Back to the future: Two-speed Internet

The New York Times reports that the F.C.C., which I am starting to think is run by Clay Davis, Evan Burrell, and William Rawls of The Wire, wants to let big bucks rule the internet even more than is currently the practice.

Content providers can pay for fast speeds.

And all those web sites for universities, digital projects put up with grant funds and a lot of sweat equity, and other knowledge-content sites that are there because someone believed in them? They can wait--or, rather, you can sit there and watch them load with 14.4-baud dial-up modem-like speed.  Remember those speeds?

It'll probably be like hotel wifi.  You know when you're in the conference hotel and you use the basic-level wifi? Sometimes the basic costs $9.95 to 15.95 a day, but it's still nothing to brag about.

You sit and wait for sites to load, until they time out.

Sometimes you watch a site that loads as if a content curtain is being slowly lowered, like some kind of information strip-tease, before a pop-up emerges on the screen and kills what little information you've been able to gather.

You watch the signal drop and reconnect.

You hope that the one button of wifi that the indicator is showing you will allow the email you're trying to send will get through.

Surprise! The wifi drops and times out before that happens. 

From the article:

The F.C.C. proposal claims to protect competition by requiring that any deal between a broadband company and a content provider be “commercially reasonable.”

But then the F.C.C. thinks that a Comcast   cable and internet provider monopoly is "commercially reasonable," so I'm not holding my breath. The U.S. already has slower internet than, say, Latvia because it's "too expensive" for the big companies to upgrade, or so they tell us.

I hope the F. C.C. comes to its senses.

At The Atlantic: The Confidence Gap

At The Atlantic, Kattie Kay and Claire Shipman explore "The Confidence Gap." In study after study, the same gender difference appears: Women are less confident about their answers, want to be absolutely sure of an outcome before they apply for a job, and don't want to risk rejection in the workplace or being thought a fool if they get something wrong.

And men?  This says it all, really:

“I think that’s really interesting,” Brescoll said with a laugh, “because the men go into everything just assuming that they’re awesome and thinking, who wouldn't want me?" . . . Ernesto Reuben, a professor at Columbia Business School, has come up with a term for this phenomenon: honest overconfidence. In a study he published in 2011, men consistently rated their performance on a set of math problems to be about 30 percent better than it was. 

I'm thinking about how this plays out in the academic world.

• We've all talked about how women take on too much service, and it's well known that women take longer to get from associate to full professor than men do.  From the article (though not about academia): "Women applied for a promotion only when they met 100 percent of the qualifications. Men applied when they met 50 percent."
• In some cases this "dot every i, cross every t" syndrome make be justified, since women may be implicitly held to higher standards.
• Is the service component  a place where it's possible to achieve some kind of perfection, whereas having enough publications is a constantly moving target?  I'm speculating, but couldn't that be true?
• Are we socializing our students in these gendered ways? When we're preparing them for an interview (a job interview, a med school interview), do we encourage men and women equally to be direct, to challenge an interviewer if needed, and to speak up?
• Does this apply to classes, too? Are the students who speak out with confidence even if they're wrong male and the hesitant ones female?  I haven't seen that in my classes, but I wonder if more study would show this.
• There's such a premium on being smart in academia, where the highest accolade is "That was a really smart talk" or "She wrote a really smart book." Does this mean that women are more afraid of being thought a fool than men are?
• How does this confidence gap intersect with those who were bullied as children, especially those who were bullied because they were intelligent or bookish? For example, what if you kept your mouth shut when you knew answers in class because you knew that you would be bullied and made miserable by a gang of girls once recess rolled around? That seems less like a lack of confidence than an urgent desire not to be picked on.

I had always attributed this confidence gap to family socialization, not so much a gendered thing but a family thing.  In my family, any offhand remark that you might like to do anything mildly aspirational (like travel or do something besides teach high school), or any stupid statement, meant that relatives teased you mercilessly about it for years. In Spouse's family, the wildest of plans were conveniently forgotten if they failed or if the person changed his mind, as if the whole former plan were swept down the memory hole.  This meant that they could, in Steve Jobs's words, fail early and often, and since no one ever brought it up again, you could try and fail without hearing about it endlessly.

Thoughts? 

The name is MOC, not MOOC, and we're charging for them. What? You got a problem with that?

So the world turns on its axis, and, like clockwork, the "monetization plan" that various critics have wondered about reveals itself. 

Inside Higher Ed reports that Udacity has decided to change its business model:

Beginning next month, the massive open online course provider Udacity will cut the first O from the acronym and only offer MOCs. Founder Sebastian Thrun, whose "pivot" last year shifted the company's focus to corporate training, in a blog post announced Udacity will stop issuing free course completion certificates on May 16.

To be fair, they're only charging for the certificate.  If you want to do the course and then manage to convince a hiring manager somewhere that you actually know this stuff for free without the certificate, well, good on ya, as the Aussies say.

So, from free, open-access, and change-the-world elite education for the masses to a fee-based certificate and a corporate training model in 3 years?  Now that's a speedy adaptation to market forces.

It's really kind of reassuring that MOOCs have found their feet and that those feet don't have to stomp all over higher education, at least at present.

Off-topic: Farewell to the Land of No Internets

Can you write an elegy for a place?

Longtime readers, if there are any, might recall that over the course of a few summers I wrote about going to a place I called the "Land of No Internets." Those of you who read writing as jo(e)'s blog have an idea of the kind of family place it was. It was a place without a lot of modern conveniences, but it was on the water, and old, and beautiful.

The house had wide-planked floors, and poles made of whole trees for supports under them, and mildly wavy glass in some of the windows. It had woods and rocks and space all around. It had deer, and birds, and more stars when night fell than I had ever seen before because there was no light from anything around. It had quiet.

But as happens, maybe inevitably, with shared family places, when some of the family want to sell, the place gets sold.

When it dawned on me that the end of the semester was coming in a couple of weeks and summer was coming in a couple of months, I thought about the place.

Maybe, like Thoreau, I can content myself with ownership of the eye of the beholder, or in this case of the eye of memory. But I can't go there any more.

http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/search?q=land+of+no+internets

Lit, rhet/comp: can't we all please get along?

Marc Bosquet's grandly titled "The Moral Panic in Literary Studies" at the Chronicle raises the specter of "senior members" of English Departments who still can't see the value of rhetoric and composition. Shorter Bosquet: those departments will be on their way to extinction, because they're basically demonizing the future of the discipline.

In the past year or two, in meetings with English graduate faculty members and students at would-be top programs similar to ours, I’ve had innumerable conversations with otherwise rational but anxious people who consider those involved in the renaissance of comp-rhet or digital publication as dullards not good enough to read poetry, as lowbrow opportunists, or—worse—as saintly philanthropists who "should be appreciated for their love of teaching first-year writing."

 Say what? I have heard about these mythical creatures--let's call them the harrumphing literary old duffer--for twenty years, and, while I don't doubt they exist, I've never seen one.  This may be a testament to my general cluelessness (likely) and to the collegial quality of the departments I've been fortunate enough to be associated with (very likely), which have valued both sides of the Great Divide. 

You can't teach several dozen writing courses over the years and not value the contributions that rhet/comp has made. On the other hand, there's value in literary studies, too. 

Can you talk about literature without talking about rhetorical principles? Don't the two complement each other?

Aren't the humanities in enough trouble without picking a fight about who gets the remaining deck chairs?

Brain change: can we still read long-form writing?

From WaPo, some research confirming what a lot of us have observed in our students and maybe ourselves.  Skimming and websurfing is changing the neural pathways of the way we read:

To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. 

 “I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” 

“They cannot read ‘Middlemarch.’ They cannot read William James or Henry James,” Wolf said. “I can’t tell you how many people have written to me about this phenomenon. The students no longer will or are perhaps incapable of dealing with the convoluted syntax and construction of George Eliot and Henry James.”

Henry James is kind of a special case--there are sentences where you want to say, "Please, Henry, throw me a verb. Any verb will do"--but there's truth to this. I've noticed it in classes. Students can identify skimmable main points, but they don't have a sense of what individual parts mean. I've tried to counter this by slowing down the reading process, not by giving them less work (since, as rational beings, they would likely skim that, too), but by spending more time looking at passages and words.

I wonder, too, whether the popularity of graphic novels and comics has something to do with shifting reading patterns.  Those can be complex visually, but the way the information is presented doesn't train the brain to slow down and do long-form reading.

A lot of people complain that students don't read anymore, but this suggests it's not due to laziness but to brain issues.

And like the people in the article, I've noticed that my natural reading patterns have changed, so much so that I've shut off some social media for now and read books in the morning rather than news, to try to retrain them.

Have you seen this, too? 

Movie post: What I've learned

I have nothing on my mind right now except writing (and have nothing new to say about that yet). And maybe you're as tired as I am of reading about leaning in and stepping up and taking charge and being a woman as ruthlessly efficient as this one:

Perhaps the most poignant detail from Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," was also one of the smallest: an overworked mother of three who "organized her time so ruthlessly that she always keyed in 1:11 or 2:22 or 3:33 on the microwave rather than 1:00, 2:00, or 3:00, because hitting the same number three times took less time."

 I'd call it nuts rather than poignant, but why focus on other people's stressed-out lives when you just might have a few stressors of your own? Jenny Allen's "What I've Learned" in The New Yorker (behind paywall, sorry) this week points out the much bigger bullets that you can dodge if you pay attention at the movies:

I am certainly not going back into the house where something bad or creepy has happened to me already.

I am never going to a carnival or a fair, particularly if there is happy calliope music playing. 

If I become an astronaut, am I leaving the spaceship under any circumstances? No, I am not--not to fix anything on the outside of the spaceship while tethered to it by one not-that-strong cord; not to explore the terrain of the planet we land on, a dusty place that looks like it has no life forms but surely will have, ones that do not wish me well. 

I am never going to remain sitting or standing next to anyone who is coughing innocently.  There are no innocent coughs, only ones that signal imminent pandemics.  

 So what do you learn if you go by the laws of old (rather than recent) movies?

If you are one of three young women in a movie, choose your friends very carefully. One of you will go to the bad to provide an object lesson for the others.  If you don't know who the bad girl is, it could be you.  

Do not believe the promises of handsome gangsters (Three on a Match) and especially not those of wealthy, Ivy-educated men (Our Blushing Brides, Where the Boys Are, The Best of Everything). They do not have marriage on their minds, and they do not wish you well. 

If you are an animal in a movie, beware, especially if you are a beloved and cuddly pet.  For plot purposes, your life is about as safe as if you live in Westeros. 

What have you learned from the movies?

Off topic: a mildly political question about media coverage

So the 2016 election is still 2 years away, yet every single article I see about Hillary Clinton has a negative tone, beginning with Time magazine's "Can anyone stop Hillary?" last summer.

The rhetorical move there is called "begging the question," mainstream media; it's a logical fallacy and assumes the answer to a question by avoiding it--as in "of course, someone should stop Hillary. Who's our best shot for doing so?"

Did the Koch brothers buy up Time and the rest of the news media and not tell anyone? Or do they figure that if they dangle enough shiny Kardashians in front of us, we won't notice? Or is it just part of the "tear down--resurrect--tear down again" cycle that they use with all celebrities?

I hear tell that Time used to be a news magazine, albeit one with a conservative bent. Remember the old saying "Life [a now-defunct picture magazine] is for people who can't read, and Time is for people who can't think"?

Yes, the MSM treats politics like a horse race, and yes, they correctly assume that the US public has the attention span of a gnat.  But if they want it to be an interesting race, why don't they talk about new policies or something substantive rather than dredging up Buzzfeed-worthy headlines about "5 Secrets about Hillary Clinton's White House Years"--which ended, lest we forget, nearly 15 years ago.

Comments on Wordpress blogs

I've been getting a message when I've tried to post to some Wordpress blogs: "Your comment cannot be posted" or something like that (on Historiann and Quod She), so I switched Gmail identities.  The new one isn't working, either, so apparently I am persona non grata at Wordpress. I'm not a spammer--honest!

So for now, I am reading, but I can't post comments. I'll keep working on it. My next identity will have the name Unwilling Lurker :).

What I learned about writing from 1930s musicals

To escape from thoughts of work, for which TV works better than reading, I recently spent a couple of unfortunate nightmare-ridden nights after watching The Wire. It's a great show, but not what you'd call slumber material.

So now I'm trying 1930s musicals. Not the good ones, like Golddiggers of 1933, but the kind that you have to be a movie fiend to love, like The Show of Shows (1929) and Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Broadway Melody and On with the Show!  In other words, the kinds of musicals for which the studios pulled out all the stops, and into which they put all their stars. The kind that wore out the public on musicals and made them box office poison until Golddiggers and 42nd Street brought musicals back.

There's a lot to love about these musicals, just in terms of sheer weirdness. Girl chandeliers! Girls marching and climbing up and down ladders! Girls draped with beads for clothes with statuary on their heads! Jolson impersonators! The comedy stylings of Frank Fay! Shakespeare! (John Gilbert and Norma Shearer in Hollywood Revue doing Romeo and Juliet  in modern slang; John Barrymore doing the most villainous Richard III ever in Show of Shows, with the most mobile eyebrows in the history of cinema). And song classics--"Am I Blue?" sung by the great Ethel Waters, "Singin' in the Rain," "You Were Meant for Me," and lots more.

What you'll probably notice most, though, is the big chorus numbers and the dancers.  Except for the acrobats, the dancers have different values and technique from dancers today. A couple of timesteps and the ability to tap dance en pointe in toe shoes and you were golden back then--if you could also flash a big smile.

But the energy was there, though not what would be perfect technique today. So what if they sometimes had to take an extra step to catch up? So what if their arms flailed a little? They got through it, and the whole thing got done, in the can, shipped, and out to audiences.

There's something about technical perfection that can be a little bloodless, and something about looseness and energy that can feel more interesting and creative.  And that's how I'm thinking about the writing right now.

Random bullets of checking in

• Travel + intense work = blog neglect. I've missed reading blogs and missed writing in this one, so I hope to get back to both.
• Some nice professional affirmation recently, which is about as specific as I can be here.  But you know how good it feels when you are keeping your head down and slogging away for a long period of time, and then you lift your head up to tell someone your ideas, and that person thinks they're good? It was exactly that. 
• The admin stuff has been intensely stressful at times but overall tolerable and even satisfying, now that I'm getting the hang of it.  A bonus lesson: if person X wants something but chooses to express it not to me but to a third party, who then tells me, I completely ignore it.  If you're not talking to me, I'm not listening. If you don't want to ask me to fix it, go be unhappy someplace else.
• I'm on the trail of an "undiscovered" author whose work fits perfectly with a writing project. Searching, reading, learning more, and writing is so exciting that I barely want to quit to eat, teach, or do other work.
• Still working on the Laocoon manuscript, which--not to mix metaphors or anything--I am convinced unravels itself at night like Penelope's weaving. 
• Oh, and I've been following with intense interest the negotiation nightmare that Flavia writes about.  The sum total of one of my job negotiations was this: "Here is what we can pay, and we can't go above it." Me. "Okay." Obviously, I want and need to know how negotiations really work.

The Scorecard: Admin 1, Writing O

Some days are like that. You start with deadline-driven admin or service tasks and by the time you look up, 12 or 14 or so bleary-eyed hours later, you wonder, "Did I have writing to do today?"

That's not accurate. I did eat lunch and dinner. I did watch an hour of House of Cards with Spouse. I did go out for a run/walk late in the afternoon. I could have done some writing instead of eating or run/walking or watching House of Cards. 

But maybe if I put it all away now, I can make that score Admin 1, Writing 1/4. It's worth a shot, even if it's just revising a page.

Teddy Roosevelt was famously productive. He could start a meeting at 12:20 and end it at 12:25. He'd keep reading while his appointment for that time walked across the room. This is the man who thought he ought to go back to law school because being Vice President wasn't taking up his time.

But I may need more Francis Underwood evil genius than TR energy.

This is me tapping my Sentinel class ring on the wood of my desk and getting back to the real work of writing.

On writing: if it quacks like a book . . .

I'm going through the manuscript and writing short pieces and making edits.  The notes and citations are for another day and another headache, but so far, this is quacking like a book.

Some chapters haven't been touched for a while.  This means that, absent a writing group, I get to look at them with a more impartial eye. My reactions are ranging from "I have to fix this" to "hey, I've read worse" to "okay, this is pretty cool."

One time I read about an irritable projectionist who, when the sprockets wouldn't line up or there was a break in the film he was showing, would simply tear out big handfuls of film and splice the rest together. He didn't care if the film made sense.  I now get where he was coming from.

Pieces I thought were necessary and left to be written later--well, I'm not so sure I need some of them now.  This doesn't have to be the world's last book, or my last book, either.  It's like saving leftover pie crust for tarts: there'll be a use for it somewhere.

I took about 6,000 words out of a chapter today. It was on additional works by an author, and I didn't need them, but--. No buts about it. It's all just more pie crust for another time.

There's still at least an hour of work time left if I get at it now.

Follow your bliss? What if it doesn't follow you back?

Over at the Chronicle, Julie Miller Vick and Jennifer Furlong say something that has long needed to be said: "You don't have to love your job."  This isn't another post by a teacher moaning about hating teaching but a statement that having a job is important, and in many cases, distinct from loving a job.

Sometimes the two go together, and that's fortunate.

But since I am not an optimist by nature, hearing people quote Joseph Campbell's "Follow your bliss," translated into "Do what you love and the money will follow," always seemed beyond daft to me.  It also seemed like advice that privileged people would give to other, younger privileged people, which is the unspoken codicil to this particular phrase.

"What if it doesn't?" was always my immediate question.  Since I didn't want to (choose your own silly 1960s cliche here) harsh someone's mellow or surround them with a cloud of negativity or bring them down or kill their buzz, I usually wouldn't say it.

One time, I did. It's long enough ago that this student has faded into generic student-dom, so here is what happened.

I was talking with a student who was, as the Academic Excellence office would say, not making good choices for a path to success. Translation: she was smart enough to do the work, though not a standout, but she rarely did the work. As a result, her grades were low to middling.

She announced to me that she would get a Ph.D. and be a professor in English.

I tried to explain about the scarcity of jobs, the competitive nature of graduate programs, the hard work and determination needed to keep up with a program, the debt load, and all the rest.  "Are you sure that is what you want to do?" I asked.  "Aren't there other possibilities that would be more--" and I can't recall the word I used, but it was some way of saying "realistic" that wouldn't be insulting.

She shrugged. "No. I guess I'll just have to follow my bliss and it will work out."

What can you say after that? 

This is the power of positive thinking writ large. "Your only limits are your imagination." "If you dream it, you can do it." Remember The Secret?


What Vick and Furlong are doing is making it all right to say "But what if it doesn't follow you back?"

Mid-career academics: Just tired or over it?

Last week I had lunch with the Colleague from Another Place Who Keeps Me Sane (Colleague for short). We got to talking about how hard it has been to get motivated and keep working longer and longer hours during the Endless Gray Winter--and ours isn't bad compared to some places this year.

"Maybe we're just tired," I said, talking about the possibility of yet another conference with lots of tedious travel, costly out-of-pocket expenses that won't be reimbursed, anxiety about writing yet another paper, time taken away from other projects, and all the rest.

"Or maybe we're just over it," Colleague said. "Maybe we've just done that and want to do something else for a change."

I've been having this conversation a lot with mid-career academics, especially those who are at full rather than associate.  They still love teaching and research, and they're still good at it, but they want to do something else.  If they write criticism, maybe they want to write something different, nonfiction or a biography. Or maybe they want to work more in administration, or write fiction, or work harder for social change within the academic or local community. 

Let me be clear: this isn't a complaint, because I know how lucky we are to have a career in academics and how many adjuncts (of which I was one) would kill to have this job. Reading the blog posts where we're invited--nay, enthusiastically encouraged--to die or quit or retire keeps that very firmly in one's mind.

And I'm not quite at the "over it" stage. I have a lot of academic goals I haven't met yet and am faithfully working away at them.

But I wonder this: at what point does the tipping point for creative reinvention of one's career take place? When do academics start thinking about extending or shifting what they do, even if they love the basic parts of their jobs? After 10 years? 15? 20? After a promotion?

Eight years of blogging

No retrospective, no words of wisdom, because I'm trying to get stuff done--but I couldn't let the day pass without noting, for the first time, a blogiversary. Happy blogosphere to all!

Quilted writing

I've been reading Claire Potter's posts about writing in chunks, a method that makes a lot of sense. The manuscript I'm working on finishing is complete in some ways but has gaps with placeholders like "write up  review of criticism on this" or "expand on this reading" or "write about this one work." These are all texts I've read, so it's more a matter of "reread and write" than doing something entirely new.

When I open up the chapters, filling in the gaps seems overwhelming.  But if I think of this as a quilt where I need to finish just one square a day, maybe it'll be easier.  Needlework isn't my forte at all--I recently hemmed some gray pants with light blue thread because it was the only kind in the house--but I can visualize a quilt even if I can't make one.

The same holds true for the chapters.  When I look at them in Word, or even in print, I throw up my hands and am afraid to start.  But if I put them in Scrivener, where it's easy to see the tiny pieces separately, that works. That's not unnerving.

One quilt square a day, one patch of writing a day.  Surely I can do this.

Credit for MOOCs? Only for "non-elite institutions"

If this doesn't make you wince, read it again.  Yes, we knew a while back that there'd be no credit for you in a MOOC if you're part of the elite cadre that's producing them.

But let Caroline Hoxby, cited at MOOC.com, spell it out for you. MOOC-consuming institutions are, well, how to put it?  (Here's the working paper.)

• They are like Mickey D's (I'm paraphrasing) in that they sell "current educational services for current payments,”  unlike the "venture capitalists" of elite institutions that  "invest massively in each student" and reap the benefits of--knowing that they've helped to further human knowledge?  Don't be ridiculous: they'll reap the real benefits in donations from their rich, grateful alumni.
• And since these non-elites are effectively training academies (paraphrasing again) rather than actual universities like Stanford and Duke, MOOCs can replace them: "they may provide viable substitutes for [non-selective post-secondary education] courses that are already effectively summarized by certificates.”  

Hoxby is right about one thing, the very thing that bloggers have been writing about for the past three years: why would students at high-status institutions pay expensive tuition for credits from their own institution if they can get credit for the course through a MOOC for free?  I won't keep you in suspense: they wouldn't.

If highly selective schools start accepting MOOCs for credit, and students stop paying, the institutions may no longer be able to financially support the effort to create the courses in the first place. This is just one of the reasons Hoxby argues that these institutions should not consider accepting MOOCs for credit, even those MOOCs they develop themselves.

So developing MOOCs is effectively like elite institutions eating their own seed corn, which I think Jonathan Rees pointed out some years back.

One thing the summary of the report, at least, doesn't seem a bit concerned about that humanities faculty at places like Amherst were thoughtful enough to consider: what happens to the non-elites once the elites have had their MOOCs inserted into their curricula?

Actually, I'm being unfair to Hoxby. She's really just laying out the economic reality that we're all going to have to deal with sooner or later.  Once MOOCs get their hands--tentacles?--into non-elites and things get worse, as they will, what she tells us will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Writing in public

I've been intrigued by Claire Potter/Tenured Radical's two posts about writing in public and Historiann's recent roundup mentioning Matthew Pratt Gutterl's new blog.

Like the other posts, TR's "Re-thinking the Place of Writing in our Lives" has a lot good suggestions, several of which made me think about how they could be implemented.

• Is it possible to write in the office? Yes, and I love the idea that supportive colleagues would establish quiet times (or, better still, set up quiet rooms/cubicles) on campus.  There are two things that make this tricky. First, at any given time, I have about 20 books open, out of maybe 200 that I rotate in and out of my study at home, and I use them when I'm writing. Second, they're at home rather than in my office, and it's not practical to lug them back and forth.  

Although I work from notes and electronic sources, too, the books have become--maybe from habit--a visual stimulus to thought.  They are visual placeholders.  Sometimes I'm looking away from the screen and thinking of something, and the cover of one of the books will remind me, or I 'll read to get the focus back.

There's also the writing habit that goes with certain spaces.  The office seems to trigger the desire to do a lot of necessary teaching and administrative tasks, whereas home is for writing. 

Perhaps this is more habit than necessity, though. Maybe the books and the division of spaces between work and writing are like a turtle shell, in that they make me feel surrounded and protected by the resources I need to work.  Maybe a little more public writing would help to erase the dependence on that shell.

• Short-form writing? Also a good idea, and I'm doing some of it, although it counts for nothing at P and T time.

• Have a conversation about why books are the gold standard in the humanities? The MLA has been weighing in on this for at least 20 years, most seriously 12 years ago with Stephen Greenblatt's statement. We can keep having this conversation, and things may be changing, but in talking to academics in the humanities, I don't hear about there being much change in this.

• Too much service as an escape, in a way, from publishing, since the rewards are immediate? It's true that this can eat up your time.  One of the hardest lessons I've learned is that this kind of work eats up mental space as well as physical time. Read an email on the weekend or over a break, and even if you don't answer it, your brain will be busy trying to think up a solution.  
• Train yourself not to read email on the weekend or group them all to answer at one time.
• If the break is longer, don't read the email but send a polite reply saying that you'll respond once you get back from a conference, semester break, or whatever.  A lot of times, people don't expect an immediate reply; they're just lobbing their thoughts onto your desk so that they don't have to look at them any more.  You are not obliged to respond right way.

Random bullets of a new week

• Today is Martin Luther King Day.  Among other things we need to remember on this day is that the whole controversy over establishing it, more than 30 years ago, is a reminder of just why we need to honor this man's legacy.
• The beginning (post-MLA or no) of the semester marks the real beginning of 2014 for a lot of us.
• Historiann's Liturgy of the Book post is worth reading more than once for a lot of reasons, not least what it says about the difficulties of the "bang it out" first draft mode.  I wonder if that works better for fiction than for research-related writing, for, as she says, "Part of the reason for this is that the intricate social history that I must do in this book means that I’m frequently both doing the research and making discoveries and connections while I’m writing."
• Madwoman with a Laptop's well-argued post On Boycotts is another one worth reading more than once. I am trying to stay resolutely mute on this topic (note the deliberately light post-MLA blog post), but there is a report of the meeting at IHE and at the Chronicle.
• And now, on a lighter note: I have a countdown of weeks and days until I have to turn in this manuscript.  Let's hope it's not like Gob Bluth's Final Countdown.