It's my time, and I'll do what I want

Oft I have travelled in the realms of gold. Or maybe just traveled. And then traveled some more.

But recently everything feels out of control, or, more accurately, I feel as though I am not in control of my time. Incessant emails, demands for information, writing tasks, more emails, more meetings--sure, it's standard drill for an administrator. It has to be done when it has to be done, and if your own writing suffers--with consequent damage to grants, writing, awards, etc.--that's just too bad. No one twisted my arm to do this, and I believe in what I'm doing.

Figure 1. Still the best technique.

You can only feel pushed so far, though, before you want to reassert control, which I did in three ways recently. If you don't want to read about petty triumphs, this isn't the post for you.

The first is the end-of-semester anger management technique I wrote about--surprise!--at the end of the semester a couple of years ago: "Take your hands off that man!" 

"You want it to say X, even after I explained the problems with that? Fine. X it is then." Take your hands off that issue. Let it go, and don't look back.

Figure 2. One of these things is . . .

The second is this: A couple of weeks ago, one of my collaborators--you know, the ones from The Good Place--asked about something in my area of expertise; I spent some time on research and a careful answer, which ze ignored, as per usual.

In recipe terms, I said something like "You know, Worcestershire sauce and vanilla extract may look the same, but if you use Worcestershire sauce in your chocolate chip cookie recipe, you're in for a world of hurt." Today I received an email saying "full speed ahead with the brown liquid for the cookies, yes?"

Figure 3 . . . not like the other.

I wrote back and said, "So glad that we're going to go with any old brown liquid condiment for all the cookies without checking to see what it is; much easier to find than figuring out, as I recommended two weeks ago, whether it's actually vanilla extract or not."  Collaborator: "What? Oh, no."

Figure 4. Grady explaining "correction" to Jack.

And maybe tomorrow I'll turn off email and do some of my own scholarship for a change. 

The conference cycle as it really is

1. Call for papers comes out. 

"That looks so interesting, and the conference is in a cool place!  I have to submit something. Do I have something already written? Nah, but the New Direction will spur me to do better work."

2. Acceptances/rejections come out.

If I didn't get in: Mildly sad, then "Oh, well, that's a relief."

If I did get in: "Hooray, hooray!  So excited to go and present this work that I haven't written yet."

3. Months intervening.

 "I'm doing the research, but I really ought to write the paper well ahead.  Nah, I've got this Deadline on Another Thing- Crisis Level Admin Task - Teaching and prep - Papers to Grade. I have lots of time."

4. A couple of months or weeks before the conference. 

"I said I'd write about WHAT? Who wrote this proposal?"


5. Near the conference dates, but please, Flying Spaghetti Monster, not on the plane. 

Write write write write write. 

 6. At the conference before the panel.

Please let it go well please let it go well please let it go well. 

"I will never put myself through this level of stress again. I will write all papers months in advance, hand to FSM."

7. At the conference after the panel. 


Huge relief, like exiting a roller coaster. Turn into Sally Field: "They liked it! They really liked it!"

8. Browsing the announcements tables. 

"Hey, that looks like a really interesting conference, and it would stretch my work in new directions. When's the deadline for the call for papers?

Women in academe: short takes on the news

 Well, let's see what we've learned in the past few weeks.

1. At InsideHigherEd.com, we get our annual confirmation that "female professors experience more work demands and special favor requests, particularly from academically 'entitled' students," thus hurting us on course evaluations. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/01/10/study-finds-female-professors-experience-more-work-demands-and-special-favor

Comment: We're "helpers, not doers" according to the findings of the study. Awesome.

2. And IHE found the same thing true last year: women faculty--wait for it--do, yes, more service, to their "possible detriment." https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/12/study-finds-female-professors-outperform-men-service-their-possible-professional

Comment: I think this is an annual one and the most frequently replicated study in all of science. I've seen variations of it for 15 years, and I've learned two things: (1) the findings are always the same and (2) the role of women in doing service doesn't change.

If you want to see more variations, check out any of these past posts (which have links).

3. Also at IHE, which is killing it on reporting this stuff with a straight face: we can teach identical courses online, where students can't even see us, and they'd still rather have a male professor. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/14/study-says-students-rate-men-more-highly-women-even-when-theyre-teaching-identical

See also: lower course evaluations.

Figure 1. "Queen Bee" is a misogynistic red herring.

4.  But we're learning to be more rude to each other, apparently: https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/incivility-work-queen-bee-syndrome-getting-worse

 "Across the three studies, we found consistent evidence that women reported higher levels of incivility from other women than their male counterparts," Gabriel said. "In other words, women are ruder to each other than they are to men, or than men are to women."

Comment 1: Not to me, or at least they'd better not be. 

Comment 2: This is disheartening--or is it? Or are they interpreting as rudeness behaviors that they'd tolerate from men?

Figure 2. Joan Fontaine in Born to be Bad.

Comment 3:  The study defines incivility as "low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm," but that's always been true for a certain subset of both men and women, hasn't it?

Think about Joan Fontaine's Christabel, in Born to be Bad, who is manipulative seven ways to Sunday. Example:

 Christabel is trying to oust the fiancee of the clueless and wealthy Zachary Scott, and doing a bang-up job of it, too. But she wants to keep Robert Ryan for her lover, so she praises the fiancee in the "bless her heart" manner familiar to those from the South (I've heard):

Christabel: "What a fine girl she is. So strong! So sensible! So capable!"
Robert Ryan: "You ought to see her change a tire."

He's calling her out on her passive-aggressive BS, but none of the other men see it for a second. So Christabel isn't rude, but she knows exactly what she's doing and the damage that she's causing. Who among us hasn't known a Christabel in academe?

Anyway.  Maybe there'll be some good news in the next set of studies. 

Writing inspiration: Wordsworth, academic writing, and learning lessons over time.

The things that you learn about writing and about yourself accrue over time, don't they?

Figure 1. The Abbey he's actually not at but a few miles above.

Remember Wordsworth's "Lines, Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"?

The narrator thinks back to his youth:

when first I came among these hills; when like a roe / I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides / Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,  /Wherever nature led

Did anyone else used to stay up all night and write a paper due the next day as an undergrad? It was sometimes good, sometimes bad (no revision!), but hey, it was done.

And now we're more like this:

hearing oftentimes 

The still sad music of humanity, 

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt 

A presence that disturbs me with the joy 

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 

Of something far more deeply interfused,

On one hand, that's a bit too elevated a sentiment for academic writing, but what we're doing is "interfusing" all that we've done into a meaningful piece of writing, even if it isn't "sublime."

I'm not doing justice to this poem at all, but it made me think of some recent things I've (re)learned:

• It is what it is, or it takes what it takes. If it takes you 25 hours over several days to write a five-page paper about something that you already know well, with a ratio of about 4 hours of thinking and reading to 1 hour of writing, well, that's what it takes. Don't beat yourself up about it (says the person who has been doing just that). Try to make deadlines, but do your best even if you can't.  It's a process.
• Speaking of process, when you're recollecting in tranquillity, like Wordsworth, you come to know your own processes well. That anxious bout of administrative editing when you should be writing? It's displacement writing, dealing with a lesser anxiety to avoid confronting the greater anxiety of the academic writing you have to do. The writing is working in the background, and it will emerge in good time when you do write. Bonus: the administrative task is that much closer to being done.
• Don't follow literally the advice all over Twitter to "write drunk, edit sober." How do people do this if they're literally drinking? Maybe it works for them. What I took away from it, though, is to loosen up and spill everything out in paragraph form, if possible, and in list form, if not, even if it's too colloquial or too pompous or otherwise not a thing that I want in the paper. (I know that this is perennial advice, via Annie Lamott's "sh*tty first draft," but it's still important.)
• Edit and revise and edit some more.  That bounding roe of an undergrad Undine would never have believed it, but--surprise!--it's as much the editing that tells you what you think as it is the writing. Again, know your processes: I have to see it on paper at certain stages, the header should have some kind of an autotext time stamp so that I know which version it is, and it helps if I have a red pencil to mark a big slash across pages after I've made the edits.
• The more work you do, the more you know. The reading I've done to develop the three pieces of writing over the past six months (you know, the ones you've heard me complaining about) is actually paying off now in ways I couldn't have anticipated. 
• Recognize what's not working.  Sometimes, if you're stuck on a piece of writing, there's a piece in there that doesn't belong, no matter how insightful it is or how fond you are of it. You can spend a lot of time trying to shoehorn it in, but sometimes you have to cut your losses and all those hard-won words. Mark Twain said that you should "kill your darlings" (also adverbs), but good news: with writing, you can put them in another file and save them for another day. If they're good, they'll survive.
•  Delete those annoying emails. Tired of sanctimony and virtue-signalling and lengthy email lectures on Correct Principles when you already hold those principles? If there's no action required, delete them. Or put them in a folder called "Colleague Bloviations." It'll make you feel better and help your sense of focus. 
• Let your writing helpers help you. Writing or accountability groups. 750words, Strict Pomodoro, Excel spreadsheets, etc. And for a bonus: get a new black notebook, since the old one is almost full.

Big picture, small details, collaboration, and The Good Place

Figure 1. If you're not watching The Good Place, you should be.

I've mentioned before that I'm part of a collaborative project that's been going on for some years. (Think editing a journal, running a conference, or working on a grant.) We all have the same background but our strengths differ slightly: one knows MLA style up, down, and sideways, etc.

The details are important in this project. What I'm good at, though, is the big picture stuff--organization, logic, and sense-making in the writing that we're dealing with. I might not pay attention to whether the comma after an italicized phrase is also italicized or not, or even notice it, but then, my collaborators will, so I'm not worrying about it.

So far, this has worked well, and we work well as a team. But in one recent facet of the project, there's a huge problem that I'm having trouble convincing them is a problem. I've done the work to show why it's a problem, and explained it more than once, but no dice.

 A few analogies may help.

***

Dried Leaves

1. Someone gives you a nest of crumbly dried leaves and you have to put it together as a folio of coherent writing that makes narrative sense. 
2. Wait--you also have to put it together in the order that the person who gave you the leaves implies, but will not tell you, is the one, true, and correct order. 
3.  You investigate over many hours, find evidence that helps, put it together, and write up an explanation. Aha! you think.
4. Your collaborators say, "I think that there is a pixel of green on this leaf. We have to discuss that at length."

Titanic

You say: "If we take this route, we'll get to a lifeboat."

Your collaborators say, "these gates across the third-class east stairway should be painted black, not blue."

The Trolley Problem

You, as Chidi from The Good Place: "Logic and ethics make this the best solution! Also, arrrgggghhh!"

Collaborators, as Eleanor and Michael: "Did you notice that there are 14 spikes holding the rails on the left side and 15 spikes on the right side? We have to discuss that at length."

***

This will all probably work itself out, but right now, I'm Chidi.

***
Or not, and I need to get out of this project, when they praise each other for their mad skilz and brush past my genuine intellectual contribution to say "thanks for keeping track of the edits."  Yeah, I might be done. 

Productivity, MBTI, and plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

 Xykademiqz's interesting post on her MBTI type has me thinking about how personality or certain traits or however you want to define it affects how we work.

It turns out that we're the same type (INTP), and boy howdy, did her post resonate with how I approach planning. I'm looking forward to her next post on the subject and to participating in the comments.

Here's a link to the test she posted https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test and my result (at right). I first took the official version of test on paper years ago as a process of figuring out job search strategies or something and then took it online a few times. Have I changed over the years?  Uh, nope.

As I mentioned over at her place, something about planning (is it on the P scale of the test?) makes this type feel trapped. That doesn't apply to work--I can lay out a course, a class, an admin task, etc. and follow through just fine--but to plan out life stuff (especially writing) in this way just doesn't work.

An example: I had a friend once who claimed that she planned out her dinners a whole year in advance. She claimed that this gave her great peace of mind. (Teddy Roosevelt was apparently like this: he would write papers or speeches months in advance and never think about it again.)

To me, planning dinners like this seemed bonkers, and it made me itch just to think about it. How would you know whether the asparagus was good that week? What if you didn't want to eat tuna casserole on a Friday six months hence? I've tried this kind of planning for even a week a few times, and I always rebel and switch up the days. There's nothing like knowing that you have to do something to make you rebel against doing it.

And that, right there, is why those posts about making lovely little check boxes that xykademiqz links to and making a timetable for something like writing is so tough to do. I can admire it, but I can't really do it. The most I can do is to draw a line down the right-hand margin of my little black book and list a few tasks that I hope I can get through that day.


Here's another visual aid about how I start writing: watch Ed Norton (Art Carney) as he sits down to play the piano. Yeah, that's me.

Me and my (shadow) notebook

We're getting good at keeping track of time, my little black notebook and I. 

• Yes, it took me 7 hours to do that administrative task. It takes what it takes, but the thing is, I can't feel despairing because I wasted the day. It's not wasted. It has to be done. My notebook tells me how I spent that day when I'm beating myself up mentally about not writing more.
• Receiving a long, detailed, multi-part email about non-urgent minutiae? How long will it take to read and respond? My notebook tells me. It's a number, that, anonymized, averages out to  "too long." Bottom of the reply list for it.
• I send an email that doesn't receive a response but receive more non-urgent minutia-driven emails. Do I hasten to reply? I see from my notebook that this was discussed already with the person sending the email. I let the email sit for a while.
• Meeting that's supposed to take two hours and we're only 2/3 of the way through the agenda? Unless the president or provost has convened it, I'm leaving at the end of two hours. This is the 70% rule that xykademiqz and gwinne have talked about.
• Document, document, document those progressive emails.
• X writes to say "I need you to break this rule for me" sent to someone not me. I reply to the person who forwarded it saying when X contacts me, I'll respond.
• X writes to someone not me to say, "hey, could you get on this right now? Time's a-wastin' here!" Same answer. When X contacts me, though, I'm ready with a reply.
•  The To Do List is in the little black notebook as well as in the spreadsheet. It's more satisfying to cross things off in pen than in a spreadsheet.
• The spreadsheet only tells me when I didn't meet a goal (as in Paul Silva's How to Write a Lot) or how many words I wrote. The notebook tells me that I didn't get home until 9:15 p.m., which puts a little different spin on what looks like a wasted writing day though it was a useful campus one.
• Because it also holds some drafts and bibliographies all in one place, I can tell when I've added something to a main document: the transferred material has a line through it.
• In the notebook, I can trick myself into writing with pen and paper sometimes when the computer holds too many other distractions (grading, etc.), as Dame Eleanor talks about. 
• And every day when writing happens, there's the number of words, circled, at the top of the page. Pasting or stamping gold stars to the page might be a step too far, but I don't need them anyway. The circled numbers are enough.

My time is (not) your time

A while back, before the endless year of 2017, we were talking about keeping track of time (me and these happy few, this band of sisters on the blogroll) and productivity.  At the time Laura Vanderkam was making a splash by making excellent use of lots of money to hire help to do the work we do for free her "productivity journey" of logging every second of her day.

Gwinne asked in a recent post about how to find "high-energy time" for the work she needs to do.  That seems to me to be more the issue: not how to find time, because you can always get up at 4:30 a.m. or some outlandish thing to go to the gym, but how not to do a faceplant into your desk at 10 a.m. when you do so. Time is finite. Energy is finite. Put them together, as you must to do anything creative, and they seem to diminish in exponential proportions.

I was thinking of this recently because of something to do with an ongoing collaborative project and a document. Said document has been edited ad infinitum and back, but we had added something and needed to do a bit more. My collaborators are lovely, but the part we needed to edit was exacting stuff, requiring energy, logic, creative thought, and all those things I would usually save for writing. Add to this the fact that some in our group don't feel that they've done anything unless they've changed a word for its synonym (i.e., changes that don't make a difference).

So I clocked in and out in my little notebook. Time going over the sections to discuss: 2.75 hours. And then I mentioned it in my response, phrasing it positively as reminding ourselves of the work we're doing collaboratively and its importance.

Asked whether I would go over it again before our conversation, I said that I had the hour before the meeting to look at it. "Will that be enough?" they asked. "It will have to be," I said. "That's all the time I can allot to it."  The meeting went well, and we're still positive about the project.

What difference did it make to keep track of the time? Or to mention it?

It made me feel as though my time was not in a giant vat somewhere that people could dip into and out of as they needed to. I gave them a measure of it and let them know when it was enough. It still cut into my writing--after that, and class, I had no brainpower left--but I felt in control.

Pace Rudy Vallee, it's not so much that my time is or isn't your time (sometimes it is), but realizing that I can keep track and limit it makes a huge difference.

Random bullets of MLA 2018

What was memorable?

•  New York City! How can you not love going to NY? Maybe it's different if you already live there or near there, but it's an exciting place to be even if you are among the hayseeds (that would be me) rather than the cosmopolitan cognoscenti. Going to a museum and becoming transfixed by a painting. Seeing a Broadway show (yeah, guess which one!). I had been there this summer in the same area and so was less prone to getting lost than usual. Yes, even on a grid system some of us will not know what direction we're walking in until we get to a corner.  
• The "bomb cyclone," because "snowpocalypse" is so 2016. Yes, it snowed a lot on Thursday, and a lot of people weren't able to get to the conference because of the wind and cancelled flights. If you were there and didn't have to get anywhere, though, it didn't seem so bad--that is, if you're used to snow and cold of 8-10 degrees. There were snowplows, shovels, and enough salt on the sidewalks to bring Carthage to ruins again.
• The conference hotel(s): Hilton and Sheraton. The hotels seem finally to have gotten the message that we'd rather grab something fast in a deli-like setting than sit down for a meal, and the Hilton had the perfect spot for that. Also: a real fridge rather than the dreaded mini-bar  whose sensors charge you if you move a bottle. This being NY, there were plenty of great restaurants as well as delis and supermarkets.
• Conference rooms: Decent room temperatures, lots of water to drink, and hotels very close together. Also, the wifi password was in the PMLA program this year, and the wifi worked!
• Mostly good sessions, with a lot more 4-person panels and roundtables than there used to be. Nobody grandstanding (that I saw) and droning on past their time. No one had to use the Hook. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the BLM session with Harry Belafonte.
• Everyone loves to complain about people reading papers. But I went to a panel in one of the new 3-session "working group" formats that was 75 minutes of people randomly chatting about theory.  There were pauses. There were random generalizations. There were lengthy readings from theorists. In its reorganization a few years ago, the MLA killed off several of its standing sessions on authors, periods, etc., and I get why they thought it was a good idea. MLA also wants you not to read papers but to experiment with other presentation modes. But I would have killed for some tightly argued, highly focused papers in this session with a spirited discussion to follow. And this format gets three time slots per convention, proving, I guess, that sessions expand to fill the time available.   It'll be a while before I return to a "working group" session.
• The MLA is even acknowledging that it's becoming less central to the job market, now with Skype interviews and everything. That's a move in the right direction. 

Wait--I have been doing this for how long? Previous MLA roundups:

• 2015
• 2014
• 2013
• 2012 
• 2011
• 2006
• Conference tips no one ever tells you
• Random conference thoughts

Happy New Year! Resolutions 2.0

Random resolutions, updated for what I hope will be a focused year.

1. If I can't sit still in the morning but have laser-like focus to write from 9-11 p.m.--indeed, I get restless wanting to write at that time--I need to stop fighting it and go with the flow.
2. Recommit to writing every day, which I lost in the various caretaking activities. All my strategies--Excel record-keeping, 750words, pomodoros--do work until the writing sets me on fire (in a good way), so I need to keep at it.
3. Continue using my superpowers for good, though they are super in a limited way. "That office told you what? Doesn't sound right to me. Let me make a call to see if something can be done." 
4. Realize--as in feel it--that I have a great job that I love, and that any one lousy day does not take away from the entirety of the experience. 
5. Keep going even if something is difficult.  This NYTimes piece says that gratitude, not grit, will help with resolutions and procrastination because you'll feel responsible to others and want to show them your good traits. I'm thinking that's called "guilt over not getting something done" but am certainly going to try.

Tha's all for now. Happy New Year!

Year's end post for 2017

A popular meme on Twitter these days is to state three things that you accomplished this year. Everyone is posting about prizes won, book contracts, degrees completed, and all that.

But nothing I could post would be on this order of magnitude. Here's what I really did:

1. Took care of people. What else can you call it when you cook, clean, buy groceries, do laundry, listen to stories, be patient, and provide care for children or the elderly? That's not an accomplishment, but it is definitely needed. It's invisible labor, all right, until somebody doesn't do it.

2. Wrote. Yet most of what I wrote was and is hard-fought words on a piece that I just could not seem to write--two pieces, actually. I finished one, and I'm seeing the finish line on another, with a third promised (why? WHY?). My main vow is never to agree to contribute a piece like this again. There's nothing wrong with the project; I just didn't click with it (or it with me), but having agreed to do it, I have had to carry it around with me every day, all year, instead of knocking it out as should have been the case. Probably 80% of the time was spent resisting writing and 20% writing.

3. Worked with collaborators on a large project. Taught (new) classes. Both were rewarding, but again: not quantifiable, and not in the service of the projects that I was so excited about last fall (2016).

4. Did what I could to fight against, endure, or ignore the current political dumpster fire. Actum est de republica, indeed.
 
5. On the plus side: Travel! Travel to archives, to conferences, and, if you want to count walking and hiking, engaging in what the Japanese call "forest bathing."  Reading good books. Seeing family. Getting excited about ideas. Shepherding administrative changes through various approval processes to do what Silicon Valley calls "making the world a better place." 

What about your year?

Experiments in grading? Maybe another time

Update 3/11/18: Jesse Stommel (below), in a thoughtful post, explains what he means by "ungrading": written evaluation and reflection throughout the semester; students assign their own final grades. http://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/

What better time to think about grading than when you've just done a bunch of it?

I'm overall pretty happy with my current standards and methods, which have been developed over the years with lots of help from readings in pedagogy, colleagues, and, probably most of all, experimenting from semester to semester to see what works and what doesn't.

This last, I think, gets underrated. We experiment all the time, trying an approach, a topic, or an assignment one semester and modifying it if it doesn't work. Right now we're being inundated with very self-righteous screeds from both sides on laptops in the classroom. The thing that they seem to forget is that you have to find a balance that will work for your and your students. 

Right now I'm fascinated by the accounts people who grade in non-traditional ways and have so many questions for them.

• Cathy Davidson's version of contract grading sounds interesting. Students contract for a grade and then complete assignments graded by their peers S/U, while Davidson confines herself to comments. It sounds good but highly labor-intensive; she says that she has never used it in a class of more than 30, and she has a TA and a Teaching Apprentice to help with the 30-person class. 
• Since the production of an edited video is part of the course, who pays for the software? (Maybe this isn't an issue since she teaches at Duke.) Who teaches them to use it and to upload it to YouTube? 
• What happens if the required writing has some good ideas but some grammar or structural problems (like wordiness)? Problems like that can take several papers to get ironed out, and if papers can be handed in an infinite number of times to get to an "S" (not sure if this is the case), does the student get discouraged? What about the teacher? 
• What happens if everything is grammatically correct but entirely uninspired? 
• Jesse Stommel says he doesn't give grades at all. He says a lot about what he won't do but never says what he does, because he's apparently saving it for a future post. 
• He makes some good points--grading on a curve is pretty heinous, true, and feedback is far more important than actual grades. But how does he not give any grades at all? I suspect that there's some semantic wiggle room going on here--that there's some "commenting" and "assessing" that he doesn't call grading but that the rest of us would.
• At every university where I've been employed, I have to fill out a grade sheet at the end of the term or face some draconian consequences, like being fired. I can't just announce to the registrar that grades are part of a neoliberal capitalist oppressive system that disenfranchises students and march on out of there. Or can I?
• Kevin Gannon's "How to Escape Grading Jail" at the Chronicle has some good suggestions. 
• Smart "calendaring" that means not too many essays in one week. 
• Rubrics, which I've never had any luck with but are always worth trying. 
• Recorded rather than written responses. He uses Voisi, records comments, uploads them to Dropbox, and sends the students a link. For me, this would be more time-intensive than simply typing the comments (with the help of auto-text), but I've recorded comments before when teaching online. I asked the students how they liked it, and they seemed to like it as a novelty but didn't want me to switch to it. 

The main thing I took away from all these is the same thing with which I began: you experiment, and you ask for feedback, and you observe your class and students to see what works.

And don't think that you have the One Best Way. None of us has the One Best Way, or we could stop trying.

Other posts about grading here: http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/search?q=grading

At The Atlantic: Bryan Caplan's entry in the "kids today! Amirite?" sweepstakes

At The Atlantic, Bryan Caplan says "The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone." (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/).

But just when you think he might have a point--there are indeed many kinds of work for which traditional college isn't needed where people will make way more than college professors, for example--he joins the chorus, usually led by the minions of wealth at the Wall Street Journal, about kids these days.

He has a minor point with this:
"The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them."

If we can swallow "useless subjects"--I can't--it's still somewhat true that the traits are important, yet so is the place where you learn to think.

But here's what he concludes:

Kids these days don't like to learn: "Indeed, today’s college students are less willing than those of previous generations to do the bare minimum of showing up for class and temporarily learning whatever’s on the test. . . .  Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying. Effort has since collapsed across the board. “Full time” college students now average 27 hours of academic work a week—including just 14 hours spent studying.

What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun.

 Aaaaannnnd--there it is. Kids these days. Having fun. I don't know what his students are doing at George Mason University, but mine are working. They're holding down jobs and trying to get through with a minimum of debt because they don't have a trust fund.

His argument is basically twofold, but wholly conservative.

1. People in Certain Classes of Society ought to know their place and become worker drones if they can't properly appreciate, with suitable leisure, Great Thoughts.

2. Things were better in the old days, when everyone was intellectual.

This tells me (1) his political perspective about social class and (2) that he has no idea that students have been excoriated for "having fun" for literally millennia.

As I wrote in a little screed of my own against this kind of article in 2013 http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2013/07/at-wsj-education-aint-what-it-used-to.html

First of all, I think this is the same article they run every month under a different title and by-line. It goes something like this:

When I was at beautiful Ivy or Oxbridge back in the olden days, I had an extremely famous professor (this time: Frank Kermode) who inspired me with the timeless truths of the humanities curriculum. 

Alas, there were few such professors then, and there are none today. That pesky GI bill opened education to the masses, and now students want grades instead of reading literature for timeless truths. Literature has been sullied by the grade-grubbing paws of these students. Where is the pure love of literature of yesteryear?  

Now, I have a certain sympathy for the author's love of literature because I obviously think it's important, too, and what he says about the thrill of books--yes, I get that.

But is the best way to get students to have this relationship to books, where the books help them to experience their lives in different ways, to avoid teaching the humanities?

I'm imagining students, taking 15 credit hours, working 20 hours a week at Mickey D's. What happens if you toss them a copy of The Odyssey or Henry IV, Part I, and say, "Here, kid, this will change your life. Read it in your spare time"?

This is the "kids these days" argument 2.0, and I'm still not buying it. 

Random bullets of December 1

• First of all, look at "End of Semester Bingo" at https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/end-of-semester-bingo. You won't regret it.
• Spending a month and thousands of dollars in travel taking care of--and trying to keep healthy via preventing them from smoking as part of that care--an elderly family member with multiple breathing-related illnesses and pneumonia drains your brain of energy and crowds out all writing juice. Then when they start smoking again the day after you leave, airily declaring that they're an adult and can do what they want, you realize that your efforts may have been well-meant but are ultimately futile, that the deadlines you blew by this action are now more pressing than ever, and that if you don't get your brain back to work instead of worrying, you'll be in worse shape than before.
• That high-profile professors such as Jay Fliegelman and Franco Moretti have now been held to account in some way is good news. But (speaking rhetorically now) in how many cases has the perpetrator been allowed to quietly leave ("pass the trash"), or retire, or go on leave and then come back as if nothing had happened, with no information given to the community even about cases where the finding was that abuse had occurred? How often has time, like moss, been allowed to grow over the finding until the perpetrator is honored again because no one remembers what happened? How often have we (generic we) been cautioned not to bring up findings because of fears of retaliatory lawsuits or that they're not germane to the proceeding at hand?
• But there are good things:
• Another Facebook break. For those of you not on FB, it used to be 90% politics and 10% pictures of cute animals and funny stuff (as nature, God, and Zuckerberg intended); now it's about 45% fundraising for causes, 50% politics, and 5% cute animals. 
• Decent weather.
• Nearly the end of the semester, and the students and classes have been terrific.
• No travel for a while.

Holding academia to account, Bingo version

You know those bingo cards that appear every so often on Twitter or Facebook? The one I usually see is for department meetings.

I wonder if we could have a scorecard with Bingo squares or points for the times we hear and see things like the following, either stated or implied:

1. "He should still get the award, because his personal life has no bearing on the tremendous contribution he has made to scholarship. Aesthetics and the life of the mind is important; what happened to that grad student was beside the point. Besides, that incident was years ago."
2. Woman faculty member is interrupted and talked over.
3.  Woman makes a point,  and it's ignored; man makes the same point two minutes later, and it's brilliant.
4. "It wasn't such a big deal. She should get over it." 
5. Faculty of color asked to be on a zillion committees or outreach projects and then criticized for producing less scholarship.
6. "He's going to retire soon, anyway. There's no point in pursuing it."
7. "That's just how he acts; the bullying and yelling isn't about you personally. Stay out of his way and you'll be fine."
8. "This whole process will be a lot easier if we just give Professor Y what he wants in terms of this time slot/this course assignment/this committee assignment/this candidate for admission. Otherwise, he'll pitch a fit and make our lives miserable. Professor X won't complain about teaching at 8 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. MWF, so let's give that schedule to her."
9. "If he leaves the department, he'll take that big grant/that journal/that prestigious reputation to another university. He brings prestige, so we can't make waves."
10. "[Women faculty] should be in their offices more, in case students need to talk to them; they need the emotional support.  As for me, I'm not going to the meeting. I have writing to do." 

 Any more for our scorecard?

Things that will make you feel better for a moment

• Get fresh air. Run, walk, bike, or whatever in the fresh air. More fresh air. More nature. More beauty. More air. Give your brain something else to think about and some oxygen to help it do so.
• Mueller time! Things are happening out there, so don't give up hope.
• Check social media--well, FB--only for an hour every other week. That way, you can wish everyone happy birthday. Don't post anything, or you'll want to see what happens.
• Skip over every single political outrage post, no matter how righteously angry it will make you and how virtuous you will feel to be on the right side of history. If you think this is irresponsible, it's not. You'll still see and do things. (I voted this week. I gave to Hurricane Maria relief.) But use your energy, money, votes, and power where they'll do some good. Facebook isn't it.
• And those people pumping out political outrage who you know are bicycling through France on a holiday you can't afford? Unfollow them. Enough's enough. 
• Watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. If you don't get or don't want to watch the show, watch some videos. Parodies but hilariously true ones of song genres, like "Settle for Me" or "Greg's Drinking Song" or "Let's Generalize About Men" or a Gene Kelly-esque tap dance number whose title I can't print here.  They will make you feel better.  
• Make up your own mental Bingo card for meetings and presentations. Call it the "Neoliberal University Assessment Intersectionality Excellence" card, or whatever five words (in random order) you hear the most at your university.
• For a little while every day, if you can, read a book just because you want to, and leave the screens behind. No phones. No computers. It sounds impossible, but for 30 minutes at lunch, just try it. I used to read The Chronicle at lunch but realize that (1) we've all read these articles before, pretty much and (2) it wasn't exactly a break to read more stressful things about work. Some of you do yoga or meditation, so this is probably my version of that. 

What temporary measures make you feel better? 

Reading irritations for a Saturday morning

The good news about being an academic in the humanities--okay, literature--is that you get to read a lot.

The bad news about being an academic in the humanities is that you get to read a lot, and you don't always get to choose what you read but you have to find an interest if you're going to write about it.

Right now, this never-ending story of a piece that I am working on has me reading some things that are worthy, even brilliant, but are a little . . . trying. Here are some additional irritations to add to last year's post.

• Religious doctrine, religious reflection--very important, I know, but reading this stuff is a slog for me.  "Be a good person, the end" is my medieval-peasant style level of understanding, if that's not an insult to medieval peasants.
• Travel writing. I love the blog entries that you all post from travels in other countries, but straight travel writing, 19th-century style, reads sort of like this: "As we meandered down the [word in another language], we were greeted by the [ditto], with their charming [ditto] beside them as they [ditto] in happy expectation of our [ditto]," followed by a paragraph describing the local flora and fauna in exhaustive and exhausting detail. It's Mad Libs, international style.  I don't lose my will to live, but I do lose my will to read. 
• Modernist texts that like to play hide the person's name, or the pronoun reference, or the central defining event of the book by mentioning it once in 400 pages. I understand why that's important and representationally sophisticated and the rest, but for trying to slog through, please give us a name. Please. 
• Cruelty to animals and children. If they show up in a contemporary text, you need to look out, because often they won't last long and will be dispatched in highly unpleasant and lengthily described detail to prove that the author isn't "sentimental." I gave up on John Updike's Roger's Version because of this, and you have heard me rant before about Lolita. "But look at the wordplay and the language," I was told. "Lolita herself is just a girl, just incidental." Not to me, she's not. 

And now back to reading my religious-doctrine-centric book with lots of travel and name-hiding and, I fear, some animal cruelty coming up.

Edited to add: Nope--child cruelty and death. Modern fiction, you never disappoint in your predictability.

What kind of reading do you find tough to get through?

*Updated to add: The Man Booker Prize this year goes to George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, which is by all accounts wonderful, and which I want to read--but it features #4 (Lincoln mourning his dead child) and #3 (a surreal, experimental style that one account said will leave you not understanding what's happening for chapters at a time). Just . . . leaving that out there.

Writing by the numbers: was it worth it?

This is basically a reminder post, to future Undine, not to promise things as past Undine has done. It's a short record of time spent versus actual benefit, and it contains the valuable "Was it worth it?" test.

1. Recent book review #1: read book carefully, made notes, spent at least 10 hours writing for 1200 words. Was it worth it? Well, I learned something. But was it worth it? Not really. 
2. Recent book review #2: read book all the way through three times because I kept getting pulled away by other tasks and forgetting the details; made notes; spent at least 10 hours writing the 1200 words. Was it worth it? See above.
3. Work on long-promised article project: spent all of summer 2016 reading for this project and making notes for it but not writing it up. Have now spent at least 10 hours each day to get to my 750 words, in part because the ratio of looking up & reading:writing is about 3:1 or 4:1, in terms of time, because it's a little outside my usual wheelhouse. Was it worth it? I'm learning things. But was it worth it? Time will tell, but it's clear I'm spending way too much time on this. And this doesn't even count the extensive editing and cutting down and stitching together I'll have to do.
4. Spending last fall sending out those articles instead of working on the above? They were a combination of old and new research that I found exciting. Worth it? Yes, indeed.
5. Refusing, on three separate occasions with three different subjects, to contribute to a prestigious bibliography project. Worth it? Yes, indeed.
6. Doing a tenure review, with the many hours of reading & writing the letter that that implies? Well, worth it because we all need to be good citizens. Ditto for writing letters of recommendation for jobs and grants--grants that I haven't applied for, in part, because see #3. 
7. Rummaging through my computer until I found a good 10 pages or so on the subject of another promised article project? Totally worth it. Gold, in fact.
8. Being very choosy about the conferences I submit to, and only submitting if I actually have an ongoing project in mind? Very much worth it. I've stopped my membership in some organizations, and it feels so good not to have them nagging at you to submit proposals, not to mention that they rarely accepted them anyway. (Not MLA, although a friend of mine said once that instead of submitting a proposal to MLA she could just set fire to it, with about the same results as far as an acceptance went.)

 So, what that I actually did was truly worth it just for me and not just for the sake of being a good citizen? #4, #7, and #8. Future Undine, take note.

Chocolate and control and writing, oh, my!

Dame Eleanor has a post up with normal news, and JaneB has one that's funny and heartwarming, and John Scalzi has one about why it's hard to write  that's much more eloquent than my similar rant of a few weeks back.

So if you've already responded to the news and donated, etc. etc., here is a different question: how are you granting yourself a feeling of control when the world seems out of said quality--i.e., "self-care," as people say now? I've never had a mani-pedi or any of that salon stuff, but here are a few things:

1.  Eat more chocolate. I used to get this for special occasions, but now I keep a bag of my beloved Guittard chocolate chips in my office and eat them when I finish something especially administratively boring. Or feel more stressed than usual. Or after lunch. I'm trying to taper off, but maybe not right now.

2. Take another FB break. At first I was all "but--but--I won't be able to wish people whose emails I don't have Happy Birthday!" and then realized that they would survive. As to missing out on scholarly stuff that gets posted to FB--well, if you post a CFP there and there only, you've already limited your range considerably, so capturing the attention of a broad range of scholars clearly isn't what the organization is going for, and it doesn't need my attention.

3. Change office hours and meetings to suit the times I'll see the most people and that suit me the best. The corollary is that I've stored up enough rage courage to respond politely but with some heat to the people who are never in the office or attend meetings if I hear even a hint of "where were you when I looked for you at 4:30 on Tuesday?' or some such thing. *Yes, I keep track when I'm in a meeting and my colleagues are consistently absent, for exactly this reason. No, I probably shouldn't care.

4.  Figured out an academic version of the Serenity Prayer. As in "grant me the serenity to hear about another time-sucking initiative on which they claim to want our input, the strength to read between the lines, and the wisdom to know that it's already a done deal and I don't have to pay any attention to it."

5. Start writing again. Between travel and research trips and the news and writing conference papers and house renovation, this was a chaotic summer for writing; added to this is a series of things I promised to write and that are not exactly flowing from my pen. So: back on the horse, I say. I've actually written at least something every day for a few weeks, with the help of my old taskmasters Strict Workflow Pomodoro  on Chrome (which only lets me go to Twitter, my noncaloric chocolate substitute, when the apple turns green), 750words.com, and my black notebook where I record progress and cross things off. *My accountability group helps, too.

How about you? How are you gaining control over your life?
*Edited to add. 

Patience, or the lack thereof

I'm still patient with my students--very patient. I want them to succeed. And I do like my colleagues. Everyone else is getting a little more, er, directness, though.

• The sorority pledges (I assume because no one else is that gussied up, usually, on our campus) walking five abreast on the sidewalk, teetering on heels, who initially didn't move an inch and expected me to step into the street? Dream on, ladies. Ditto for people texting.
• The person who emailed to say "why don't you do X?" when I had explained, twice, why that didn't work? Ze got a return email with my previous answer, this time in bold. The end.  You don't listen to my messages or explanations, so guess how I'm going to respond to yours?
• Would I mind not moving into my new and at that time empty office for a month or so, so another faculty member (male) could hang out and have meetings in it instead of in his own office? Would I mind? Like an idiot I said, "sure, whatever" but then got furious at myself, moved everything into the new office that day, and turned in my old key. Either my interior fuming or the stuff in the office must have gotten the message across, because I didn't hear any more about it.
• You can shoot all the emails you want at me after 5 p.m. on Friday, if that's what your heart desires, but to me they're just silent snowflakes drifting down to settle into my inbox snowbank  until 7 a.m. on Monday.

I now see that this is sort of a companion piece to the previous post; thanks for helping me work this through. 

Burned out on being accommodating

One of the truisms of our profession is that assistant professors have to protect their time and learn to say no so that they can get promoted and tenured, and that senior scholars have to make this happen. Fair enough. (Yes, I know that not everyone is lucky enough to have a t-t job.)

Another truism of our profession is that associate professors have to protect their time and learn to say no or else they'll never make full, especially women faculty, who often do a lot of service. Senior scholars should make this happen, too. Fair enough.

A third truism of our profession is that senior scholars and full professors are--to judge by the Chronicle and other chatter about the web--pretty awful: self-absorbed, selfish about their time, and generally interested in making life miserable for their juniors. All that NYTimes kvetching about millennials and their avocado toast is nothing compared to how the press sees professors.

I want to be accommodating and helpful.  I'm a full professor and happy to step up, right? To write letters and reviews of all kinds, right? To go to campus for an hour-long meeting that completely kills a research day or show up to warm a chair at an event, right? After all, where am I going to go from here?

Here's the problem. Because I technically can, and because I don't want to be THAT guy, I say yes to obligations. And I think I am happy to do so, at the time.

But it's taking me longer and longer to do the reviews, letters, and the rest, because I procrastinate about writing them. Why? Because I don't really want to but feel that I ought to, so I do twice the amount of work on them that I would normally do in an effort to feel enthusiastic about it.  I can't seem to just wade in and git 'er done (which, in academic terms, is still a lot of hours).

For every article review, I think of my own articles, all things that are not getting done because I'm doing work on someone else's work. Peer review is important, and we should all do it cheerfully.

As I should. Or should I?

Random bullets of a breathable Saturday

• Yeah, Scalzi said it best; doesn't he always?
  
• Being on a Facebook break is great. Checking in on FB and seeing all the perennial outrage and demands to march right now--much of it coming from people who are on a leisurely European vacation bicycling through France or whatever--not so much. I believe the young folk call it "virtue signalling," and if you want me to ignore your posts when I check in again in two weeks, that's a good start. 
• Twitter thrusts its outrage in my face every day, but then, I ask for it by going to Twitter. Ditto for NYTimes and WaPo. I go to FB to see what my cousins and friends are up to, not to have my face ground in the awful news redux. Maybe my cousins and friends can write a letter instead, since I can't see them through the fog of awfulness.
• We have finally gone from "this air WILL hurt you" to "this air might bother you," so I can't wait to get out and move for a change.  Fresh air and walking (and maybe Diet Coke) are the only drugs I really crave, and being told that both are hazardous has been hard--not Hurricane Harvey or Hurricane Irma awful, but still. 
• I am also ignoring email on the weekends. Nothing good ever comes in on the weekend. Here's what I would cross-stitch on a pillow: Email is always someone else's idea of what you ought to be doing, not your idea of what you ought to be doing. Respond accordingly.
• I am reading for work again. I am getting ideas. I am writing. I am happy about it.
• Is it a coincidence that the FB & email break coincides with wanting to work again? I'm betting it's not.

Writing inspiration, sort of

1. From Air & Light & Time & Space: "Studies by Hartley and Branthwaite (1989) and Kellogg (1994) suggest that the most productive writers typically write several times a week for one to three hours per session. (Sword, Helen. Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (p. 50). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition).  
1. Do you count reading and research in that time?
2. How about visits to the library?
3. Or making a bibliography?
2. Do you keep track of the hours you devote to class prep (including reading and grading) and to administrative tasks?
3.  If so, do you keep track of your writing hours in the same space, if you keep track of them? 
4. The big question: 
1. Do you set yourself a number of hours each day to write?
2.  Or do you write until you have a certain number of words?

The writing formula for a piece of writing that you promised but don't want to do: twice as long to write and at least four times as much procrastination beforehand. All this means my time is up and I have to try to write tonight what I could not write all day. 

Addendum: I'm also tired of "if you can't effect major social change, do nothing," or a Twitter attack on Little Free Libraries

An LFL heinously upholding neoliberalism.

Okay, the next post will be about writing or something, I promise.

But I came home after a full day and a long drive to see this on the news and on Twitter--on the traditionally slow "news dump" time of Friday afternoon:

• Against precedent of having the Justice Department vet pardons, Trump throws yet MORE red meat to his base and pardons the convicted Joe Arpaio.
• Hurricane Harvey is bearing down on Texas and Louisiana, drenching it in torrents of rain and wind so strong it's swaying concrete buildings.
• Trump disgracefully issues an order banning transgender service members, after the Joint Chiefs had individually indicated it's a terrible idea on so many levels--not just rights but fighting strength.
• He also might deputize school safety officers to enforce immigration arrests in the schools, where children are supposed to be safe. 
• This is on top of threatening to hold U. S. hostage, via the debt ceiling, to pay for the ridiculous, racist, and unnecessary wall that he swore to the Trumpettes that Mexico would pay for. With no sense of irony, one of his cabinet said "It'll be like the Maginot Line." Uh, yeah. Ask France how that one worked out.  Maybe they ought to go for Hadrian's Wall instead.

 And this is just an hour's worth of news.

But what's most important? What's A#1 on the radical librarians' agenda this evening? (Google them if you want to. I don't want to give them the link.)

Little Free Libraries.

That's right, the little free-standing book houses where you can take a book and leave a book. Where little kids can get books for free (and so can adults).  Where someone in your community cared enough to put the time and effort in to reach out to neighbors.

They don't solve the problem of inadequate library funding, say the rad librarians. True enough.

They make people feel good without a radical tearing down of the oppressive structures that enable systemic privilege blah blah blah and you can fill in the rest of this speech yourself.  True enough.

But shouldn't a small good get the benefit of the doubt?

Apparently not.

I'm tired of the false equivalence thing not only because in the media it gave us Trump (Hillary's emails! Hillary's emails!--remember that?) but because in giving equal weight to horrible things like white supremacy and the trans ban and things that just aren't quite correct enough, like the Little Free Library, we're squandering an opportunity.  And with things the way they are, we don't have the luxury of wasting opportunities to set things right.

How can we write in the current environment?

I saw a tweet the other day that said something like "I hope I can put the 6 hours a day I spend watching the news about the U.S. destroying itself on my annual review."

Amen to that.  I know that this is a first world/academic world problem, and it's insignificant in the face of what Charlottesville has suffered and what continues to happen throughout the country,  but it's a problem nonetheless.

How do we keep calm and carry on, as the Brits say, when there's a fresh !@#$show every time we open our laptops? How can we develop consecutive thoughts about research when the country is being run on the reality show principle that every day is an escalation of the worst of the day before? When Nazis are back and racism is horrifyingly endemic? I might be ripped apart for saying this, but we were making progress on racism. Obama did give us a sense of hope. Now the president endorses white supremacy, and the Congress does nothing? Is this the United States?

And what if we are horrified by what's happening but express ourselves incorrectly? For example, Tina Fey did a sketch recently about eating sheet cake to drown out stress or to satirize people's desires to turn away rather than to protest. I didn't think it was hilarious but thought it was okay--until social media tore her a new one, pointing out the parallels to Marie Antoinette, branding her with the most heinous of insults--"liberal" and "neoliberal" and "racist"--and generally taking her down.

It feels disloyal or traitorous, somehow, to write about something other than the events that are happening around us. About the only non-news things on Twitter, for example, are those that are put out by twitterbots, which would churn out tweets if the sky was falling, which it kind of is.

If we need to write about our actual research, we seem unfeeling or uncaring (we're not). Ditto for teaching, with each fresh tragedy appropriately bringing with it a "syllabus" to teach resistance to the Nazis. Yet we have obligations that demand other kind of content, and we have to consider that, too, don't we?

I have research-related posts and writing that I want to do, but I keep thinking I'll wait for the !@#$show to end or at least die down. Like the never-ending heat this summer, though, it never does.

Off-topic: Some Sears homes

The Westly, apparently one of the top 4 models.

As a chaser from current news and the last post, I give you some Sears homes.

With Sears in its current cratering state, it's possible that people don't know that it once shipped not only girdles, engagement rings, and farm equipment, but houses. From 1908-1940, you could have all the pre-cut materials shipped to you on a rail car (plumbing and heating extra) and build the home on your own lot. The lot sizes were included so you could decide.

This fancy model has a servant's room.

These were well-built homes, and especially if you live in the Northeast or Midwest, you've probably seen them. This site (http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm) has pictures and floor plans, and if you're looking for distraction, it's a great place to visit. Here are the most popular models.

Floor plan for "Modern Home #115" from 1908-1914.

It's an interesting tour through the early twentieth century, too. The earliest plans don't include bathrooms as a matter of course; the later ones do.  The one at left has a pantry, parlor, 3 bedrooms, and an attic but no bathroom.

You can see the trend toward neo-Colonial versions emerge in the 1930s, with names like "The Salem" and "The Lexington," but the majority continued to be bungalows.  One defining feature seems to be whether the homeowner was willing to pay for extras like dining rooms and hallways--not so different from today, really.

By 1940, the homes are virtually all two-story or 1 & 1/2 story models, more Cape Cod than bungalows.

After the war, one of the hit movies celebrating/satirizing  individualism in home ownership was Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948).  You can see a clip from it above. (The completely blank stare from Cary Grant when he doesn't have the faintest, foggiest notion what the builder is talking about is priceless. I have so given that blank stare at being given a choice between two options when I didn't even know there were options to be considered.) There were a lot of these houses built, too, all over the country, including Northern Clime.

Do you have any Sears homes in your neighborhood, or have you seen any?

Catching up and current events

I've been gone again with travel, and more travel, and still more travel via planes, trains, and automobiles.  I'm home for now, though.

While away, I barely looked at the news. It is always depressingly the same:  the President is a crazy person who threatens all our lives with his stupid, showy, dangerous posturing, the only certainty of which is that he times each new outrage to the daily 24-hour news cycle before moving on to the next. In the meantime, his administration guts the hard-won protections (EPA, health care, women's rights, voting rights, the social safety net for the elderly, immigrants, the poor, and the rest) that keep  us functioning.

And then the white Nazi terrorists at Charlottesville, and seeing the brave students standing up against Nazis. In this country. (And the President, who uses Twitter as a flamethrower against movie stars and dictators as crazy as himself, says nothing lest he disturb his Nazi followers, but enough about that.)

How is it that random violent idiot terrorists--er, "low-information voters for Trump"--can dress in camo and patrol the streets with assault rifles, which we're not allowed to call assault rifles officially because the NRA has a fit, as if this is a normal thing to do?

And, while we're at it, why can't the CDC track gun violence as a public health issue, which it definitely is? And why is concealed carry in classrooms permitted in ten states? (Wait! I know the answer to that one, and I'll bet you do, too.)

People are being raked over the coals on Twitter for asking questions like "how did we come to this?" and "what can we do?" so I won't ask those. 

But I do think about people of my parents' generation, the older ones of whom fought in World War II. A close family member was a pilot and flew during the D-Day invasion and the Battle of Remagen. Other families have heard stories from Holocaust survivors.  Did we really go through all that to have Nazis here in this country?

I know that the U.S. has a fraught history of racism and isn't close to perfect. But we are better than this and need to show it.

A midsummer night's thoughts

Back from travel and more travel, lovely but draining. It was a conference, but a conference in Europe, so I got work credit and the benefits of seeing life from another perspective.

• The perspective of "oh, yeah, Roman ruins, no big deal" to those who live there, but a wondrous thing to me. Walking on roads that I now see are laid in the Roman pattern while not being in Rome gives me a whole sense of the empire's reach that we never got in Latin class and a new appreciation for those stylish nail-soled boots. 
• And to see foundations laid by the Romans, built up by the Normans, abandoned, reclaimed, repurposed into air-raid shelters or what have you--again, magical. Knowing that there's not a square inch that hundreds of people in previous millennia haven't already walked on--which is not the case where I live--still amazing.
• Here as there, people take their dogs everywhere, especially the elderly ladies with their tiny dogs, as a matter of course.
• How I know I'm a hopeless rube: dinner at 9:30 p.m., however delicious, takes some adjustment when you're used to getting up at 5 a.m.
• The blue of the evening sky. The moon. The moon in the blue sky even close to midnight.
• Architecture and public sculpture--aspirational, representational, and worth seeing--everywhere I looked. Things happened in these spaces, some terrible, and they were commemorated lest we forget. 
• Walking to see everything, about 10 miles a day. When you walk, you own the space in a different way than when you ride or drive. We took trams or buses some places, of course, but walked much more than we had before. In my usual walks, I feel as though I own the terrain, as Thoreau did, because I can visualize it all and see the minute changes.  Walking in a strange place gave me a temporary possession or perhaps a different understanding of it, one reinforced by all those cobblestones, narrow streets, and buildings.

Writing inspiration: random thoughts

Gwinne's post on writing had me thinking about the process (and also made me buy the Air & Light & Time & Space book), so here are some random thoughts:

• It's still June! You still have a lot of summer left--really! That's it for the inspiration part of this post.
• Doing all the home improvement stuff was a little like having a baby: your brain refuses to do much else for a time since the process is all-consuming. I'm slowing coming out of this and was able to send a long-promised revision today 
• I don't know why this is, but if I promised to write something and don't want to write it, I have a really, really hard time even looking at it. This last instance took me about 2 months to write a couple thousand words that I could have knocked off in a week or two if I wanted to do it--but I didn't. It was in the middle of the house disruption, but still: there's a lesson here about promising things you're not enthusiastic about doing. 
• All those authors who talk about "write first--walk later" must live in a much cooler climate than Northern Clime, where if you don't get out first thing in the morning, the temperature is in the 90s before you know it. Also, who can sit still first thing in the morning? 
• This month is an experiment in writing without access to books--well, access to most of my books, anyway, since they're still in boxes except for two bookcases full.  How far can you go and how much can you write without a lot of books, using just online articles & books & information and what you already know? Time will tell. 

For Bardiac, who asked to see the floor results (will disappear)

Bardiac had asked to see the results of the hardwood flooring installation, so here goes! I'll take this pic down in a day or two. The flooring is red oak, with a clear finish.

*Poof*--all gone!

June: home upgrades but work downgrades

For the past month I (we) have been doing some much-needed house refreshing--hardwood floors in place of 20-year-old carpet, some new carpet--which involves packing & carrying more books and furniture than I even thought I had. This has gone on for weeks, and it involved lots of trips to Goodwill & other charities to donate furniture & books that I should be able to take out of the library if needed, Marie Kondo-style.

It also confirmed my medieval (?) view of the world. I read or heard one time that in medieval times the peasantry observed mass from behind a lattice screen (medievalists, this may not be true, but hear me out) because they had only a primitive set of beliefs in which simple transgressions brought immediate punishment or because (more likely) the nobility didn't want to rub elbows with them. My behind-the-lattice primitive set of beliefs was borne out in this process of home refreshing because for everything I dared to order that might be considered hubristic (new carpet, hardwood in place of worn and stained carpet) something else in the house of equal value broke and had to be replaced or repaired (furnace, water damage). My wanting a decent-looking house was discovered by the Powers Above, and absolution came only in the form of having to literally pay the price for things that broke. Random events joined by post hoc reasoning or sound retribution for the sin of house pride? You decide.  

Hours spent in moving, cleaning, and talking to repair people has played havoc with my writing, of course, so more about that anon.