Creativity Link Roundup: The Brains! The Brains!

Apparently I am thoroughly sick of writing about academic topics this summer, so let's talk, or link to articles about, brains--sweet, nourishing brains.

• "Secrets of the Creative Brain" from The Atlantic has an account of an interesting long-term study of creative people. Among the findings: 

"So far, this study—which has examined 13 creative geniuses and 13 controls—has borne out a link between mental illness and creativity similar to the one I found in my Writers’ Workshop study. The creative subjects and their relatives have a higher rate of mental illness than the controls and their relatives do (though not as high a rate as I found in the first study), with the frequency being fairly even across the artists and the scientists."  I would only say that, from talking to people who have worked in psychiatric wards, the reverse is not necessarily true: madness does not necessarily mean creativity.

• "Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime" from Scientific American (and can't we all say a big "amen" to that?). Not only does the brain like to laze around from time to time, but it's a hearty eater: 

By the mid 1990s, however, Marcus Raichle of Washington University in Saint Louis and his colleagues had demonstrated that the human brain is in fact a glutton, constantly demanding 20 percent of all the energy the body produces and requiring only 5 to 10 percent more energy than usual when someone solves calculus problems or reads a book.  . . . Related research suggests that the default mode network is more active than is typical in especially creative people, and some studies have demonstrated that the mind obliquely solves tough problems while daydreaming—an experience many people have had while taking a shower. Epiphanies may seem to come out of nowhere, but they are often the product of unconscious mental activity during downtime. 

 "This is Your Brain on Writing" at The New York Times. This one gives a big implicit push to the idea that if you write every day, like a professional writer, you'll actually access different parts of your brain than a novice. 

As the scientists report in a new study in the journal NeuroImage, the brains of expert writers appeared to work differently, even before they set pen to paper. During brainstorming, the novice writers activated their visual centers. By contrast, the brains of expert writers showed more activity in regions involved in speech. 

“I think both groups are using different strategies,” Dr. Lotze said. It’s possible that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice. 

When the two groups started to write, another set of differences emerged. Deep inside the brains of expert writers, a region called the caudate nucleus became active. In the novices, the caudate nucleus was quiet. 

The caudate nucleus is a familiar part of the brain for scientists like Dr. Lotze who study expertise. It plays an essential role in the skill that comes with practice, including activities like board games.

• Scientific American's blog informs us that there is no such thing as right brain/left brain activity: 

• In a recent large review, Rex Jung and colleagues provide a “first approximation” regarding how creative cognition might map on to the human brain. Their review suggests that when you want to loosen your associations, allow your mind to roam free, imagine new possibilities, and silence the inner critic, it’s good to reduce activation of the Executive Attention Network (a bit, but not completely) and increase activation of the Imagination and Salience Networks. Indeed, recent research on jazz musicians and rappers engaging in creative improvisation suggests that’s precisely what is happening in the brain while in a flow state.

 And because I can never let this alone as a topic, a reprise of "What's Lost as Handwriting Fades" at the New York Times: 

But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how. 

“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain. 

“And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued. “Learning is made easier.

Do you remember (and share) your dreams? A sort-of poll.

Still not ready to write a real post, but after Spouse patiently listened to another of my dreams, he offered this: "You know, in talking to various men, they all say that their wives tell them their dreams but that they rarely dream or rarely remember it if they do." Obviously dreaming itself can't be a gender-linked thing, but what about remembering dreams and wanting to tell someone about them?

So, commenters: Do you remember your dreams? Do you tell them to someone or maybe write them down?

Is it done yet?

It's the phrase you love to hear, because it means that someone is paying attention to the infernal manuscript, and the phrase that, next to "are we there yet?", you probably hate the most, if you have to answer "no."

I am in the same boat as Dr. Crazy: not writing on the blog, despite that long post on Joyce Maynard/J.D. Salinger, because I'm trying to get writing done. And like her, I've figured out some things I can ignore.

• CHE, which I usually take a break from anyway in the summer, and ChronicleVitae. My admittedly writing-obsessed and  very possibly writing-cranky self now looks at the headlines at CV and goes down the list: "Knew that. Knew that 20 years ago. You didn't know that? Nope, you didn't invent that. Yup, that's true. Nope, you're wrong." Finally, I realized that CV is for new academics, not mid-career ones, and now CV is going on the banned-for-summer list too. 
• TV, at least normal non-Netflix TV and most of Netflix, too. 
• Premature election coverage, A.K.A. all election coverage at this point. 

Things I can't ignore:

• July deadlines.
• Getting out of the house and getting some exercise, unless I want to resemble you-know-who from Back to the Future. 

Off-topic: Mid-century Male Writers, Salinger edition

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Apparently my reading for pleasure these days involves revisiting some of the twentieth-century writers, the Mid-Century Males, that I read back as an undergraduate. J. D. Salinger is one; isn't he for everyone at that age? Catcher in the Rye was okay, but in a short story class we read (and I reread many times) Nine Stories, later discovering on my own, like just about every late adolescent everywhere, Franny and Zooey, my favorite of his works. 

Recently, I saw the Salinger documentary and checked out of the digital library Kenneth Slawenski's Salinger: A Life, Joanna Rakoff's My Salinger Year, and, because the other sources mentioned it, Joyce Maynard's At Home in the World. Apparently I was the last person on earth to have read Joyce Maynard years ago without knowing about The Salinger Connection, so I wasn't influenced by that when I read her.

Slawenski's book made much of Salinger's horrific WWII experiences, which started on D-Day and ended 299 days later after he helped to liberate concentration camps, something that the documentary emphasizes with a whole lot of (deservedly, I suppose) portentous music. Rakoff's My Salinger Year is delightful. It's a memoir of her year in the mid-1990s working at The Agency (Harold Ober and Associates) and handling both Salinger's fan mail and her employers' charmingly eccentric terror about encroaching technology. It's 1996, but the IBM Selectric is still king of the office.

 Maynard's book is similar to the first two of hers that I read years ago (Baby Love, Looking Back).  She's a keen observer of her own life, but only of her own life, and only of herself as the primary person within it. As she says many times in At Home in the World, she's not a reader, and she doesn't seem to be able to make those connections except through pop culture, although she's very good at the specifics of that. When she reports incidents like threatening to cut off her long braided hair and her husband Steve saying, "It's your hair," the implication is that he's too stolid and isn't paying sufficient attention to her misery. Less sympathetic readers might think that she's being a drama queen. That doesn't prevent her from making some good observations, though.

The whole Salinger thing that she was pilloried for is only a part of the book, and apparently, in another interwebs development I totally missed, everyone is in a pro- or anti-Maynard camp: either "How dare you malign The Great Man?" or "How dare The Great Man have acted so cruelly toward women?"  Maynard's take on the relationship, in the new preface, is not so much "what was I thinking to quit Yale and move to New Hampshire with Jerry Salinger?" as "how could he violate my innocence by overpowering me with his adoration? Shouldn't we think of 18-year-olds as girls instead of women?" It's a fair question, but really, who could have stopped her or any of us at 18? That's not a hornet's nest I'm willing to wade into in this space.  

Salinger's writing advice--which is why I read the book--is actually sound. Salinger on writing: he writes every day, and by about 6.30 a.m. he's in his writing room, later apparently the famous writing bunker where he would stay for weeks at a time. He shows Maynard at least two manuscripts but says that writing for publication is all just ego and being of the world, which he condemns.  Given that Salinger seems to have had the biggest ego in the Western Hemisphere, this is a little disingenuous, but all right. The documentary says that there are books lined up to be published in 2015 and beyond.

Here's the thing that struck me, wanting as I did the details of the writing life: Maynard and Salinger eat their breakfast of thawed frozen peas and then both of them go off to their writing tasks.  Maynard never mentions that in the memoir; it only comes up in an interview in the past couple of years.  Two writers, living in a house together: that's the portrait that the interview gives and that she's trying to avoid. Yet elsewhere she describes her writing routine, and she's a remarkably disciplined and productive writer.

Instead, the memoir section about her life with Salinger is all about making herself small, about buying a sewing machine and cooking badly and leaving her stuff strewn around the house and feeling wounded and above all not writing the memoir she's been contracted to write. It's clear that she did feel diminished by his treatment, as who wouldn't? Yet by the end of the year, the memoir has magically been written, with an epilogue heavily influenced and partly written by Salinger himself because she wasn't being specific and honest enough about what she was writing.

That's the frustrating part of this memoir: it has the wrong focus, or maybe the right focus for Maynard but the wrong focus for someone who wants to read about writing. Even though the focus of any Maynard book is always going to be Maynard, front and center, she zeroes in on her father's alcoholism and her mother's weird obsession with her as defining, formative moments.  No doubt they were, but this makes the whole thing come off as another of innumerable recovery/abuse memoirs. She has had the experiences, though, and the talent to make more of the memoir than this. 

What I wanted to see more of was the narrative that's trying to emerge here and can't, of Salinger trying to teach her something about writing and the approach that writers have to take to make it mean something. It has to be honest and something you care about, he tells her; there's no glory in taking pot shots and writing snark about beauty contests and Pillsbury Bake-Offs, although she does.  Salinger warns her about this and about adopting her mother's voice as she has adopted her mother's methods of applying to contests, pitching stories, etc.

When she shows up at Salinger's door in 1997--which I think took a lot of courage, by the way--he tells her that she had the capacity to become something but has become nothing, or something like that. She's obviously made something of herself, having had a successful career,  and she is a survivor, but is there anything in what Salinger says? Or is this just another case of a powerful man falling in love with an image that he creates and trying to destroy the image when she turns out to have a voice of her own?

Friday randomness

• All the writing energy is going into the endless project, except that I'm now excited about it. 
• I sent two pieces of it this week so now someone besides me will read it. 
• Then it was time to do all the errands: call Kabletown about lowering the cable bill, which will happen, and pick up dry cleaning, and get car serviced, and get groceries so that there is more than kale and cheese in the house.  Pro tip: No one can live solely on Cheesy Kale Delight or Kaley Cheese Delight or any permutation thereof.  It's been tried. 
• I am getting increasingly annoyed with news sites reporting celebrity gossip as though it is as important as the tragic mass shootings we have seen lately. Double that for calling the perpetrators "shooters." "Shooters" is for video games. These people are murderers. 

Random writing points for a Tuesday

• If you wake up naturally at 4:30 a.m., consider that the summer's early light is telling you something. You can get a lot done of writing done then. 
• Writing makes me hungry, and not the faux "let's avoid this paragraph by seeing what is in the refrigerator" kind of hungry. I'm talking light-headed and stomach-growling hungry every few hours. Is it because of the brain using up glucose? I've taken to eating smaller meals more often. In case you were wondering: none of this results in any weight loss.
• I wish there were a Hallmark card that you could send to say, "I'm sorry I'm not getting it done as fast as you'd like it to be done, but I'm working really hard on it--honest."
• You can trim down a long chapter by a lot if you read it paragraph by paragraph and ask yourself two things: 
• What's the subject of this paragraph? 
• And what's the point of this paragraph? 
• I figure I should be able to write a 1-word tag for the subject, but if I can't identify how the second contributes to the argument, it gets condensed, moved, or chopped.
• I have been gleefully ransacking my files for my old manuscripts, things I've reviewed, and so on.  Why? For the paper, not the great thoughts contained therein. Everything that's not already printed double-sided goes into the maw of the printer for printing drafts on the clean side.  And my files get cleaned out, too.  Win-win!

Still here

A conference, some deadlines, more travel, a hectic week, and then some more deadlines.  News I thought about writing about but didn't:

• At The New Yorker, the case for banning laptops in the classroom (wait--I already did that). More on this from WaPo and Margaret Soltan. [Edited to add links.]
• Cursive handwriting improves learning.
• The MLA recognizes a jobs problem but touchingly believes that (1) 60% of graduates get jobs and (2) that jobs are going begging in museums, libraries, and nonprofits, all of which will snap up vast numbers of English Ph.D. graduates immediately if we can (3) lower the time to degree and provide different sorts of training without (4) diminishing the number of graduates.  
• Quick quiz: which of these items is probably true?  Answer: 3. Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker does a quick check of the MLA's math.
• Mad Men, although that may be yesterday's news. 

A real post soon.

Breathe, just breathe

Summer has started, and so have the deadlines, some missed already and some for things due immediately.  That may be why my dreams are all about I'm writing a conference paper, but it's the wrong paper, not what I said I'd do at all. I can't see the words on the page when I type. I'm locked out of email--of course, since all the passwords for everything had to be changed because of Heartbleed, that's a waking reality, too. The nicest one was where it was the wrong paper I was writing, but for visuals someone had made silkscreened panels with portraits of the writer and gold thread embroidered in them, which was much better than PowerPoint.

But it's summer, or nearly so, and the trees are flowering. Between the smell of the early morning air, the trees, and the pine bark, walking and running every day is almost as good as chocolate. Although I have to stop working on it to work on the deadline things, the writing I've been doing has been going well and is interesting.

Breathing means taking a break from reading The Chronicle and maybe taking a break from Facebook and Twitter.  It also means mastering the art of replying to emails that say "Here's a great idea! Let's meet to talk about it!" by saying, "Fabulous idea! Why don't you look into it and we can talk about it in August?"  Like weekend emails, which I learned to stop seeing as something that had to be answered right away, these are expressions of enthusiasm and ideas, but that doesn't mean that they need a response.

Breathing means the kind of conscious spending of your time that you don't get to do during the school year.  You can choose your work, and you can choose to turn off the distractions, or some of them, anyway. Right now, with deadlines looming, it's easy to feel short of breath mentally, as though wherever you turn there is stressful work to do. I'm hoping that seeing this as being under my control (after all, I did agree to these deadlines) is going to help with the calming breathing that's going to get the projects done.

Do you have a 5-year academic plan?

Karen Kelsky, of The Professor is In, shares a success story of a student who had a 5-year plan in graduate school and is now about to win tenure at an R1. She shares one of the years of the student's calendar and adds the result. It's pretty inspiring:

This student obtained, in total, some $200,000 of research funding in graduate school (in cultural anthropology–a field that does not have massive grants), in addition to her basic TA funding package.  She had several publications before finishing, and secured a tenure track position at an R1 institution in her first year on the market.  She is solidly on track for tenure, and this past year she won another major research fellowship that gave her a year’s leave time for new fieldwork on a second project.

A calendar like this is a great idea in a lot of ways, and (I'm guessing) a lot of us have internalized a calendar something like this. Deadlines for Kalamazoo or MLA or CCCC are at such and such a time each year, grant deadlines are at always at a similar time, and so on.  I try to inform my students about deadlines in the field, too, so that they can develop a similar yearly calendar if they haven't already.

And Kelsky is also right that, as they say about the lottery, you can't win if you don't play. If you do submit to a conference or put in a grant proposal, there's a chance you'll be rejected, but if you don't submit anything, there's a 100% chance you won't get to present at a conference or get funded.

The only thing I'd add to this plan is this: it helps with a good outcome, but it can't guarantee one, because the ultimate results are often not in your hands.  You have to be flexible.

• Grants don't always happen; in fact, grants usually don't happen. The NEH funds about 6% of applications for individuals. What if, as is likely, you're among the 94% that didn't get funded? What's your Plan B? It's like being a prospective college student, in a way: what if you don't get into Stanford or your equally competitive first choice?
• Publications don't always happen, either, or at least not on a schedule and timeline that's going to facilitate the outcome you want. Your article may get rejected more than once, or your research plans may be disrupted due to a lack of funding (see above).
• Your writing might not take the direction you've planned, either. Maybe what you thought was a straightforward topic with a clear timeline turns out to be more complex than you thought, or you need more research than you thought, or you just plain need to think longer and harder about it than you originally planned. 
• Opportunities can arise that aren't in your plan. Serendipity happens, but rarely on a schedule (or else it wouldn't be serendipity). Are you going to say yes, and, if so, how does that affect your plan? 
• Sometimes life intervenes: you get the flu, or have a baby, or your family gets sick and you have to care for them. 
• Also, money isn't a part of this plan. What if you have to teach more to make more money so that you can go to conferences, or you can't afford to go to a major conference because it's being held overseas or far away? A conference costs, on average, at least $1500 unless you can drive to it; research trips cost more; and if you're turned down for a travel grant, how will you accomplish these goals? 

As a fan of charts, I like the idea of a 5-year plan in theory, but with some flexibility built into it. Do you have a plan like this?

Mad Men Season 7: Random Bullets

"Don't worry. It's not symbolic."
"No. It's quite literal."

I treated myself to Mad Men non-HD from iTunes ($22.95) this week. A few episodes downloaded, and then Episode 4, "The Monolith," got stuck. It would not download more than 10 minutes, but iTunes insisted it had already downloaded and could not be downloaded again. An endless loop of frustration? Symbolic or quite literal?

What's the song for this event and this season, Matt Weiner? "Riding along on a carousel, round and round and round and round with you"? Or "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right/ Here I am, stuck in the middle with you"?

Season 6 was not fun. Watching Don Draper double down on what we saw him do for all of Season 4--drink too much, stick with an irritating and sanctimonious Wise Woman of a mistress, and mess up at work--was, well, like being on a carousel, and not in a good Kodak-moment kind of way.

So far this season, we are in for even more misery theater.  Here's how it seemed to me last year: "There's a trend in television now that I think of as Misery Theater: how much can you punish or torture the protagonist for his or her sins and still keep the audience's attention? For you Game of Thronesfans, let's call it the Theon Grayjoy rule, or maybe we should just call it Degradation Limbo: "how low can you go?"

Well, now Theon/Don is reduced to shuffling around the office, doing the bidding of lesser men, as new creative director Lou ("He's adequate!" protests Cutler) is poised to cut down his ideas. Unlike Theon, he literally has all his body parts, but symbolically not so much.

Don has so angered everyone in the office with his antics that they're willing to stomp on his good ideas (new computer account) along with the bad ones. Then again, everyone in the office is in a foul temper all the time, including Peggy, and it's apparently all Don's fault. The only ones who aren't are Roger, who seems happier since he stopped trying to work at all, and Ted, who looks as if someone just stole his beloved puppy.

But the interwebs seem quite certain that the Mets pennant means that Don may be back on track in 1969, and certainly the sight of him typing on a magically restored typewriter at the end gives one hope. If he can write a pitch like Accutron, he's still got the gift.

"Just do the work, Don," Freddy Rumsen tells him. Words to live by, for sure, and I hope for the sake of the show that there's a silver lining to this endless black cloud.

By the way, did anyone else get a kick out of the computer sequence? It's big, it's shiny, it's the future, and no one knows or cares what it can do because Big! Shiny!  Future! I think the model was the MOOC 360.

Even economists love literature

From The New Yorker: 

Krugman took Milanovic’s hand and apologized for suggesting, in The New York Review of Books, that Piketty was the only living economist who was literate. “When was the last time you heard an economist invoke Jane Austen and Balzac?” Krugman had written. Milanovic feigned indignation. “I used Jane Austen in my book, too—and Tolstoy! ‘Anna Karenina’!” he protested.

“But Anthony Trollope has many more,” Durlauf replied.“Why Jane Austen?” Durlauf asked. “Austen has a lot of details about income and money,” Milanovic said.

“My wife made me read Jane Austen,” Milanovic said. “And then I actually realized that I could use it for my own work. Mr. Darcy had ten thousand pounds! Also, I use Balzac. I didn’t cite it in my book, but I did all the calculations. I have it on my Excel.”

I somehow love the idea of internationally renowned economists doing the calculations for literary characters' fortunes and putting them in Excel.

Also, show of hands: who else besides me wants to see those Excel tables? Who else wants to see the fortunes of characters in Jane Austen and Balzac and Henry James and Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf all laid out so we can adjust them for standards of living at the time and make graphs of them?

*Of course, we know that nicoleandmaggie love literature, but Paul Krugman? Who knew?

Writing inspiration: John Updike

Walking really does help you to be more creative, even if the source of the information is HuffPo.

For inspiration and productivity, you could do worse than to emulate John Updike. I know that David Foster Wallace faulted his steady productivity and self-absorption, but like his friend Joyce Carol Oates, Updike just kept on. Snippets from various parts of Adam Begley's Updike:

From breakfast until late lunch, he wrote.  In that summer of 1957, when he was working on The Poorhouse Fair, he made up his mind to produce a minimum of three pages every morning (and many mornings, he did better). 

His schedule remained essentially the same for the next fifty years.  He never seems to have had any difficulty in getting himself to start work, or to sit still and concentrate for the number of hours necessary to meet his three-page quota.  It sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Having guests in the house did not mean that Updike altered his work schedule; he shut himself away as usual for his daily three hours. 

Updike's work is controversial for a lot of reasons, portrayals of women being among them*, but for sheer literary industry, doesn't this inspire you?

[More in an Updike interview at The Paris Review] http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4219/the-art-of-fiction-no-43-john-updike

*My take, in part: the Rabbit tetralogy works, although Rabbit, Redux, which seemed good back when I read it, seems in retrospect a Very Special Episode on the turmoil of the sixties. Maybe it wouldn't seem that way if I read it again. The Maples stories and most of his other stories, Couples, The Centaur, The Poorhouse Fair, and his essays were all well worth reading. Marry Me was a more intensely focused version of Couples.

The Witches of Eastwick--no. Just no. I stopped reading Roger's Version when the child abuse parts came up and didn't read S. or any of the Bech books or the later fantasies--come to think of it, I stopped midway through Roger's Version and never went back to Updike.

[Edited because I confused S.  and Roger's Version in the original post, and I had forgotten that I had read Marry Me.]

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.