mississippi State University who studies this issue, "you have people who are literally distanced out of healthy diets."

Poverty ghettos are often fast food ghettos which not surprisingly leads to obesity ghettos. We are not only what we eat, but as the Canadian Press points out "where we eat." This makes the war for health a lot more complicated

Holidays are the time to read - I hope

2007-12-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping for some reading time this holiday season. Of course I'm always reading - but mostly student papers - which still stand in stacks on my office floor waiting for me to finish grading. But when I'm done - well, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, is still waiting on my coffee table, recommended by my librarian friend Paula, and I bought myself (secret Santa) the new Jan Karon Home to Holly Springs, which I am sure will be delightful (Joyce McClurg of USA Today thinks so). But today's news mentions Patricia Hampl's new memoir The Florist's Daughter, which sounds great. I loved her spiritual memoir/travel book Virgin Time, both for herself and for her writing. So this new memoir is tempting. Plus, I loved working in a florist shop and would enjoy the insie look at her father's business. The review by Marjorie Kehe points out the Hampl loved her father more easily than her difficult mother. I can relate to that as well. Reading the New York Times Book Review was how I taught myself to write and introduced a freelance writing career, and "when I retire" I plan to revive this goal. But it also links to my other jobs - bookseller and librarian. So - as my mother would say - "we'll see."

Thanksgiving potpourri

2007-11-21T16:51:00.000-08:00

Campus is so peaceful at 5 PM on the day before Thanksgiving, the sun has set after a glorious blue and gold autumn day in Oregon. The building is empty and quiet, and I'm trying to finish things that have been waiting on my desk for weeks - about 3 weeks to be exact since I last posted. Many apologies! My colleagues here know exactly what's been going on with classes.

So this post will combine several things I really wanted to post on at more length, and which I hope to return to:

Questions of class: Ah, yes. America, the great classless society. Read "A Class Traitor in Academe" from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, (Nov 9) by Thomas H. Benton, aka William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Mich. Benton discusses the apparent lack of scholarship or lack of books about the intersection of academic life and social class. He lists 4 (not including Alfred Lubrano's Limbo. Benton points out the disconnect he feels in academia from his own background and wonders what he is doing about the situation: He says:

... at times I feel discontented with the larger purpose of my work. The overwhelming majority of my students come from social strata far above mine. I seldom feel like I am giving anything back to the community from which I came. I believe that my courses complicate and soften the aggressive certainties of future elites. But, as I become more secure and established, I wish I could do more to help other first-generation college students.

What's worse, says Benton, is that the education is no guarantee of upward mobility. He describes people

in the place where I grew up, ...men and women in their 30's who live with their parents and can't start families because there are so few real jobs, even for the ones who put in a couple years at community college, transferred to a state school, and were the first in their families to get degrees that were sold as certain tickets to the middle class.A lot of those people end up delivering pizzas, mowing lawns, waiting tables, or working the checkout lane at Wal-Mart for $7.15 an hour, and the message spreads that education doesn't matter

From teaching at community colleges where the students are often working class to now at a 4-year state university where the students are more from the middle class yet many are still first-generation, I know what he means about issues of class. My own career track has been quite varied, and students are often surprised to hear me talk of the pre-academic days when I worked as a river guide, ski lift operator, etc. Jobs that can be counted as working class amid a resume that also includes museum administrator at one end and secretary at the other. (and it wasn't so long ago).

Switching Gears:
and certainly classes in society: new film The Jame Austen Book Club (from a book by Karen Joy Fowler I haven't yet read either). Here's what Stephen Holden at the New York Times has to say about the film:

“The Jane Austen Book Club” is such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.

And will this film (and its book) give insights into literature? Says Holden:

You can question the story’s conceit that the novels of Austen are an ideal guidebook to personal fulfillment for the modern American woman. But as the members of a Jane Austen reading group, who live in Sacramento, analyze the behavior of the characters in her novels, the movie is also a savvy course on how to read a novel of manners. If that novel has any depth, the characters’ motives are open to interpretation. Is a knight in shining armor really Mr. Right? Does a happy ending really augur happily ever after? What are so-and-so’s real motivations?

Does every novel have to be unhappy (Tolstoy?). So, on my to-do list, rent this film (once we replace our dead VCR player with a DVD/VCR player, since nothing now comes out on VCR)

NEXT? German Deutsche Welle is expanding literature: in this article "New TV Company Aims to Switch People on to Books" saying that

Television has long been regarded the enemy of more traditional pastimes such as reading books. Now the first-ever German TV company (lettra) devoted to producing programs exclusively about literary matters wants to change that.

What they plan to do is
"[present reading] in a unique way with verve and in an entertaining manner -- for both old and young," according to Wolfram Winter. "Lettra also wants to let everyone with a passion for books have their say, giving a voice to readers, as well as writers and publishers."

And if I had time to watch TV (or a DVD), this sounds like something to check out.

Now - it's time to go to the store for some Thanksgiving treats. I hope you are all having a great holiday!

Weekend Reading

2007-11-09T17:16:00.001-08:00

Although I have a stack of student proposals to read, I hope to catch up on last week's New Yorker with Jeffrey Toobin's article on the digital library (but wait, that's not last week's) HEre's another article more recently, but this one is Grafton's and online only. And here's a response from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. in case that sounds like something you want to read. My super cheap subscription to the New Yorker ($25/year!) means I feel I must read many articles. Last week's article on Paul Watson of the environmental group "Sea Shepherd" is a must-read as I met Watson in Portland in 1974 or so. He was breaking away from Greenpeace as being too tame! Clearly I am far behind.

Ah, Wikipedia

2007-11-09T17:06:00.000-08:00

Inside Higher Ed has a recent piece on using Wikipedia in the classroom. They say:

If there’s one place where scholars should be able to question assumptions about the use of technology in the classroom (and outside of it), it’s the annual Educause conference, which wrapped up on Friday in Seattle. At a morning session featuring a professor and a specialist in learning technology from the University of Washington at Bothell, presenters showed how Wikipedia — often viewed warily by educators who worry that students too readily accept unverifiable information they find online — can be marshaled as a central component of a course’s syllabus rather than viewed as a resource to be banned or reluctantly tolerated.

I would agree. Here at Oregon State - at least in my writing classes - I teach students what Wikipedia is and how to use it sensibly and ethically. Students are going to Wikipedia anyway - I consult it regularly myself. Banning it doesn't make sense. And as the article points out:

shared, public online documents have characteristics in common with parts of the academic review process. “The shift to thinking about placing the term paper as a Wikipedia encyclopedia entry allows for another level of peer review,” Groom said. Such entries have references and citations; allow for a process of repeated, continual editing; and encourage collaborations between authors.

Students need to learn about audience, who is reading the work and what reactions they will have. Too often students claim that their audience is "everyone" which means "no one". They don't always take peer review as seriously as we hope. If they imagined that their term paper were a Wikipedia entry, they could suddenly wonder who would edit out errors and comment on their tone. Interesting concept! Also, as we ask students to think about writing to the world, engaging with a real, and broad, audience, Wikipedia is a good way to start the discussion.

Personal in the classroom / standardizing?

2007-11-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

My friend and colleague Laura posted this link from Dartmouth on her blog about the use of personal writing in a first year composition classroom. Laura is writing about personal writing for a class, and I am avidly following her research and thinking. We use some personal experience in our first "ideas" paper in first year composition here at Oregon State. I would like to hear what other schools do regarding the use of the personal.

At the same time, I'm intrigued by what Clancy Ratliff says at Culture Cat about standardizing first year composition. Clancy is the new Director of First Year Writing at University of Louisiana and very savvy about rhetoric. I want to comment on her post. Our program is fairly standardized. I am interested in the arguments on both sides.

Intellectual curiosity satisfied? a Library Career?

2007-11-09T16:11:00.000-08:00

Maura Smale's recent article "Gearing Up for My Third Career" from the Chronicle of Higher Ed gave me the thought that when I retire I could seriously consider getting a library degree and working in a small community library. Smale is looking for a job in an academic library, which I would not be, but there are important similarities. I think I would be good working in a library. I am organized - well, people seeing the papers on my desk would not think so -- but as long as someone else (Dewey? the Library of Congress?) determined the numbering system, then I can certainly put things away. (See my earlier post - when? - on the great new book Everything is Miscellaneous which will explain my difficulty categorizing.)

Other than shelving books, I am also great at research. After all, these years helping/teaching students to write researched argument papers have taught me to be persistent and imaginative in finding resources for them to enter the conversation in a variety of discourse communities (stakeholders) and on a wide range of topics.

Plus many of my favorite colleagues are librarians - right here at OSU and elsewhere.

Finally, it's genetic - my grandfather, historian J. Franklin Jameson, was chief of manuscripts at the Library of Congress in the late 1930's. And as a child, I remember going to the fiction stacks in the old LC annex where my father had stack privileges and checking out books. What fun.

A library job sounds perfect for my dotage.

UPDATE DEC 4: After my friend Paula commented (see below) I realized that I forgot to mention that I had already worked in a library - reference desk on call at Grants Pass public library in southern Oregon (before the budget crisis closed the libraries for 2 years). Helping patrons find what they needed - either a specific item or something for a project - was so satisfying. The same is true for my decade as a bookseller in Grants Pass at The Bookstop (since out of business) where I helped customers find books for themselves and others. Delightful. It was also fun to have them ask for a book based on a review I had written for the local paper!

Teaching & Studenting

2007-11-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

A colleague pointed out this interesting feature from Poets & Writers by Kelly Ferguson on "Confessions of a Teaching Assistant." Although Ferguson is a MFA at U of Montana where they teach on semesters, it is a pretty good description of the job that our TA's do here at OSU on quarters and would explain why the first term can seem so overwhelming as the incoming TA's learn the school, the concept of first year composition (many are such good writers that they never had to take the course themselves), elements of rhetoric, techniques for classroom instruction, while simultaneously starting to work on their own writing. No wonder TA's feel overwhelmed at first.

What does Google mean by "books" and "literature"?

2007-11-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

Because my personalized Google News page is set to locate stories about books & literature, I can find articles on J.K. Rowling and Russian publishers. Mostly it's very effective. However, the search function sometimes returns unexpected results. Today Google presented this article "Hospital's cost-shifting exposes bid to balance books" which uses "books" to mean business accounts and "literature" to mean scientific or scholarly research on the use of a certain medication.

College Degrees for everyone --

2007-10-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

Bob Lenz in the San Francisco Chronicle today points out that "No Child Left Behind" looks backward. Instead, we should look forward and rename our efforts "College diploma in every hand" - the article points out that graduating students from high school with at least 8th grade standards does not prepare them for college. Writes Lenz:

Studies show that the lack of self-management, critical thinking and effective communication skills are major reasons why students drop out of college in their first year. Students also don't get far in college without problem-solving and technology skills, as well as the ability to collaborate and be creative. Meaningful college preparation is less about teaching facts than empowering students to think.

Those of us teaching writing - especially first year composition - at state universities know this to be true. Teaching writing is teaching thinking. Even students who arrive with AP credit in English, struggle in an intermediate composition/argumentation class with adequate preparation in thinking deeply.

Western Writers at OSU

2007-10-18T10:18:00.001-07:00

Lucky us - today we have western novelist William Kittredge reading tonight at the OSU Valley Library. I loved his memoir Hole in the Sky (1993) when it came out. Kittredge along with Norman Maclean, Ivan Doig, Craig Lesley, Theresa Jordan (Riding the White Horse Home), and others really define the west for me.

And tomorrow we have Craig Lesley at OSU at 4 PM in the Memorial Union (sorry, cannot find a link) and later at the Magic Barrel fundraiser (scroll down or check Magic Barrel directly for a lovely poster) in Corvallis. I loved his Sky Fisherman and just bought Burning Fences.

Irresistible new word of the day - Neogauchesque.

2007-10-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

Who knew? I do try to keep up with neologisms - and frequently ask my friend Michael about puzzling technology acronyms - such as DS and ABFT.(probably not American Board of Forensic Technology or Atlantic Bluefin Tuna - see this link but possibly, in the context of "books on tape/iPod"something to do with a new domain name ABFT that is for sale? According to Technorati, " There are no posts in English with some authority tagged ABFT ."

But this bio for (and by?) Marcello Ballve, who reviewed and praised new books by author Tao Lin in "Literature is Inside of Life Just Like a Tree is Inside of Life," caught my eye more than the review:

Marcelo Ballvé was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1975. In 1982 he left with his family to live in Atlanta, Georgia. In the late 1980s he also lived in Caracas, Venezuela and Mexico City. He has a degree in history from Brown University and a journalism degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He worked as a journalist in Brazil and the Caribbean and now lives in Buenos Aires. He devotes himself to neogauchesque literature and metajournalism and occasionally publishes essays on books, music, art, cities and nature. He has a multilingual blog called Sancho’s Panza where he very slowly digests readings and learnings.

A Google search for "neogauchesque" turns up only one other mention in a somewhat confusing blog post about Ecuador, writing, the Episcopal church and other items.

Diego's Wall - "Do you use any blue? Is it Prussian?"

2007-10-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

A nice conjunction of interests recently - my friends Gaby and Simon from England writing from San Francisco that they were enjoying murals by Diego Rivera reminded me to search for E. B. White's witty poem "I Paint What I See" from the New Yorker. When Rivera's mural " Man at the Crossroads looking with uncertainty but with hope and high vision to the choosing of a course Leading to a New and Brighter future" was removed in 1993 at the orders of J. D. Rockefeller's grandson Nelson - partly because the painting included a portrait of Lenin, there was much public protest. The clash of integrity and worker's rights and third world aspirations with the center of capitalism in New York and the wealthy elite is probably no surprise.

Of course this immediate public reaction. Michael Hallinan posts "Art Hits the Wall: Property Rights versus Artistic Expression."

More recently, blogger Lyle Daggett in "A Burning Patience" mentions this incident in his post on Proletarian Poetry.

Wall photo credit via Google Images from the American Studies program at the University of Virginia

Do good intentions count?

2007-10-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

I wish someone would invent software that would allow me to post to this blog by mental telepathy. While I am commuting, I have many ideas I want to share, yet when I get to my desk, the emails, phone calls, student visits, grading, articles to read (or write) pile up and my poor blog gets pushed back. But good intentions do count, at least as part of ethos, as I tell my students when teaching Aristotelian appeals. The Greek name eunoia for the good intentions part of ethos seems so intuitive - the opposite of "annoy." Wikipedia's stub brings up some interesting tangents. The Online Etymology Dictionary has no entry. Hmm. And posting to the blog takes more than just 5 minutes here or there - as I have to gather my thoughts - need a Border Collie for that task!

Lovely Autumn in Scotland

2007-10-02T08:07:00.000-07:00

Marieke's Lady Fern blog is a delight - listen to this recent description of Autumn: "Dry leaves overtake me, racing on the wind toward a quiet grave in a soggy gutter or flinging themselves dramatically over the sea wall. Scattered white horses rear in the bay. " Here at OSU, maples are kindled, tossing red torches into the blue or grey sky, shafts of gold leaves pierce the firs.

Banned Books Week?

2007-09-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

September 29 - October 6 is the American Library Association's Banned books week - so read a banned book today! In fact, you probably already are reading a banned book, because the list of books which have been banned by various groups and organizations over the years is amazingly large.

According to the ALA, these are the top ten banned books from 1990-2000:

Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The ALA has lots of ideas for how we can assert our intellectual freedom to read what we want because ignorance is not the way to justice or peace in the world. For some background, check out "Banned Books Online" from the University of Pennsylvania. Whether politically or religiously (or morally?) motivated, some people who want to control others by limiting their access to ideas. Everyone - not just teachers - should resist attempts to limit our knowledge.

Many readers champion Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 as a call to preserve freedom to read. According to Wikipedia, this is not Bradbury's intent:

Over the years, the novel has been subject to various interpretations, primarily focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which ultimately leads to ignorance of total facts.^[1]

^{And of course Bradbury is correct with the problem of dumbing down as an effective tool for controlling people's thoughts ( maybe a bit also like Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" from Welcome to the Monkey House where those who can think are intentionally burdened with handicaps to keep them from thinking ) because if people don't even want to try to think or can be sufficiently discouraged from thinking, then those in control don't even have to go to the trouble of banning or censoring ideas.}

Note: Image comes from "Jovial Cynic" at http://newprotest.org/details.pl?495.

Books for All Ages

2007-09-26T14:49:00.000-07:00

When I worked at the bookstore, we had a children's book section. Libraries, also, have books categorized by adult and children (also sections for teens and Young Adult). Yet as Deidre Baker argues in "Not a childish pursuit: Children's literature a vital part of our literary tradition" from the University of Toronto Bulletin, we should resist such labels. Many authors - such as Ursula LeGuin and J. K. Rowling - have written books that are popular across all age groups. Says Baker: "It never occurred to my father that he shouldn’t read children’s books just because he was an adult." And I agree -- a good book transcends age groups and categories.

Baker continues:

So many friends of mine — doctors, lawyers and business executives — take avidly to the practice of reading children’s books that I am always surprised when someone balks at it. It seems especially peculiar if that person is involved professionally in the study of literature. "Thanks so much," someone will say when I make them a gift of a novel by Brian Doyle, Sarah Ellis, Alan Cumyn or Julie Johnston or perhaps Leo Yerxa’s Last Leaf First Snowflake to Fall. "My children/grandchildren will love reading this." Maddening, absolutely maddening

.

Do some people feel "too grown up" for these books? I heard that the early Harry Potter books were issued with both children and "grown up" covers, lest adults should feel awkward. Baker explains:

When Harry Potter took off in the U.K., its adult audience merited a special, more "mature" looking cover — and it wasn’t just more marketing. The lively characters and cheery colours of the original cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone were, I guess, thought to be professionally compromising to some of its readers, adults "shamefully" engrossed in a children’s novel.

After the first one or two novels, however, I should think that became unnecessary. In fact, it may be that older readers want to look (and be) really hip and up with pop culture! Though I think Baker's point is partly -- and I agree -- that the books are classics (whereas I guess I think - am I wrong? - that pop culture is not classic or at least classic in a different way). Or maybe the classic books supersede categories. Consider C.S. Lewis's Narnia novels. As I think, I'm noticing that the classics are often fantasy/allegories. And that may be because "human societies need myth and legend" according to Kyl Chhatwal's article in The Record. And in fact Chhatwal's article focuses on Rowling and Harry Potter, connecting that to University of Toronto professor Northrop Frye. And since Baker is also from the Univ of T, we come full circle.

Gentle Reader

2007-09-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

One concept we teach in writing class is the difference between "writer-based prose" - writing the writer does with only herself in mind, and "reader-based prose" - writing with an audience - often a particular audience in mind. Many bloggers - I include myself particularly, here - post prose that is too much writer-based. Not that it isn't interesting, but that it may not work hard enough to keep readers interested. (I'll try to do better)The goal of keeping "gentle reader" following along on the journey is addressed nicely in today's column "The Care and Feeding of the Reader" by Rachel Toor for Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Says Toor:

"Gentle Reader" was both a direct address, and an expression of keen insight on the part of 18th- and 19th-century authors who knew that you can't hector someone into reading your work. If we are to find our readers, we must be gentle with them, keep them in mind as we write, help them along. We need to think about their pleasure, not just our information.

Anyone can publish. But not everyone will produce work that more than a small number of people will read. The art and craft of publishing a good article or book is being able to write what you want, while at the same time keeping in mind what the reader needs. It's a dance. We've all seen people dancing by themselves, hearing a tune that plays only in their own heads. It can be amusing to watch for a while, but, ultimately, most of us turn away to look for a partner."

That's a great goal. (By the way, the articles that appear with Chronicle Career column nearly always educate and amuse. Well worth checking.)

Propaganda Posters

2007-09-07T16:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a great resource for teaching Visual Rhetoric: The US Government Propaganda Posters from WWII collected in the library of Northwestern University.

This one on the right: "He eats a ton a year" (credit: ID: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/
govpub/collections/wwii-posters/img/
ww1647-64)
is typical of the friendly type that try encouragement and an appeal to patriotism and helping rather than guilt or fear tactics. The posters from earlier in the war, such as this one from 1942, have a simpler color scheme. Later full color would be used.

Students are usually surprised and intrigued that the US government would use propaganda to rally the citizens to the war cause. Nowadays, it's all TV newsbites. However, WWII was not the first. Here's a British enlistment poster "At the Front" from the first World War.

At the top is a Russian poster. Can anyone translate this? And look at the remarkable Russian poster of Martin Luther King Jr. with the American Flag.

I apologize for the layout - I don't know how to move the images around in the post.

The great map flap

2007-09-03T08:27:00.001-07:00

A fan of geography though not beauty pageants, I was unaware until I read Steve Duin's "Unable to find empathy on the map" in yesterday's Oregonian, that Caitlin Upton flubbed the question part of the Miss Teen USA competition. Then, this morning, I saw that my friend Michael had posted on "This Map Stuff has Hardly Gone Far Enough" both the video of Caitlin's flubbed answer and a great YouTube excerpt from The West Wing on the Peters Projection Map (something I definitely want to know more about - espec1ally in light of the obvious point that the Mercator maps do in fact distort relative size of countries and relative centrality (favoring Europe of course). However, not everyone agrees with the Peters Projection. See this discussion on "About.com". That also links to further discussion of Mercator, and the key point that of course no flat square representation of a globe can be accurate. Matt T. Rosenberg recommends alternatives:

Alternatives
Non-rectangular maps have been around for a long time. The National Geographic Society adopted the Van der Grinten projection in 1922. The Van der Grinten encloses the world in a circle. In 1988, they switched to the Robinson projection, on which the high latitudes are less distorted in size (but more so in shape). In 1998, the Society began using the Winkel Tripel projection, which provides a slightly better balance between size and shape than the Robinson projection.
Compromise projections like the Robinson or Winkle Tripel present the world in a more globe-like look and are strongly encouraged by geographers. These are the types of projections you'll see on maps of continents or of the world today.
But what ever happened to the map that looks like a pealed orange? Apparently that is called "Sinusoidal." Read about it here.

Last Christmas on the bargain book table, I found and bought Island of the Lost Maps, a true story of "cartographic crime." Sadly I haven't read it yet - but now I am inspired to do that.

Credits: Map on top left from Carlos Furuti http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjInt/projInt.html

Map at top right = Mollweide (Sanson Flamsteed flattened map) from Colorado State
http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/gif/mollweid.gif

Like Riding a Bike?

2007-08-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

Is writing like riding a bike? Once you learn how, you can always remember how to keep your balance? I wrote a poem once about this - same title as I recall - and if I can figure out how to attach a file here I'll do that. But John Lemuel's essay "Like Writing a Bike" seems to argue that bike riding - a physical skill - is easier overall than writing. In describing his summer of simultaneously teaching his daughter to ride a bike successfully with less successful efforts to help a student finish an incomplete writing course in order to graduate, Lemuel illustrates some of the challenges in helping another take initiative. We sometimes talk about student agency, letting students voice their opinions, encouraging them to voice opinions, helping them figure out what their opinions are and how to articulate them and realize that their voice matters. Sometimes it feels like we are fighting an uphill battle (sisyphean task?) - yet as my friend Michael says about his own Sisyphean Task, and quoting Sartre in his wonderful - and finished! - thesis about the blogosphere (about which more later), the task is the joy of the journey, not a frustration at never arriving. I'm not sure I've paraphrased this right, so maybe Michael will jump in to clarify.

Because I love adding photos, here is one from
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/Schwinn_Bicycle.jpg/450px-Schwinn_Bicycle.jpg&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Schwinn_Bicycle.jpg&h=600&w=450&sz=77&hl=en&start=66&sig2=h8znLBxpi-9CwoMROiO8NQ&tbnid=UlWxKh1_2m8nbM:&tbnh=135&tbnw=101&ei=je7WRpb5GKWQggOH8YwX&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dbicycle%26start%3D60%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

Liberal Arts

2007-08-30T08:43:00.001-07:00

For the last two years that we have used the 5th edition of Sticks and Stones, a collection of student essays, I have found that the essay "Liberal Arts: A Practical View" by Mark Jackson, to be very helpful in getting first year students at OSU to think about what we might mean by the term Liberal Arts, especially because the majority of our students are NOT liberal arts majors but rather majoring in science-math-engineering-ag science etc. The question of "What's Liberal? And why arts?" is discussed by Drew University president Robert Weisbuch in his essay about several summer vacations reading, talking, and musing on teaching. He says:

In fact, there is so much to know about everything -- about musical composition, baseball, gemology, wine, lyric poetry, and, yes, even television.
A sense and a sampling of that plenitude struck me that first summer as one definition of a liberal-arts education. The liberal arts do not occur in nature or in culture. They are the academic organization of knowledge and learning, but they are the free spirit of inquiry more than they are a set of topics or fields. Our job, as educators, is to thrill our charges with a sense of that plenitude and with some experiencing of specific worlds of it.

I totally agree that our job is to arouse enthusiasm amongst our students for the vast realm of knowledge and how we can add to it. However, his definition changes the following summer when his reading group disagreed about a book on "Listening to the Other." Weisbuch then quotes Hannah Arendt:

I recalled the comment by Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, that "the more people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel or think in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking, and the more valid my final conclusion, my opinion." To reach a conclusion, she must first see things from every perspective, including those foreign and even, and especially, opposed to her own gut reactions.

That summer, the island taught me that the liberal arts are the opposition to talk radio, to fanaticism of all kinds, including our own, that another characterization of the liberal arts consists not in wonder worlds alone but in a cherishing and empathic practice of difference. The notion of reaching beyond the self is the liberal arts.

And again, I agree with this characterization of being open. In fact OSU's motto is "Open Minds" - which sometimes is seen as a "liberal agenda" - though with the word Liberal used politically. (I remind students that in the phrase "liberal arts" the word liberal means "free" as in the free Romans - therefore middle class or wealthier elite - free / at leisure / to study, as contrasted to the slaves with no leisure to study who learned crafts - carpentry, metal work, etc - an early version of Vocational Ed? This is a point that Weisbuch seems not to get or at least overlooks.)

Weisbuch goes on to explain his next insight:

My liberal-arts epiphany the following summer came not from reading but from staring out at the lake on a cloudy day and thinking about the previous sentences from the previous summer. It occurred to me that thought isn't enough -- that if the kind of education we practice is meant to connect us to others, it should include something more active, more worldly.

And that's right - ideally we are not ivory tower hermit scholars / the romantic image of the writer alone.

Finally, Weisbuch concludes:

On this dreamy lake, though, as the wind picks up to carry away such frivolous thoughts, the answer comes to me. Instead of adding on something, imagining anew, we simply do what the liberal arts are all too good at doing, and exile what does not belong. This liberal-arts education thing? From now on, how about we just call it college? And anything else isn't. That's all. Let it sink in. But taking together my five summers of desultory thought, I have a final one. Let us make certain, when we say college as we once said liberal arts, that we don't describe an island. The mainland calls. We are equipped.

We are equipped and I hope we are equipping our students with critical thinking and interactive participation in socially constructed knowledge - something that Web 2.0 makes much easier. At any event, at the end of a cooler summer and looking toward classes starting in 3 weeks, it is good to recall exactly what it is we liberal arts educators try to do.

So much to write about - never enough time!

2007-08-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

In my role as "filter" here's a great article by David Oliver Relin from Sunday's Oregonian about the work of educators to bring about world peace "Waging War Against Ignorance." This is what we do in all our classes.

And here's another on the indirect effect of war "What it Costs Us" in terms of coal miner's lives lost - by Jeff Goodell from the Washington Post. I didn't know that so much coal was used. Here in Oregon we feel smug about our renewable energy - wind, water etc (though I'm not too happy about the new plan for Wave Farms off Florence - I'll find the link and add it)

So far, many of my blog posts are like items in a curio cabinet - what my friend and colleague Michael calls a "Wunderkammer" - items of interest (to me?) but that don't spark much discussion. Too much "writer-based" - that is, things I find interesting. Not enough attention to what others might find interesting?

Other times I share items from the news that seem important, such as these above. So far my posts haven't sparked much interaction from the public. Maybe I need to write more in a way that engages others. Or maybe readers just don't feel like jumping in. Maybe we are all tired this summer.

Teaching Part Time

2007-08-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

Many of our grad students look forward to teaching writing full time at community colleges once they have their MAs and MFAs, despite Oregon's poor funding situation for higher education right now. The tight funding means that community colleges continue to hire more part time faculty than tenure line faculty, because that's cheaper. But a new report described by — Scott Jaschik from Inside Higher Ed on student retention shows that the higher the percentage of full-time faculty, the better the student retention rate.

While the use of adjuncts is widespread and growing in all sectors of higher education, it is particularly prevalent at two-year institutions. In many cases, community colleges seek out part-timers who are professionals in various fields to teach career-related courses. But community colleges also fill many sections (a majority in some subject areas on some campuses) with part timers. Administrators frequently say that given their institutions’ enrollment growth and tight budgets, they have little choice.

Here's another excerpt on the article from Laura's blog on the subject. I wonder if this new study will have the effect of changing hiring patterns.

When I taught part-time at Rogue Community College in southern Oregon, the percentage of part-time faculty in the Humanities department was 70%. We all loved what we were doing and worked really hard and longed for tenured positions, which were not open. We used to say that if the part-time faculty went on strike, the college would have to close. Everyone admitted that the situation was not the best, but the tight budgets kept everything going the same, year after year.

Poetry

2007-08-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

My friend Paula has just started a lovely blog Random Reading with some thoughts on poetry, which inspired me to send her the heartbreaking poem by Donald Hall "Names of Horses" and a recommendation for poems by Jane Kenyon starting with "Otherwise" (from the book Otherwise). In addition, I have greatly enjoyed Hall's nature memoir Seasons at Eagle Pond about their rural life in New Hampshire. Here's a great resource to start off with Hall and Kenyon. I had forgotten that Hall was poet laureate, but I knew of Kenyon's translations of Anna Ahkmatova's work.

For crying out loud, shouldn't poetry be above stereotyping?

2007-08-19T15:02:00.001-07:00

Recently, at the National Poetry Out Loud contest, Amanda Fernandez won with her recitations of three poems. Fernandez, representing the District of Columbia as a graduate of Duke Ellington High School, recited Wilfred Owen's masterful anti-war poem "Dulce et Decorem Est," Sterling Brown's "celebration of rural black culture" "Ma Rainey" and Anne Sexton's "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward." Fernandez was happy to win but unhappy that the media focused entirely on the 2nd poem, ignoring issues of war or womanhood to typecast her as the poet of race.

In her article in the Washington Post, Fernandez says:

Even though all three poems I recited had something important to say, the media reduced me from the complex person I am to a one-dimensional figure by repeatedly discussing my reading of just one -- the poem about race.

She continues:

Why weren't they interested in my political views about young men and women dying in war, as expressed in the first poem? Why didn't they see me as a woman -- not a black woman, but a woman -- as reflected in the third poem about the tough choices that women face?
Everyone overlooked those two poems. I've become known solely for the poem about race.

The power of poetry to evoke emotion and share the human condition should be exactly opposed to perpetuating stereotypes. Fernandez's powerful editorial reveals her sadness as well as her anger at the reaction.

Photo shows 2007 Poetry Out Loud National Champion Amanda Fernandez with John Barr and Dana Gioia.

Signs of Fall

2007-08-19T14:56:00.000-07:00

It seems a bit early, but already the autumn crocus or Colchichum are coming up at the base of our walnut tree. Every year in the same place, they push up through dirt as dried as adobe (though last night's rain may have helped) and bloom.

Election year rhetoric - Barmedical

2007-08-17T16:42:00.000-07:00

One day some years ago I was reading my old dictionary (1968 Random House) and I discovered at the top of a page the word "barmecidal" which intrigued me, especially after I read the definition:

Plentiful or abundant in appearance only; illusory: a Barmecidal feast.
[After Barmecide, a nobleman in The Arabian Nights, who served an imaginary feast to a beggar.] [see the link too]

Immediately, I could see possibilities to use in political debate and elections: "My opponent's health care plan is barmecidal!" It sounds serious - and really, it is serious considering the scandal in health care coverage - but I doubt this will catch on. Most likely, this is just one my habit of loving words (is this philology?).

Libraries - thriving and diving

2007-08-17T08:18:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times reports that the library in Queens, despite tight funding is flourishing. Francis X. Cline in "A Most Bookish Borough" reports that the library is so popular that patrons are lined up before the staff even arrives. By contrast, southern Oregon's Jackson and Josephine counties closed their libraries due to funding cuts by the federal government for lost timber revenue. According to Meredith May's article, this is the largest library closure in the US. Loss of libraries is especially serious in the rural counties, May reports:

I wish we could call FEMA; this feels like a natural disaster to me," said Ted Stark, interim library director for Jackson County.

"Libraries are so much more than just libraries in rural areas. This is where all the town meetings are held, where all the kids come after school, where everything -- everything -- happens," he said. Indeed, today;s libraries have evolved from merely loaning out books to providing Internet access, reading hour for babies, community meeting centers and art galleries.

This raises again the digital divide between the haves and the haves-not and sets back our students.