Highly rhetorical questions for the end of the semester

• If you ask me a series of technical questions in a group email, and I jump right on it and spend 20 minutes answering them, and then you ask the same questions again in a slightly different form as if I had not responded, am I going to be passive-aggressive enough not to answer this one? To remind you that I answered the questions? To wait a few days before responding to any other messages? All of the above? Yes.
• Is there a possibility that after the 1,751st draft of something in which we have collectively moved a passage from one place to another and back again, making inconsequential language changes and fighting about the MLA style each time, I will write an email saying, in more polite language, "Do whatever you want. I don't @#$@$^ care any more"? Yes.
• If you're sick with some kind of deadly contagious plague, is it better to stay home or to come to work and buttonhole everyone you meet to tell them, "Boy, I can't believe I am this sick during the last week of classes! I really feel horrible"?
• If you collectively dream up a position that not even Jesus with feathers on could successfully fill, is it someone's duty to point this out? 
• If you are in a meeting and someone is being all pouty about something, is it better to let it get you down or to declare silently, like Roger Murtaugh, "I'm getting too old for this [stuff]" and get just angry enough to keep from being depressed? 
• Knowing the volatility that everyone has at the end of the semester, is the best reaction to remember your colleagues with affection, keep your head down, and just power through? Yes. 

Are you the colleague you want to meet in the hallway?

Figure 1. Edmund Wilson's version of auto-reply.

There's been a movement afoot to light on fire, in Twitter terms, anyway, anyone who tells a woman to "smile!" Next to "you look really tired," I can't think of any phrase that's less welcome, especially if you are really tired. Also, some of us have RBF and aren't going to look happy no matter what.

Just so we'll get the obvious out of the way:

1. Do people say this to men? No.
2. Do they treat women who smile all the time any better? No.
3. Are women who are all smiles treated well in the workplace? No, because they're taken less seriously.
4. Are women who are direct and/or abrupt treated well in the workplace? No, because they're seen as -- well, fill in your own uncomplimentary adjectives.

But despite this double-bind, you might want to think twice before embracing "grumpiness for grumpiness's sake," as recommended in  "The Case for Being Grumpy at Work." 

The author cites a number of studies about emotional dissonance, about the emotional labor that women especially experience when forced to pretend to be happy in the workplace, and so on. Women are expected to be more caring, which means that their anticipated response in the workplace is effectively lagniappe for employers, a trap especially for service workers like cashiers (been there, done that). 

But the author's equation of grumpiness with some superior form of pessimistic insight is wrong. You can be plenty pessimistic and not present yourself to others as grumpy. One's a way of perceiving the world. The other is a way of acting out so that the world can see that you have All The Feels. 

Look, nobody has to be happy or pretend to be happy all the time, especially at this point in the semester. I suspect that most of us cut our colleagues a little slack in April, knowing the stress we're under, and we hope for the same from others.

In other words, we're being the colleague that we want to meet in the hallway.

A curmudgeon thinks that this is a one-way street. Everyone should be charmed by his (or her) grumpiness, and all should cut him some slack, but he doesn't have to return the favor. You may think your grumpiness is adorable, but other people may not share your high sense of self-regard.

A "lovable curmudgeon" may exist in literature--who doesn't like to read about Edmund Wilson's famous postcards or Mary McCarthy's acid reviews?--but in real life, the term is an oxymoron.

One of the great lessons of adulthood is that except for a few of those close to you, nobody cares how you feel. They want to know if you get the work done. 

My approach is the same thing that I do in emails: mirror what I'm receiving. If you're professional and at least marginally pleasant, I'll respond in kind, and promptly.

If not, not.

I realize that this is a position of privilege and that not all jobs will allow this luxury. (See cashier experience, above.)  But at the very least, those of us who do have the ability to respond to rudeness or curmudgeons shouldn't indulge their behavior. 

What does a sabbatical do?

I've been on campus for a few things recently, and while it's nice to be missed (it really is!), the downside is realizing that the sabbatical is coming to an end. There's still the summer, but still.

Although I haven't done All The Things, I've done enough to feel reasonably good, though it still seems as though I wasted a lot of time. I'll keep working on All The Things.

But the main thing that the sabbatical did was to give me back a sense of joy and curiosity. If something interested me, I could follow it and read about it and above all think about it, often to good effect.

I know that this isn't the path to research that GetALifePhd and other efficiency experts, like Paul Sylvia,  recommend, where you state that you will have 15 points to develop by 7:45 a.m. on Tuesday and you just do it. Maybe if you have data, that's the way it works.

But maybe that's the difference between the humanities and the social sciences. We really have only a few weapons in our arsenal: curiosity, knowledge, and the ability to think about the two together in productive ways to see what's been done and what needs to be done in terms of research.

When you're pressed for time, as we all are during the school year, we're a little like our students. We don't have the time to follow those winding paths, or Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit holes, so we try to answer immediate questions. Our students use the first results on Google, and though we might not do that, we use the same process of working for efficiency in an answer rather than for complexity.

During the sabbatical, I learned a lot of things I needed to know, but I also learned a lot of things that I didn't need to know, or at least that I don't need immediately. That's not a waste of time. That's the point of a sabbatical.

Nothing. What's new with you?

Still plodding along, still working hard, and still relishing a sabbatical that's almost over--that's what's going on here.  In other news:

• A lovely trip to the archives in which I could revel in reading and taking pictures of materials all day long, and at the end of the day get something to eat and not cook or clean or do any of the other housekeeping stuff I've been doing all year. It felt like a vacation, though I was working hard every day. More archival trips, please!
• Winter is receding, sort of, and has settled down into a grey skies, grumpy rain, and chilly wind pattern that beats the heck out of the ice, snow, and general misery we've had since November. Some day the sun will shine again, I'm almost sure. As a special added bonus, apparently the weather cleared up here while we had an epic snowstorm in Archive City.
• About the sabbatical: so many ideas, and so little time!  
• I've gotten so tired of seeing "woke" as an admiring descriptor that I silently correct it to the overused slang of another era, "peachy-keen" (1950s) and "bitchin'" (1960s) being two current favorites,  though maybe I should give "swell" (1920s) or "gnarly" (1970s?) a try as a change of pace.
• Big collaborative project is going well.

What's new with you?

Asked and answered at IHE and the Chronicle: why are halls empty? Because loyalty is a one-way street.

Deborah K. Fitzgerald's "Our Hallways are Too Quiet" at The Chronicle asks, in effect, "Haloooo? Is anybody there? Where'd everybody go?" (Bardiac has a post about this issue, too.)

Entire departments can seem like dead zones, and whole days can pass with only a glimpse of a faculty member as someone comes to campus to meet a student, attend a meeting, or teach a class. The halls are eerily quiet. Students, having figured this out, are also absent. Only the staff are present.

This seems a bit of an exaggeration, yet there's something in what Fitzgerald says. Yes, it's better if faculty are around so students can talk to them and so they can talk to each other. Being collegial at brown bag sessions, etc. can help with that.

But there's only so much time in a day, and, as the old saying has it, "what gets measured gets managed." Not to be too cold-blooded about it, but presenting at or organizing an event gets you a line for your CV or annual review. Warming a chair at one, well, doesn't. You show up because you care about your colleagues, and because you want to support them, but at year's end, you have to weigh where you want to spend your time.

Also, faculty, especially newer faculty, are being told endlessly by the productivity gurus "Get your writing done. Keep your door closed," which is exactly the opposite of what Fitzgerald suggests.

How often have we seen on blogs and academic sites advice about the plight of the (usually) overworked woman professor who's around a lot and gets to do the hand-holding and general friendliness on those empty halls while her male colleagues are away writing their heads off and getting treated like stars?

In unrelated news, John Warner tells us at IHE that "In Higher Ed, Loyalty is a One-Way Street." He describes the insanity necessary to get a raise:

So, not loyalty, but leverage counts. This is similar to scenarios where, in order to be considered for a raise, tenure line faculty must hit the job market, secure a competing offer, and try to use it to improve their local position. 

The unbelievable waste this practice entails is sort of mindboggling. When I was first informed of its ubiquity, I almost couldn’t believe it, but I now know it to be common. 

The faculty member who likely has no real desire to leave, but wants or needs a raise, must carve out time from their regular duties to hit the job market. They may also miss classes to interview for these jobs they don’t really want.

I think Warner's point answers Fitzpatrick's, to a degree.  As faculty we're getting mixed messages.

1. Be loyal and supportive. Show up! Be there for students and your colleagues. Hang out. Our college would be better for it.

2. If you pin your loyalty to an institution, you're loving something that can't love you back. You'll have to strongarm it into a raise by being disloyal and getting a competing offer. If you don't do what it values--and even sometimes if you do--it can turn you out without a backward glance.

So academe says it values loyalty above all, but that's not what its actions show. Houston, I think we have a problem.

Cursive handwriting rises from the dead

Figure 1. Thoreau could walk around Walden Pond
 with a notebook and a pencil he made himself.
He knew that the hand  was connected to the brain, all right.

The AP announces that cursive handwriting is once again being taught in schools, after being sidelined in favor of printing (reasonable) and keyboarding (not).

The insistence that keyboarding alone would fill the gap assumed that people would have available at all times a keyboard, battery power, and wireless access.  Like Apple, which insists that the default should be using data on your phone to listen to music instead of downloading it, this assumes a level of financial privilege and an urban environment in which you're never out of range.

Where I live, you're out of range plenty of times. You're better off with a notebook and pencil, like Thoreau, and even if you're in range when walking in the woods, a notebook, unlike a phone, never talks back with little buzzing messages. You talk to it, in writing, and it listens.

Anyway.

I know I've written about this to the point of exhaustion (yours! sorry), citing everything from the class dimensions of not teaching cursive (ruling class needs it, grimy proles don't) to the uneasy alliance with American "traditionalists" who want it, but this point needs emphasis one more time, for two reasons.

First, the connections between hand and brain, as when you do something with your hands and it helps to rewire neural connections in your brain and create new areas, is well documented, as when students take notes by hand instead of typing them. True, you don't need cursive to do this, but I'm in favor of anything that gets students writing by hand because this connection is real and helps them in a way that keyboarding doesn't.

This is what Anne Trubek misses in her bestselling takedown of handwriting. In the new article, she says it's like piano lessons: you don't need them to succeed at life. What about the correlation (not causation, I know) between piano playing and math ability? Doesn't this hand-brain connection deserve more study?

Second, here comes that pesky class dimension and the humanities again. You might not need piano lessons, or music lessons, or art lessons, or a knowledge of literature, history, foreign languages, economics, and politics to succeed in life. But you can bet your bottom dollar that any little Trubeks, and any other middle-class children of aspiring parents, will have access to these "frills," even if the parents have to pay for them separately. Why? Because more knowledge is better and is a marker of future success, that's why. Trubek saying you don't "need" piano lessons is only part of the truth.  They're an added value that helps not only to develop the brain but helps students to succeed.

Figure 2. Lorelei Lee explains the economics of added value.

I'm reminded of what that great economist and philosopher Lorelei Lee says in the movie version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. When accused of marrying Gus for his money, she says, "Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?"

All those humanities frills, including cursive handwriting, do help. Why should they be reserved only for children whose parents are wealthy enough or savvy enough to ensure that their children get them?

Writing inspiration: writing group models, part 2

In an essay that's making the rounds of social media, here's another kind of writing group: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/how-make-writing-humanities-less-lonely Researcher Alice Kelly describes the process as this:

I convene a group of postgraduate students and early career researchers to write together for three hours twice a week. After coffee, I ask everyone to share their goals for the first 75-minute session with their neighbour. Goals must be specific, realistic and communicable, such as writing 250 words or reworking a particularly problematic paragraph. I set an alarm and remind everyone not to check email or social media. When the alarm goes off, everyone checks in with their partner about whether or not they achieved their goal. After a break, we do it again. After our Friday morning sessions, we go for lunch together. And that’s it.

Have you ever participated in a group like this? Does it help with writing or make you want to claw the walls of the coffee shop?

Writing inspiration: writing group wisdom

For the first time since my dream about the Mad Men writing group and Dame Eleanor's group a few years back, I am in a writing group.  Hooray!

It's really an accountability group of the kind that Boice and Silvia have separately recommended. We're not reading drafts, but we set goals and hold each other accountable for meeting them. "No excuses" is Silvia's motto, and it's ours, too.

I'm starting to think that the process of thinking about writing--the act of analyzing what you do when you write--is a recursive process, much as the act of writing itself is. When I read old "writing inspiration" posts here at this blog and elsewhere, it helps me to think about the process, which in turn helps me to think about the writing I'm trying to do.

The writing group is already helping with this, in these ways:

1. You work harder when you know you have to look into the eyes of a group and say, "No, I didn't meet that goal this week."

2.  They can cheer you on when you get things done.

3.  They can also fix you with a mildly stern gaze and point out that taking on too many low-hanging fruit-type writing assignments can leave your main project behind.

4. Since these are people in approximately my general field, I can ask for and give suggestions about publication venues.

5. Seeing how much everyone is accomplishing when not on sabbatical is a bracing reminder that I ought to be accomplishing more and to set goals accordingly.

This is the sixth year I've kept the Excel spreadsheet to keep track of writing, and there's a separate page where projects and deadlines are listed. It really does help. But I can choose not to open the spreadsheet, whereas the writing group is going to expect to hear from me.

Internet pranks by academics and fake news

Some of you may remember, in 2013, that Mark Sample, a ProfHacker writer, thought it would be amusing to pull an internet prank in which he pretended to be in danger and disappear, leaving people to worry about him. 

I wrote about that in a post called "Cry Wolf," and in linking to it and rereading it yesterday, my anger at that stupid stunt came back in full force, and I added to that post and to yesterday's.

In comments on the original "Cry Wolf" post, Stacey Donahue, who had convinced me to leave it up, mentioned the #OccupyMLA hoax, so I looked that one up and added this:

Edited to add: here's a link to the #OccupyMLA hoax, otherwise known as more pranksters wasting the time and patience of everyone on a serious issue so that tweets about genuine injustices will be ignored next time when people believe it's a hoax: http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/occupying-mla/45357

All three of these hoaxers dressed it up in theory-speak and tried to spackle it  over with pretensions to doing something useful, but this is the same juvenile mindset that makes 11-year-old boys put firecrackers in mailboxes every 4th of July.  I don't see why we should either excuse it or trust the perpetrators.

And to yesterday's post, I added this:

Forgot to add this: if you want to play pranks with the the sensibilities of people who follow you, be prepared to be unfollowed and to never have anything you say taken seriously again, even though The Chronicle (a more forgiving medium) publishes your stuff. This is one scholar's body of work I never have to read. What credibility would that scholarship have? How would I know he's not making it up, too, a la the Sokal Social Text hoax?

Edited again, because apparently I still am angry about these oh-so-clever bros (see link above) messing with our minds on Twitter and thinking how meta they are for planting lies and making us fall for it: you call it a pomo experiment, but the erosion of trust is real.

Here's my question: why does this make us--okay, me--so angry? I wasn't involved, it was years ago, and there was no personal harm intended.

I think "erosion of public trust" is the key.

We've all seen that Goebbels quotation by now: "“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and or military consequences of the lie." 

We've also seen how the "straight from the horse's mouth" medium of Twitter lends credibility to the most outrageous lies and how charges of "fake news" have become the "lie big enough."

We know that if a certain tweeter-in-chief told his followers that the earth was flat and paved with unicorn tongues, they'd believe it, because he's told them that all voices but his are fake. The technique isn't new. All cult leaders do this. Charles Manson did the same thing.

That's the harm, right there, and that's the cause of the anger.  Mark Twain once said that if a cat sat down on a hot stove once, she would never do it again--but she would never sit on a cold stove, either.

Or, as the old saying goes, once burned, twice shy.

So whether you're posting fake twitter b.s. as a postmodern exercise in meta-tweeting blah blah blah with supreme contempt for the poor fools who are taken in, or whether you're doing it to control a legion of followers, you're still doing the same thing.

You're manipulating people's minds and eroding their trust in a system of information that promotes the common good. You're teaching them to trust nothing, and, in the process, to rely on their gut instincts about what's true--Stephen Colbert's famous "truthiness"--and we have visible daily evidence of how well that's working out.

Tips for social media types

Thank you, sincerely, for all the useful things you all post on Twitter. I mean it. I learn a lot every day about resources that are available. I "like" a lot of things and repost many.

Thanks especially when you choose the most cogent or telling sentence out of the piece before posting a link. It really helps.

But when you say, without explanation, "this is a must-read," it makes me want to set fire to it.

Too many acronyms and abbreviations make my head hurt. There are hundreds of intelligent, literate people on Twitter whom I follow who don't use them, and if you clutter up your message that way, I'm going to skip your message and go on.

A Twitter essay, strung out in 15+ posts of 140 characters each, clogs up my Twitter feed and is annoying to read. Go write a blog post or publish on medium.com or lithub like everybody else.

If you set up bots to repeat the same message several times over a 24-hour period, it whispers "spam" to me and everyone who follows you. If you do it for more than a 24-hour period, that whisper turns to a shout.

If you (or your bots, and you know who you are), post just a link to Facebook on your Twitter feed, I'm not going there. Why?

• First of all, the angry timekeeper guardians that protect me from my own baser timewasting instincts (like Freedom and Strict Pomodoro on Chrome) won't let me go to Facebook, for my own good.
• Second, FB is a closed system, and I object to having to log in to get a piece of information. Mark Zuckerberg already has enough information about my opinions, habits, and friends and family, thank you very much. 
• Third, 99.9% of the time it's a piece of self-promotion, which, though not bad in itself, isn't worth the extra clicks and logins. 

Somewhere, if you're tweeting about a conference or event, someone involved ought to give its full name so we mere mortals can tell what you're talking about. Sometimes even clicking on the hashtag doesn't shed any light on the subject. 

Forgot to add this: if you want to play pranks with the the sensibilities of people who follow you, be prepared to be unfollowed and to never have anything you say taken seriously again, even though The Chronicle (a more forgiving medium) publishes your stuff. This is one scholar's body of work I never have to read. What credibility would that scholarship have? How would I know he's not making it up, too, a la the Sokal Social Text hoax?

Edited again, because apparently I still am angry about these oh-so-clever bros (see link above) messing with our minds on Twitter and thinking how meta they are for planting lies and making us fall for it: you call it a pomo experiment, but the erosion of trust is real.

Any tips that I missed?

The winter of our discontent

As the long winter of our discontent drags on, I struggle to find something to say here that isn't simply repeating the several million messages of escalating daily outrage in Twitter or that doesn't sound entirely frivolous--like posts about writing.

To do the former is to pile more doom and gloom, and you already have enough of that on Twitter to sink your own feelings ever deeper. People are recommending books that are ever more dystopian both ecologically and politically, as if they figure you can't get enough of "I told you so" misery.

To do the latter is to suggest that you're gleefully dancing on the grave of American democracy, as in people hissing, "Don't you even care?"

Both positions can leave you feeling powerless, despite the actions you've taken (calling legislators, etc.)

What to do?

Well, "fight on," obvs.

But maybe also give a little time and space to some things that help mentally.

One, for me, is contemplating pictures from the past of my region --not to go back there politically (because nostalgia = racism, sexism, and all that, I do get it, I really do) but just . . .  to look and imagine being there, in that time and space, to see if it can be recaptured for --

Two, some writing that's not academic but might be fiction or creative nonfiction, never to be published (since it's neither sci-fi nor dystopian nor memoir) but just to turn the brain over to a different place for a while.

And then I'll write more about writing if everyone promises not to hiss at me in the comments.

Welcome to 2017!

I haven't posted here or over at my Real Name blog in forever--well, a month, anyway, and haven't even been reading many blogs because the news has been so, um, compelling.

I keep saying things like, "But how can that be legal?" and "Doesn't everyone see X?" and "That's insane" and, to my elected representatives, very respectfully, "Hello, I'm a registered voter in your district, and here's my address, and here's what I think about defunding the NEH."

The NEH may not love me, like it doesn't love the 94% of people like me that apply and don't get funded in its elite 6%, but I still love it, because it does good things. Also, Humanities and Democracy.

My thinking is that right now, those who rule politically are basically shaking up a snow globe of ideas so heinous that you wouldn't think they are real. They come fluttering down via the media & Twitter thick and fast,  and we're the little figures inside trying to pin them down to one so we can protest it. But what they really want to do is to use the whole snow globe to smash this country.

Anyway. I'll write a real post soon.

So how was your winter break?

And a partridge in a pear tree: summing up a sabbatical semester

In the comments on the last post, Gwinne had asked about what I'd done with my time on sabbatical.

Reading all the Facebook, blog, and Twitter posts about people grading sent me into a little tailspin last week, to wit: "What have I done? My sabbatical is half over! I haven't worked on my main sabbatical project! I have failed!" 

This had two results: 

1. Another Facebook break. See you later, Facebookers!

2. Grumpiness and chocolate for a day.

Then I decided to look at the data.

In short: 3 articles submitted, 3 conferences, 1 invited presentation this fall. Since the beginning of 2016, although I wasn't on sabbatical last spring: 7 conferences, 3 grant proposals, and assorted conference proposals. According to the Excel sheet, 73,000 words this year, give or take a few, although some of those are repetitive because they count proposals, though not article or manuscript reviews, letters of recommendation, or tenure reviews.

And a partridge in a pear tree.

How has sabbatical affected this whole process?

1. I wanted to work on those articles and felt desperate to work on them and to get them out, although I'm behind on some promised work. I prioritized the articles, because during my last sabbatical, I concentrated on the promised work and got absolutely nothing else done.

2. Those articles made me feel as though my brain were alive again, and working on them felt fairly transgressive. For one of them, I've already received a rejection, but it was so lovely and encouraging ("excellent but not a good fit for us") that I immediately sent the piece to the journal suggested by the reviewer.

3. In life changes: because of being home, I've gained some weight, yes, and certainly didn't need to. It's my own fault, though, for stress eating when bored or frustrated with writing.

Since the weather now and for the foreseeable future is best described as "ice everywhere," it's tough to get out to do the kind of roaming around on foot that I do during better weather. I'm trying to make more of a commitment to get to the gym and to be mindful about what I do eat.  Also, since I have to cook for the family every night, I can get more of what they like to eat that I'm indifferent to eating (like rice), which will help.

The priority now has to be the promised work, the sabbatical project(s) and associated travel, and getting some motivation back.

Writing inspiration: Reaching for the stars

In the spirit of those old commercials that said "don't hate me because I'm beautiful," I christen this post "don't hate me because I'm on sabbatical." I know it's crunch time for everyone, but it's writing time right now for me.

As Flavia wrote about in her recent posts, I have to keep reminding myself that when you're on sabbatical there's nothing wrong with wanting to write and losing yourself in the pleasure of writing. Being off Facebook helps enormously, in that I'm not getting stabbed by "completion envy" every time someone announces something they've finished or published. (Not a pretty fact, but true.)

Sure, I'm still avoiding some of the things I should be working on, including Big Sabbatical Project, but gathering low-hanging fruit still means that you've gathered some fruit, right?

The project that was 95% done is now sent, so that's two articles submitted this semester. Now, it would be better if they were the ones that are (1) overdue and (2) hugely overdue, but they're out of my hands and the folders are back in the file cabinet rather than on my desk. 

I'm now revising a third, one that seems fairly finished to me and that seems to say "why didn't you send me out for review before this?"  Because, like everyone else who's not on sabbatical, I couldn't put together the necessary consecutive hours of thought time and creative excitement to do the work on it, that's why. During a regular semester, we're all in triage mode all the time (attend this meeting or grade these papers?), but that's not what sabbatical is supposed to be about.

For the two submitted articles, I reached for the stars and sent them to some--what would you call them? aspirational?--journals in which I haven't published before. They might or might not get published, but at least I should get some feedback unless it's a desk-reject. As I've mentioned many times before, I don't have a writing group or trusted writing partner as some of you do, so conference presentations and article reports are about it for feedback.

These three articles are an elaborate avoidance strategy for the real projects, but at least I'm getting somewhere.

RIP, SEK

I was so sorry to see, on Twitter and Inside Higher Ed, a report on the death of Scott Eric Kaufmann, who wrote at Acephalous, Lawyers, Guns and Money, The Valve (remember that?), Salon, and The A.V. Club, among other spaces.  LGM has links to all his collected works on the web.

SEK was a fine blogger and an interesting writer, especially in his visual analyses of film. I hadn't read his most recent stuff on the commercial sites, but he's also very funny, in all the text-based game dialogues he did and the newer Oldman Cats dialogues (except for a preview, inaccessible to me because they're on Facebook, which I'm off for an indefinite period). As Scott McLemee reminds us at IHE, he spoke about blogging at MLA 2006.

Correction: it was Timothy Burke who had a problem with "mere" bloggers. Carry on!At an early stage, he was dismissive of "mere" bloggers who wrote pseudonymously (guilty as charged), but I get that: you have to stake out your claim and he was not afraid to do that. I only met him in person once, very briefly, but he made his presence felt in what we all do here.

RIP, SEK. 

Ready for a writing post? Here's one on conferences.

In Hamilton, the second act is--let's just say very, very sad. Lin-Manuel Miranda calls it a "cryfest," and he wrote it, so he ought to know. The saddest song is "It's Quiet Uptown," and it is so sad that I've only listened to it maybe 5 times instead of the dozens that I've listened to the rest of the soundtrack. The next song, "The Election of 1800,"  begins with Jefferson saying, "Yo, can we get back to politics?" and James Madison saying, in a strangled voice, "Please!"

So, to reframe: "Yo, can we get back to writing?" "Please!" You understand, don't you?

I don't dare say this on Facebook for fear of being seared to a crisp as uncaring, apolitical, an accommodationist, a monster, "neoliberal" (which are all the same thing on Facebook)  at the very least. I'm not. I'm still upset.  I've contacted congressional representatives, donated, and the rest. (Fat lot of good contacting one representative did: what I got in return from one was a rah-rah Trump cheering newsletter talking about "draining the swamp." But at least I did it and will keep trying.)

To get back to writing: This fall, I've done three conferences, some with two papers, and an invited talk, all of which had to be written (no recycled work); I've submitted one article to the major journal in my field and have another about 95% ready.

The most recent conference was incredibly productive, both in terms of hearing new work and in terms of taking me in a new direction for what I can do next. I got direct and very positive feedback on my papers, and I connected with people who are working in this new-ish (for me) research area, who liked what I was doing.

We all know that talking with people at a conference can really help, not only in terms of knowing what work is coming out but in terms of research opportunities (what X archive holds that isn't obvious from the finding aid, for example.) I don't think we think enough about how conferences can force us beyond our comfort zones and push us in new directions, however.  I rarely see a call for papers and think "great! This already-written piece will fit perfectly, so I'll make an abstract and send it in." Instead, I think, "that sounds interesting. I wonder if X would be a good idea for that?" and send in an abstract.

Then, of course, I have to do the research and write the paper, not to mention go to (and pay for going to) the conference or the archive. This does not make me happy, but at the same time, it creates some sense of tension and excitement that helps the writing, although that's probably the wrong way to look at it.

Maybe it's the thrill and agony of a deadline. Everyone differs in this. To give an example: Teddy Roosevelt, if given a writing assignment, would do it as soon as humanly possible, put it away, and forget about it. William Howard Taft would agonize and procrastinate, working over drafts forever.  If you've been reading this blog you know that I, ma'am, am no Roosevelt.  To get anything done, I need to borrow inspiration from the Roosevelts among you, and that means conferences.

Random bullets and links since Tuesday

• Nicoleandmaggie have some links for giving. It's what we can do now to help.
• If you have not heard Kate McKinnon's powerful rendition (as Hillary)  of "Hallelujah" on SNL, go and listen right now.
• "Because I was a girl I was told" at the NYTimes is the story of women and what they were told they could not do because of their gender. It will have you nodding in recognition, and for once, the comments are as good as the article. I have my own stories about this, as I'm sure you do. Please share in the comments, if you feel like it. 
• Also, here's a link to the Southern Poverty Law Center: https://www.splcenter.org/ .

Cassandra without portfolio

Well, the chipper feeling of that last post didn't last long.

I didn't see this coming, did you? In academia, we knew it couldn't happen because the candidate was racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, crude, a liar, etc. etc. etc. plus not being able put any plans or logic together, and everyone must hate this and see what we did. Right? Right?

But I feared it. Looking back there were some little nagging things, like something you catch out of the corner of your eye, weren't there?  Like the guy who predicted all the elections correctly?

Back in the mid-NAFTA-1990s, I went around asking, "But if all the jobs and factories go abroad, who's going to have living wage jobs to buy all the junk we will now be able to buy so cheaply?" (something I also asked on the blog) and was told "Shut up! Knowledge economy! Jobs for everyone! Don't worry about it!" which sort of worked a little bit for some people in the tech boom and then not so much because of a lot of corporate reasons involving outsourcing jobs and moving their corporate headquarters abroad. Same with the 2008 housing collapse: the lending principles didn't add up, but I figured that it was my stupidity and not their mendacity.

One day I came into the room and told Spouse, "I'm worried, because you-know-who is talking about job loss and H1B visas and the Democrats aren't doing that as much." But then with every revelation about his prejudices and actions, the pundits would say x group certainly won't vote for him now (evangelicals, women, etc.) because it would offend their moral sensibilities and I would think, they absolutely do not care, regardless of what they say they value. Yes, I saw the charts, and yes, I know that higher-income voters voted for him and that too many white women did, too.  It was horrible but true what he said about being able to shoot someone down in cold blood and still people would vote for him.

And then Hillbilly Elegy, along with all those economic hopelessness articles in WaPo, became part of an economic conversation about rural areas that we were not having, or not having enough of, in the academic vortex of Twitter. Michael Moore called it (as 
xykademiqz told us today)  and so did David Wong, who basically says that our president-elect is a brick thrown through our windows of privilege.  [Edited to add: Matt Taibbi has an analysis at Rolling Stone and Elizabeth Drew at The New York Review of Books.]

Now we who were with Her are left in the aftermath of the election trying to take meaningful action in this country* and maybe to think about what Ethan Coen said in his satirical "thank you notes" in the NY Times: 

6. All our media friends. Thank you for preserving reportorial balance. You balanced Donald Trump’s proposal that the military execute the innocent families of terrorists, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced pot-stirring racist lies about President Obama’s birth, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced a religious test at our borders, torture by our military, jokes about assassination, unfounded claims of a rigged election, boasts about groping and paradoxical threats to sue anyone who confirmed the boasts, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced endorsement of nuclear proliferation, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced tirelessly, indefatigably; you balanced, you balanced, and then you balanced some more. And for that — we thank you. And thank you all for following Les Moonves’s principled lead when he said Donald Trump “may not be good for America, but he’s damn good for CBS.”

And the Republicans? They got their whole wish list--President, House, Senate--but I can only imagine that they are now like the couple at the end of The Graduate, wondering what they've gotten themselves into.




* Here's a pro tip for those who have dramatically exclaimed that they'll move to Canada: It is very, very hard to immigrate to Canada as a U. S. citizen, unless you already have dual Canadian or British citizenship: you'll need a job offer in a field that they don't have enough of (spoiler alert: humanities grads--they've got 'em!), then a path to landed immigrant status (hard to get, and you have to be there 5 years before even being considered for citizenship), then money for lawyers, and so on. If you have bad vision, health problems, age problems (as in being over 45), they want to know about that, too, and not in a "we'd like to take care of you!" way, either. Yes, they want to see a recent set of chest x-rays, too, or used to.

And dauntless crusaders for women--the votes!

Go and vote, if you haven't already!

It's an inspiring day, isn't it? How could you not be a little choked up at all the people lined up to vote and also the lines to honor Susan B. Anthony by placing the "I voted" stickers at her grave (live feed is here: https://www.facebook.com/News8WROC/).

Or, as some might say, "Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now."

I voted a few weeks ago and took my ballot to the mailbox, since we have to sign them on the back and who doesn't worry a little about identity theft? (Our county clerk doesn't, based on a few letters I exchanged with her about it, but our letter carrier does: he came to the door and lectured me about putting outgoing mail in the mailbox the other day, which I almost never do.)

I'm working on a project right now that involves women in the era right before the 19th Amendment. So much talent and achievement: lawyers, tax attorneys, attorneys-general, state senators, and someone who helped Jeannette Rankin get elected exactly 100 years ago yesterday, long before either she or Rankin would have been eligible to vote in a national election.

Well done, sister suffragettes!
*

Do clickbait articles like "Why professors are writing crap that nobody reads" erode the humanities? Here are 5 weird tricks to tell you the answer.

Figure 1. It got your attention, didn't it?

This little number--"Why Professors Are Writing Crap That Nobody Reads"--was all over my Facebook feed recently, as it may have been all over yours.

Why?  Why does this stupid piece of clickbait provocation keep popping up every few months? I didn't link to it because you don't need to read the article; Google tells me that there are 13 million+ hits on the same exact subject.

Although I'm calling out this one because it's the most recent, it's a whole genre, and you could take your pick of reasons why they're written and published:

1. It requires absolutely no thought at all to write, since the conclusion is always the same: "Well, the main reason is job security." No kidding! Do tell me more, Captain Obvious. 
2. It's quick to do, because you can always pick up some random figures from a recent study to "prove" your points.
3.  Snark is the currency of the internet, and everyone wants to raise their social profile by getting a lot of hits.  It's easier to hurt something than to build it up. 
4.  It's basically an aggregator paragraph or two that popularizes someone else's research with a few sensational provocations--calling what professors write "crap," for example.

Yes, we'd like it if more people read our stuff. And yes, we ought to reach out to the general public, as I do, or try to, on my other blog, and as many of you on the blogroll already do. Yes, we shouldn't be enabling Elsevier and the rest to make the big bucks by profiting from our free labor as writers and editors. Finally: yes, it's true that we ought to give more weight to informative posts on social media like blogs or platforms like Vox, Medium, LitHub, and the late, lamented The Toast.

But there's an insidious side to all these calls to stop publishing for a scholarly audience and judge an essay's worth based primarily on its popularity. Here are the five weird tricks promised in every clickbait headline to tell you why, although I'll spare you the usual pointless slideshow festooned with ads to show you the list:

1. You can't judge the impact of an article by its immediate popularity. Did Vannevar Bush's classic "As We May Think" make as much of an impact in 1945 as it has since the development of the computer? Some pieces take a while to come into their own. How many ideas popular in their own time (cough*eugenics*cough) were popular and entirely destructive?

2. All research, and certainly humanities research, builds on previous work--standing on the shoulders of giants, I think they call it. The general public may think that an article mapping where speakers in England used "icicle" and where they used "isacle" is pointless, but maybe it tells later researchers where the Vikings landed, or something. I don't know, because I'm not a specialist in Old English, but that's exactly the point: I don't know, and neither do you, dismissive writers and casual readers on the web.

3. It plays into our current national value of being ignorant and proud of it. There are a lot of things I don't understand because I'm not trained in the field, but that doesn't mean that they are not worth attention. A civil society has to trust its members, and it ought to trust that people with expertise know something.

4. The people who read these essays are in a real position to harm funding for research--not just voters, but legislators, who like to wave things from the internet around during their speeches to prove that they're current with what the public is saying. Every time a state legislature moves to cut funding for higher ed, saying "why can't they teach 7 classes a day, 5 days a week?" this is the kind of article they cite.

5. People are hungry for real information, which is why we should share it, but not everything is going to make enough news to gain the kind of currency that these articles demand.  What's going to make a bigger splash on Google News--identifying the multiple authors of a manuscript or a cute walking molecule simulation?

When these articles appear on Facebook, I have held back from saying what I really think, in the name of being noncontentious. I think it's time to start being contentious.