June: Thinking positive thoughts about everything but email

It's June! This is the time of year when the apple & plum blossoms turn to tiny green fruit, when the butterflies entice the cats into trying to catch them, and when the sky stays light well past a tired person's bedtime. How can you not love the summer solstice? I'm trying to be more positive and less critical, and this time of year can be a big part of it.

Work (though not writing) is going along well. It's a kind of work that must be done so that other work can be done--think sorting index cards or classifying and writing down types of paper clips or figuring out what an author means when she says "about that other matter" or dates a letter simply "Tuesday afternoon." But since I'm the one who has to do it, I'm finding it fascinating, or if not fascinating, all-absorbing. It seems like rote work, but it will pay off down the road. It already is, really, in overall connections I'm making in my head about the bigger picture of the project.

June is also the season of non-reciprocity, though. It's the month of the almighty auto-reply, when academics on vacation send you requests, you respond, and you get an autoreply in return, or get invited to subscribe to their substack, or added to their publicity mailing list. And sometimes, you get lots of emails from someone who pays absolutely no attention to the carefully thought-out replies you've already sent. It's communication, all right, but it's neither collegial nor reciprocal, because you've become an instrument, an entity of solutions that require work on your part and will benefit them. The solutions: wait before responding; provide minimal responses; or just don't answer at all. 

Also, you can draw your personal boundaries to maintain focus on your own work. There's a lot we do--reviewing articles, manuscripts, etc.--that counts for very little, and before you say yes to something, think about what you'll learn from doing the review as well as how it services scholarship and the larger academic community. I say yes a lot--most of the time, in fact--but then, I almost always learn something when I do. Other types of service might not be as rewarding, such as writing book blurbs. I used to do this if asked, to be collegial, but last time, I put some significant hours--writing time, remember--into one, and it didn't get used. The publisher can use whatever blurbs are going to best sell the book, of course, and aren't obligated to use what I wrote, but similarly, I'm allowed to spend my time where it's not going to be wasted: on my own writing.

To get back to positive thoughts: June! Early morning air! Lavender! How's your summer going?

At the Chronicle: Kevin Dettmar gets it right about summer service.

Over at The Chronicle, Kevin Dettmar answers a department chair's question--"How do you get professors to respond in the summer?" with some words of wisdom:  https://www.chronicle.com/article/ask-the-chair-how-do-you-get-professors-to-respond-in-the-summer. His answer is, basically, "pay them," and it is so good to hear that. 

From the piece (behind a paywall, sorry): 

For scholars, summers represent what the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are to the retail trade: the time when we move, if barely, from the red into the black for the year’s writing and scholarship. And as someone who has tried to remain productive, I guard that time jealously — no, viciously. So I’m in full sympathy with your faculty colleagues, as perhaps you are as well.

Other good advice: "plan ahead" and "show them the money."

Dettmar's analogy about the retail trade is a good way to look at it, too: it's not so much the time that you spend in answering an email as the loss of focus and time that answering a request represents. Northern Clime and its administrators have been good about this, even if you don't leave a scorched earth out-of-office message as I've seen elsewhere on the web.

But I needed the reminder that Dettmar provides and that I wrote about in 2018 to push me into applying this principle to another time-sucking practice, not from university departments but from faculty who are heading off for three weeks on a fabulous research grant or vacation and will eat up all your time on either side of their time away by impinging on your time with a flurry of emails and requests, especially if you haven't set a firm boundary.

You don't have to have a fabulous grant, or a destination further than your own back yard, to ignore these requests. As Dettmar says about department chairs, their timetable is not your problem, and you don't need to make it your problem to be accommodating. 

An example: in Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar, the mother tells Majorie, who's working for free at a summer camp, something like "they can wait for a while for what they're paying you." It's not always true, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Maybe this isn't a problem for you, or you have a scorched-earth out-of-office message doing that work already. But if you don't--if you're inclined, like me, to respond too quickly and be too accommodating--this is a reminder that you're paying yourself to write or research or relax this summer, and that anything work-related that interrupts might be able to wait a while, for what they're paying you.

Taking Stock: Random Bullets of an end-of-semester retrospective

 For academics, it’s natural to think of the beginning of May as the end of the year, because, well, it is. 

• Was it a good year? Pretty much, yes. Yes, I got Covid (not too badly) despite all the vaccinations, but approximately 100 percent of the people I know who have traveled by plane got Covid, so by that metric, only having it once was not too bad.
• Did I get the writing done I’d hoped to do? No, but I did get some done, and some previous articles were published. 
• Being on sabbatical and away from campus and its various dramas may have made me a little less diplomatic. I was talking with a colleague at an event recently about a Big Initiative that some were promoting in the department, one I’d read about. “What did you think of BI?” Asked my senior colleague. “It’s bonkers,” said I. “Oh, it was my idea,” he said. “Um, well, it's still not a great idea, and I’ll tell you why—“ and, Reader, I told him. The old administrative me would have been more circumspect, but come on—I’m senior faculty, too, and if the tenured people don’t stand up against a bonkers idea, who will? At least the debate will spur some thoughts on both sides, and if there’s a reason that it is sensible instead, I’m willing to be convinced.
• Speaking of administrative work, I see in the trending posts sidebar that the “To Resign or Not To Resign?” Post from 3 years ago is on that list. I did resign, and it was definitely a good call. Having the responsibility without the power to put plans into action was making me lose sleep and perspective, and just letting go was a huge relief.
  
• Speaking of letting go, I've realized that one of the collaborators in the long-term project ignores my emails explaining things or answering questions and that it's a waste of time to give a substantive reply because ze won't read it. Solution: diplomatic responses along the lines of a telegram (10 words or less) if absolutely necessary to reply and saving explanations for meetings.
• Apologies for random capitals; I can't seem to get rid of them.
  

How was your semester?

Random bullets of tech, etc.: working hard or hardly working?

1.  Mostly working hard. I've completed some writing & received editorial compliments on a forthcoming article, which makes me happy. Judgment: Working hard.
   
2. My on-again, off-again love affair with Endnote is on again after I discovered how easy it is to attach and read .pdfs in it. Yes, it's more expensive than Zotero (which costs $0), and definitely more glitchy, but I understand it, which goes a long way when you don't want to reformat your brain to learn a new kind of software. One of its most touted features blows up my computer in a spectacularly awful way if I dare to try to use it, so I won't be doing that again any time soon. Judgment: Hardly working.
   
3. Does anyone else do this with new technology? My iPhone had gotten so ancient that Apple had done the tech equivalent of telling me to send it to Shady Pines for a good long rest, so I bought a new one a month ago. Why did I wait a month to set it up? Because I knew there was a good chance that the "Setup your new phone in 15 easy steps" would go wildly wrong and that I would have to sit on hold to get it straightened out. It didn't go wildly wrong, just a little wrong (problem: too ancient an iPhone to do the new kind of setup), and yet, I did spend time talking with tech support to get it set up. Judgment: Hardly working.
   
4. It's funny: I used to read The Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed fairly religiously, the latter more than the former, but since they're both paywalled now and you can't read more than a few words, I've mostly given up. Yes, IHE gives you some free articles if you sign in, but by the time I've tried to log in, been told that my password is wrong (and it always is), I kind of lose interest. Same is true for CHE, which I can get months-old versions of from Northern Clime's online library, but by the time I've logged into the library, done the two-factor authentication, found it, etc. it doesn't seem worth the bother. I feel about those the way I feel about games: if it's more work to play than fun to play, forget it. Judgment: Hardly working.
   
5. Same holds true for article links posted on the dying hulk of Twitter: if you have access, use a gift link in your tweet, for heaven's sake; otherwise you're just tormenting us with something we can't read. The whole "whither goest thou, English major?" set of articles recently were probably good, but except for the one in The New Yorker, I couldn't read any of them and, yes, gave up. Judgment: Hardly working.
6. For one brief moment, in wrestling with images this week,  I wanted to go back to an easier, simpler time when departments had People to whom you could say "I'd like .TIFF files of X, Y, and A," and they would make it so. Or is this simpler time a complete illusion? Were there ever such People to help professors in this way? Anyway: hardly working. 
7. For a brief moment, Northern Clime had some screencast system where students and instructors could project stuff on a screen, if you downloaded it and learned the intricacies of the program, but then it went away, to be replaced by something else, maybe.  Time spent learning software that gets replaced frequently = time spent on hold with the phone company, working your way through the bots and the automated systems until a real person can fix the problem. Hardly working.
8. Wordpress hates me again this week, so I couldn't comment at nicoleandmaggie's or any of your Wordpress blogs. I fill out the info, and WP tells me, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Undine." Congrats on DC1 going to Carleton! Hardly working.
   
9. On the other hand, this whole process of frustration at not being able to read or access stuff means more time to do actual, you know, reading and writing, so here's the good news, related to point #1: working hard.
   

Random bullets of an in-person conference

 I recently returned from a conference in a field that I love (think: flying dinosaur studies) but that I don't publish in as much. It's the second or third in-person conference I've been to since lockdown, and while Zoom conferences provide more access and don't cause you to spend your vacation fund traveling somewhere (no reimbursements for this trip), in-person still has some advantages.

This was a different experience because it's a conference where I knew no one--well, I knew maybe one person--and no one knows me, so I had no expectations about how things would go. 

• Everyone was so nice! Sure, there were obviously people who were Eminences, but they were nice, too, and their questions in Q & A sessions didn't exclude the rest of us. 
• There was no alternate paper-giving (i.e., "this is more of a comment than a question"). There was none of the "And you are? And you teach where?" kind of nametag-checking and conversations I've seen at other conferences. 
• Getting on an elevator, I saw an Eminence whose books I've had on my shelf for ages and was a bit starstruck. I see Eminences at my usual conferences but haven't had this starstruck feeling for years--maybe because it's a different field?
  

• Let's not forget the sheer fun of seeing in person the people whose books line my shelves and my folders full of .pdf articles.
• The papers were brilliant but also accessible--really amazing. The panelists really did aim to convey ideas and encourage discussion. Part of it may have been that there were enough panels on the areas that interest me that I knew all the texts they were talking about and felt at home in the discussions. 
• Also, hearing and overhearing incidental discussions about what people are working on gives you a hazy but useful impression of what might be going on in the field, one that helps the impressions and notes from the sessions themselves. 
  

And about the conference experience?

• It's hard to explain, but people seemed kind. Their eyes were kind if they met your gaze.  There's a hard-edged conference face that you see a lot when people are stressed and trying to get from Point A to Point B, even if they're not being stone-faced in looking at your name tag before they meet your eyes. There didn't seem to be any of that--and again, as an anonymous observer, albeit with a name tag, I would have seen it. 
• Maybe this is because everyone's happy to be back in person after the pandemic? 
• The conference had encouraged masks, and probably about 10% of people wore them at any given time. 
• The conference tech for showing media was all good. I saw only one mad scramble for Mac dongles because the people at Apple can't get it together and have the same kind of dongle from year to year. The EU has put its collective foot down and mandated USB-C connectors from now on, and it's about time. We can't do that here, because it might be suspiciously linked with the metric system or something, hence un-American, but it's a great idea.
  
• Something that works: a pitcher of ice water and glasses. Something that doesn't always: a water dispensing machine with no instructions for use. This conference had water pitchers but also the machines. Do you press the buttons on the front, which seem to be made to be pressed?  Nope, you hold your hand about two inches from one of the buttons, which is in fact a sensor. I learned this from one of the hotel people refilling shelves of glasses and immediately passed on this great wisdom to the people after me. 
• A thing that seems to have disappeared is people live-tweeting a session. This may be because Twitter is a total trainwreck these days, but the evolution of conference etiquette seems to be this:
•  2011: thinking about live-tweeting a session.
  
• 2012: Wondering about the etiquette of live-tweeting, which in the early days people did without threading their responses, which was very annoying.
  
• 2012: Tables set up for those tweeting.  I didn't see this at MLA this year, so maybe it's not a thing any more.
  
• 2023: People type or write from their seats, and there's always wifi, so they don't have to make a big deal of it. They maybe do one tweet promoting their session before the conference and maybe one responding to a session, and that's it. Maybe people have come to the same conclusion I did privately some years back: it's in a book or an article, and I can read it later with real attention instead of dividing my attention between trying to condense complex ideas into 120 characters and listening to the speaker.

Have you noticed anything different about in-person conferences these days?

Can AI (ChatGPT) Replace Writing?

AI writing (ChatGPT, etc.) is supposed to be transformative and all, the Washington Post tells me.

 The New York Times  worries about jobs; no worries, says the Washington Post, since AI requires "chat whisperers" to get the best from the software. CNET tried publishing articles written using it, but oops--too many mistakes.

AI can also spark creativity, apparently, although the examples most outlets choose to illustrate the creative problem-solving sound like obvious solutions. It's more of a springboard to creativity than a solution to writing, as scifi magazines have found out since they were flooded with AI-written stories and had to stop submissions for a while.

But what can the writing part of AI do well as of this writing?

1. Perfect C essays, all correct grammar, platitudes, puffery, and no substance.

2. Mission statements, ditto. 

There are surely nuances I'm missing, but everything I've seen so far either when testing it myself or when reading about it has been pretty much on the spectrum from 1 to 2.

It will get better, but ChatGPT--which, yes, is in its infancy--is so far like a bar trick--you know, where someone puts a quarter inside a bottle or something by magic means, or folds a dollar bill in a certain way to win a bet. I can't be more specific because I mostly only see this on Better Call Saul, but you know what I mean. 

There's been a lot of hand-wringing about how this might affect the classroom: one IHE writer calls it a "plague on education"  while others suggest creative uses for it. Some instructors have started using it to get students to question their assignments and test its limits. 

I'm kind of eager to see how this might work in the classroom next year. What about you?

Edited to add: Here's the first paragraph of what it wrote when I asked it to write like me. Like looking in a mirror, don't you think? This blog is all about the peppy self-help pitch, am I right?

Write a blog post in the style of notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com 

 V

"The Art of Doing Nothing" Greetings and salutations, my dear readers! Today, I would like to talk about the lost art of doing nothing. Yes, you heard that right, doing nothing! In our fast-paced world, it seems like everyone is in a rush to do something, be it work, hobbies, or socializing. The constant stimulation and activity can be exhausting and leave us feeling drained. But, what if I told you that taking a break from it all and doing nothing can actually be beneficial for our health and well-being? Studies have shown that taking time to do nothing can reduce stress, increase creativity, and improve our overall mental and physical health. It's a simple concept, but often overlooked. So, how exactly can we incorporate this into our daily lives? One way to start is by simply taking a few minutes each day to sit quietly and do nothing. No phone, no TV, no distractions.

More on handwriting

[Sorry! I was trying to get rid of a dead link in this old post and it posted as a new one.] 

 

The Washington Post has an article, "The Handwriting Is on the Wall" about the death of cursive (not handwriting per se--thanks, Sisyphus, for making that distinction). Here's a snippet from p. 2:

In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills. But Graham worries that students who remain printers, rather than writing in cursive, need more time to take notes or write essays for the SAT. Teachers may say they don't deduct for bad handwriting in class, but research tells another story, he said. When adults are given the same composition written in good handwriting and poor handwriting, "they still give lower grades for ideation and quality of writing if the text is less legible," he said. Indeed, the SAT essays written in cursive had slightly higher average scores than those written in print, according to the College Board.

I'm not as worried about the first statistic. First graders aren't college students, and by the time students have practiced some form of handwriting for 12 years, they're bound to get pretty good at it. Some people can print as fast as they can write (anyone ever teach engineering students? I rest my case), so that statistic may not hold true. But what about the second part? Have you ever noticed a correlation between types of handwriting and the content of the work? Most people I've talked to who've graded a few thousand essays have formed some impressions, although they don't let it get in the way of assessing a paper. Maybe if everyone starts printing, those differences in scores will be erased--or maybe the advantage then will go to the fastest typists. Also, will it become difficult for people who don't know how to write in cursive to read cursive writing? Disclosure: the handwriting thing is hitting home for me because it seems to be going down the tubes just as I've gotten all interested in pens, inks, and paper. I've been trying to keep a notebook recording word counts, notes, page counts, information to look up, etc., and have been writing in it with my new pen. (I'm not obsessed yet the way some are, but I can spend far too much time pondering the qualities of J. Herbin versus Noodler's Ink or Clairefontaine versus Moleskine notebooks. Okay, maybe I'm a little obsessed.)

Latest in the "let's kill all the libraries" movement: newly-formed Vermont State University

Quick midday post: the newly consolidated Vermont State, the latest college to kill the libraries, is really, really committed to it: 

https://vtdigger.org/2023/02/08/vermont-state-university-community-surprised-dismayed-by-library-and-athletics-changes/

Administrators announced Tuesday afternoon that the system’s member schools — Castleton University, Northern Vermont University and Vermont Technical College — will shuffle their athletics programs and transition its five campus libraries to an “all-digital” model. 

The library shift is set to take place by July 1, and will eliminate seven full-time positions and three part-time ones, according to Parwinder Grewal, the inaugural president of Vermont State University. ...

As part of those changes, campus libraries will shift online, meaning students will only be able to access books, academic journals and other materials online. Most of the physical books and other materials will be donated and administrators plan to “repurpose” the spaces. 

We're not talking about your basic Starbucks Memorial Library here, knocking out a few obsolete science journals to make room for the ever-essential coffee machines and treadmills.

All the books will be gone. 

I kind of get it. My students don't seem to go to the library much, except when I take them on a tour or make an assignment requiring it. 

But the no-books model has some issues.

1. How could you not like to go to the library and work with real copies of, say, The Illustrated London News or Harper's Weekly in big oversized bindings, especially when your campus may or may not have access to the increasingly-behind-paywalls digitized versions? Learning is so 2-D in a digitized world: we look at screens all day, every day. It's kind of exciting, as my students tell me every semester, to go and look at the actual materials. 

2. And given that budget cuts happen every single year in a university, and library budgets are especially prone to being given the axe--happens at Northern Clime every year--what happens when students don't have access to a particular paywalled resource?

3. What happens if you're working with a historical text (a novel, say, from Google Books or HathiTrust) where part is missing, blurred, or otherwise inaccessible? 

4. In a broader sense, won't this lead to more of a haves vs. have-nots situation, with this being one more place where resources are removed for the have-nots but kept for well-funded universities? 

Maybe this is all an irrational fear on my part. I guess it's reminding me of an exam I had to grade one time for an independent study student (not my student). The exam hit the basics but did not go one word, one thought, or one sentence beyond what was absolutely required. Did it pass? Yes. But it was like a ChatGPT essay: grammatically correct and without insight, a perfect C. 

Somehow I think that a curious student + a library with books has a better shot at a different perspective, which may be a romantic illusion.

Your thoughts? 

Random bullets of February 1

•  First of all, happy February! January's over, and you got through it, so yay!
• I'm still hoping that the cloud cover clears so that I can see the green comet. 
  
• If you haven't read about New College of Florida--about how the Florida governor is undercutting academic freedom and removed the well-respected scholar Patricia Okker in favor of one of his sycophant/cronies, here's your chance. What I'm seeing from other academics is that New College was basically the honors college of Florida. Here's more from the New York Times about how DeSantis is laying waste to the education system, one step at a time, to "build his brand" for 2024. 
• Speaking of "building a brand," I am sick to death of those videos of big talking heads of influencers flapping their gums at me from a camera 2" away whenever I go to a news site or Twitter. If I wanted to see big talking heads saying nothing, I would go to TikTok or Instagram. I realize that this is a niche view and that apparently all Americans have lots of time and money to waste in paying attention to influencers, but please, make it stop on sites where news might actually be present. Yes, I sound like my grandmother. Consider this my entry in #crankyrantsmanship for February.
  
• About two years ago, we started hearing about substacks instead of blogs, which are apparently passé. A substack is a blog or newsletter that you pay for instead of reading it for free. Since binge-reading blogs is a treat for me when I have time and email is a "one more thing I have to deal with," I'm not usually tempted to subscribe, except for George Saunders's story club (which I still haven't joined), and I'm definitely not inclined to write one, since it requires a real rather than sporadic commitment. Questions: 
• Do any of you have a substack (maybe under your real names)? 
• Do you like the format and interaction?
  
•  I'm hesitant to say anything about writing for fear of jinxing the progress made thus far this year, but it's going all right. What's different?
• I've gone back to the pomodoro system and 750words.com.
• I'm tracking in the notebook as well as in the Excel spreadsheet.
• Notes and brainstorming count as much as real writing. Hey, they're words, too, right?
  
• For the current project, I'm using Scrivener for the draft so that I can see all the notes I've made, which is easier than having 15 Word documents open. 
• How's your February going? 
  

Random Bullets of MLA 2023

Figure 1. Marriott Marquis in San Francisco.

 Happy New Year! It's time for the (somewhat) annual MLA roundup.

The last MLA I attended in person was in Chicago (2019). I attended & presented at MLA 2022 virtually and attended but didn't present at 2021. I like virtual conferences, and as my Visa bill tells me this month, they're also a lot less expensive. (No reimbursements from Northern Clime.)

But on to 2023 San Francisco!

•  
•  
•  
• It's probably not news to anyone that the travel to San Francisco presented "challenges," as we now call problems. Southwest had just barely recovered from its scheduling meltdown when an "atmospheric river" unleashed a "bomb cyclone" of rain on the Bay area, right at and before--you guessed it--the exact time when MLA was scheduled to start. I lucked out by getting there just before everything hit, but the rain and wind were epic at times. 
• Because of travel and illness issues, I heard that some sessions scheduled to have, say, 5 people had only 2 show up. That can't be helped (except through virtual sessions), since even the mighty MLA can't control the weather.
  
• The MLA had the good sense to choose a main conference hotel--the Marriott Marquis--right across the street from the 4th St. Trader Joe's. How great is that? Instead of a soggy $15 breakfast sandwich, you could get food that you actually wanted to eat. The rooms had real mini-fridges so that you could stock up on salads or Diet Coke or other familiar treats. And the hotel actually honored the deal where if you were a (free) Bonvoy member, they waived the $14.95 internet fee.
  
• Speaking of technology, A+ for that! When I went up to the projector with my big bag o'dongles (HDMI, VGA, etc.--thanks, Apple!) ready to get set up, I discovered that the HDMI cable and connection were already at the podium, so there weren't any awkward cords. Audience members politely reminded people to lean into the microphone. And there was even a tech person coming by to make sure that we were all set up, that the screen actually showed what we had on our computers, etc.
• The conference venues (the hotel and the Moscone Center West) were good as well. The Moscone Center is cavernous, with ceilings about twice the height that you'd think is necessary, but that's just what you want in COVID times--social distancing. 
• I heard from other attendees that some of the hotel sessions were overcrowded but didn't see it at the conference center. Of course I got lost going from one to the other, even though they are literally like one block apart, but that's due to my terrible sense of direction and the lashing rain that made the street signs hard to see.
  
• The MLA sensibly mandated masks, and everyone I saw wore masks except when actually presenting papers. 
• The Big Meeting went smoothly and focused on issues of actual, practical use to the profession. I groaned inwardly when we were broken into small groups for discussion a few hours into the meeting, considering it cosmic payback for doing this in teaching, but the discussion was actually interesting.  

This doesn't address the many interesting sessions, but I'd be here all day doing that. 

Happy 2023!

Other MLA Conference Posts:

•  2022 Washington (virtual)
  
• 2019 Chicago
  
• 2018 New York
• 2015 Vancouver
• 2014 Chicago
• 2013 Boston
• 2012 Seattle
• 2011 Los Angeles
• 2006 Philadelphia
• Conference tips no one ever tells you
• Random conference thoughts

 

Nearly the end of the year, but it'll be a new beginning, right?

 It's nearly time for MLA er, New Year's Eve, and I'd prefer to look ahead than to the land of little work that was November and December

Right after I announced that writing was going smoothly (and thank you, Dame Eleanor and xykademiqz, for your lovely encouraging words), it dried up. A few weeks of this was due to Covid brain (which is real), and then I couldn't get started again--but this post is a new start.

But as usual, the MLA paper and another project are lighting a fire under my lazy self, and it will get done.

Other events--not much, but it's a start:

• The Twitter debacle, part I. Why does a man as rich as Elon Musk buy Twitter and then do his level best to burn it down and crater his Tesla stock prices as sort of a side benefit? My guess is that no one was paying attention to him or his rockets as much as he wanted, but still, it seems an expensively destructive hobby. With a lot of its engineering workforce gone, apparently Twitter will lurch on with increasingly frequent outages until it just stops, or so a long-form article explained it recently. Tonight's outages were part of that, I guess.
  
• The Twitter debacle, part II. I did get an account on one of the Mastodon servers, which everyone hopes will be a great & decentralized space. My experience thus far: If Twitter is the place where I have to look up acronyms every day but am rewarded by silly animal videos, Mastodon is the place where I sit obediently and get lectured earnestly about subjects of great importance and am rewarded by . . . getting lectured earnestly about subjects of great importance. 
• If you like your Twitter spiced with drama, try the "Receptiogate" dustup: https://twitter.com/paularcurtis/status/1608146988511690753. Short version: medieval manuscripts scholar posts about his discoveries & research; someone scoops it up, steals it, puts it in a book with his/her/their name on it, and says to the scholar something like "it's on the internet so I get to claim it; nobody cares about your stupid blog anyway." As you might guess, telling scholars for whom provenance, attribution, and credit are really important that, well, that's their truth and your truth is that you can steal whatever you want from the internet did not go over well. 
• My whole life is not Twitter--honest. There's also being excited about the project I'm working on even if I'm just reading and not writing right now. Because the weather has been too miserably icy/rainy/freezing to walk, Spouse got me a Fitdesk for Christmas, which should help with getting a little exercise until after MLA when I can go to the gym. (I don't want to risk getting sick and flying again.)

So far, my only resolution is to write here more often instead of wasting time on the internet, so let's hope that that's one resolution I can keep!

Random bullets of where has the time gone?

Happy fall! How's everybody doing? In no particular order, some thoughts:

•  Twitter: There's a lot going on over there, including people leaving in droves, as Musk tries to charge $20/month for blue checks and bring back the most toxic man in America besides himself. I'm staying for now because of this logic: (1) Musk did this for attention and will get bored with it sooner rather than later; (2) he won't want to keep pouring money down a losing proposition; (3) he doesn't understand that the users are creating the content. Scalzi said it better than I just did.
• Covid. Despite my masking everywhere for the past few years & getting every vaccine & booster, Covid has finally caught up with me over some travel--and yes, I masked on the plane, etc. It's funny: when you tell people that you have it, they say things like "oh, I need to get my booster" or "oh, I should start wearing a mask again," which subtly implies to my feverish ears that I should have done those things--which I already did. It's a "just world" type of hypothesis, where if you do what you're supposed to do, a particular result will follow, except that sometimes it doesn't. But the masking, vaccines, etc. have made the experience far less severe than it could have been. 
• Travel. No two airport systems are alike, and since airports are filled with funnel points of no return, it's possible to be very stressed out about where to go and what the process is. I feel no need ever to do a puzzle escape room; the process of figuring out how to rescue lost luggage, where and when to check in, etc. is plenty challenging enough. The European system of announcing a gate on a board only10 minutes before the flight closes and when the gate is 10 minutes away ensures that you get an aerobic workout as you race down the corridors.
  
•  Students. I hired students to do a project, and it's exciting and fun to work with them and to see them learn things. The only downside is that the project involves documents with cursive handwriting, which is challenging for them.
  
• Writing. The writing is, or was, moving along pretty well on my new project.Is anyone doing NaNoWriMo? Do we do that any more? 

 Hope you all are well, and I really mean it. 

Writing Inspiration and writing houses: David McCullough (1933-2022)

As you've probably seen, the writer David McCullough has died at age 89.

I mentioned his sonorous tones in Ken Burns's The Civil War a while back, but his books were good, too, an opinion that apparently I share with the Pulitzer Prize committee. 

Mornings on Horseback and The Wright Brothers were good, although TBH I was more interested in the work of others who wrote about Dayton, Ohio's, other famous son, Paul Laurence Dunbar (a friend of the brothers). Americans in Paris was maybe too familiar to me in its subject matter to get a lot out of it. 

But to get to the real stuff: writing inspiration.

Working for much of his career in a tiny windowed shed behind his farmhouse in West Tisbury, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. McCullough tapped away on a manual 1940 Royal typewriter purchased for $25 in 1965.

“I like the tactile part of it,” he told the Times. “I like rolling the paper and pushing the lever at the end of the line. I like the bell that rings like an old train. … I even like crumpling up pages that don’t work. … I don’t like the idea that technology might fail me, and I don’t like the idea that the words are not really on anything.”

First, the writing house. It's behind his house on Martha's Vineyard, which--okay, we'll never see that kind of environment if we're not rich & famous, but we can envision the writing house. 

From CBS, I learned its dimensions: 8' x 12'. This is slightly smaller than Thoreau's 10' x 15' cabin at Walden Pond, but McCullough wrote there rather than living there. 

It's clearly a working space complete with file cabinets and an honest-to-god typewriter table. Those wings at the side of the table are for holding paper. 

Most important, a typewriter table is the best height for typing, 26" and not the 29" height of most of our desks, including the one on which I'm typing this. A typing table (if I had one) is a little low for typing on a keyboard, but when you're typing on a manual typewriter, that angle allows you to see better and also to press hard enough on the keys with a downward motion.

Source: the only actual, honest-to-goodness writing I've done this summer has been on a manual typewriter, though not a 1940 Royal.This summer has been about process and preparation--think amassing a bibliography and reading--rather than making great progress. 

Here's the place I want to be, though--the one evoked by McCullough's words, which more than these mechanical things are helping me with writing inspiration this morning: 

“People often ask me if I’m working on a book,” he continued. “That’s not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It’s like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It’s almost like hypnosis.”

“Writing history or biography, you must remember that nothing was ever on track,” Mr. McCullough told the Times in 1992. “Things could have gone any way at any point. As soon as you say ‘was,’ it seems to fix an event in the past. But nobody ever lived in the past, only in the present.

“The difference is that it was their present,” he continued. “They were just as alive and full of ambition, fear, hope, all the emotions of life. And just like us, they didn’t know how it would all turn out. The challenge is to get the reader beyond thinking that things had to be the way they turned out and to see the range of possibilities of how things could have been otherwise.”

 

 

 P. S. Please forgive me for not commenting, WordPress bloggers. WP is on one of its periodic hate campaigns with me where it will not accept any identity or password, so I will have to make a new one.

 

There's imposter syndrome, and then there are imposters

 I've been fascinated recently with this article about a writer on the show Grey's Anatomy, who (necessary disclaimer--"allegedly") fabricated a cancer diagnosis and stole other people's experiences as her own as fodder for the show. Link to  Vanity Fair. 

We talk a lot about imposter syndrome--the idea that we're not deserving of the job we have, not worthy to be where we are in our careers, etc. But this is different; it's about an actual imposter, or maybe just someone who lies creatively.

I have only met one of these people in my life (that I know of), but it was memorable. Bear in mind that this happened a long time ago, pre-internet, at a small school that I wasn't teaching at (let's call it Academia U); she wasn't even in the humanities. But I knew her, and we were friends. Let's call her X. 

X had graduated from a top program, which gave her star power to me and to everyone in her department. She had written (co-written) the paper on a particular phenomenon. People sought her out. She was invited to keynote at more than one prestigious conference. Pre-WWW, who could check?

 She frequently told Academia U that it was lucky to get her, and, in fact, would regularly threaten to leave unless her salary was raised. She had job offers, she said. Academia U came through with a raise every time. 

But there was an odd problem when she went up for tenure: the school couldn't locate the publications that she claimed, beyond the famous co-authored one. Well, that was easy. She had mailed a disk with her manuscript (pre-internet, remember), and the disk was corrupted, but it was just about to be published. On another, the editor had gone on vacation and had just neglected to send the final copy to the printers. On another, some editorial intern had made a mistake that delayed publication. All just missteps.

 She had the worst luck, those of us who knew her agreed. All the editors apparently sent letters saying that yes, these were fabulous articles that would be published momentarily. That's not unreasonable: a letter on letterhead saying that a book or article is about to be published often appears in a tenure file. It's not clear to me whether the tenure process at that school in those days required outside reviewers or whether they accepted her manuscript versions (soon to be published, except for her accursed luck) as publications, but she got tenure & promotion.

But there was something else: for me, her dates didn't add up. One time when I went to lunch with her, during which she told me I could be as successful as herself --well, not as successful, but successful for the kind of person I was, I started to get uneasy. The prestigious conference in X city--wasn't that at the same time that she had said she had gone to visit a family member in city Y? If a disk was corrupted, why not send another one? Why wasn't her name showing up in the article index for her discipline, except for that one study? (Yes, I am petty. After that humiliating lunch, I went to the library and checked.) There were other inconsistencies, but when I called her on them later, she brushed them away and always had a ready answer.

Things came to a head when an official document appeared to someone official to have been forged. What! No, X would not do that, we agreed. Stupid government! They must have made a mistake. 

There was no publicity, and no court proceedings. But she quietly left Academia U for another academic job shortly after that. 

I don't know if there's a moral to this story, except that I'm now amazed that it took me so long to add 1 + 1 and get 2 out of it. Is it gullibility, naivete, or stupidity? Or is it simply trust that people are who they say they are and do what they say they do? I also recall being kind of impressed that she could keep so many stories straight for so long.

Do you suppose that this happens in academia more frequently than we think it does? Have you ever encountered an imposter or creative liar?

Service Tennis, or how to put that ball right back across the net

 As new academics, we're taught (or do we just internalize?) the need to make things right.

Or maybe this: as women who are new academics, we're taught (or do we internalize?) the need to make things right. 

• Draft of some report or document not right? Let me get right on that and rewrite it so that it sparkles, thinking through and addressing its conceptual problems as I do so.
• Committee work? Sure, I can volunteer.
• Take notes? No problem.
• Write a book review? Let me at it.
• Review an article or book manuscript? Sure, why not? 

But possibly inspired by some of the feelings that the article Maya recommended in the comments of the last post and also by rereading a few of my self-directed come to Jesus talks about doing too much service, this year has brought a change.

• Draft of some report or document not right? Well, it's a collective draft. I fix what I can't live with and figure "many hands make light work" for correcting the rest. Could I make it better by spending more hours on it? Yes. Should I make it better by spending more hours on it? That's the real question.
  
• Committee work? Is this a committee that has some actual use for what I bring to the table, or am I warming a chair? If the latter, bye.
• Take notes? Yes, if no one else steps up. I've done enough volunteering to do this for an academic lifetime. Let's start acting as if this takes a village, which it does, and the same people don't have to do this always.
• Write a book review? Never again, honestly. Marley's ghost is still haunting me, and this is probably the last one I will volunteer to do. I'd rather recommend a more junior scholar who can benefit from the experience, and it's better for them, too.
• Also, what's with the new trend of sending ebooks or a link where you have to sign up for a site, etc., to get the book on a time-limited basis? Ninety percent of the value to you as a scholar doing a book review is that you get to read and have a copy of the actual book. The last thing I need is more hours of screen reading where it's tricky to mark up the copy with points you'd like to make.
• Review an article or book manuscript? It depends. Is this helpful in terms of alerting me to new trends in research as well as being a service to the profession? A few years ago, an insidious voice started inserting itself whenever I reviewed something. You could be writing right now, it would say. You only have X number of productive hours in a day. Is this how you want to spend your time? This benefits others, which is laudable. Does it benefit you, as well? Isn't that also a laudable goal? 

I thought of this today when I received back a draft of something I'd sent to a committee, of which the point person mentioned that some changes would be good and that the other point person was on vacation. In the old days--and this was my first impulse--I'd have spent time making the changes and then sent it back.

Today, I lobbed it right back across the net and said "send it back to me once you've made the changes. Have a great day!"

 If you think of all this as your responsibility, it sounds selfish.

If you think of it as a collaborative game, you can hit that ball right back across the net and see it as a win for everyone.

Edited to add: see “Tips to Reclaim Your Time” by Leslie K. Wang over at IHE. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/tips-reclaim-your-time

 

NYT: "My College Students are Not Okay" by Jonathan Malesic

 First, here's the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/opinion/college-university-remote-pandemic.html. 

 The TL;dr on this is that students are tired--exhausted, even--and disengaged. When they go to class, they won't speak up, as if they're watching you on Zoom. 

Based on an N of 1 (me) over the past two years, I agree on some things Malesic's saying, but not all.  

• First of all, we need to separate out Zoom classes, in-person classes, and designed-to-be-online and asynchronous classes. These are different animals. I only taught a few Zoom classes, and they seemed to work pretty well. 
• The in-person classes? I guess I didn't post a lot about them, but honestly, they were great. We wore masks but it worked fine (worked a treat, as the Brits say). Was it their energy, being glad to be back, that made the energy in that classroom? Was it partly me (ditto)? Was it the approximately 1.5 times the effort that I put into those classes? More effort doesn't always result in a better class experience (shudders in memories of classes past), but maybe this time it helped?
• Online classes: these take 2 x the effort of an in-person class, and this semester especially I'd estimate that my time was spent about 80% on teaching and the remaining 10% each on research and service. This isn't ideal and is definitely not what my contract calls for, but it felt hugely necessary. Some thoughts: 
• In an in-person class, you know how sometimes you feel as though you are emotionally lifting them, encouraging them to speak, etc. and are wiped out at the end of the class, and at other times you might be a little tired or whatever but their energy helps you? This semester, I poured so much energy and time into teaching that it wore me out--but then they started giving back, even though it was an online class--more & better responses, coming to office hours (via Zoom), etc. 
• And they deserve the credit for coming through so well--they really do. To borrow a piece from Bardiac's post, they really did exceed expectations, by and large; those weren't "well, it's COVID so it's an A" grades at all. They know what the expectations for writing are, and some of them complain mightily about having to write in complete sentences, etc., at first. It's a kind of "Do you know who I am?" attitude that sometimes afflicts seniors and majors who claim they haven't been called to account for their writing before, but then they learn and it's a pleasure to see the change for the better.
  
• While it's doubtless true, as some of Malesic's interviewees say, that you can't teach some courses online (hello, lab science!), I don't teach lab science and would say that some things can be taught & discussed just fine online. I'd say in any given class about 5-10% were "disengaged" in Malesic's sense.
  
• I just looked at course evals, and the students seem to have gotten a lot out of the classes, so there's that. 

But yes, to Malesic's point: more requests for extensions than usual, etc. do point to their being exhausted and burned out. 

And so are we, aren't we?

The teacher I want to be

 First of all, I do love teaching. 

Second, I believe in flexibility, and my syllabus has all kinds of alternative assignments, escape clauses, and get out of jail free extensions built into it--all stated right up front, with no need to have class privilege to know that they're available. I talk about them. They're in the syllabus. I email students about them, if they seem not to know.

For a lot of years--decades, even--this has been enough. If a student tries, it's hard not to succeed if they put any effort at all into it, because there's always another way. They may not get the grade that they think their writing deserves, because they insist that I'm the only teacher who's ever told them about picayune details like writing in complete sentences; however, they usually come around once we've met for a few times and gone over their papers. But in my classes, there other ways to succeed.

Yet it's been a tough semester for us all. Contra academic conferences, which are so over COVID, my students are getting sick regularly despite being vaxxed, and I've made a lot of allowances for that. I've responded to emails on weekends. I've been available. I've given feedback. I've met with them. I've notified them through the course space if they didn't turn in papers (online classes--you kind of have to do this). I have put in more hours on teaching this semester than in any recent semester I can remember.

And now, a minute and a half before grades are due, students who haven't checked into the course space for literally months want to turn in assignments that they had ignored for said months. Or they've skipped a bunch of assignments but are emailing "I need an A." Or they start rules-lawyering over some minor point, which is hard to do given the really specific details in the syllabus. Or “I have a lot of work in my other [implied: more important] classes and am handing this in late.”

And with all the "take it easy on your students; COVID, etc." directives being issued, it's hard to say no without seeming like a monster.

It's probably for this reason that I'm finding this really dispiriting, even though I know I shouldn't take it personally. It's like some kind of fall from grace, or a fall from the kind of teacher I thought I was and want to be. This didn't happen in the Before Times, or happen as much, and it didn't bother me when it did because I could just point to the numbers. 

I don't want to be that tough old rounder who rejoices in saying no, but it's getting harder to keep that store of goodwill and enthusiasm flowing and to be the kind of teacher I want to be.

How long is this semester? Groundhog Day long, that's what.

• Like a good portion of the rest of the country, Northern Clime is getting snow. In April. Every day. Snow. What is it Bill Murray says? "It's going to be cold, and it's going to be gray, and it's going to last for the rest of your life." Yeah, what he said. 
• Tulips are coming up, but they're saying "nuh-uh, not going to bloom when we're just going to freeze to death." 
  
• I am playing whack-a-mole with our LMS. When I see that someone's turned in one of the minor full-credit assignments, I go in and give it comments immediately, just so I can see it disappear from the ever-lengthening sidebar list of things to grade. 
• I gave a conference paper (the conference had sensibly moved online), and rediscovered (1) how stressful it is and (2) the feeling of giddy elation when it's over. It's the old story of hitting yourself in the head: it feels so good when it stops. 
• The mask thing is going pretty well, though. Most places I go--that is, the grocery store--there's a good third of the people who are masked. If you think about it, how much attention did we pay to people's faces before the pandemic? Not a lot, and it's the same now; I barely look at them and vice versa. Nobody's said anything to me about it, and everyone seems pretty chill. 
• I'm ready if someone does say something, though. Here's my projected response: "Merry Christmas!" Cheerful enough to be inoffensive, and strange enough to make them give me a wide berth in case I am unhinged, and, in this part of the country, armed. 
• It's hard to get back to writing and thinking, although the conference paper proved that I could do it, so I guess it's time to get back to it. 
• Updated to add: a Florida judge just voided the mask mandate on planes for bonkers reasons ("masks don't do anything"). This is bad for so many reasons (children, immunocompromised people, and, oh, by the way, the rest of us who don't want to get any flavor of COVID). From an academic perspective, people on Twitter are now fretting about flying to conferences. Not to harp on the same old idea, but you know how you can't get COVID if you're at a conference? Through a Zoom screen. We are all supposed to be throwing praise parades for the in-person conferences, but this is a risk that just got riskier, not that anyone is paying attention.
  
• Another update: “who needs a mask? Covid is over completely, so definitely not me” from Megan McArdle (https://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/search?q=Megan+mcardle ) conservative columnist and author of helpful advice like “if you’re not rich, perhaps you should consult your broker” and “old people get poor and die—get over it” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/19/mask-mandate-flights-federal-judge-cdc-this-is-the-right-moment/?itid=hp_opinions

Random Bullets of April

 

•  COVID, now with new and improved Omicron 2.0, is still flourishing here and elsewhere. British Airways had their flight crews take off masks, and oh, look, their COVID rates rose.  I'm still wearing a mask, and at least a third of the people I see at the grocery store are, too. 
• I'm sure you all saw how UCLA posted a job offering with all the usual requirements, including 5 references, for a professorship for which you would be paid . . . nothing. This was in the sciences, and it probably had something to do with teaching for glory--er, faculty affiliation--when you already make lots of $ on grants, but still. Are we there yet at the English Department of the Future? 
•  Speaking of fancy schools doing dubious things, if you haven't read Rachel Aviv's New Yorker investigation of how U Penn treated one of its students, Mackenzie Fierceton,  go read it; it's excellent. This follows a Chronicle of Higher Ed account that takes a skeptical view of her story; Aviv's account has a more complete and sympathetic version.
  
• Twitter is doing its usual blend of genuinely useful information and theory and contemporary culture fight-fests over stuff where I have no idea what they're talking about. 
• In other news, I now believe that people should be required to get signed permission slips from all their neighbors before they put up outdoor wind chimes. 
  
• Friday night, and still grading--how about you? It's that time of year when grading is kind of like bailing out a leaky rowboat: just when you think you've got one hole plugged up and the water in the boat goes down, another one springs up. 

Now, I'm not complaining about the fact of having to grade. They're our students, and they deserve to have comments. I've never learned the trick of having them learn to love grades that are simply checks on a rubric, even though I've caved in and made some beautiful rubrics this semester. The comments help them, if they read them, and that's something I can't control. 

It's the time  that grading takes. I just don't understand how it can take so much time, even with all my little timer tricks. It just . . . does. 

Random bullets of "March? Already?"

•  
  
  
  First, some writing house inspiration, courtesy of Wendell "I don't need a computer" Berry: "Hidden in the woods on a slope above the Kentucky River, just south of the Ohio border, is a twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin with a long front porch.. . .The camp has no plumbing or electricity. Half a dozen well-sharpened pencils were lined up on the worktable, alongside small stacks of paper. On top of one stack was a note Berry had made, and crossed out, about Marianne Moore’s poem “What Are Years?” Above a small safe, curling photographs were taped to a wall: Wallace Stegner, Ernest Gaines, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Thomas Merton." My writing house also is 12 x 16, so Wendell and I are obviously destined to be famous authors together. 
• So much teaching. So much grading. So much time spent on both.  I want to channel Winston Churchill here: "Never in the history of mankind has so much time been spent by one person in the attempt to create a resource appreciated by so few." Written lectures, video lectures, responding to their posts, grading: I thought I had made it up that online teaching takes 2x as much work as in-person, but this year, on an N of 1 (me), I can confirm that it does.
  
•  In an extremely ill-advised moment, even after vowing never to do another one, I said I would do a book review last year. The book is good, but very, very, very long. I read it last summer and never wrote it up, with the result that I now have to read it again to write the review. Spouse says I have been dragging it around with me for a year like Marley's chains in "A Christmas Carol," and he's not wrong. 
• Now that everything's going back to maskless in-person events (even with Omicron 2.0 peeking around the corner), it's back to the irritating calculus of whether to burn an entire day traveling to campus and getting no work done to support a colleague doing a presentation. There were two presentations today I would have happily attended if they were on Zoom. They were in person, and I had a lot of work to do (travel burns the whole day), so I missed both of them. 
  
• Gwinne has an interesting post about the amount of work we do. I'd break that down even further into categories:
• Work that we are paid to do that's interesting but takes far too much time to do it right (teaching). 
• Work that's invisible and that no one cares about unless it doesn't get done (service, administration).
• Work that we want to do in terms of research but that gets pushed out by #1 & #2.
• Work that we at some point agreed to do and that we can't seem get done, like Marley's chains up there. 
• Work that we are harried into on someone else's schedule because however much lip service they pay to things being collaborative, etc., the only schedule they actually pay attention to is their own. 
  
• I'm still wearing a mask to the grocery store & everything, because why not? No one seems to mind.

 And with that I will close for now, leaving you with these words: "“I wear the chain I forged in life  . . . I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”