Update: Jeff Bezos is shocked, shocked at Amazon's practices--but ends up confirming them

Just a follow-up to the NY Times piece: in a new article, Jeff Bezos says he "doesn't recognize" the dystopian workplace described there. Want proof?

• They have fun Fridays!
• People only respond to emails after midnight if they want to.  Unspoken corollary: and if they want to keep their jobs, they'd better want to.
• Any of the abuses should be reported to HR, Bezos says. Unspoken caveat: because things always go so well for whistleblowers in such an environment.

What keeps everyone motivated? According to Bezos, it's because The people we hire here are the best of the best. But note this:

An Amazon spokesman previously confirmed that the company manages out a pre-determined percentage of its workforce every year. The engineer also quotes an unnamed senior executive telling an all-hands meeting, “Amazon used to burn a lot of people into the ground.”

So if you don't want to be one of the ones "managed out" or ranked and yanked, you know what you have to do. 

The Amazon model: coming to a university near you?

The New York Times article "Inside Amazon"  led me to think up this little riddle:

Q: What's the difference between living in Westeros (Game of Thrones) and working for Amazon.com?

A: In Westeros, you still fight 24-7 for survival, but they can only kill you once.

Here's a quiz to see if you would fit in at Amazon.com.

1) You develop a serious illness, or give birth to a child, or have someone close to you die, so your productive work hours slip to 85 per week.  What can you expect from Amazon, the company whose initial answer to warehouse workers' keeling over in 100-degree heat wasn't air conditioning but having ambulances (and no doubt pink slips) waiting outside for the fallen?

a) Supplemental paid leave
b) Flex time for completing your work
c) You'll be fired or forced to quit.

2) You collaborate with others to make a better product or to ship something faster, but Amazon uses "stacked ranking" or "rank and yank" where everyone is ranked frequently and people are fired after every ranking. You

a) Defend your team and the product
b) Explain the long-term benefits to the company
c) Anonymously report the person you want fired on the company's special feedback software, helpfully included in the worker directory along with pre-written derogatory messages; you can also gang up with your fellow Targaryens to sink someone, since these are pasted verbatim into the victim's performance review.

3) If you get an email after 1 a.m. on a weekend, when should you answer it?

a) the next morning
b) Monday morning
c) within an hour, or else you'll start getting text messages on your phone--that you pay for yourself--asking you why you are so slow

4) Which of the following statements is false?

a) One worker reported seeing people crying at their desks as a common sight.
b) Some companies are reluctant to hire former Amazon employees because they're known as "Amholes" for their combative ways
c) Jeff Bezos is truly sorry for this culture and wants to build a kinder, gentler workplace.

Kidding!  Bezos is proud of the "purposeful Darwinism" that drives people to ulcers and to quit.

What does this corporate horror show have to do with the modern university?

I keep seeing in The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, and in statements from various administrators at various places things like the following:

• Greater emphasis on numbers of publications and demands for "impact measures" to be reported, even though those scores that the scientists use aren't readily available to people in the humanities.
• Greater emphasis on grant dollars brought in, even though--again--the minuscule number of grants available in the humanities, the extreme competition for them (NEH = same acceptance rate as getting into Harvard or  Stanford), and the dollar amounts they bring in pale in comparison to those in the sciences, against whom the humanities are increasingly being compared in a misguided bid for "accountability."
• More and more kinds of performance assessments for students and for instructors.
• More and more interest in automating courses, "optimizing" for scale as though students are widgets, etc.  
• Misguided applications of MBA jargon designed to corporatize the university.

Maybe I'm being too alarmist; there's hope, after all, in the movement for decent salaries and benefits for non tenure-track employees. And the university is still a place that, as all the mission statements say, upholds humanistic principles.

But this gave me pause:

Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event.

This is the Judas software that allows workers to backstab one another anonymously "anytime," as the name promises. In the shiny widgets arms race that universities seem to have adopted, I'm hoping this is one product that will fly beneath their radar.

And kudos, by the way, to the NY Times reporters Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld for such a good article, and to the brave Amazon and ex-Amazon workers who spoke out despite a Bezos gag order. 

At ChronicleVitae: Work Less. Play More. What are your ways of doing this?

At ChronicleVitae, Allison Vaillancourt advises readers to work less, play more, and get some sleep:

The most striking finding from my unscientific research study was the theme of rituals and routines. Every single person described something they do on a regular basis in order to maintain a sense of calm and focus. For some, their routines were things you might expect — daily exercise, a strict bedtime, a meditation practice, a healthy breakfast, or a nonnegotiable dinnertime with a partner or family members.

All academics know that, next to a cult of "smart" ("that was such a smart paper" or "she's doing such smart work") we've made a cult of being busy, most of which goes with the job but some of which is self-inflicted. No one wants to be the person who isn't busy, because if you're not busy, how can you be smart?

Vaillancourt has a roundup of ways that people she knows accomplish this kind of self-care, including scheduled quiet time and an app called Habits Wizard.  Although the last thing I need is to have one more app running my life, the point is that if it works for you, you should try it. 

I'd only add that if your routine involves other people, like a quiet dinnertime without dogs milling around and stealing food off the table (family drama on a recent vacation, now resolved*), it's important to have buy-in from the people it involves.

In looking at Vaillancourt's suggestions and those of her respondents, a few things seem to be essential: (1) ritual or routine; (2) quiet time; and (3) restricting access to yourself during those times.

• "Quiet Sundays" with no email until after 5, something I've tried to do on weekends for a few years that has worked pretty well.
• Exercise that you actually enjoy, if possible--walking, running, biking, dance, etc.

Some of the ones she mentions are ones I'd like to incorporate more regularly, like looking at the stars on a regular basis rather than sporadically. What other self-care practices would you recommend?


*Resolved by me finally keeping my mouth shut about wanting to keep the dogs out when we eat, because it's only for a week and I'm already seen as the family lunatic for being bothered by this.

Random bullets of here, there, and everywhere

• While I haven't gone to a fancy place like Barcelona like Profacero or Blargistan like Notorious, and I'm not moving to a new place like Flavia or Heu Mihi, or even returning from an exciting fellowship like Historiann, or getting invited to do all-college lectures like Fie, this has been a summer with a lot of travel. I'm ready to put the suitcase away for a good long while and ready to stop being on a 3-hour time difference that has me automatically waking up at 3:50 a.m. as though it were 6:50 a.m.
• The details of this stage of the book (illustrations, permissions, etc.)  are like planning a wedding or remodeling a room.  All the details that never entered your head before are now things that are apparently vitally important, and you'll be asked to decide things where you didn't even know there was a decision possible. I don't remember being consulted this extensively on my first book.
• In its eternal quest for more and better clickbait, the New York Times turned its serious investigative chops from rich women getting stylists to do their hair and makeup immediately after giving birth (this is significant how, exactly?) to whether the air conditioning is turned down too low in offices in the summer.  A group of extremely thin 20-something white women in sundresses who complained about having to wear sweaters say yes in the article, so yup, it's officially too cold for everyone. People of other genders, ages, races, and weight categories don't count and weren't consulted.  I have always liked colder rooms, especially to teach in, because heat is much harder to deal with.  But my preferences aside, doesn't the Gray Lady have something better to do, like report on the economy?  
• Although I have a number of projects to finish, I keep thinking "I could write X book next" or "I ought to write a biography of Y" or "Since there's a trend now toward novelized versions of real-life biographies (The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, Vanessa and Her Sister), maybe I could write one of those."

The Map Thief and Book Collecting

I picked up Michael Blandings's The Map Thief  in the airport yesterday to read on the plane and highly recommend it.  It's about, well, a man who steals maps from Yale, Harvard, the New York Public Library, the Boston Public Library, and the British Museum, among others, and gets away with it for many, many years.

Having just been to one of these archives, I was ridiculously excited to see it appear in the book--way more excited than the exceedingly unhappy librarians were to discover the thefts, to be sure.  We have a thing in my family, sort of a joke and sort of not, of saying "I've been there!" when a place shows up in the news, so of course I had to bring out the book and show it to the family, as in "I know that reading room! I know that court building! I know that coffee shop they're talking about!"

This book, like The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, tries to get at the heart of why someone--specifically, Forbes Smiley, the thief--would do this.  Part of it is the old Willy Sutton thing about why he robbed banks: "Because that's where the money is." After first making himself an expert in maps pretty much for the love of them, Smiley stole from archives because that's where the maps were, and if he could get $50,000 to $100,000 for one, it seemed worth it to him.  It's a bit like the creepy art underworld in The Goldfinch. He'd fold up the map, put it in his coat pocket, wave to the librarian, and leave. 

But there was more to it than just the money.  Like a lot of other criminals, he was able to rationalize what he did by saying, "Well, people don't appreciate my great expertise. The libraries aren't paying enough attention to these maps. By removing them from atlases and selling them to people making real collections, they'll be studied much more."

I was surprised to learn that, as an expert on maps, he apparently wasn't subjected to the processes that other researchers go through, from filling out forms for each set of materials studied to having the guard rifle through his papers and laptop when he left the archives. And you archive hounds will cringe not only when he steals the maps but when he touches some of them up to make them more salable.

I was thinking about this when reading Historiann's post on book collecting, in which she wonders whether lit people get into book collecting.  While I'm acquainted with some serious Grolier Club-type collectors, I wouldn't say I'm a real collector.  I do, however, try to get first or early editions of one or two of the authors I study, because there's nothing like being able to hold and read from your own first edition, even if it's not what a real collector would consider to be in great condition.  You can go to your shelves in the middle of the night and it's there, without a library tag telling you to bring it back on such and such a date.  It's yours.

The thing is, some of us have the book gene but not the collecting gene, so to speak.  We want the book because we feel a connection to the author, but we lack the inclination as well as the money ($25,000 is the going rate for a well-known classic by one of the authors) to watch eBay, scope out auction houses, and keep track of prices as if we're primarily interested in them as an investment, because we're not.

And when we buy books, like Tom Bredehoft (whom Historiann cites), it's often because we think they're interesting or we may write about them some day. I have a couple of schoolbooks, one a grammar book, from the 1820s or 1830s, and they are not in great shape (cover missing) and are probably not valuable, but they are interesting and I enjoy looking at them. I don't want to search for perfect copies of them. It's the interior, rather than the exterior, that interests me, but both are important for the reading experience.

Karen Kelsky on self-promotion

Karen Kelsky at ChronicleVitae advises younger scholars to "Ignore the Haters and Toot Your Own Horn." 

Now, one of the ways she says to do this (the second one) is to introduce yourself to people at conferences, suggest getting together for lunch or coffee, etc. 

I never thought to do this when I was a junior scholar but, since I benefited from being invited to these by more senior people, I've tried to model that behavior & invite more junior people for lunches and things now that I'm a senior scholar.  Similarly, junior people ask me to get together for coffee and I'm genuinely happy to hear about their research.  This is what academics do, and I never thought of it as tooting our own horn.  It's reciprocal.

How do you feel about this, her first suggested method?

So how do you self-promote? Aside from self-citation, there are two basic avenues. The first is to send your publications to colleagues, peers, and influential people in your field. By important or influential, I mean people who are active leaders in your particular area of study, particularly those who have had an impact on your thinking. That was done in the old days via the sending of paper “offprints.” Now, sending a link or an attachment via email would be fine. Include a note that says something to the effect of: “I am sending you this article because your work has been very helpful to me in the development of my thinking. I’d welcome your thoughts on it.”

How do you respond if, on top of the email tsunami you get every single day, you get an invitation to read something that is not part of the heap of work stacked on your desk, not part of the many, many deadlines you have, and not from someone who is depending on you to turn around that article/recommendation letter/manuscript review/reader's report, etc. in record time? Do you read it and respond, or do you ignore it?

Self-promotion is part of the game in 2015, especially for new scholars.  I get that. 

Twitter (and Facebook) are a big part of self-promotion.  Indeed, some day I am going to do a study to see how many messages are devoted entirely to promoting someone's work.  (I'm guessing about 30% of tweets, down from around 40% because I unfollowed some people who promoted their posts--the same posts or articles--multiple times in a day.) 

I am heretical enough to believe that self-promotion has no relationship to the quality of the scholarship, though. Instead, it reflects the ego and self-promotional savvy of the person doing the tweeting.  That doesn't mean that the scholarship isn't good, but the number of retweets doesn't have any bearing on the quality of the work.

I have also noticed that some of the incessant tweeters are, in person, people who aren't especially good listeners. (Correlation or coincidence?)

But what's the line between letting people know about the work you're doing and annoying people by doing so?

Notes from the archive

I'm in Archive City again (well, an Archive City), and settling into a routine. All I do is eat, and sleep, and write, and walk to and from the archive. It's not a vacation, but it is a break, and a welcome one.

It's funny: the city isn't cool and quiet, and yet I have an impression of things being cool and quiet because that's what an archive does for you.  Some thoughts about the experience:

• There are campus tours going on, lots and lots of them, and it's fun to see the maybe-someday-students and sometimes their parents walking around and talking. They are chattering and hanging out in the sunshine as I go into the cool stone building where their voices echo when they go inside for a quick tour.  Soon, they're back outside, and it's quiet and cool again.
• At one archive I've worked in, you're assigned a table, but here, you get to choose, and everybody seems to choose a spot and stick to it. I think it lessens the distractions, not that there are a lot in a room full of people reading.
• This must be what it is like to be an athlete in training, not that I would know. You get up early, work on one task before the archive opens (writing); then you go to the room and read; then you come back to your room and resume writing.

And some thoughts about the process:

•  For some folders, I've laid out the work plan and am supposed to be simply checking problem areas in the transcriptions from before as well as taking photographs of the manuscripts. (I have managed to turn off the bells & whistles and am no longer the fool with the noisy camera.)  But then I start to read the manuscript, and I just want to sit there and let those words unfold, with all the crossouts and inserts and everything. It's like hearing a more direct voice from the author with all the hesitations and choices.
• Reading fluent, graceful English in the form not only of manuscripts but of items as small as a thank-you note is a pleasure. 
• It also makes me realize just how much debased and trivial junk I read on the web every day--stuff that says nothing and yet it's there so I read it anyway. I think that's why the web is so addictive: a lot of the writing and many of the ideas are basically junk food, repeated endlessly as they cycle through their 24 hours of fame. You read and read, but it's never satisfying. 
• Oh, author, why did you stop writing that story just when I was getting interested in it?  Why didn't you finish it? Maybe you found it boring or unpromising, but I didn't.

A happy brief post: trifecta!

• SCOTUS upholds marriage equality!
• SCOTUS upholds the ACA!
• The CSA battle flag comes down in South Carolina and everywhere else!

Wonders of Technology?: Kindle Page Numbers

Back in 2011, Amazon announced with great fanfare that it was including page numbers, real page numbers, in its Kindle books.  I was excited about it back then, too.

Has that promise come to fruition?

Sort of.   Of maybe 15 random Kindle books on my iPad, here's the breakdown:

• 4 have actual page numbers corresponding to actual published books.
• 4 more have "page numbers" corresponding to someone's Platonic conception of an edition that never existed.
• 7 just have location numbers and that infuriating thing where they try to figure out my reading speed, as though you never jump back and forth in a text.

Some observations:

• The public domain texts are least likely to have page numbers, real or imagined, as you'd expect. 
• Newer trade books are more likely to have page numbers, but that's not a given.  
• Jon Krakauer's Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town has real page numbers, as does David Shields and Shane Salerno's Salinger.
•  Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's just-published The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland and Susan M. Schweik's older The Ugly Laws do not; they only have location markers. 

At least Amazon tells you whether there are real page numbers or not.  If you click on the "length" dropdown tab, it will say one of two things:

• "Contains real page numbers based on the print edition, ISBN #whatever."  This will have the real page numbers.
• "Based on the print edition, ISBN #whatever." This will not have the real page numbers.

There's an new and expensive book that would be really helpful for the upcoming research trip; it's long and weighs a ton, so I was thinking about the Kindle edition (still very expensive--over $60). Since the extremely expensive book is "based on the print edition" but without page numbers, I think I will pass on it.

But wouldn't you think that after four years, the publishers would have gotten the memo about readers wanting page numbers?

Time for a media fast

Here's the news cycle that the web encourages:

Say you find a story that for some reason interests you, like maybe the Rachel Dolezal story, to name a nonstressful example.

You read the first reports as they start to come in from feeder sites.  Then you go to the NY Times, WaPo, Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed or other actual news sources. You click on their links.

Then you go to HuffPo, Jezebel, Slate or other quasi-news aggregator sites. You notice that what's reported in all these various sites and that the sites conflict with each other. In the Dolezal story, for example, that would be all the variations on number of siblings and so on.

Maybe you check out the comments to see if any insiders have information.  Maybe you even click on the listicle aggregators ("Five things to know about Rachel Dolezal," "What Twitter thinks of Rachel Dolezal," etc.) that are basically automated collections of what people no better informed and far more angry, hostile, and profane than yourself think of the issue.

Maybe you read the long, thoughtful opinion pieces, or at least skim them. 

If you're on Facebook, people have stories and opinions. Lots of opinions.

If you're on Twitter, people have opinions and outrage.  Lots of outrage.

As new revelations come out, you read those, too, because whether it's fracking or Rachel Dolezal or some other story, you want to see how it ends.

Before you know it, you've sunk way too much time in following a story that isn't worth that kind of time and attention.

It's not that you should barricade yourself away from the news or refuse to have conversations about it.  But you realize that you should have spent your time instead on something worthwhile where your attention could make a difference.

It's like the information is rat food in a Skinner box, and you are the rat, pressing the bar for more. The food pellets, though, are composed of anger, outrage, and stress.

So here are five things I intend to do the next time I start scurrying down this particular web rabbit hole. 

1)  Go outside and run my hands over the lavender, which is in bloom, so my hands will smell like lavender as I type.
2)  Pick some weeds out of the garden.
3) Stand up and read something.
4) Turn off the wifi or use Freedom.
5) Log the time I'm wasting, with RescueTime or something else, or stop going on Facebook.

Maybe this is a media diet rather than a fast, but it's a start.

*Edited to add: I don't mean to be ungrateful about Facebook--it does let me connect with friends and family members--but a break sounds like a good idea.

We should not say his name

We should not say his name.

We should not read his manifesto.

We should not listen to the thousands of words being wasted on trying to decide whether he was mentally ill or hated religion.

We know why he did it: racism.

We know how he did it: abusing the trust of a welcoming congregation to spread hatred, violence, and death.

We know what he would like: publicity.

We should not give it to him.

Random bullets of mid-June

New and improved with categories!

• Education in the News. Bet you thought this would be about Rachel Dolezal, didn't you?  No, this one needs Margaret Soltan's fine touch, so I hope she'll write about it.  Are you curious about what Scott Walker is going to do with the $250 million he gained by destroying tenure and gutting the University of Wisconsin?  Here's the answer: building half of a new $500 million basketball stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks. 

• Travel. Has this happened to you?  When I see "seats assigned at check-in" on an itinerary for a flight, I assume that it means "fooled you, you sucker! We're going to bump you from the flight"--because they do. Am I the only person this happens to, or have you gotten bumped if you didn't have an assigned seat?
• Work Progress.  I'll be turning in the Laocoon manuscript for copyediting and production this weekend, and it should be out next year.  Hooray! 
• Work Progress. Now to get at the overdue piece for another project.  Flavia wrote recently about the whole phenomenon of writing for companion volumes, and while I agree about their proliferation, I just signed on to do another one, after I turned one down earlier in the year. These do get cited, so they are indeed useful. 
• Cats. One of my cats hates doors being closed (don't they all?), and so if she sees a partially closed door, she will rear up on her hind feet, put her front legs together, and launch herself at the door until it opens. This is a dog behavior, sort of like huskies stiffening their front legs and launching themselves downward to break through the ice or a coyote pouncing on a mouse. I don't know where she got it from.

Thoughts on traveling here and there

When I came back into the U. S. recently from another country, the airport was crowded, with insufficient signage so I didn't know where to go.

Here was the surprising part: the customs people were pleasant. "Have a nice day," they said, and "welcome back!"

So were the TSA screeners.  We were all stressed out, since everyone had connecting flights and the lines were long and slow in a cramped, hot space.   I put my stuff in the 4 bins (laptop separate from iPad, don't forget, unless it's one of the airports where they yell at you to put them together) and put my hands above my head in the scanner booth, as directed.  When I got out, the woman who told me to go ahead pointed to my Fitbit and said, "I want to get one of those with a watch in it."

"Me, too," I said. "This is an older one."

It wasn't so much what she said as that she was making a human connection after all that stress. I noticed that the other screeners were doing similar things--just saying something mildly human and noncommittal.

I had seen one of the male TSA agents joking with a bevy of slender, pretty young blonde women waiting to go through, but that's how 40-ish men usually behave around young things.  But no: the agents seemed to pay some pleasant attention to several people, even those of us who aren't slender 20-year-olds, instead of barking at us about what we were doing wrong. 

Is this some new training that TSA is doing? If so, please continue it.

 ---

I'll be heading out for a research trip in a few weeks, and while I'm grateful for the opportunity, I would just like to stay home for a while.

Would I go if I could get the materials online? Probably, yes, because there's nothing like an archive.

But when they invent a 3D virtual reality archive in my subject area, I certainly want to try it out.

The economics of wishful thinking about campus funding

Given the resounding thump on the head that the protections of tenure just took in Wisconsin (see Historiann's posts), I've been thinking about the implications of articles that call for universal tenure, or tenure-track lines for teaching, or vast increases in lines because humanities are a good thing, or even free state-funded tuition for college students.  (See Notorious's post on this issue.)

A few years ago, there was a call for tenure-track faculty to "just say no" to any hiring of contingent faculty instead of tenure-track lines, and if that meant courses didn't get taught, well, tough beans.

Now, I like the principles behind these idealistic stands, but I am wondering about how these would work in an economic environment like this one where state legislatures continually raid the higher ed budget to fund other things, where double-digit decreases in state funding are the norm, where tuition is mandated by the state not to increase, and where some governors may well destroy great university systems so that they can make the destruction a cornerstone of their conservative credentials. See

How might the conversation go at Everystate University?  I'm hypothesizing that it might go something like this in the worst case:

Words and Widgets Faculty: "We need to teach 100 sections of Words and Widgets 101 next semester, but we don't have enough faculty."

Admin: "Increase course sizes. Put 'em in an auditorium. Hand 'em some clickers."

Faculty: "No, we won't increase course sizes."

Admin: "Okay, hire some contingent faculty."

Faculty: "No, we made a pledge not to do that.  In fact, we need 10 new tenure-track teaching faculty in our department right away to teach 3 sections apiece. We will also need you to fund the search costs. If you don't do that, we can't and won't offer 100 sections."

Admin: sounds of crickets

Time passes. True to their pledge, the Words and Widgets Department offers only 70 sections of Words and Widgets 101.  Many angry phone calls from students later, the department and Admin meet again.

Faculty: "See? We can't offer these courses without enough tenure-track teaching faculty."

Admin: "Contingent--"

Faculty. "Not gonna do that.  It would threaten our educational mission and break our pledge."

Admin.  "Here's 70% of your last year's budget, then, since you only taught 70% of the students. Oh, and we now have an agreement with MOOCs-R-US to teach the other 30% online."

Faculty: "You can't do that. You have to run it through the Faculty Senate."

Admin: "Oh, can't we, though? Bwahahahaha!"

This doesn't mean that the noble ideals aren't worth fighting for.  They are. But in my pessimistic moments, I wonder about how these might fare in the world of academe as it currently exists.

Edited to add: See Bardiac's roundup at http://bardiac.blogspot.com/2015/06/teaching-track.html

From the archive: Conference papers are like ball dresses

Inspired by Dame Eleanor Hull's comment about revisiting things from our blogs, I have been reading through old posts and am finding a few things  as the summer writing season gears up.

They'll be tagged as "From the archive" if you want to skip them. Here's one from http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2008/10/conference-season.html. 

Conference papers age, like ball dresses in a trunk, if you put them in a file folder and don't get back to them. It's easy to see how that happens. You'll get back from the conference. You'll be fired up about working more with your paper and turning it into an article to send out.

But there are those 50 papers to grade, those recommendation letters to write, those committee meetings--and all of a sudden it's six months or a year later, and you need to do a lot more work using materials that you now don't remember as well to get the thing into publishable shape. Unless you have little birds to sew up your ball dress/paper, like the ones in Disney's Cinderella, you may end up with a trunk full of conference papers and a lot of good intentions. Make sure that your research agenda is driving your conference-going and not the other way around.

Blogger.com bloggers: check your template for Sitemeter redirect problem

Notorious Ph.D. brought up an issue in the comments that this blog was redirecting toward another site.

This happened to me the other day and is apparently happening to a lot of people; the problem is Sitemeter.

Here's a description: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/blogger/cASo57LTy58

I removed Sitemeter and reinstalled the template, so this shouldn't be happening.

If it still happens after you refresh the page (so that there is no Sitemeter at the bottom of the page), let me know--thanks!

Blogging thoughts, Dr. Crazy, and why pseudonymity at this late date

Like other bloggers of years past, Dr. Crazy is hanging up her blogging spurs, to use what might be a Historiann metaphor, and is going public with her name instead if you know her on Facebook. I've been reading and enjoying her blog for many years, so like a lot of other readers, I'll miss reading her.  Part of her reason is this:

If tenure means never having to say you’re sorry (as a certain Madwoman once said), then full promotion means that you don’t need a flipping pseudonym. I have things that I want to say now that I want to own, and I want to write in ways that speak to the value of my discipline, of the humanities in general, and of the work that we as faculty do in higher education.

Dr. Crazy is right (always, am I right?) in a lot of ways, and now with the promotion to full, I shouldn't be afraid to post under my own name.  In fact, I do have another blog, but I don't post the same things.

But on that blog, I feel obliged to be professional and interesting.  As is amply evident, I don't feel the need to be either here, because I figure if you blogfriends don't care about the post, you'll just skip it and move on.

What can I post here that I can't or won't post there?

• Over on the real name blog, my voice is more temperate.  Here, not so much.  I can be irritated and extravagant and no one minds.
• On Real Name, I don't get irritated and post rants about email.
• I don't critique MOOCs, because to do so would be to bring down a hailstorm of mansplaining and also youthsplaining about how if I just understood the shiny technology of today, I would not be so thoughtful and critical about it. (A favorite MOOC post: "MOOC 'n' Bake.")
• I don't make fun of articles in The Chronicle, NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, or Inside Higher Ed.  
• To be more positive, I don't cite their creativity and brain research and write those posts, either.
• I don't write satires about the English Department of the Future or the New Office Commons.
• I don't post fantasies about the classroom as airplane or the Mad Men writing group or inventions I want to see or  wandering through blogland.
• I don't publish any posts about the Laocoon manuscript, or arguing with your brain, or writing inspiration, or the "dither and blather" of the writing process, or writing houses.
• And it goes without saying that nothing over there is about job searches, teaching, grading,  or service.
• Or MLA. Or gender in academia.
• Dear Ms. Undine is a lot of fun to write but obviously can't appear on the Real Name blog. 
• On a more literary or cultural note: No Mad Men. No reflections on mid-century males or childhood reading. No movies. Maybe I'll port some of those over if I ever come out and use my real name.

Recently, I decided to post over at the other blog and wanted to upload a picture using one of those little cards that you remove from a camera (can't remember what it's called). I have a Mac and absentmindedly slipped the card not into the card slot but into the DVD drive.  What followed was frantic and I hoped non-destructive probing into the DVD drive to get the little card out without killing the DVD drive.  It worked, and the DVD drive seemed to be fine.

But if you believe in signs and portents, then you would logically think that the universe was sending me a signal not to post over there, at least not right then.

It sent me here instead.

Your thoughts? 

Mad Men: Thoughts on the Finale, or Confession is Good for the Soul

SPOILERS!

So what did you think of the Mad Men finale? This is my only break (of a day!) between more stressful travel and stressful conferences, so here is the only thing I actually want to do today, besides maybe go to Big Sur:

• I wasn't doing Mad Men predictions, but I was happy to see two things come to pass: the Coke commercial and Don/Dick's time at Esalen: "Don renames himself Werner Ehrhard, invents EST, starts leading seminars for Stan the FBI agent and Philip on The Americans." I'm too culturally ignorant to know the difference between Esalen and EST, but that was what I was going for. Matt Weiner, you planted those clues just right.
• The Coke commercial: confession time--I had hoped for this ending early on, when Coke became the Big Cheese for Don to land, but didn't think that Matt Weiner would dare to do it. I have always liked the song and even have the non-Coke version on my iPod, proof positive that commercial culture has entirely infected my brain and that I have no musical taste. Note: The Coke version is actually better.
• Fun fact: the Doors' "Hello, I Love You," which was playing in the garage where Don apparently worked, was a huge hit, and it's well known that the fuzz bassline is almost identical to the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night." The Kinks have apparently dropped into "Hello, I Love You" on occasion in concert to mock/protest/acknowledge/kid/riff on this similarity.
• Speaking of confessions: this was the last of Don's confessions, and, from the perspective of one who was raised Catholic, it was phrased exactly like a confession. We saw this earlier with Peggy's sister when she goes to confession: there's are set phrases and then what you might call the enumeration of sins before the penance and absolution.  
• Look at Don's language in this segment, how oddly formal in language and I-focused it is, which leaves him all the blame: "I scandalized my child. I took another man's name and made nothing of it." Since when does Don use judgmental words like "scandalize"? It's reminiscent of "I took the name of the Lord in vain," which is one kind of common confessional formula.
• Now look at how this scene is framed: He's framed as if he is in a confessional booth, a space of plain, dark wood where people can speak freely. He's in a
  
  partially open, partially framed public space, speaking to an unseen listener.  
• The old confessionals had a screen separating the priest from the person confessing (maybe they still do), so that they could not see each other. He slumps down, spent, after his confession and says he can't move.
• But Peggy, acting as his confessor, absolves him: "Come home. You know McCann would love to have you back. Don't you want to work on Coke?" Earlier in the series, she refused outright to confess to Father Gill.  Now, she is acting as Father Gill, a nonjudgmental one, in absolving Don. 
• Then another woman comes by and says, like Peggy, "yes, you can move. Come with me to my seminar.  I'm late." After all he's done to women, they are the ones who save him.
• Don's prayer of absolution?  If you watch him, he isn't saying "om." He's saying "home." 
• Yes, we're meant to think he returns, reconnects with his family, and writes that commercial. Look at the clothes on the young women he talks to at Esalen (?), all red-tied braids and embroidery (h/t Tom and Lorenzo) and one of the women in the commercial.  
• The big debate on the interwebs seems to be whether this is horribly cynical--great feelings exploited to sell us Coke--or sincere--Don actually achieves a measure of peace and learns that love is not an illusion. The jury's still out, but wouldn't you love to have seen that Coke pitch meeting?
• Speaking of Coke, remember what Steve Jobs said when he recruited an executive at Pepsi to run some early incarnation of Apple: "Do you want to stay here and make sugar water or do you want to come with me and change the world?" He divided the two pursuits; the Coke commercial doesn't, for good or ill.
  
• Don's not the only one who confesses. Of course there are all the "seminar" confessional scenes, in one of which Don breaks through his wall of isolation and hugs the man who feels as if he's in a refrigerator and is not being chosen by his family. But the one we've been waiting for is this one: Stan confesses his love to Peggy (on the phone), and she confesses in turn, first on the phone and then in person, the third or fourth use of the episode's title.  The sour commentators over at Slate, whose columns I skimmed in the airport yesterday, apparently wanted more misery for Peggy and less rom-com.  Not me. I'm happy for those two crazy kids.  If you want misery, go watch Game of Thrones.
• What about the rest?
• Joan is not ready to retire and be a plaything. Starting Holloway Harris in her apartment recalls the Season 3 finale when they all worked out of a hotel room. Even Kevin's caregiver sounds more professional.  Joan knows how to run things and especially how to whip underlings into shape. She'll do fine. Roger's visit: there's still a little bit of wistful "the one who got away" in Joan's comment about some woman finally getting the timing right.
• Roger and Marie--Hilarious. Finally, someone who'll be crazy and imperious enough to give Roger the excitement he craves.
• Pete and Peggy. "A thing like that!" is Pete's catchphrase, even more than "What is going on?" Peggy listened to him, maybe the only person at SCDP who did, and says it back to him. To paraphrase what Peggy said, very anachronistically, when she smoked dope with Paul back in an earlier season, they're in a very good place right now. 
• Speaking of catchphrases, did you see Sally channel her mother when she wanted to talk frankly to Bobby and Gene was in the room? "Go watch TV!" Gene says his only word in the series except for "Bye, Daddy"--"No!"--but he goes anyway.  
• Just realized also that Stephanie calls Don out on his catchphrase and overall philosophy of "This never happened."  "I'm afraid you're wrong about that, Dick," she says, sadly, and this time he hears it.
• Pete and Trudy. It's amazing to look back and see how much Pete has always been enamored of aviation.  Sure, Secor Laxatives paid the bills, but what he wanted and could never quite get was American Airlines and Something Aviation.  Now he's got Learjet, Trudy, Tammy, and Wichita. 
• Edited to add: One thing that has always confused me is this:  Betty has a dishwasher in Ossining, and she has one now in her goth mansion (the appliance with the big lever). So why does she do the dishes by hand, wearing rubber gloves, and why is Sally doing the dishes by hand, when they have a dishwasher? I can see if she's washing crystal wineglasses or something, but she and Sally do this for regular dinnerware.
• Also, various sites keep talking about Anna's "wedding ring." It's not. A diamond solitaire is (or was in those days) an engagement ring, not a wedding ring, although maybe fashions have changed. The fact that Stephanie calls it "Anna's engagement ring" when she gives it to Don/Dick is also a clue, wouldn't you say?

Enough!  Back to the stressful part of my life. I've been waiting for my suitcase (delayed in yesterday's travel) to arrive so I can do a wash before heading out at the crack of dawn tomorrow, and it just got here. But I hope you enjoyed the finale as much as I did!

Mad Men: Don Draper, Jack Kerouac, and the Divided Mid-century Self

I know that this is the second Mad Men post in a week, but there's only one episode left, so I won't be writing about it much longer. ("Doesn't this woman have any work to do?" you may be asking.  "Oh, wait--that's why she's procrastinating.")

Does he remind you of anyone?

I'm thinking of a parallel between Don and  Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road the spirit-Bert quoted to Don in a recent episode: "Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

For Kerouac, all that endless travel always led back to his mother, as Joyce Johnson writes about so beautifully both in her memoir Minor Characters and in her biography of Kerouac, The Voice is All.   

According to Johnson, Kerouac's drive to write and to create, to find a voice that could fuse the parts of himself--thinking in the joual French of his French-Canadian parents and writing in the English of the Beats that he would pioneer--was part of this restlessness.  Haunted by the death of his older brother, Gerard, when he was a child, Kerouac was on a continuing quest for some authentic voice that would admit perfection and ecstatic vision to be expressed through language. This and his insecurities led him through some self-destructive behavior, to say the least, including involvement with numerous women and heavy drinking. Oh, and he is drawn primarily to dark-haired women, leading him to tell the blonde Joyce Johnson (then Glassman) that he doesn't usually go for women of her coloring.

Sound like anyone you know? Does this mean that Don will be trying to get back to some state of origin, despite knowing that, as Thomas Wolfe, a great influence on Kerouac, put it,  "You can't go home again?" Don can never get back to his mother, although that doesn't stop him from trying to recapitulate the homecoming experience.  What Kerouac knows/knew is that even if you can go back physically, emotionally you never really can.

I'm not trying to trivialize Kerouac's achievement by comparing it to advertising, by any means, or trying to draw an exact parallel.  But if Weiner and company are trying to capture some essence of the mid-century man and the divided self, they couldn't have chosen a better model. 

***
Just as an aside: wouldn't you like to see the ending be what the writer over at Vox thinks might happen, the Mother of All Don Draper Pitches?

Mad Men: A few bullets of The Milk and Honey Route

• Am I the only person who thinks that Chris Ellis, who plays Bud, the motel owner, bears a striking resemblance to Ryan Cutrona, who played Gene, Betty's father? (I've seen these actors in other things and always get them confused.) They even sang the same song, George M. Cohan's "Over There." Back in season 2 or 3, Don told Gene not to talk about the war (WWI) and the German soldier he had killed. Now, Gene # 2 is telling him to talk about the war.
• A sad storyline for Betty, which now, in retrospect, seems inevitable.  The fortuneteller in the episode"Tea Leaves," when she had her previous health scare, told her that she was much loved and respected, and at that point Betty knew it wasn't true. Now it is. 
• Pete hasn't fared too well in the heartland. Remember Detroit? "Not great, Bob!" But he's right about the corporate clientele for jets, even though he can't see how corporate wealth will rule everything by the twenty-first century.  Now that he's figured out he is better with Trudy than without her, and she's agreed, maybe he has really changed, even if he can't convince his loathsome babe-magnet brother ("Women have always found me attractive") to give up his wandering ways.
• How is Don getting money for these travels? Is Meredith paying his Diner's Club/AmEx bills while he is away? I can't imagine that he still has a job at McCann. 
• Don is confessing and confessing and confessing, although never the whole story to the same person. How many people now know that he's really Dick Whitman? And he's told a version of the explosion where the real Don was killed before, although never with such emphasis on his own responsibility.  But as we learned from Peggy's sister's jealous confession to Father Gill way back in season 2, confession doesn't lead to absolution, just more punishment (for Peggy, once Father Gill hears what happened to her baby). 
• Don looks happy at the bus stop because he has maybe finally saved someone. He tried to save worthless Sad Diana, using his con man persona, and he failed. But he can take the fall for Worthless Grifter Kid and give him his Cadillac and a fresh start.  He has saved one person, even though he doesn't seem to be able to save himself.  Does this mean he can stop the downward slide at last?
• Sadly, probably not. I used to have hopes for some happy ending for Don, but this entire season has been about his accepting a continuing punishment and humiliation in expiation for his behavior the previous six seasons.  He's the scapegoat and takes all the sins on himself, even the ones he doesn't commit. It won't be a quick end because Matthew Weiner wouldn't think that would be punishment enough. Best case: a fix-it shop in a run-down section of a nondescript Midwestern town.  Worst case: Sally trips over him on Skid Row as he asks for spare change.