b l o g o s

OFL on my ethnicity, among other things.

Over the weekend I nearly broke my University ID card--this morning it was barely hanging together--and so I had to get a replacement before it snapped in two and jeopardized all the copy money I have stashed on there. This of course meant getting a new ID photo made. Which was fine by me because I loathe the broken photo which makes my cheeks look so damned pink and circly. I've always had remarkably (and almost embarrassingly) rosy cheeks, and I'm sad to report that this new i.d. photo is even worse than the broken one: it really looks like someone took a barbie pink digital airbrush and made a little dot on each side of my face. I'm a little horrified, but who ever looks at the picture anyway? I ask myself.

Answer: OFL. The first of many things out of her mouth this (rather warm) afternoon upon looking at my ID card: "You must be Irish to look like you have roses in your cheeks."

Ah yes, my favorite librarian. I'm sure my autonomic response made the real roses blaze even more. She pressed, "Am I right?" And so I relented that yes, my mom was a Fitzgerald. "Oh! like Honey Fitz and Rose Kennedy."

The new ID card unfortunately had to go through reprocessing at the library, so OFL and I had lots more time to chat, though I was relieved when part of that processing meant she had to make a phone call--i.e., chat with someone else. These ID numbers must have some logic, because the phone processor guessed the new part of mine, and she exclaimed that he was good with numbers. She then asked him if he had any lottery numbers for her and then went into a long explanation about why now would be a good time to win the lottery. Then in the middle of telling him how much the lottery was up to, or maybe when she was talking about a car repair she needed, she let the phone fall just a little, and stared at me in cold disbelief.

"He hung up."

for Fey and Rocket

ran across this anonymous gem while looking at KB's first published story. [update: since it's tough to make out the citation, here it is: The Dial, July 1920, p. 46.]

Reader Response

So far today I have spent a total of--no joke--nine hours reading. That counts the Sunday NYT, but I knocked that off in less than an hour because I knew my eyes would need to be saved. I'm making my way through someone's dissertation, and one of my grad students just sent me a draft of her second chapter (hooray!). Read the diss in hard copy--one chapter in a comfy chair, and two during a marathon elliptical machine session at the gym (I got up to a page a minute in the middle there). Read the newly, ahem, born chapter at my computer so I could give neat and thorough electronic feedback. Read and rated a log of conference proposals, also at the computer, but this time slouched over my laptop--this reader apparently needs frequent changes of venue. Interrupted the conference proposal evals with dinner, and--lo!--look what's next to me as I finish up that task and sign on me blog: a quarter glass of guinness. Hang on. Make that empty.

Oh, and just for a changeup, I wrote two letters of recommendation earlier today. I only have two more chapters of that diss and a nice bo-omb frosting-topped chapter a friend just sent along, and my queue--it will be cleared.

You know what that means: if I have a fairly productive reading-evening, tomorrow morning I get to start my own new chapter, which I will in turn send to kind-hearted and sharpeyed readers.

When I think about the economy of reading and writing we academics inhabit, I frequently flash on a scene post-basketball practice when I asked one of our grad assistant coaches to stay after with me and feed me the ball so I could work on my shot. After hundreds of rebounds and sharp passes, when my shot finally started to reappear, I thanked her and fretted that I couldn't think of how to repay her. She just smiled and said I could stay after and pass to someone on another day.

All those passes. All those letters and papers and chapters my advisors, colleagues and friends have written and read for me. Yep. It's exactly that kind of economy.

blogology

One of my New Year's Resolutions for this blog was that I wouldn't blog about blogging. But I suppose those things are usually violated by late February, and so here I go. I don't want to rehearse all the exchanges that Rice's IHE piece has produced, but I do want to second Jenny's and Spencer's points in response to some of the kicked up discourse that blogs--nay, even one 'single' blog--need not exist for some monolithic purpose. In the end really no one said they should or do, but given how the discussions have gone, there have been strong intimations, and so it's worth pointing out any old way.

I also want to pick up on Jenny's point about blogging to write: this has been one of the most surprising things to me since I started posting on this site a few months ago. Gale Walden, a writer who works in my department, contacted me recently about a piece she's working on which takes up the question of why academics blog. After posing the question to me on email, she wrote parenthetically "(Given the amount of writing the profession requires anyway.)"

Walden's is a fair and common assumption, one I totally shared when I started blogos, and the reason that another of my resolutions was that I couldn't make any promises for how much I can blog when my normal teaching load resumes in the fall. But I discovered that varying the kinds of writing I do--going beyond article, book, letter, and email writing--actually simply expands the amount of writing rather than squeezing out the others. In other words, as I put it to Gale, writing is not necessarily zero-sum. I talked about how blogging has become a 'warmup' or 'cool down' from academic, 'worky' writing. How it offers a way to quickly respond to or ruminate on what's going on in the world, no matter how broadly or narrowly defined that 'world' might be. And how, for those who still don't believe, it can take surprisingly little time to craft an entry anyway. None of this is news to the blogging community, but I did want to post it, since a lot of people who zip across this site don't necessarily have blogs themselves. (In fact, an ever increasing number of hits at blogos seems to be from those looking for news about Vivi--the whippet that escaped at JFK--but that's an entry for another time.)

City Dogs

Yesterday the four of us drove the straight, flat, line up to Chicago, and we're staying at Loews House of Blues, where the decor is funky, the beds are comfy, and the motto is "Loews Loves Pets." Though to be fair the keycard professes Loews' love for kids as well. Apparently Loews also loves people who drink until they can no longer stand up, as evident from some of the lobby scenes John and I hurried past last night.

It's Tillie's first time in a hotel, but Jada, the old pro, is doing a nice job setting her at ease. Having dogs in a hotel is usually something of a novelty, and other guests are continually amazed to look down and notice pooches on elevators, etc. And so it didn't surprise me when the woman across the hall gave us a long stare yesterday as we brought the dogs down the hall toward our room. But the stare was different from the surprised looks we usually get from other guests. This one was much more judgmental, scrutinizing, and even a little scornful. I thought at first that this person hated dogs, but then I heard her ask her companion which size crate she should use for hers. Baffling. (I was also baffled at the notion of having more than one crate on hand.)

It all came together, though, when the doorman asked us later that evening if we were here for the dog show. Unbeknownst to us when we made our reservations, this weekend is the International Kennel Club of Chicago's annual show. That means that the hotel is crawling with all kinds of purebred, perfectly "conformed" pooches. Last night we saw four weimeraners and two little dignified curly haired dogs whose breed we don't know but that we're sure is rare. And every time our dogs get the stare down by the ones on the other end of the lead (i.e., not the dogs). They are for the first time being sized up as show dogs, which is rather funny, given all their adorable imperfections (Jada's rather beefy for a whippet and is missing some teeth, and Tillie has awesomely crooked ears and, my vet tells me, a serious overbite). And neither is terribly obedient.

They both seem to enjoy the attention, however, and we are getting a kick out of constantly being asked if they're in the show. One valet guy even confided in us that our dogs looked like they had a better shot than some of the others he'd seen. Fierce!

All told, Jada and Tillie are handling the pressure quite well, and they also seem to be enjoying checking out Chicago. They, like their human companions, seem to be getting quite a buzz from navigating busy sidewalks, and just being near water. They also seem to be learning that the big city can be a little bit tiring for small town dogs.

It's definitely a good thing these narcoleptic hounds are not in the show.

Chronic What?

On Superbowl Sunday, Naomi introduced us to the now-legendary SNL Chronicles of Narnia Rap, which is, hands down, the funniest thing I've seen or heard in a long, long time. I've debated in turn with a few of my pals about which single scene is funnier: Is it the mini-rap about mackin on cupcakes (Collin seems to like this one)? Is it the admirably quick achievement of rhymeful consensus about which GPS map service is superior (Elizabeth agrees with me on that one)? Or is it--Naomi's fave--the remarkable rhythmic incorporation of a pre-fab, pre-movie trivia question, complete with the answer? It's definitely the case that the dueling backdrops of geeky children's fantasy and mind-bending rhyme take the cupcake, cousin. 

With the good news, always the bad

So Larry Summers finally stepped down. Even as someone who really has nothing to do with Harvard, I must say I'm glad. It stands to reason that the most prestigious university should probably not be headed up by someone who would actually deign to suggest, as Summers did in 2005, that biological differences between genders may account for differences in standardized test scores in mathematics and--consequently--for why women are so underrepresented on math and science faculties. Those sorts of utterances should surely be left to talking Barbies, who by the way, were ultimately discontinued.

Even if the speech was a forgivable accident--and I don't think it was either--Summers had quite the reputation for bullying and offending faculty (including really nice guys like Cornel West), and his tempestuous reign at Harvard has convinced me even more of the importance of faculty governance, the idea that faculty should have a strong say in University operations, from the curricular to the budgetary, to choices about whom they will call their colleagues and their leaders. Leaving aside his presidential salary of over a half-million Gs, should a university president really be driven around in a black limo with vanity tags (1636)? Why in the world should a university president need his own public relations adviser?

Both of these details, mentioned in the NYT article, point to the larger rift between university administrators and those who work at and attend universities, to the increasingly comfy alliance between Big Business and Higher Ed, and to the backsliding of faculty governance. Consider, for example, these two tidbits from the NYT article:

1. "'How can anyone govern a university where a fraction of faculty members can force a president out?' said Joseph O'Donnell, a Boston business executive who is a former member of Harvard's Board of Overseers and a prominent donor."

and

2. "Josh Downer, 19, a freshman, who rallied for Dr. Summers yesterday, said he believed that disgruntled faculty had forced him out. 'The faculty is throwing a temper tantrum because the president set a bold agenda that doesn't necessarily align with the egos of the faculty,' Mr. Downer said."

First off, I think O'Donnell's strategic use of the word "fraction" is misleading. Last year after the outrageous remarks on gender, Summers received a 218-to-185 vote of no-confidence--a fraction, to be sure, but more than 1/2, which I think counts at least as a robust fraction. And the more recent resignation of the Dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is a strong indicator as well that faculty confidence in Summers was far from returning.

But worse than that is O'Donnell's presumption that faculty shouldn't have a role in university governance. The American Association of University Professors has a strong stance on the importance of shared governance, has since 1920. At stake in shared governance is education itself, the shape of the curriculum, and the ideals of higher education. If left to the hands of corporate-identified donors or administrators like O'Donnell, Universities become just another site of consumption, higher education just another drive-thru service, with the customers served being businesses who that want better products.

Perhaps even more concerning than O'Donnell's outrage, however, is the way the rather ominously named student, Josh Downer, configures the faculty as children with poopy diapers and monstrous egos. Now, I'm never one to quibble with the size of academic egos, especially at a place like HU, but that measurable faculty response can be dismissed with an image of a snot-flinging, fist-pounding toddler, or, in O'Donnell's case, with the statistical hedging of the minimizing word "fraction," is cause for concern, if not alarm.

Counter-Statement

In order to counter the frigidity-inspired descriptions in the previous entry, and to heat us up with thoughts of summer, I post here an excerpt from a letter Kenneth Burke sent to his longtime friend Malcolm Cowley in August, 1952 upon completing a summer lecturing stint in Bloomington, Indiana:

Dear Malcolm,

Q: Was I hot?

A: Jeez, I was HOT.

At first I even feared I couldn't take it. But at those times, one usually survives, if only through sheer meanness. Sometimes, all day and late into the night, I sat in my room in my shorts, batting at my typewriter, drinking large glasses of sugarless lemonade with a slight edging of gin, and oozing my drinks almost as fast as I swallowed them. Every few hours I'd take a shower, and start over.

The meaning of Zero

Man, was it cold.

That's really all one can say about this weekend in east-central Illinois (though I bow to those of you in Minnesota and other places where it was much more wickedly cold than it was here).

John's mom was here this weekend, and she still braved the outdoors for walks and things, while we really could barely bear our necessary dog walks, after which Tillie ended up here:

The only good news about temperatures that hover around--and drop below--zero is that when they warm up to say, 25, the outdoors feels somehow inhabitable, alive even. Blue jeans, for example, don't icily transmit cold directly to the front of one's legs like they do when it's 0. And it's not painful to accidently touch your own face like it is when it's -2. I guess it's a little like the logic or sense that applies when some sort of viral illness descends: when it's gone, 'normal' health registers more noticeably and positively. It's the same with positive temps.

Bring on the 20s, I say! I now have a deeper understanding of those who hail from Minnesota and Michigan and wear shorts when the ice is still melting. And abiding admiration for those in upstate New York who, convinced that it may never be warm again, hop on their bikes in spite of it all.

As John's ever-optimistic mom said when she set out for her walk, the sun's out. Surely it'll warm up.

campus sequence

1. A line of three guys overtakes me on the track at the gym--that is, runs me off the three-lane indoor track. After I recover from fuming about the lack of track etiquette, I realize all three guys are wearing suits. Not nylon track suits, mind you, but business suits, as in van heusen, armani, whatever. And button down shirts. And ties. They run one mile (and some other people off the track) and then lift some weights, again all in a row, all without smiling or talking to each other.

2. A snow machine is running outside a frat house near the lunch place where we took our job offeree. Half the frat yard is covered with "snow," and one branch of the nearby oak tree is bending under the wet weight. The rest of the frat yard, like the rest of Urbana and Champaign, completely snowless. Pieces of trash here and there.

3. Outside my office a co-ed is sitting in the hall, books splayed on the floor in front of her, scribbling math formulae on a spiral notebook with all the solemnity of the three suited runners. She is surrounded by three bobbing happy birthday helium balloons tied with a giant red ribbon.