Mad Men 7: Random Bullets of a Brief Review

Now that Historiann has opened the voting, so to speak, and to follow up on my earlier Mad Men thoughts, herewith some random bullets of Mad Men 7.1.  I saw it during the regular broadcast time, since there was laundry to fold and since iTunes refuses to download episodes with the season pass that I bought.

• "Is That All There Is?" played 3 times in this episode. We get it. Is Don having an existential crisis? Does he ever have anything else?
• On the other hand, Don wears a striped shirt! The times they are a-changin'.
• If Don came to me as a fortuneteller, I would totally clean up: "You are haunted by a mysterious brunette from your past, and she will return in your dreams. You cannot erase this figure through sexual contact with other brunette women."
• Critics seem to think that Ken would have been better off writing his novel than getting back in the game with Dow.  Matt Weiner says this, and so does Alan Sepinwall, who's the critic most worth reading.  But to do this, Ken has to live on Cynthia's money, and he has always resolutely resisted that. Also, he has said that they have to pay (emotionally) for anything they get from Cynthia's parents and that there are lots of strings attached.
• Isn't living on your wife's money just as corrupting, in its way, as working for Dow, even though it does not involve a hazmat suit? What Ken really has is two bleak choices: Dow's money or his wife's.
• A thought experiment: Did Peggy have a choice in the meeting with the frat guys from McCann other than ignoring their halfwitted remarks and plowing ahead, if she wanted to enlist their help? Should Joan have brought along a flame-thrower? Discuss.
• Note to Peggy: cheering Joan up, or dispensing sanctimony and blaming Joan for the way she looks, in an elevator is always a losing proposition. The decade will declare that "Sisterhood is powerful," but individual experiences might argue "not so much."
• The internet loses its mind about Roger's and Ted's mustaches, and Weiner declares that people in future generations will think that the 2015 beards will look strange. Well, facial hair comes and goes. My bet is that people will think that men shaving their heads over the past 20 years or so will be thought odd, since that's historically a new development in male sartorial splendor, unless you're counting the era when men shaved their heads to wear wigs. 
• Since Season 6 was basically a repeat of Season 4 (fine performances with endless downward spiral), I'm hoping that Season 7 will repeat Season 5, if it needs to repeat anything. I want a happy ending of some kind for these characters.

Off Topic: Amazon Dash, the awesome CueCat of 2015

For about 30 years, breathless news stories have been telling us that we want smart homes, including refrigerators that can automatically see when we're low on milk and order it for us.

This is to save us from the .0000025 seconds

that it takes to open the refrigerator door and see that we're out of milk.

Amazon Dash is the product of the same Refrigerator Needs to be Connected thinking: the unnecessary product that fulfills an imaginary need (but that doesn't stop Time from heralding it as "awesome.")   It's a series of individual wi-fi controlled buttons that you put all over your house so that you can order the product from Amazon immediately, without walking the 10 steps to your computer.

For example, if you put a Tide button in the laundry room, and you notice that you need laundry detergent, you push the button and shazam! Two days later, the Tide shows up from Amazon.  You can order juice, dog food, and toilet paper in the same way--because getting things a few days later when you need them immediately is much better than getting them right away.

Various news sites swear that this isn't an April Fool's prank, but I wonder. 

1.  Why would anyone want to look at, say, a Tide button every week for several months just so that the one time in 3-6 months you need it, you can press a button?
2. Why wouldn't it be faster, cheaper, and easier to buy the products when, like most people living within range of a grocery store, you go to the grocery store?
3. Wouldn't the button and its branding fade into the background, so that you'd forget to use it anyway?

And, in the imaginary needs department: I can see why it would be a marketer's dream to have tiny ads stuck to cupboards and walls all over your house, but is it your dream?

Another entry in the "technology is always cool" connected-refrigerator line of thinking was the now-defunct CueCat.  Remember those from the year 2000?  

The idea was that you would somehow get a CueCat (Madio Mack apparently gave out the CueCats, but I never got one) with a unique serial number.  You would then read the ads in the newspaper (how quaint!), scan the special CueCat code, and then get even more ad information when you looked on your computer.  In the meantime, the CueCat people got information about your consumer preferences.

To CueCat's surprise, consumers seemed to be pretty happy with the level of advertising they were already being bombarded with, and the CueCat was a failure.  They were an advertiser's dream of how consumers would ideally behave instead of something that was actually needed. Ironically,
 they now have a second life as a barcode scanner--an actually useful item--on LibraryThing.

So I'm picturing the conversations now:

"You know what this laundry room needs?  More Tide branding!"

"Tiny velour guest towels that don't dry anything? Check. Tiny floral-scented soaps that no guest will use? Check. What else does this bathroom need in the way of decor?  A branded Dash button so you can order toilet paper every 3 months, that's what.  Tells our guests we care about them."

"Who says dogs can't read?  Mine have been ordering 26-pound bags of dog food every week since we installed the Dash button and they started pushing it.  And the FedEx delivery person says he's never had such a good workout!"

Your thoughts? 

Mad Men thoughts on the approaching finale of Season 7

It's known as a mind vacation.  You need it at the point of the semester when you know that, whatever task you work on, someone is going to be disappointed or angry, because you can't get everything done on time. 

But in a mind vacation, I can rewatch Mad Men for an hour or two while folding laundry or when I'm too tired to work or need to shut my mind down in order to get to sleep. The press of all the things I'm not doing/haven't done are completely at bay for that time.  Reading isn't a mind vacation any more, because I'm hammered by thoughts that I should be reading for work.

I began with Season 2 and am up to the beginning of Season 5. I'm looking forward with some anticipation and a little dread to the upcoming half season finale of Mad Men. Some random thoughts:

•  In Season 4's "The Suitcase," one of the best hours of the series ever, Don and Peggy have a huge blowup before coming to understand each other. When she reproaches him for never thanking her, he erupts, "That's what the money is for!" She makes a personal or sentimental appeal, and he, as usual, reacts with rage or coldness. 
  
  What I hadn't realized until this viewing is that this is exactly what happened when Conrad ("Connie") Hilton drops Sterling Cooper in the last episode of Season 3, the fantastic "Shut the Door. Have a Seat." Hilton tells Don that he's "cutting him loose," and Don gets angry, making a sentimental appeal about Hilton wanting to kick him around, treating him like a son and then dropping him, etc.  Hilton just stands there and says it's just business (or some other Godfather-inspired thing). They end by shaking hands. 
  
  In "The Suitcase," Don is angry, sure, and upset about Anna, but he's channeling Hilton by telling Peggy that this is about business.  Of course it's about more than that, but what better way to reclaim your power than by channeling Conrad Hilton?  It's a lesson in business for Peggy, in this season of lessons, and by the end of Season 5 (when she leaves SCDP), she's learned to take this power into her own hands.
• Speaking of "The Suitcase," why didn't Jon Hamm win the Emmy for this? I think he lost that year to Steve Buscemi for Boardwalk Empire, and while Buscemi did good work, it didn't touch Hamm's. Since I'm not a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, my opinion doesn't count for anything, though. 
• Every single person in academia would benefit from spending an hour a week with lovable Dr. Edna, the child psychiatrist who sees Sally for a time in Season 4. 
• They (the writers) should have kept Megan at SCDP.  Think about it: she's a naturally gifted copywriter and a decent actress.  Her ascent would have threatened Don in different ways, and it would have made for interesting conflicts with Peggy. We have Joan as a contrast to Peggy (traditional vs. new perspectives on women in the business world), but Megan would have been a different kind of competitor.  From the first, Megan seems a little . . . premeditated in her actions toward Don, and although she seems to love him, or tells him she does, there's a hint that he may be a means to an end.  She's like Jane Siegel Sterling but with career ambitions.
  
  Once Megan went to follow her bliss as an actress, there was less and less point to her being on the show. By Season 6, she would bounce into the apartment once in a while, but you kind of forgot why she was there.  She and Don seemed to have nothing in common; I would spend their scenes wondering what they found to talk about. She devolved into yet another example of his alienation, as if we didn't have enough of those already. Bonus: we could have seen more pitches like Cool Whip.  
• To be honest, I fast-forward through some of the scenes. Lane Price and the pseudo-gangster. Some of Betty's perennial grouches.  The "weight-loss and hair-dye" Betty plotline from Season 6 might get skipped.
  
  Betty is like the reverse Sriracha sauce: a little of her makes the episode better by binding it together, but too much of her makes the episode more bland.

Actually, a lot of Season 6 might get skipped.  The more I think about it and its Misery Theater, the more irritated I get at the wasted opportunity. See Don relive Season 4! See him drink and wallow in misery! See him engage in yet another affair, this one even more formulaic than the rest: 1. Sylvia expresses guilt at their affair.  2. They have sex.  3. Sylvia expresses more guilt and drops a few Pearls of Wisdom. Every. Single. Time.  The Bob Benson plot is fun, as is some of the agency stuff, but the Sylvia plot is irritating. 

Your thoughts?  

Other Mad Men posts:

• Season 4 
• Positivity and Mad Men
•  Random Bullets of Mad Men
• Mad Men
• Season 5, Of Mad Men and MOOCs
• Season 6, Thoughts on Season 6
• Season 7, Random Bullets of Season 7

The Mad Men Dream Writing Group
Postwar Hauntings: Don Draper and Dana Andrews

Promoted!

For a year or so, I've occasionally looked at the mostly empty box of business cards that I got when I came to Northern Clime.  Order new ones with "Associate Professor" on them? Or wait and see what happens?

Yes, dear readers, I now need new business cards because I can take the "Associate" title off and just write "Professor."

Thanks to all of you for hanging in there and reading, especially during the Great Obsessive MOOC streak.  This space and your blogs help so much--thanks!

Groundhog Day: mid-career academic choices

This post is on a parallel but slightly different track from Notorious's post about "Choosing to Change Direction."
It's about the three stages of an academic life.

1. When you start out as an academic, your whole life is spent in applying for things.  Your mentors may have told you never to turn down an opportunity, and it's good advice. Think about it:

• Applying for jobs (and applying and applying and applying). 
• Submitting abstracts and papers for conferences.  
• Pouncing on every call for papers.  
• Applying for travel funding and grants. 
• Volunteering to be on committees. 
• Waving your hand high in the air when someone wants you to help with a conference. 
• Hearing yourself say things like "Sure, I can write a draft of the report."
• Getting rejections and applying all over again.

2. Then, once you have done some of these things, people may start asking you to do them.

• You get asked to contribute to a collection.
• A journal editor hears you give a paper at a conference and asks you to submit it.
• You talk with someone in your field at a conference and put together a panel. Maybe you even get to know enough distinguished people to ask one of them to be a commenter at a conference that more or less requires a famous commenter to get on the program.
• Someone asks you to write a report, or run a search, if you are fortunate enough to have a fulltime job, or be on a committee.  This is the "just say no" phase that so many bloggers have written about. 

You say yes to a lot, maybe almost everything, because you realize this means they like your work, your work ethic, or maybe "they really like you!"

3. In the third stage, the one Notorious is talking about, you realize that you can't do everything.  The time after tenure may feel at first as if you're in the movie Groundhog Day. Now, you're not a jerk like Phil Connors, so you don't have his lessons to learn. But you're doing the same things you did before, except that you can't see the next goal ahead.

Every path you take--and they can be all good choices--means that there's a path you can't take.  It's not infinite any more, and it's not directed toward a single goal (tenure). You have to choose the goal, and, in choosing, decide that some paths are ones you're not going to follow, maybe forever.

• Do you go into administration? That can be a new challenge, but it may mean you have to spend less time on scholarship.  
• Do you focus on scholarship? If you do that and turn down opportunities in administration, you might not be asked again. 
• Do you like where you are or decide to leave? Do you apply for new jobs? I mention this because Notorious does, but it's a drastic step.
• Maybe you decide on more work-life balance and take a few steps back from the job, either emotionally or actually, by resigning from some commitments and scaling back on others. You decide you don't need to go to as many conferences and that you will put that money toward your and your family's well-being.  Are you prepared for, and can you accept, how that might affect your job in practical ways? For example, what if your department see you as less committed to it and to scholarly pursuits, which may be reflected in your performance reviews? 

 I think that part of the post-tenure slump, or post-tenure more generally, might be in this third stage of choices. You now know how much time things take--to write an article, mentor a student, teach a brand-new class--and so you know that you have to choose, in a way that you didn't know in stage 2. In Groundhog Day terms, you can try to save the homeless man or rob the bank, but probably not both.

You wonder if your choices are good ones, and you know you have to make the most of them. Part of coming out of the slump may be the growing conviction that yes, this is a good choice for me, and yes, this is a good path to follow. Eventually you get there, and you hope that it's February 3.

At Notorious Ph.D.'s place: post-tenure blues and other reactions

Notorious Ph.D. has some good posts up, the first of a series, on post-tenure blues. And I can't help it, because the song's in my head: she called one post "I can't complain but sometimes I still do," so would you say this, or "life's been good to me so far"?

Notorious asks some great questions, including these:

Were you depressed post-tenure? Angry? Did you contemplate a career change? Did you check out for a while? Did you double down on the work?  Feel free to post anonymously if you want.

Not depressed or angry but liberated.  I had done what the system said I should do, and, instead of going horribly wrong, as usual, it had worked.

The job security thing was and is huge for me, irrationally so.  I had not worried much about earning tenure, partly because I was working so hard but primarily because of an ingrained fatalism about my ability to affect the results. It was a huge relief to know that the institution would have to mobilize in major ways to fire me, if it ever wanted to.  Maybe that's the mindset you get after years of adjuncting.

But I know the feeling Notorious is talking about.  It's like that Peggy Lee song "Is that All There Is?" that is on my "Top 10 Most Depressing Songs of All Time" list; Earnest English even expressed it that way in her comment over at Notorious's place.   It's a serious issue, and a serious conversation.

So--post-tenure blues, or were you more conflicted/relieved/other about it?

Comments Wordpress won't let me post

Wordpress is on another kick of dismissing my comments with "your comment cannot be posted at this time," which means "we know you are a secret troll/spammer and want nothing to do with you," so here are a couple of comments:

• To Dame Eleanor Hull:  If I knew how to make little hands clapping signs, I'd do it.  Kudos to Sir John!
• To nicoleandmaggie: Do you mean "do something FUN every day that scares you"? Riding horses sounds like that.
• To xcademiqz: I try not to interrupt, but some people speak and make a point, and when I respond to it, keep going to make the same point a second way, and a third way, and a fourth way.  I end up interrupting without meaning to.
• Comrade PhysioProf: Those flank steak tacos look amazing, as did the flank steak with rice pilaf.  Amazing!

It's not a "best practice" unless someone makes a profit

At the Chronicle, somebody's determined to confuse/conflate "innovative teaching methods" with "stuff we can charge students for."

Among the "innovative" methods that those pesky professors know about but are swinging their Luddite sledgehammers at:

•  Using standardized assessment tools to gauge student performance.
• Using external (paid) materials to augment content (This at a time when a lot of us can't persuade students to buy books and some state legislatures are trying to outlaw book ordering if a free alternative is available)
• Using clickers 

Also taken as given as "best practices":

• Flipped classrooms (which Jonathan Rees pointed out in a post about Coursera could be used to divide "content" from "helper teachers" or whatever, the old MOOC model) 
• Hybrid courses (partly online)

The study is from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but I'm guessing some of the many profitable edtech/content providers are very interested in this, too. 

Just to be clear: Some of these don't cost money, of course, and I have no problem with any of them if the instructor finds them useful. But to take these as evidence of "innovation," and by implication to cast those who don't use them as not using "best practices," is illogical and rhetorically fairly--no, really--shady. 

This week in calling out sexism: "Office Housework" and "Bossy or Brilliant?"

Two articles this week confirm what many of us have experienced about gendered attitudes.

In "Office Housework" at  the New York Times, Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant support with good evidence something that we've seen before: women get to take notes, take on service tasks, and so on. If they don't do these things, they're not collegial; if they do them, they are relegated to lesser status:

When a woman declines to help a colleague, people like her less and her career suffers. But when a man says no, he faces no backlash. A man who doesn’t help is “busy”; a woman is “selfish.”

For staying late and helping, a man was rated 14 percent more favorably than a woman. When both declined, a woman was rated 12 percent lower than a man. Over and over, after giving identical help, a man was significantly more likely to be recommended for promotions, important projects, raises and bonuses. A woman had to help just to get the same rating as a man who didn’t help.

In "Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant?" Claire Cain Miller reports the results of Benjamin Schmidt's study of terms used to describe male and female professors at RateMyProfessor.com:

It suggests that people tend to think more highly of men than women in professional settings, praise men for the same things they criticize women for, and are more likely to focus on a woman’s appearance or personality and on a man’s skills and intelligence.

And, for a little humor, "Reasons you were not promoted that were totally unrelated to gender" at McSweeney's.

Some of the comments on the first article say, in effect, "yeah, the sky is blue, sexism happens, so why are you reporting on it?"  But it's essential to report on this, and to keep reporting on it, because who would have thought, in 2015, we would still be having to talk about this because it was still happening? This isn't a new finding; these behaviors and their consequences have reported on since at least the 1970s.

I experienced an example of the related phenomenon the other day, the one where a woman says something, is ignored, and hears a man make the same point to great acclaim 5 minutes later.  In this case, I was in a meeting, summed up an essential intellectual/conceptual problem fairly elegantly (we all have our moments) and saw the rest of those in the room, all men, nod but otherwise not respond.  Five minutes later, one of the men says the exact same thing, another man says "brilliantly put," and the rest chime in with words of praise.

What's up with that?  Why does that still happen? They obviously heard me, or why else would they have used my phrasing?  Let me take that back: they heard the phrase and the logic, but they didn't hear me.

Why didn't I bang my shoe on the desk and demand to be heard?  Partly because I was amused to see this happen again, because this isn't my first rodeo with this kind of thing, and partly because of the double standard: nothing would be gained, and I would be spending social capital to push the needle of judgment on me toward "crazy and hysterical" instead of "sane and rational." It's not worth it.

There are a few things we can do, though.

• Stop apologizing. I realized a couple of years ago that I was routinely using the phrase "I'm sorry" when reporting less than optimal news as part of my job and in a lot of other instances.  The turning point came when I realized I'd used "sorry" about 4 times in a single message.  I took them all out and have been writing stronger messages ever since.
• Sit on your hands once in a while when volunteers are needed. Not all the time, of course, but you don't need to save the world or even your department.
• Stop explaining. Learn the phrase "No, I won't be there at that time"; you don't need to explain why. They didn't ask you to explain; they asked whether you could be there. Offer another time or two when you'll be available. That's all they really want to know.
• You are not someone's research assistant (except when they are paying you). When someone says "I wonder if we could collate this information/run this data/match this information with that set/track down these addresses/update this database," say, "I'll put you in touch with someone who can do this" or, better still, "I'll look forward to your results."  
• Answer the question that you're asked, not the premium version that you think they need to know.  You are not in school any more, and there is no extra credit for email. If they ask you about A, and you reply with information about A, B, C, and D, they won't necessarily care or thank you, and you will have used up your store of time and willpower (h/t nicoleandmaggie) for something that is of no benefit to you.  If they want to know about B, C, and D, they will ask. 

What else can we do? 

Random bullets of nothing momentous except books

• Do dog friends ever pick you up on your walks/runs?  Today a nice golden retriever that I'd never seen before followed me for a good 2 1/2 miles through the neighborhood, all the way home.  He would stop and look back to see if I was following him.  When I got home and went inside, he said "Woof!" which apparently meant that this walk was not over as far as he was concerned.  He's not there now, so I'm guessing he went home; he was obviously someone's dog and well cared for. I don't have a dog, but I'm guessing he wanted a walk and figured he might as well follow someone.  I've had this happen more than once, not always with the same dog. Is this a dog thing that you've noticed? 
• Now that the book is off my desk, I'm finding all kinds of conference papers and longer talks that I never turned into articles, reading them, and wondering why I didn't send them out.  This is taking me away from the overdue article that I'm supposed to be writing but may pay off in the long run. 
•  Daniel Goldstein at IHE makes good points about the limitations of e-books. 
• And since I've been packing up books to donate in order to make space on the shelves, I find myself asking questions I didn't use to ask about some of the relatively obscure ones: 
• How likely is it that I will need this book in the future, and is it likely that a library will still have it? 
• Or will the librarians have deaccessioned it for being old, or dusty, or because they see it as ridiculously obsolete (like those librarians that nicoleandmaggie link to who make fun of books)? 
• Or because they believe in the whole 'Google Books now, Google Books forever' thing, when more books keep getting embargoed all the time? 
• Some books that I'd otherwise have given away are ones I've kept simply because I'm not convinced I will never need them.  Yes, I know: this ought to give me my own Discovery Channel series called "Hoarders: Book Ladies," but you never know.

Show your work

I was turned down for a grant recently and got the feedback.  Basically, they liked the project but wanted to see more relevance to broader contemporary concerns.

I get that and am okay with it.  What I thought was self-evident about the value of the project was not, and what I needed to do was to show my work, the way kids are taught to do now with math.  The grantors wanted it to be more relatable, and I already see a way to do that.

Although I view applying for grants as equivalent to spending 20 hours buying a Powerball ticket with about the same likelihood of success, I will probably apply again, and, yes, this time show my work.

There's some resistance to this, though, in some subfields, and I keep seeing comments that roughly translated would be one of these:  "Scholars in old traditional field X just don't understand how groundbreaking my work in kitten studies is and are persecuting me because they won't fund it" or "They are just the olds and are stupid jerks incapable of understanding technology because yay shiny technology is a good in itself." Maybe the complainers are right, and maybe they're not.  But that's the game.

Showing your work is what you do with grants. You're essentially betting that the vast time suck of applying is going to pay off.  You have to be a gambler who thinks that very small odds and small rewards are worth the rush of winning. (For scientists, most humanities grants don't amount to a rounding error in what they apply for and get.)  But as with any gambling situation, the odds favor the house, and if you don't play by the house's rules, you don't get to play very long.

Show your work.

New year, new blog template (no post)

I'm trying out this new blog template,

Well, that's a relief!

First, the Laocoon manuscript is done and sent to the press. Now I wait for readers' reports.  But done! And sent! Thank you all for hanging in with words of encouragement over the past couple of years.

All the trinkets I promised myself once I finished are things I don't really want now. The main one was a new iPad, but I looked at them and wasn't feeling it.  Apparently being done is its own reward.

Oh, and one other thing: I took my time when wandering around Costco the other day and even looked at housewares, though I didn't buy any.  That felt like a treat, taking time and strolling around the store, which is pathetic but true  The other thing was to look at and comment on your blogs, but Wordpress is having a spitefest against me again, so I got "this comment cannot be published" on a few of them (sorry).

Do I want to get at the promised-but-delayed projects that I have put off while working 12+ hours a day on the book over the past month? I do not.  I irrationally now want to start another book, but the projects have to come first.

 The best part of that time was feeling the intensity of wanting to work, really wanting to, and being able to do it. No timers and all of that; I just wanted to work.

Time to get to campus.

Random Bullets of MLA 2015

• Nice weather!  Once the fog cleared, I realized that we were actually on the water, with breathtaking views of mountains across the bay.  Another plus: no ice on the streets.
• Downtown Vancouver as you see it from the convention center was apparently dropped wholesale onto the planet, buildings and all, starting in 1975, so all the architecture you could see from the conference site is interesting and new. 
• Hotels were close to the convention center and easy to find--big, distinctive, and with bright signs. If you've ever stood on a street corner at MLA wondering which way was which, having distinctive buildings is helpful. There were lots of good restaurants as well as a food court for quick meals. 
• Wifi password was prominently displayed in the hotel, and, saints be praised, the conference center wifi didn't require you to log in. This was the best conference yet in terms of being connected. 
• Also, and I don't recall this before: the convention center was loaded with smiling, helpful MLA people who could tell you which way to go to get to the room you wanted or the book exhibit.  A few years ago at one of the conferences, you entered the Convention Hall and the Twilight Zone simultaneously. You would see NO ONE as you walked down the dimly lighted hall toward what you hoped was a hall with rooms where the sessions were held, your heels echoing on the concrete floor.
• The panels and papers I saw were really good, with spirited but courteous discussion.  People stayed within time limits.  Could it be that the famed Canadian politeness extended to the conference atmosphere?  Or was it the red and green sheets of paper for signalling the panelists to be quiet?  I could figure out that red meant stop, but I never did figure out the green one: did it mean "2 minutes"? At any rate, it's an eco-friendly alternative to the red and green lights of MLA 2006.
• Here's a pro tip if you want to get your session accepted: call it "The ____ Turn." There were lots of sessions with that title. There also seemed to be numerous sessions on DH, on rhet/comp/writing, and on comics and games.  It's exciting to see the MLA opening up to these.
• I was hoping the issue of Skype interviews instead of conference interviews (which I favor) would come up somewhere and could get an official MLA endorsement, but apparently it didn't.
• If I were giving the MLA a granola bar ranking (granola bars being my go-to breakfast), I'd give this five out of five granola bars. 

Other MLA posts: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011,  2006

The news we need isn't the news we get, and it's our own fault

 One way you can save time and a whole lot of negativity is never to look at anything promoted by the King of Clickbait, Emerson Spartz.  Read Andrew Marantz's article at The New Yorker. It's pretty chilling about the, uh, "borrowing" (hey, I don't want to get sued) and repackaging of other people's news content with no regard for actually informing people, being accurate, or any other recognizable component of news.

The writer's tone in that piece is fascinating, too, as if he's watching with horror as an unrepentant cobra goes about its day but is trying to provide an objective view.

The King of Clickbait won't rest, he says, until all the news is tailored to us and our interests, which the information collected in our clickthroughs will tell all the news aggregators. News organizations like The New York Times are twentieth-century losers (I'm paraphrasing).

This is actually an idea as old as the World Wide Web, but I've become more attuned to it recently because of

• Listicles
• Headlines that end in a question mark and reveal nothing
• Numbers in headlines
• Misspelled headlines, even at The New York Times, to say nothing of the hilarity that ensues when I look at the headlines in our local paper
• Clickable links at Slate and The Huffington Post that bear no resemblance to the subject matter of the page where they finally take you.
• CNN. Just look at it, and you tell me what's going on.
• Yahoo News, which used to be decent 15 years ago but now is basically run by the Home Shopping Network, as far as I can tell from my infrequent visits. This article about Marissa Mayer at least explains why that's so.

Ha! As they say, you see what I did there?

Anyway.

Negativity sells, or generates clicks.  I read recently that a list of the 10 best movies generated far less interest (measured in clicks) than the 10 worst.

We keep clicking on the worst of things, and we anticipate with schadenfreude-laden breath reading something that makes us feel better about our lives by contrast. It doesn't work. It just drags us down into the Kardashian pit of five weird tricks to lose weight.

So the next time some piece of outrage-clickbait (like college football coaches' salaries)  beckons, I'm going to seek out an article on the budget, maybe, or at least Paul Krugman. Think of it as casting a vote for real news with the only currency we've got.

Resolution/Revolution

I'm not much on New Year's resolutions, but it struck me that a revolution, of a mild sort, might be just the thing. They're only one letter apart, after all.

The question I want to ask is this one: what events, attitudes, or actions that you could control this year would you like to change for next year? How do you plan to do it?

1. I'd like to be more positive next year instead of immediately thinking of a snarky or negative answer to things I see, mostly on the internet. The stupid clickbait headlines, always in the form of a question, seem to be begging for this, but why give in to it? 

Action: Let's go with Mr. Lincoln's "the better angels of our natures" instead of the worse ones and consciously turn some of those negative thoughts around. I've already started doing this to an extent.

2. I'd like to be more inwardly patient instead of getting annoyed with people over trivial things.  I'm usually outwardly polite, but this is getting harder to sustain. So what if they're bragging incessantly about how productive they are or if they've just discovered that water is wet and want to share their vast knowledge with everyone?  It has nothing to do with me, so why get annoyed?

Action: Stay away from bragfest arenas like Twitter and Facebook. Set a limit--maybe check in every 6 weeks or give them up.  Stay away from professional sites that tell you what you already know, like that water is wet.

3. I'd like to get better control over my time and to stop being angry about email interruptions. In fact, looking at these items, I realize that I'd like to stop being so inwardly angry about trivial things, since the things that are making me angry (email, things I read) are almost entirely within my control.

Action: I'd slipped a little on the autoreply and email rules I'd set for myself and as a result let email and other events intrude where they didn't have to.

4. I need to structure writing time that operates as I really work.  I get up and write in the morning, but it's hard to sit in a chair because I have so much energy then. The time when I want  to write is in the evening after about 8 p.m. I have fought this tendency because of all the advice about writing early.

Action: Get more exercise in the morning (as I do in the summer) so that I can write more effectively. Get up from the computer when my eyes give out at 2 p.m. and do something else for a while.  Don't fight the writing at night impulse but use that time to go back and write from the morning ideas.


Put together, these don't look so revolutionary, but I'm guessing that there'd be a quiet change for the better if they're put into practice. 

What are you going to change this year?

Random bullets, holiday edition

• Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy Boxing Day!
• Happy celebration of grades being turned in and the semester being over!
• I just wrote a comment over at Fie's place about why I'm still keeping up with the blog even if I'm trying to go full tilt on getting the book edited with footnotes done. It's an alternative to the other writing, and I find myself thinking of little things I would like to write here. The words want to be here, and it doesn't take that long to write them down. 
• Speaking of writing, Historiann's Christmas post really lit a fire under me ("now that the book is off to the editor"), so Historiann, thank you for that.
• Once again this year I thank the goddess Rosemary Feal or whoever is responsible for the later MLA dates. It is so wonderful not to have to wake up in the middle of the night on the day after Christmas to transport my suitcase, my paper anxiety, and myself to the airport for a full day of travel and wondering whether the conference hotel will give away my room before I get there (yes, this happened to me even though I guaranteed the room with a credit card). Just having the chance to regroup before that trip makes the whole holiday season better.  This year my paper is a section from the book, so it needs to be trimmed and spruced up for reading but is otherwise done, I hope.
• In Alice in Wonderland, people are always advising Alice to keep her temper. This is sound advice that I am following with the people who email me to ask admin questions on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I keep my temper and write back after a day or so, being careful to spend no more than 10 seconds and 10 words on the message.
• Latest insight: University offices are like everywhere else when it comes to dealing with the people there. Some are lovely, like going into a bakery; some are so bureaucratic that the DMV sounds like a day at the beach; and some, you learn, will be confrontational, like dealing with an insurance company that automatically and aggressively denies your claim even if you're in the right.

Random bullets of some things

• Really enjoyed my class(es) this semester.  In one, I was a couple of minutes late about a week ago, which is very unusual, and when I came in, they said, "There she is!" and gave me a round of applause in what I'm assuming is a mocking but affectionate way.  Lots of positive comments on the class from them, too, and the feeling was certainly mutual: I really liked them.
• One minor way I liked them: they always identified themselves by name in their emails (great) whereas people from random other places will email me with entire messages like "Hey, did you get that thing I sent, and why haven't you done something with it?" without identifying the "thing" they're talking about.  This is getting into rant territory, so I'll stop there. 
• On the positive side, I've decided on a few steps for email so that this doesn't degenerate into the "I hate email" blog:
• You don't have to be the first to respond if someone sends you and several others a "please fix this" email.  In fact, if you wait it out, you might not have to respond at all.  Since I'm usually a get-it-done person on these, this was a hard lesson but a good one. And some demanding messages -- the 3rd or 4th in a row about things that have already been solved -- are just getting deleted.
• Sometimes a break makes people want to wax philosophical about ways to do things differently and how you might spend your time over the break by outlining strategic ways to accomplish them. Hence anything with phrases about planning for the future, possible scenarios, or "next year let's do this" is getting a fake autoreply that says "Great idea. You look into it, develop a plan, and report back in January." 
• Now to get back to work in the manuscript, grade some papers, and try to chip away at the Christmas to-do list. 

Imaginary email responses (a cranky post)

I'm rewatching The Office on Netflix while folding laundry, because it is more soothing than getting stressed out about the work I'm not doing when I'm folding laundry, and laundry constitutes a delightful break in the day at this point in the semester. Those of you who watched The Office may remember when Pam tried to get people to reply to the wedding invitations she sent out.  Short version: no one would send an RSVP. Kelly said she'd only come if Ryan would be there. Meredith said she'd text Pam on the morning of the wedding for driving directions. Ryan said he liked to keep things loose. On and on.

That episode struck a chord with me.  Some of these are hypothetical; others, not so much.

• If you send me an email that says nothing more than "See attached," here's a news flash: I have an equally terse two-word reply in mind that I am too polite to send.  Best case scenario: I open the attachment and don't respond. Usual case scenario: it goes into the junk mail file immediately.
• If I've asked you to respond to a poll so I can schedule a meeting, and you reply with a message listing all the various times you are not available but never answering the poll, here's a pro tip for you: I'm not going to enter them into the poll for you, or indeed take any notice of your special unavailability at all. If you think I care more about having you at the meeting than you care about being there, let's just call it a grievous error of judgment on your part.  Just click on the link and fill in the poll like the rest of us.
• If I ask you to fill out a form and you write back with an email saying "you know I always do X and Y," do you think I will fill out the form because your time is so much more important than mine? Seriously? If the most eminent people at the university are courteous enough to take the time to fill it out (and they do; maybe that's how they got to be eminent), you can do it, too. Get over yourself.
• If I write to ask you a question after a lengthy email exchange during which you changed your mind 5 times, would it kill you to answer the question instead of saying"I thought we cleared that up"? If we "cleared it up," I wouldn't be writing to ask you the question, now, would I?
• If after failing to respond, you send me an aggrieved email that you or your wishes were not considered, that sound you hear is me playing the world's tiniest violin for your distress. Oh, and also shuffling your complaint to the bottom of my considerable email pile.  
• I am also not interested in a lot of attitude if you outrank me in the academic worldsphere. Unless your 10-line self-promotional sig file includes the name "God, Ph.D." I am unimpressed with your attitude and will take special pains to indicate that. 
• Edited to add: Northern Clime University, I love you, but at this point in the semester when we're already drowning in email, could you please refrain from sending those all-employee messages every day about "Next Tuesday is take your kitten to work day!" and such?

Writing inspiration: Creativity link roundup

After yesterday, when I did not do one scrap of writing (Thanksgiving, yes, but if I had time for a Godfather marathon with family, I had time to write), I figured it was time for some writing inspiration.

"How Environment Can Boost Creativity" is interesting, once you make your way past the blizzard of popups that The Atlantic has taken to hurling between its articles and the public.

Apparently a messy desk can help (check), dim lighting (check, though not dim by choice), and a little noise:

Evidence also supports the habits of people who eschew a desk altogether, instead opting to work in a coffee shop. A little bit of ambient noise (between 50 and 70 decibels—the average noise level of a coffee shop) slightly disrupts the mental process, which one study showed to help people engage in more abstract thinking during a word-association task.

This explains why so many people write in coffee shops, maybe, and why I ought to give it a try.  But I play music to drown out the voices within; does that count?

You can even listen to coffee shop sounds on your computer, if you want to: https://coffitivity.com/

And more interesting points:

Though few people actually do it anymore, writing by hand can help with idea generation, learning, and memorization.

Other studies have shown that taking walks, or working in rooms with high ceilings, can promote divergent or abstract thinking.

Another tip: Get a little tipsy.

Handwriting: will try it again. Walks: absolutely. Rooms with high ceilings: is this the library effect? And a little tipsy? How about if you reach for a Diet Coke instead, even if wine is probably better for you?

What about coffee itself?  Just as I was about to try to learn to drink coffee because of all the health benefits, we were told that it might hamper creativity.
  
The New Yorker  reviews the research and concludes, "Yup, afraid so," whereas The Atlantic, in a deep state of denial and perhaps dizzy from all the popups, says, "Nah, don't worry about it.  Next to Adderall, it's the best thing we've got."

There's also a creativity search engine, Yossarian, from "I tried to make a search engine write me a poem" at NYTimes.  I didn't try it, because you have to create an account and log in, and I do not need one more password to write down.

I calculate that I spend at least 15 minutes a week tending passwords--looking them up in a book I have, since every one is a precious unique snowflake, as we are told to make them; having password reminders sent and then trying to remember the passwords for the email account where I have the reminders sent, and so on.

Now we're being told that maybe depression is related to creativity or at least deep problem-solving behaviors.  "What if We're Wrong about Depression?" suggests a physiological basis related to infection and a possibly adaptive evolutionary purpose, which the ubiquitous brain science writer Maria Popova puts in context over at BrainPickings. No one would ever, ever choose this as a strategy for creativity, but it helps to have another way to think about this debilitating problem.

But maybe the best strategy is Rachel Toor's "The Habits of Highly Productive Writers." It's a great piece of writing inspiration. She advises that a little self-hatred if you don't get your writing done can go a long way toward getting it out the door and that yes, you can get bored with your own writing midway through.

I'm not so sure about Toor's friend who has "trained his family" that he can ignore them because his writing is more important, though. Maybe he's Faulkner, who said the same thing, or maybe he's just this guy.  He'd better be pretty darned sure that his writing is worth it, and unless he's Faulkner, I doubt that it is.

Teaching: What's love got to do with it?

Xykademiqz has a good post and cartoon up about how teaching is valued at a research university (hint: aim for "decent") and What Now? has a good post about the tyranny of the online gradebook in which she discovers that her students haven't been reading comments on their returned papers but just checking their grades.

These struck a chord with me because they're examples of a slogan that gets repeated often, and cynically, over at the CHE discussion forums: "You can't care more than they do."

In Xykademiqz's case, the "they" would be administrators who care about grant dollars and researcher recognition, with adequate teaching being a baseline that, if you go above it, might indicate a lack of research seriousness, as a colleague of hers keeps insisting.

In What Now?'s case, the "they" could be students who care about the grades but not the comments.  She started putting the grades in later, so they'd have to look.  I did that, too, for a while, but then got lazy and posted the grades with the papers.  The result has been that I'm not sure whether they're reading the comments or not.

  In fact, I thought about putting in a secret word on the comments and then giving them an extra point on the paper if they could identify the word by writing it down in class. I didn't do it, because I don't want to treat grades as a game (and I "can't care more than they do," right?), but I was sorely tempted.  With the final paper, taking advice from all who chimed in on this blog, I wrote a little note saying that since they wouldn't have a chance to write another paper, I wouldn't be writing marginal comments but would be available for discussions about the paper if anyone wanted to talk.  The range of those who took me up on this was 0%-0%.

But here's the thing: can you live with yourself and are you happy if you approach teaching from an absolutely rational standpoint?  Xykademqz, for example, has more midterms because she knows it's pedagogically sound.  I write comments for the same reason and meet with students whenever I can to discuss their papers--that is, when they ask to see me (because "can't care . . ." etc.). Yes, I know that "minimal marking" has its adherents and is supported by research blah blah blah, but I think they deserve to know what's going on, especially when it's plain that they have no clue whatsoever why there's a checkmark in the margin beside a sentence.

Think about the tradeoffs that we might make if we really treat teaching rationally:

1. If you have a choice of teaching a class with a cap of 40-50, for which you have no grader but that you love, do you request that class or another that enrolls, say, 25?  How about a class that enrolls 100 for which you are well suited but that takes a lot of prep?

2. Do you eliminate one assignment or an exam, even if you think the students might need it, because of the time demands?

What other kinds of tradeoffs do we make?

Real world math

This is really in nicoleandmaggie's wheelhouse, not mine, but here goes. It's more of a link roundup than a post with a point.

• The NY Times has been running good articles on saving for college, including some that talk about what to do if parents haven't saved for college, another that tracks declining support for state institutions, and a third that explains why rating institutions won't help lower costs. There was one recently (I can't find it now) that was shocked to realize that FAFSA (and CSS, the private version) counts everything as an asset, including retirement accounts, which are dangerously treated as funds to be tapped for college. (The unmentioned corollary is that neither FAFSA or CSS has any interest in listing debts, like car loans or mortgages--just assets.)
• How likely is it that there could be significant overlap between the academics saving for retirement (below) and those who, having had children in their mid-30s to 40s, are 18 years later confronting the realities of college costs? I think you know the answer to this one.
• Although students are applying for many more colleges than before (too many, says this article), part of the reason is that they want to play schools' financial package offers against one another once they're accepted. One piece of advice from one of the articles: if you play this game, make sure that the financial aid package is for more than a year. I've known parents who have steered students to the school with the best package of aid, only to have that aid dry up after the first year when it's tough to change. 
• Over at The Chronicle, "Retire Already!"  speaks to us from a land of sunshine and unicorns, where everyone has a million dollars saved up for retirement and the only factor keeping anyone 55+ from retiring is their selfish, limpet-like clinging to jobs. But here are two hypothetical scenarios for faculty members; which one sounds more like the people you know? (Both are purely hypothetical, based on what I've read at The Chronicle and on comments.)
• Golden Child graduates with a PhD at 28, immediately lands a tenure-track job, progresses up the ladder with raises every year and the expected promotions, has a lavish retirement package, and jets off to fabulous places (or like the writer above, accepts fabulous artist-in-residence residencies) when she retires at 65.
• Regular Person finished a PhD in her mid to late 30s, gets a TT job at 40-45, and goes through several years of no raises at all, not because of merit but because of the recession and flatlining funding. Promotions are forthcoming, but because of salary compression, she makes less as an associate than her new-minted assistant colleagues. She has 15- 20 years, until "Retire, Already!" says she should stop, to save up enough money, at 6% of her salary per year or whatever the retirement plan is,  to last the rest of her life--say, 30 more years if she retires at 65.

Attitude reset: Jumping off the Anxiety Treadmill and taking a break from "polishing the shiny"

I read one time--okay, lots of times--that since the key to establishing a successful routine is to get into a habit, like writing,  the flip side is also true: if you have bad habits, such as reading advice columns or stress eating or checking Facebook incessantly, if you have a break of even a few days, the ties of habit and the neural pathways that reinforce them get weaker, so it's easier to give them up.

Being at a conference is a good reset break. Yes, it's stressful as well as stimulating, and yes, you will definitely get sick when someone drops into a chair next to yours and announces that they're coming down with a cold but just didn't want to miss this session, but the reset part is pretty much worth it. I had already gone on a Facebook fast and felt much calmer as a result.  Going to a conference is like pressing the reset button on bad habits. If you leave Twitter alone, too, you may even stop feeling like the Red Queen, as though you have to top everyone not only in productivity but in bragging about it--excuse me, "wisely promoting your brand and your scholarship."

At Inside Higher Ed, there's a great post called "Get Cracking" that calls this endless self-promotion "polishing the shiny." From the article:

[I]t reminds me of how pervasive the combination of raised productivity quotas (measured in quantity and dubious reputational metrics of quality) coupled with the need to be spending a substantial amount of our time promoting our personal brand through multiple social channels is making it hard to do anything other than produce and polish that shiny surface like mad. No time to think, or learn, or listen. We can’t do those things because producing and polishing the shiny takes all of our time and we’re scared. Scared we’ll fail. Scared we’ll be overlooked. Scared we won’t make the rent. Scared we won’t have a future.

I am starting to think of the whole education-social media complex as a giant Anxiety Treadmill. No matter how much you do, no matter how fast you run, someone is always doing more. Tweeting from a conference, of which there are multiple ones every single week of the year. Publishing a book or article. Getting a contract. Being invited to do a talk. I've written here before about whether our obsession with the number  of words we write bears any correlation to the quality of those words, or, for that matter, to the readers we hope will learn from them.

Think about it.  Do you sit down with a journal just for fun and to keep up, or do you look at it only when you're doing some research of your own? Do you think to yourself every time you sit down to read something not immediately related to research, "Yes, but when I'm reading I'm not writing"? 

I'm not denying that there's knowledge to be gained through these channels, especially Twitter.  But is  it worth the feeling of running and getting nowhere?

In trying to step off the Anxiety Treadmill, I discovered one thing: when you look back on that frantic  stream of information, it feels a little being on board a ship and looking at the land receding behind you. They're gesturing, but you don't have to listen to it, at least until you decide to dive back in again.  Then you can do the reset button all over again. 

Random bullets of travel

I'm sitting in an airport and I can smell bread baking.  Who bakes bread in an airport? Subway? It doesn't matter. It smells great even though I am not hungry.

Did you know that some airlines won't check your luggage if you arrive more than 4 hours early for your flight? It's true.

I am on a streak of losing things and leaving things behind out of distraction and carelessness. Some of them  I find (keys) and some of them I don't.  This may mean something (stress? fatigue?). But I'm sure there's a better week ahead.

A completely hypothetical and in no way real situation: Let's say you know how to do something and have the equipment to do it and it's an essential feature of a conference--a Jenga-building machine, let's say.  The speakers are supposed to build with Jenga, but in the spirit of academics everywhere, the Jenga-building hall has not provided the right equipment and although most speakers are gracious, a very few speakers are too something (too proud? too lazy? too invested in their Jenga incompetence as a mark of their vast intellectual acumen? ) to bring their own equipment and make sure that the Jenga-building will proceed apace.

You hurl yourself into the breach just to be a decent person and, since you have the equipment, set it up and help them with Jenga-building during their presentations. Later, you hear complaints from a few audience members, not about your Jenga-building help but generalized griping that the Jenga-building should have been faster, smoother, and easier. If you had not helped the speakers, their presentations would have had no Jenga at all.

Two questions:  Would you (1) do it all over again if the same conditions came up because most speakers are decent and gracious or (2) "accidentally" leave your Jenga-building equipment behind the next time?

And to the person who said, "Someone ought to get in there and check out the Jenga-building equipment throughly and and in advance," what do you say?  (1) "I'm glad you volunteered to do that." (2) "As a random audience member who isn't any part of organizing the conference, I'll get right on that" (3) Other.

Maybe a little bit more advice on the job letter

I've written a bunch of posts full of advice about the job letter, and I don't want to repeat myself so this will be short.

As far as I can tell, the advice has not changed from blog to blog or year to year, but there are a couple of points in otherwise good posts that I would like to challenge.

1. Karen Kelsky (Professor is In) usually has good advice, like about tailoring a job letter. (Of course I think it's good; it's advice I've given myself. ) I did read somewhere that it's too much of a burden for the applicant to tailor a job letter, but if you're applying for a job you are serious about, what do you think?

 But she thinks Interfolio and non-tailored letters from your faculty recommenders are a sign of the apocalypse, or anyway serious professional laziness on the part of faculty.  I'm happy to write personalized letters, but as a member and/or chair of a search committee, I certainly didn't expect personalized letters from faculty members that had tailored them to our specific hiring needs.

2. Philip N. Howard's helpful Inside Higher Ed essay on the lines needed in job letters has a lot of good advice, too. Amidst this excellent advice, though, is one thing that might not be true:

"Address your letter to the person heading the search or the department head. A greeting such as 'Dear Committee Members' shows you haven’t done enough research." 

"Research" in this case may involve defying the HR requirements of posting the ad, which for various reasons may not list a name at all but may instead  specify that the letter has to be addressed to "Search Committee Chair" or some such. I don't know why they do this, and I'm not brave enough to go to HR and find out.

So "research" in this case may involve using the name of the department chair, or calling the department and requesting the name of the search committee chair. I get why Howard would think this is important, but what if 300 applicants all call the administrative assistant to try to get this information in the name of "research"?  It's nice if you have the name, but don't lose any sleep over it if you don't. It's a salutation, not the Holy Grail.

Let me assure job candidates who may be reading this that, as a search committee member and/or chair, I could not tell you whether the hundreds of letters I read had my name, the department chair's name, "Dear Committee Members," or "Dear Bozos on the Bus." Quite honestly, we skip to the first paragraph -- AS WE SHOULD-- and get right to the substance of your qualifications and interest in the position.

3. The letterhead issue is another one that bloggers, CHE, and IHE have written about for the past ten years or so. Karen Kelsky points out that you should be able to get an electronic version, or, in a pinch, Photoshop a version of it for your electronic publications.  I'd only add that your department probably has this for the asking for grad students (although some don't give it out).

 In a funny reversal, when I asked for this letterhead template a few years ago, various Northern Clime admins assured me that we had no such thing for faculty or students. What was I talking about! Didn't exist! A student did have a copy of it, though, so that's how I was able to post much better-looking versions of letters to job portals and Interfolio. For the most recent logo redesign, we were officially sent the template, which is a step in the right direction.

Pedantry or self-preservation?

It's grading season--wait, it's always grading season, isn't it?--and as the papers come flooding in, it's inevitable that we'll get some of these:
--papers with no page numbers
--electronic papers called things like "myroughdraft.doc" or the ever-popular "paper1.doc."
--papers with no Works Cited
--papers with no names
--papers with Works Cited in a separate file
--papers in some odd format that can't be opened
--Works Cited in some peculiar numbered list, which we don't use in MLA

Now, on the papers themselves, we're used to explaining, or not explaining if you believe in minimal marking, when there's a comma splice or a fragment or a missing apostrophe. I am sometimes told I'm the first person ever to point these out to the student, which, if true, is kind of sad and inspiring at the same time (as in they're better off to learn about it now).  Along with commenting on the contents, which is the more important part, it's part of our jobs to note these.  We grade holistically, so we're not dinging them for points all the time.

But those format things in the list above used to make me bang my head on the desk.  Why would they not follow the guidelines that I'd given to them? I'm writing a final comment, and I have to number the pages myself to say "On p. 4"--why, oh why, is it up to me?

[Edited to add, in light of Tenured Radical's recent column: I don't make fun of them for this, or think they are doing it to spite me, or think it reflects on them as people in any way.  Anyone who's ever filled out a grant application or any other kind of form can testify that when you're trying to get it done, you'll always find some piece that you find arbitrary. That puts you and the students on the same level ground about requirements.

No, my issue is strictly whether it makes more work for me or not.]

Then I got smart.  The papers are still graded holistically, but here's a test: does it make more work for me if Stu Dent didn't complete the format things? Then Stu Dent gets a gentle reminder on the first paper, and after that, it's -1 for those things. It's not enough of a penalty to hurt them, but it's enough to get their attention--and it seems to work.

Some would call it pedantry.  I call it the "you make me work to do something you were supposed to do, you pay" rule, or self-preservation.

Test post

The Mac OS updated itself today, and in addition to making all the icons look like international traffic signs, it's messing with things like Firefox and Chrome.

I log in, but it says I'm not logged in when I try to comment on other blogs, sort of like this duet from Annie Get Your Gun. Watch it if you are brave and can watch Betty Hutton without screaming.

"No, you can't."

"Yes, I can."

"No, you can't."

And so on.

Writers on Writing: Winston Churchill

I want to reply to Historiann's challenge, but first a post about writing.

From The Guardian, a window into Winston Churchill's methods of writing, with comments:

Downstairs there is a room with green lamps hanging from the ceiling, and maps on the wall, and a telephone exchange: and here Churchill kept his researchers – about six of them at once, junior Oxford dons, research fellows, some of them destined for high academic honours. There they were, filleting, devilling, rootling around in books and documents in search of stuff that might be of use.

Comment: Would you want this?  It's the Doris Kearns Goodwin way of writing (teams of researchers finding material that you fashion into text) and it works well for her and others.  But would you have as good a sense of the primary texts if you had outsourced, so to speak, the initial reading of them? 

I'd like to try a research assistant, since I'm sure it would help. If nothing else, I could set a research assistant to changing all the @#$%^& in-text citations to endnotes in Chicago 16 style.  (I have experimented with Endnote's Chicago 16 setting & don't see any way to do this automatically.)

After dictating to a squadron of scribes all night, Churchill would have text. Oh, boy, would he have text--more, Boris Johnson, the author, tells us than Dickens and Shakespeare combined:

The sheaves of typewritten paper he would then correct and amend by hand – and we have innumerable examples of his cursive blue-inked marginalia – and the results would be typeset as they would appear on the page; and even that was not the end.

He would fiddle with the text. He would switch clauses around for emphasis, he would swap one epithet for another and, in general, he would take the utmost delight in the process of polishing his efforts; and then he would send the whole lot off to be typeset again.

Why did he write? Partly for money, but also for this:

His creative-depressive personality meant that writing (or painting, or bricklaying) was a way of keeping the “black dog” of depression at bay. He wrote for that sensation of release that comes with laying 200 bricks and writing 2,000 words a day.

The End Matter

I'm close enough to the end, or I'm deluding myself I'm close enough to the end, of this manuscript to start compiling the Works Cited in an actual document rather than Endnote as I work through the footnotes. In looking at the press's guidelines today, guess what citation format I'm supposed to use.

MLA? No.

Chicago 14? No.

Chicago 15? No.

APA? Bite your tongue.

Chicago 16?  Yes indeed, the only one that I had not, until today, shelled out $42 to purchase. Now, if I ever leave academe, I will have enough hefty Chicago/MLA Style books to serve as doorstops for every door in the house.

This made me think of one of my favorite essays, whose title I've shamelessly stolen, Louis Menand's "The End Matter."  Among other gems, there's this one:

To begin with, the designers of Word apparently believe that the conventional method of endnote numbering is with lowercase Roman numerals—i, ii, iii, etc. When was the last time you read anything that adhered to this style? It would lead to sentences like:

In the Gramscian paradigm, the “intellectual”lxxxvii is, by definition, always already a liminal status.lxxxviii

If I weren't laughing so hard, I would cry, because every single time I rename or resave a file, my footnotes revert from Arabic numerals to the Word default for endnotes, something that looks like ASCII run amok.

And I have been looking into the mysteries of compiling master documents in Word, of which only two pieces of advice found online are remarkably consistent:

1) If compiled improperly, master document can turn your chapters into word salad.
2) Sometimes it turns your chapters into word salad just for the sheer joy of destruction.

I still have a lot to do, conference papers to write, and so on, but the fact that I'm getting this close to the end matter makes me think that this will not be the Key to All Mythologies but an actual book.

And now, for a treat, I'm going to read "The End Matter" one more time.

Clap your hands if you believe

I'm not writing here much lately because, in looking at CHE and IHE and ChronicleVitae, I feel as though I've seen these issues before, some of them a lot of times, and written about many of them (ditto).

But one that I'd like to see more specific data about is a trend whereby the PhD and inventive variants are promoted as good bets for working in various unnamed industries or libraries. Aren't librarians having trouble finding work? What kinds of industries? What kinds of foundation work?  The articles I've seen tout 3 or so success stories as the wave of the future, but what are the facts?

Sometimes the Ph.D. is promoted as an enrichment degree so valuable even if you don't get a job, you'll be glad you spent 10 years doing it, which might be true if you are independently wealthy or retired.

Sometimes they even propose expanding or creating new degrees that don't have the expectation of university teaching at the end of it, as in the recent kerfuffle at Cornell.  The descriptions of what exactly graduates would do are both uplifting and stunningly vague, as though even those proposing the degree don't have much of a concept beyond mad critical thinking and research skilz--good in themselves, but how about specifics?

Sometimes, it's not only an enrichment but something you owe it to the world to treat as a calling:

To sustain scholarly inquiry, we need scholars around the country and world engaged in research and capable of critically assessing each other’s work. We need to ensure that humanities graduates at all levels — in K-12 schools, museums, local societies, media, universities, and government — have the space and time to engage in scholarship and be part of the conversation.

Well, yes. Yes, we do need scholars.  Let me add the important corollary that scholars need to eat, and have health insurance, and maybe a place to live and a car to drive, even if you're not counting expensive, frivolous extras like having children.

The article goes on to say we need to address supply and demand:

On the demand side, we must expand the number of tenure-line positions in the humanities across the nation and resist the deprofessionalization of teachers and professors.

Well, done and done, then!

I should not be so cynical about this, but it is crazymaking to read something like this--"we must expand"--when none of this, none, zip, nada is in the power of ordinary academics to do.  We can try, but we do not control the money. Let me repeat: We do not control the money. We have little say over how it is spent, how salaries or research funds are allocated, and did I mention having no control whatever over allocations from the state or Board of Regents or whoever determines the university's budget?  For most of us, simply retaining a line when someone retires instead of having it snatched back by central administration is cause for feasting and dancing around a sacred idol.

When I was little and saw Peter Pan, there was a scene where Tinkerbell was dying and we all had to clap our hands and believe if we wanted to make her well.  Without more facts, these articles seem to me to be saying "clap your hands if you believe, and you will make it so."  I wish these confident assertions were true, but I want some investigative reporting rather than opinion pieces to tell me how they might be.

Dear Ms. Undine answers self-evident questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

Ms. Mentor calls October "exploding head month" because of all the grant applications due then.  A whole lot of local ones are due next week. How can I deal with applications that want to know how much money I need to spend on June 10, 2015 when I can barely get through the stuff I need to do for next Tuesday?

Signed, Future Shock

Dear Future,
Here are some possibilities:
1. Start last year.
2. Start tomorrow for next year.
3. Seriously, practice a little time management.
4. Comfort yourself in the knowledge that with grant support so tight (NEH funds 6% of its individual scholar grants) you are likely only to be bragging fodder for its glossy brochures anyway: "We got 10 zillion applications and only funded 5! Look how selective we are! Yay for us!"

Dear Ms. Undine,

Clay Shirky, a famous person on the Internet, has pronounced laptops a distraction in the classroom and restricted their use, something I figured out and did a long time ago.  Now the fanboys who have called me a Luddite and blamed me for not liking the Shiny Things are falling all over themselves pronouncing the Wisdom of Clay.  Why is this so?

Signed,

Not Ned Ludd

Dear Not Ned,

Because you are not famous on the Internet, and because, I fear, you are not a guy and hence to fanboys do not have the mental equipment to think intelligently about Shiny Things. Think of yourself as the secret Queen of the Internet who predicts all things but whose power would be diminished if anyone listened to you.  In other words, get over it.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Out of idle curiosity, I looked at the MLA Job List and discovered that there are only 5 jobs in the country, 3 in something resembling my specialty, at the associate or full level!

Signed,

This is a job market?

Dear This,

Unless you have spent the last 30 years in silent meditation and prayer, surely this cannot be a surprise to you.  Ms. Mentor had a column about this recently, which if the CHE had a search feature instead of a Ouija Board, I would seek out and link to.  Surely you can find better things to do with your idle curiosity, like putting your books in some kind of order, or writing something, or taking a walk around the block, or, better still, helping your students and junior colleagues to get prepared for their job applications. 

Was there ever a time of idealism in college?

Dean Dad has an interesting post about artists and the advice being given to them:
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But where some variation of “follow your dreams” would have gone when I was in college, I heard “learn a trade” and “get good at living on very little money.”

He continues:

What I didn’t see, though, was youthful idealism.  I didn’t see what I used to think of as teenage bravado.  I saw some very young people who had been forced by circumstance to act in ways that used to be the province of their elders.  I saw young adults, rather than teenagers. 

In many ways, that’s great.  Given the very real economic obstacles many young students face, a certain gritty realism is appropriate.  And if memory serves, teenage bravado can be wearing in its own right.

But that “bulletproof” teenage stage -- that, in retrospect, relies on a base of economic security -- serves a purpose.

Dean Dad's take on this is interesting, for he sees it as a generational issue, whereas I see it as a class issue.

Although I went to college in a time that was supposed to be somewhat idealistic, the people I knew at public universities never went through a "bulletproof" stage of economic security where they thought "follow your dreams" was good advice. Idealism costs money, either immediately or in the future, and they knew it.

That's not to say that people weren't idealistic, or that they didn't do the same stupid things that college students have always done, but they understood the "gritty realism" of the consequences. The idea that you could throw yourself on the economy like a trampoline and bounce back wasn't part of the equation.

Private universities or elite publics--sure.  My friends who came from upper-middle-class professional backgrounds knew they could do whatever they wanted. If they made money in the summer working for their parents' friends, it went toward backpacking in Europe and not toward next year's expenses.  It's not that one was wrong and the other right, but they were different experiences.

I've been thinking about this because of reading other Mid-Century Males, Jack Kerouac and other Beats in particular.  Kerouac didn't want to be tied down, which may be the understatement of the decade, but whenever he got the urge to travel, which was most of the time, he had two things going for him: (1) plentiful manufacturing or service jobs that he could get easily and then leave and (2) like Allen Ginsberg, a family that, though not wealthy, would scrape up the money for bail for him when he got in trouble with the law.

The same seems to be true for the following decade, the 1960s, as I mentioned in a post about a year ago in talking about Sara Davidson's Loose Change:

What I actually took away was that people in those days could quit, drop out, or do any damn thing they felt like doing, and there would be someone or something to pick them up afterwards: plentiful jobs, more jobs than there were applicants, seemingly;  a network that would allow the main character, with just a phone call from one of her parents, to go to Europe and work as a translator in Italy; and a generous system of social service benefits that wouldn't let them fall into poverty.  They could change the world--or at least the upper-middle-class white women in the book could--because the world was going to support them financially no matter what they did.  I realize that that's probably not true, but it has a truthiness to it and seems true, given what Davidson describes.

  I think Dean Dad is right, but only partially so.  The idealism gap, if you can call it that, was always there for some students, but now it's hitting the class that used to be told "follow your bliss," and that's what speaks to the troubling reality that he's talking about.

Solving for X, where X = time to write

It's that time in the semester when it's late enough to see how the trajectory of meetings, classes, admin, etc., is going to go but early enough to correct the course. What's vanished, as usual, are the two things that matter most: time to get out and exercise, and time to write.

The usual distractions are under control, I think.  I stopped checking email on weekends, and the sky hasn't fallen, although I did miss out on a couple of opportunities by ignoring email until Sunday night.  I've blocked Facebook during work hours, even during department meetings, and my Twitter presence has dwindled to about nothing.

 No, this is about other variables: the carefully planned day of meetings that, when one of them gets shifted, means another full day on campus and no writing or exercise. That's a variable I can't control.

Another variable I can't control is administrative deadlines. These aren't a problem in themselves, but they require big blocks of time to do the tasks. Imagine if you had 1,000 widgets to put into a complex set of boxes but got called away in the middle.  You'd have to restart the process, so these tasks can't be done in 15-minute blocks with interruptions.

A variable I can control is clock time--getting up earlier, for example, as many people advise. But since I don't always sleep well, getting up at 4 or 5 a.m. to write can lead to sleepiness when driving.  I can't control fatigue, either, after a day on campus.

I did try the 10-15 minute "write when you have time" method the other day and was nearly late for a meeting, since I got absorbed in the task at hand.  The research journal I started a couple of years ago has been the best way to keep engaged with the writing, though.

In short, I'm still solving for X, but I think the answer may lie in (1) regular writing in my research journal; (2) ignoring email as much as possible; and (3) getting some more sleep.  (3) may not be immediately achievable, but (1) and (2) certainly are.

Any suggestions?

Roundup: Now with writing inspiration

*Poofed* part of this because it was entirely too cranky, even for me.

• Historiann's lovely writing space, which inspired me to clean both my office and my home desk.
• "Less is More" in writing by GetALifePhD (Tanya Golash-Boza) has some writing inspiration. 
• Inspired by Flavia Fescue's posts about writing in journals,  I downloaded Day One, a journal app. It tries desperately to post whatever I write to Facebook and Twitter and is hell bent on getting me to put in information so that it can report to our Alien Overlords of Social Media.  I haven't given it any information, but I don't trust it. Isn't a journal supposed to be private, or is exposing your private thoughts to the known world the new function of a journal?
• Karen Kelsky says it's a mistake for job applicants to use a dossier service. Having been on many, many search committees as chair and as just a member, I don't agree.  The key thing is going to be the candidate's letter, CV, writing, and general tenor of the letters.  I can and do write those job letters for my students on the market, although it takes time, but is there really an Interfolio disadvantage? Readers, what say you? 
• Speaking of writing recommendation letters, if you have not yet read Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members, do it. Your local library probably has it, it's a quick read, and it's both hilarious and uncomfortably close to the truth about how many of these letters we have to write for everything and the place of humanities in the university pecking order. 
• John Oliver takes on student debt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8pjd1QEA0c