b l o g o s

on hosting

This November I'll be doing something I have never done before: "hosting" an interview, kind of talk-show style with a pretty large audience. This is exciting to me because it will be fun to be part of something kind of biggish, and also to be playing a supporting role (to the celebrity I'll be interviewing).

Now. The bulk of my preparation is going to be a lot like my preparation for teaching a graduate seminar. To wit:

1) find out all I can about the special guest. This will involve reading interviews and books the person has written, and it will even involve--yes--watching some game footage.

2) come up with some good questions that I'd like to hear this person respond to and that others might find interesting. 

3) generate a thematic order for sets of questions so that we don't meander all over the place or misuse time, and so hopefully there is some kind of narrative arc or at least sensible segues.

Additionally, I will also do these things:

4) remember that this interview is not about me at all, but rather I am facilitating. (this, along with the preparation above, I'm hoping will help with nerves.)

5) try to find some interesting photographs or other visuals to direct questioning/audience eyes. My impression is that my interlocutor is a little on the humble side so this might be appreciated. And I will welcome them as cues.

6) start asking people who they admire as interviewers/hosts and why.

So maybe yall can help me with #6. Who is your favorite interviewer or host, and what qualities do you think make them do a good job?

rounding the bend

Several conditions conspire to keep me in the house a lot more than I am normally in the house these days. First, as you know by now, I'm pregnant. And at this point, I qualify as really pregnant. (As in, less-than-a week-from-my-due-date pregnant; so pregnant that women at yoga look at me like I'm cuckoo-crazy when I announce cheerfully that I might see them all next week, on my due date.)

Also, it's cold outside. Really cold. But most of you know that; this winter has been very effing cold. Cold to the point where we have had the opportunity to get to know each of our radiators personally, such that I am going to give them 7-dwarf style names "leaky," "whiny," "steamy," "needs-a-bookjob." But believe me, we do like having the boiler as a go-to when it gets too cold for our electric heat pump. 

The third condition is half-related to the first: I'm on leave from teaching. I say half, because technically half of my leave is research leave (JM and I split the parental leave). So that means I've been taking this opportunity to do lots of reading for my next book before the big arrival. And oh man, I'm loving that. Did you know that people living in Medieval England took Aristotle's word for it that weasels reproduce via their mouth and give birth through their ear? Me neither.

Being in the house so much has reminded me of certain qualities and tendencies of mine, not all of which are that great. For starters, I like public radio. Such a cliche, I know, but that iphone app that lets me listen to morning edition in San Francisco while I'm eating lunch? Genius. Here are some more things I have noticed.

- I have too much faith that emails will hold onto formatting that you give them. The result is a visually mangled description of my graduate course sent to the rhetoric listserv. 

- If left to my own devices without a plan for the day, especially on a weekend day (I am in the habit of not doing too much academic work on weekends), I will spend WAY too much time checking in with facebook, which leaves me despondent about how BORING the internets can be and also makes my sludgy-jointed wrists hurt. (No offense to my fb friends. It's a platform with, you know, limitations. Though I did enjoy hunting down celebrity doppelgangers for a select few of you.)

- I must get out of the house at least once a day. JM has noticed the importance of this and has instituted a rule that I do that even after the baby comes. Does this include passing out in our back yard, I wonder?

- It turns out that while reading the Sunday Times I can read an entire book review without noticing who the author of the review is. This isn't a huge deal of course, except when the review is of a book about the decline of the liberal arts, and the review happens to be written by one of our colleagues. JM had to tell me later who wrote it. Jeez. Good news, I guess is that I had an unbiased opinion about said review, as reflected in the fact that I read it with great interest from start to finish.

- Seinfeld reruns simply don't get old. That Larry David? Genius.

- I have a bad tendency to enter into pointless arguments in which a) I have no stake, and worse b) I have no evidence to offer. Like today when JM asked why on earth "Friends" ever became popular, I thought I had answers, but they all returned to the theme song: "Because people like to know that people will be there for you when the rain starts to fall!" "Because the actors are all superstars!" And so on. JM just smiled, another victory notched. 

- I like Vampire Weekend's new release. There, I said it. All you haters can now sit back in smug judgment of me. I'm with Pitchfork on this one.

michael moore gets highlights

OK, not of the streaky, glimmery $100-300 variety--though that would be teh bomb--but from yours truly. Oh, and spoiler alert! The details below about Sicko (MM's latest) will likely detract from your outrage/surprise if you go see the movie (though surely you know what happens in a broad sense: the documenting of Americans getting completely fucked over.) I have developed a few highlight-worthy categories, but feel free to add your own in the comments.

Funniest moment: prolly when Moore (and by extension, the audience) discovers that in France new mothers receive help from the government in the form of a nanny who will, among other things, do laundry. (Close runnerup: the boat trip to Guantanamo.)

Cutest doctor: I thought it was the English one, until I saw the Cuban one. Not that this was the point, but I did expect more from France.

Most compelling tidbit: (second place for most outrageous) The way that incentives for English health care workers to deliver the best, most thorough treatment are the direct INVERSE of those here in the U.S. In other words, while some testimony (literally) from U.S. doctors and other workers in the health care industry revealed that doctors are rewarded for discouraging potentially life-saving treatments because of the money they save insurance companies, doctors in England receive merit raises based on--you guessed it-- cures and success rates. Huh!

Most obvious elision of complicated circumstances on the part of the filmmaker: The line of argument about how Guantanamo prisoners get better medical care than "most" (Bill Frist's word I think) U.S. citizens, with no acknowledgment about how they get treated otherwise.

Weirdest self-indulgence, even for MM: the bit about how MM 'anonymously' gave his biggest critic 12K to help pay his wife's medical bills. Though the first sentence from the one non-fan letter was pretty funny. The line? "Fuck you Mike."

Best use of chiasmus: [nearly a direct quote, but I'm not sure, so I won't use quotation marks] In France, the government is afraid of the people, but in the US, the people are afraid of the government.

The rhetorical canon most effectively used: Arrangement, hands down. The orderly move from countries with which most Americans most easily identify (Canada and England) to those they don't (France and Cuba), a move that also happens to achieve a neat geographic loop from the U.S., up, out, down, and back to the U.S., is not only elegant but powerful. And I don't think this is just because I prefer to travel in loops.

Oddest omission: A real paucity of discussion with American physicians. Do they feel threatened? Are they too busy trying to schedule people in their network, like my doctor, who three weeks ago couldn't schedule me til today, and now I'm all better? Too busy getting wooed by Big Pharma? I would think that Jerome Groopman might have made an  appearance. His book, btw, is really good. 

Most outrageous moment: Brought to you by our fine president, of course. This is the clip that shows GWB talking with a woman in a town-meeting kind of setting (I never get how something with a big stage and tons of cameras is a town meeting, but whatev), and the woman tells him that she works three jobs, and W jumps back like a little monkey whose banana got stolen from him in a game and then responds "Three jobs? Well, good for you!" What. TF. I still seethe when I think of it.   grrrrrr.

best audiobook ever

Seriously. This thing had me sitting forward in the Cruiser seat, my face practically shoved into the windshield and purposefully slowing down lest we reach our destination before the fourth cd ended. The last audiobook that had me this entranced is Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: for the first few chapters of that, I was so riveted that I didn't realize one of our bikes had come off the rack and was hanging by its lock, its rear tire dragging along I-376. This shit is dangerous. 

Huge thanks to C and E for the reco.

little does anyone know

The movie "Stranger than Fiction," in addition to Will Ferrell, the main character who is, well, a main character, also features Dustin Hoffman playing an English professor, a literary critic who has taught an entire course on the phrase "little did he know." Hoffman's character is busy--teaching five courses in addition to advising doctoral students (!) and serving as the faculty lifeguard (JM's favorite feature of the character's c.v.)--all the while writing about what the script rather ineptly calls "literature theory." Hoffman's character ends up being the most hubristic of the bunch--even, in the end, more hubristic than the omniscient narrator/author (Emma Thompson)--because unlike her (the author), he (the critic/theorist) believes a masterpiece is worth dying for.

At the end of a typical week, this character with his five-five/doctoral advising/lifeguarding load would have given me a good chuckle. And it did that, but this has not been a typical week, and so there is, it turns out, a rather dark side to the portrayal of Hoffman. In the aftermath of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, one can't help but notice one of the minor characters--in fact a whole set of minor characters--in the media blitz has turned out to be English professors. For the most part, the writing teachers who had Sueng-Hui Cho in class have been presented in a sympathetic light, as people who encouraged him to seek counseling and even contacted the authorities.

But there's a darker, smaller response to their efforts, found in the comment section of The Chronicle's news blog's brief report entitled "English Professors Formed Task Force to Help Cho."

In response to the piece, some rather ill-informed commenters claim, variously, that the English profs were "out of their league"; the department "punching way out of its weight class" by taking the matter into their hands (ftr, these folks fail to realize that the very point of the task force was to help get Cho professional help by those qualified, but that gets clarified by other commenters). One commenter who calls herself Kelly and is--or claims to be--"a scholar and clinician who has published extensively in the areas of social deviance, criminal justice, and the personality of psychopathy," lashes out at the English profs with comments like these:

"It does not surprise me, nor does it surprise any of my colleagues (some of whom have been on interviewed [sic] in the national media), that an English Dept. had the hubris to imagine it could somehow keep an eye on Cho."

"Kelly" goes on to ascribe partial blame to the English department for its "hubristic" behavior, for what she reads as the professors' collective belief that a task force replaces mental health care (again: no VTech English prof that I've seen interviewed ever purported to believe in such a replacement). Now, it's tempting to shove aside Kelly's response as one among a thousand desperate and blaming responses--and for the most part that's what I choose to do.

But I am pretty interested in the particular conception of English professors that Kelly holds and that she obviously hasn't just conjured out of the air. It is a conception that the makers of "Stranger than Fiction" toy with--that Hoffman's levity depends on--and it is one I have encountered in countless campus or mixed-discipline meetings: the overly-confident, overly-favored, underqualified English department, the place where 'expertise' is at worst not expertise at all and at best irrelevant. Sometimes it's what people say, as when a classicist once said "how is it that the ENGLish department gets all the students? what do THEY offer that we don't?" Or the paleontologist who asked me "what do you research in English, METAPHORS?" But most times it's how they say it--"The ENGLish department"--as if the enormity of the egos can only be balanced by the wispy triviality of its subject matter, the stressed ENG by the lightweight "ish," held together by the stretchy, gummy L.

And while the cultural conceptions of English professors is pretty far from the most important issue to come to the fore last week (see this post for my thoughts on that), Kelly's and others' finger-pointing arguments rest on some troubling misconceptions about what we English professors do and who we think we are.

tired of your workout routine? try this!

emotional and seasonal whiplash

Monday a memorial service in Philadelphia (my lovely grandma); today a celebration of partnership in Orlando (grad school roommate; dear, dear friend).

The only thing these two events have in common is my black silver-buckled boots, which are in fact burning me up at the moment.

Warmest wishes to Blake and Rob!

provocation from the left

Over at the blogora sometime this weekend while I was at my conference, Jim Aune posted something of a provocation about The Chief. Since then he and the other blogoroggers have posted about other topics, and since the discussion might get buried,  I thought I'd like to revive it here to see what people think (and of course, to say what I do). Basically, Aune wonders why academics who otherwise argue for polysemy believe that this mascot has one meaning. Aune seems to be conflating what's going on here at Illinois with other eruptions about native team names, a la the Stanford Indians, which, by the way, was changed to Cardinal in 1972--that's thirty-five years ago by my count. But U.S. trends, they say, creep eastward.

Aune also wonders what this move will do to help native americans economically, a point that on its face should be allowed to stand, but I also do wonder how such stereotypical portrayals continue to affect actual economic prospects--here I'm thinking jobs in the central Illinois region--for American Indians.   

When considering the question of local economics, it's important to remember that what we're talking about here is not a team name. To compare the Chief to the Indians dilutes the point, so I want to make sure people outside of this community know that The Chief refers to the painted, buckskinned, befeathered undergraduate who performs halftime dances that bear no resemblance at all to tribal dances, and that instead appear to have been derived from old westerns and cowboy-and-indian myths. (Some have said too that The Chief in recent years has been a particularly bad dancer, with which I have to agree!) Aune claims as well that there's not clear consensus among American Indians on this topic, and again, I think he's referring to mascots in general, not The Chief, because there has been a surprising degree of uniformity about this particular iteration of American Indian identity. Here are some examples.

Having the Chief dance around at half time is tantamount to erecting a giant statue of a black lawn jockey in front of Assembly Hall. I mean, come on.

For the record, the name "The Fighting Illini" will be kept.

rip: Tillie Olsen

Yesterday John forwarded me the announcement from his working class studies listserv that Tillie Olsen, the feminist writer and namesake of our little whippet, died on New Year's Day. Here's her NYT obit, and Bill DeGenero's nice post about her.
 

recommended reading

for all administrators, faculty members at all ranks, and any graduate student who may someday be member of a faculty:

Dealing with Bullies