Basket of Eggs

Show Off

2011-02-08T15:46:00.003-05:00

Open auto sliding doors set one. Open auto sliding doors set two. And enter the fish farm.

Immediately, as if it had been injected directly into my spine, I feel the familiar anxious academic-conference overwhelm. I must be hitting the lobby right between sessions. Conference-goers are all tagged up. They wear jeans, solid or hip shoes, interesting scarf arrangements, severe hair cuts with bad home dye jobs. Maybe not so much interesting facial hair as a few years ago when I last attended this conference. All are salmoning around on the glossy marble floor, pushing forward.

While dodging my way across the lobby to the registration desk, I notice one person in particular and can’t help but stare. Unusual even for a space filled with writers, which is to say introverted exhibitionists, a man is meditating right in the middle of the fish pen. He is seated on hard, bare marble next to one of Marriott’s trademark leatherette hassock/stool/tables, his left foot laid precisely on the bend of his right knee. Perfect half-lotus.

I started meditating about a year ago but have never seen the use of even attempting this uncomfortable posture, which is murder on a middle-aged person’s knees and lower back. The teacher who inspires me to keep “sitting” emphasizes that contortions have no particular purpose.

Some Buddhist traditions place more emphasis on asceticism than others. My teacher is much more a spirit than a letter man. I agree wholeheartedly that self-inflicted discomfort serves no purpose. And I’ll raise that and go one further. It is suspect and raises questions of character and motive.

While trying not to stare too obviously, I scrutinize the meditator. The face on top of his perfectly straight, smoothly muscled and erect torso is serene and blank, betraying no signs of agony.

The lesson comes back to me from childhood. This beautiful specimen on display reminds me of the man I saw riding bare chested on his bicycle one summer day in my childhood. He was flying downhill, no hands, no helmet, just as perfectly balanced. I was riding in a car. My mother was driving. I did a double take as we passed him, and as if sensing that she needed to correct my admiration, instruct and curb my something happening in my adolescent being, she spoke, intruding my thoughts, “Show off.”

Three Poems

2011-01-26T22:05:00.003-05:00

What’s Left Behind

Deric’s box was heavy.
Muscle, bone, sinew, organs
dissolved to a light dust.

The titanium bolts and bars
we had never thought
or wished to imagine
withstood the funerary fire.

His friends paid their respects
casually referring to “his metal”
as if they’d seen others,
shattered men who died young.

My sister managed the details.
She paid the bill, picked up the box,
—Careful there, hon, it’s heavy.

His brother hurried
through The House, his home,
my mother’s, his father’s
childhood home, directionless,
from room to room.

Where to put the unscatterable?

Doctor’s call them “pins,”
as if their artist’s hands perform a delicate handiwork,
as if mere filaments lace the bones back together
to the tiniest fragment, like a broken vase
held in place, gently, until the glue finally sets.

There are no pins.

Hard hands forge
an internal Frankenstein,
and the flesh heals over
to make the weight, the pain,
the unalterable invisible.

I can see him now,
heavier on one side,
habitually lost inside himself,
swaying, eyes half mast,
beer bottle in hand,
anchored to the ground
by his metal side.

How picking up that leg
required an act of will.

Coming Down

At his memorial meeting, meeting for worship, the wind is blowing, truly soughing. It pulls the trees toward us and pushes them away, drowning out the words spoken as the spirit moves, whooshing them away from the vanity of something to say. Their leaves come down on the garden ten friends tried to untangle.

My mother’s hands cup one golden leaf. Her hands are arthritic and twisted, unable to lie flat upon each other. She speaks. She says her faith tells her we are all cupped in God’s hands. Like so. Leaves come down faster than anyone could rake them, and my youngest sister’s hands are blistered and cut from trying. My mother asks us to take a leaf, maybe find it folded in a book. To remember.

My sisters and I speak. The spirit, or intolerable silence, always moves us to speak. Mary cannot stop the tears. “I’m sorry,” she says, and sits back down. Miriam struggles word after word toward a thought about his sensitivity. Helen speaks too softly to be heard. I look into my heart and find jealousy—that he was the oldest grandson and I only the oldest girl. What I say is “I remember how much my grandfather loved him, how very proud he was, how much he hoped.”

Upstairs, inside the house, his father is not coming down. Barely able to breathe, he looks toward the window, and lights another cigarette. One more floor up, hanging above him, sits his son’s big, heavy box.

What I Know

I feel this starting in the hollow beneath breasts
that never nursed a baby. I remember there was a time my mother
showed her body to me. My grandmother did too. Each without shame.

My mother often stood naked before her mirror,
while I waited for her to dress. I saw her broad bottom, her breasts,
emptied of milk four times, the nipples standing out like pink-brown leather.

In the last year of life, my grandmother stood
before me again, naked, gently bathed and washed,
stripped of the shame of soiled clothes, her breasts
flaps of skin against her belly, and under the folds of her belly,
the last wisps of pubic hair, lying flat.

They did this so I could know
what I will come to—
emptied again and again,
until the last breath,
held safe in their knuckled hands,
I will be filled with the knowing
of woman’s flesh as my flesh,
not hollow with its desire.

Henry Louis Gates and Reclaiming Language: The B-word and the N-word, Fag, and Redneck Too?

2010-11-08T13:10:00.024-05:00

In a conventional multicultural vision, for every insult there is a culture: that is, if I can be denigrated as an X, I can be affirmed as an X. Perhaps not the most sophisticated remediation, but the intentions are good.

Way back, Henry Louis Gates, then president of the Modern Language Association, wrote those words in Profession 1993 and now he has incorporated the same passage into Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the Black Diaspora (2010), quoted above (144). In the interim between 1993 and 2010, Gates jumped the shark as a "public intellectual" with Finding Oprah's Roots: Finding Your Own (2007). After the commercial success of that book, he virtually patented the formula of DNA testing famous Americans to determine their "true ancestry" and documenting the process in the PBS shows Faces of America,and Faces of America 2. There was also the obligatory PBS "companion book" Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary Americans Reclaimed Their Pasts (2010). This built on the success of In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past (2009).

I have to make the disclaimer that I have not yet read Tradition and the Black Atlantic. I plan to. It looks like it might pull together a lot of his best thought. But I am going to approach the book gingerly. I saw Gates act out some ugly self-loathing and class bias at a lecture in Philadelphia in February 2009, and I won't be able to put aside that vision of him while I read.

Gates was visibly drunk, slurring slightly as he made reference at the outset to his hosts encouraging him to eat something at dinner. I'm a little hyper-sensitive to drunks, but I can hear it in his voice in the recording available from the Free Library. Mainly he was talking about Lincoln. At one point he stated

In the Lincoln, Douglas debates, Lincoln advocated gradual emancipation. You know how gradual? One-hundred-years. Now, I was born in 1950. That means I would have been eight! And Molefi [addressing Molefi Asante, his host from Temple University] I'd have been a lousy slave. [he laughs] I'd have flunked slavery. [laughs again] But if I'd have been a slave, I'd have been in the big house, let me tell you, [laughs] Cause it was rough out there in the fields. [laughs] But that was another life [laughs] "Massa hongry? Massa hongry?"...But, I'm almost finished, cause I've been given the high sign, but let me just say one more thing...

The "Massa hongry" line was delivered with an accent of some kind. That was the cue for a few audience members to stand up and leave with heads down and lips pursed, also apparently the sign to "get the hook" as indicated by his reference to the high sign.

Gates was at a low point in 2009. He had recently been handcuffed on his own front porch for allegedly being disorderly with police officers who had been sent to his house to investigate a break in. This happened when his neighbor saw him trying to get into his house after having locked himself out.

In the same lecture, he referred to finding Black history at the bottom of a bottle in his upcoming trip to the Napa Valley. And almost unbelievably, the denouement to the arrest on Gates's porch occurred at a "beer summit" (Gate's idea?) at the White House with Gates, Gates Sr., the arresting officer, and President Obama sitting around a table, tankards in hand.

Yet doubt not that drunk or no Gates's class bias and disdain for his audience was real. Standing at the podium in the dank basement auditorium of the crumbling Philadelphia Free Library, he seemed to think he was slumming. He asked his mainly African American audience to raise their hands if they had Native American blood. When a forest of hands went up, he laughed at them and said, "None of you do." He said one-hundred percent of African Americans think they have Native American blood, but only 5% of them do. Then this is where it gets beyond belief for me. You can listen to it in the Free Library archives, if you doubt it. He mocks people who have come up to him in the past at his book signings, again with the accent put on:

"Dr. Gates, what you say about them other Negroes, that's not true about me, because I've got a picture of my grandma right here."

So he thinks he's selling books and a chance to send in DNA for a paid analysis to a bunch of idiots. He's thinking, what a bunch of rubes, hicks, dupes, and he says it right to them.

That night, he sat upstairs in the formerly grand, now dingy great hall of the Philadelphia Free Library and signed books with a glass of red wine at his elbow. I don't want to wax too sentimental about my home town, but after all, the Free Library, down at the heels as it may be, seems to stand for something different than what Gates was doing there, cynically hawking his books and DNA tests (whether he gets a cut of those or not, I don't know). Even though he had just finished insulting prior supplicants at his book signings, the line of people waiting for Dr. Gates's signature snaked around the hall. I left with my friend, a professor of African American literature herself. She was fuming the whole way home about the way he treated his audience.

Since I'm white, I'm not going to venture into guessing myself what names Gates might really call the people waiting for him to sign his books, the people he seems to look so down upon.

One class slur that really can't be mistaken as applicable to anyone who isn't white is "redneck." Gates refers to rednecks too in his talk, if you care to listen to the whole thing. The more of that DNA-proven "white ancestry," as Gates would have it, the worse that painful red burn when you head out to do manual labor in the spring.

In the quote at the top of this post from Tradition and the Black Atlantic, Gates talks about how people attempt to blunt the power of insults by reclaiming them. At his lecture in Philadelphia, he went ahead and doled out the insults, liberally, both openly and implicitly. Strange isn't it?

In the Profession 93 essay, Gates talks about how power can't be ignored and isn't erased by attempts to turn language back on itself. In light of that helpful observation, which has been made by many others in different contexts, it is interesting to look at the wide variety of terms that "communities" have tried to reclaim. For example, there is a lot of debate over the title Bitch Magazine, which sees itself as a feminist response to pop culture.

An interesting article in Gay and Lesbian Times takes up the question of whether words like "fag" and "dyke" can be "ameliorated," the term used by linguists to describe the phenomenon Gates describes. And no word has come under more scrutiny then the "n-word" over the question of whether it can or should be used in a positive way in the Black community.

Lately, and I guess it would be pretty easy to find out when it started, the term redneck has been used as a term of "remediation," to quote Gates. And with a vengeance. It might have started harmlessly with Jeff Foxworthy's jokes, but it has taken on a harder edge.

Take, for example, the following from http://redneckpoetryshelf.com/:

We have enjoyed the redneck jokes for years. Maybe it's time to take a reflective look at the core beliefs of a culture that values home, family, country and God. If I had to stand before a dozen terrorists who threaten my life, I'd choose a half dozen or so rednecks to back me up. Tire irons, squirrel guns and grit -- that's what rednecks are made of.

To quote Gates again, the assumption behind embracing epithets as badges of honor is that "for every insult, there is a culture." So the culture denoted by the term redneck includes tire irons?! What are those used for besides beating people to death on back roads anymore?

I have to think this through some more, and what I want to know is whether Gates is going to help me do that with his latest book. He is such a strange combination of iconoclast and cynical sell out, but somewhere in there I have to believe he's still got it going on. The reason I am able to find the quote about insults and culture using Google (and find out that the new book is out) is because his words have somehow stayed in my head for 17 years. He knows how to nail something. At the moment, every time I try to identify the fundamental difference between reclaiming yourself as a "bitch," a "fag," or a "nigger," and reclaiming yourself as a "redneck" the distinctions fall apart. Almost. I think "tire irons" might be the key to the difference. Help me out here, Dr. Gates.

I do believe the redneck reclamation project is currently folded into the "Tea Party" "movement," the latest manifestation of rage against the so-called "liberal elite." And even if Tea Party representatives won't admit it when speaking on the record in the guise of Tea Party representatives, there are plenty of slip ups by Tea Party members (for example in March 2010 as reported in the Washington Post) that pretty well demonstrate that a big part of their motivation is against our president for being African American.

I hope to be a fan of Black Atlantic. I would be very disappointed to find out that someone as smart as Gates really is as completely lost to the powers he originally set out to explain as he appeared to be when I saw him last February. I fear that he is, but hope that he is not.

What Were the Themes and Values Promoted by the Author?

2010-10-03T10:47:00.002-04:00

This was one of the questions on the "book report" form for my 11-year-old daughter's sixth-grade English class. I spend twenty minutes translating this question for her while she lies on the kitchen floor. She keeps saying, "It doesn't say. IT DOESN'T SAY."

I say, "Remember the science vocabulary words? Inference? Think of it like you are a detective, looking for clues..."

I am interrupted here by a roar of protest, "No-o-o-o!! We are supposed to SHOW where we get our answer, and IT DOESN'T SAY."

The question is asking her to hold in mind the idea of "theme" and "value," both highly abstract concepts, consider possible themes and values she has encountered previously, and then look at the book for patterns that match that set of possible themes and values. This is really a process of deductive reasoning.

I remember my seventh grade teacher providing us with a list of possible themes. According to him, there were a total of three: man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. self. As reductionist (and sexist) as that list may have been, at least he was giving us some rote tools for performing the task.

If I can keep her interested in reading, it will be a miracle. "Why-y-y-y, do, we, have, to, do this?" she whines. Good question.

If her teacher glances back at her Piaget, she'll see that my daughter is still in the "concrete operations" phase, not "formal operations." This is pretty normal for age eleven. At some point this year, she will probably (maybe) start to be able to use deductive reasoning, the Sherlock Holmes stuff.

I can't cook with her writhing on the kitchen floor. We eat tortellini soup, pre-made tortellini with chicken broth poured over it, because I can't cut up vegetables with her writhing and moaning on the floor and dragging at my ankle.

I give up and say, "Don't worry about it. Just write down why you liked the book."

There are actually four prompts, not listed explicitly as a set of alternatives for answering the question:

What did you like or dislike about this book? Would you recommend it to a friend? Why or why not? What were the themes/values promoted by the author? What was his/her purpose in writing the book? (BE SPECIFIC)

For now when we get to the mandatory book report, we will just stick with something simple. "I liked Hatchet because there was a lot of adventure in it. He was surviving. It was like Survivor Man." "Why do you like Survivor Man?" "I just like it, OK????" "And what didn't you like about the book?" "I didn't like it because he was kind of repetitive. It kept saying, 'the secret, the secret, the secret.' over and over again. It was annoying. It was like, I get it already. 'Oooh, the big secret.' Boring! Stupid!"

And to be honest, at most of the "book clubs" I've attended, this is about the level of dialogue among, college-educated women. The only difference is that the women in the book club are most interested in whether or not they like the main character and why. "I didn't like her. I thought she was a bad person," etc. And often, "I couldn't really relate to some of the parts, so I skipped those."

So English class is clearly not working.

Essay Contest

2010-09-11T15:09:00.007-04:00

I don't think I've left any information in the following that would identify anyone. I know I took a sledge hammer to "pity" as a cheap, empty, worthless emotion in my critique below, but these poor kids. They can't help it. They are just the product of an impoverished environment. Or should they be "tried as adults"?

Dear Parent Advisor:

Here is feedback for the contest entrants. I haven't sugar-coated the critique. My goal is to give these writers the unvarnished truth about the way college readers would see these samples. I am not their teacher, and a teacher wouldn't provide such stark feedback, but maybe even if painful, this feedback will be challenging in a way that is ultimately useful.

Actions speak louder than words and make a bigger difference in people's lives than just words. I am very impressed by the accomplishments of this student group! In the context of an essay, one is forced to reduce experience to words. Writing is hard. It's hard for me, and continues to be a lifelong and rewarding challenge. Trying to capture the complexity of experience in words and draw conclusions from experience without slipping into cliche or simplistic logic remains a challenge for me, even in middle age. When I was these students' age, I am certain I couldn't have done better than they did with their essays.

Very best,

Margaret Ervin

Essay #2: The Long Road

Strengths: This writer has some great experiences in his/her life to draw upon: a move to a new town, travel, and involvement in the student service project. There are some parts of each of these experiences that are intriguing and make me want to know more: shark fishing at age eight, the sorrow of leaving paradise, being a student ambassador (wow!), working with friends who have the same mindset, raising over $32,000 (wow!).

Weaknesses: The road metaphor. It is an overused cliche, and not a good way to frame the essay. The road metaphor is easy and takes the place of a thesis, but the writer shouldn't waste the opportunity to convey a thesis. There is also lack of specific details that draw the reader in. It may be that the author does not need to include all these experiences in the essay. If there is space on the application to list accomplishments, a list can be placed elsewhere. The purpose of the essay is to give the application readers insight that cannot be garnered from the application in other ways. This writer needs to think about what really matters to him/her. For example, if the focus is going to be the childhood paradise, how can that be connected to the present? How did that experience shape this writer? I can imagine an essay that starts with the scene of wrestling to land a shark. Does that experience connect in some way to being an ambassador or being part of a really successful service project--in some genuine way that is not forced? Alternatively, there is the travel story. However, there is no detail about travel provided in the current essay that stands out, only generalizations, such as "opened my eyes to worldwide problems like poverty." (Can't you just travel many places within a 20 mile radius to have your eyes opened to that anyway? What did the author learn about the differences between the poverty he/she sees here in the U.S. and the poverty he/she saw elsewhere?) Details! Maybe there are details in the writer's mind, but they aren't on the page. Where is the attention grabber? As the writer becomes more focused on detail in a new essay, he/she may be able to drop some of the overgeneralized, flowery language. If you remove all generalizations from the following sentences, there is nothing left: "I am my own individual (how so?) and that (what?) can never be replicated (why?). Every moment (for instance?) in life has left an impression (for example?) on me, changing the direction of travel (how? from where? to where?), and evidently the endless road (what road?) is unpredictable (how?)." Generalizations can be made, but they have to be earned--drawn in accurate, interesting ways from specific examples.

Essay #4 and #5: I am a privileged child...

Strengths: There is some good material here. The boy and the M&Ms. The accomplishments of the service project.

Weaknesses: The writer does not go any deeper than the assertion that having things (e.g., a finished basement) equals privilege, and that people who do not have as many consumer goods (e.g., M&Ms, new clothes, an octopus toothbrush holder) are to be pitied. "I am not only privileged but also a good person because I feel pity" is the primary message of the essay. Above all, the story about the "poor" boy in the writer's class is problematic. The writer seemed unsure about that story because he/she wrote a second essay that doesn't focus on him. The essay about that boy is the less good of the two essays. The essay about the boy paints a picture of the writer that I'm sure the writer did not intend: the writer portrayed him/herself as shallow, focused on appearances and things, and smug about his/her superiority. If you see [this boy] you think of him as an unintelligent kid. He is in the lowest level academic classes, and has an aid travel to all his classes with him." I'm thinking, a couple things here. First, I would really admire a person who DID NOT automatically assume this boy is unintelligent, who DOES NOT have the habit of thinking in either/or terms all the time: have/have not, privileged/poor, intelligent/unintelligent. The writer goes on at length about how surprising it is that this boy smiles all the time. To paraphrase, the writer is saying, isn't it amazing that a person can fall into the loser category on so many counts and still have the ability to smile? That is icky, for want of a better word, and doesn't make the writer look good. Second, I think as I read, it could be that the writer is correct about many fellow students' assumptions about this boy. Reading between this essay's lines, isn't that really an example of the failure of the middle-class suburban high school that trains students to think the way this writer thinks by tracking students into haves and have nots, a deeply flawed system, whose flaws escape the notice of the writer. By the end of the essay (both of them) I actually feel much more concerned for the well being of the person the writer has made him/herself out to be than for the people for whom the writer expresses pity. The writer has made him/herself sound like a person who would fall apart if his/her "privilege" were taken away. In the face of adversity, the person portrayed in this essay seems like one who would merely change from a pitying person into a self-pitying person. There is another example that the writer provides about the kid with who only puts three M&Ms on his ice cream sunday and how he had to be assured he could take as many as he wanted. That could be a great detail to make central in a new essay, but I'd like to suggest an alternate reading of that scene. The writer reads that event in terms of how sad it is not to have a lot of things, how very sad it is not to feel free to be greedy because you are privileged. A different way to read it would be in terms of that child's impulse to share with others and not take too many. What a kind, thoughtful little kid. The way this essay is written, I end up with a lot more admiration for the character of that child than for the character of the writer. I'm quite certain the writer did not mean to present him/herself in this way. Probably this writer thinks about many things in a complex way and thinks about the complexity of these experiences. If challenged to do so, no doubt this writer could compose a different essay, one that shows thoughtful, complex insight into the human condition. I would like to present this writer with that challenge.

Essay #1: Changing a person's life only becomes possible...

Strengths: This writer sees a challenge and forwards the thesis that the best way to solve problems such as poverty and epidemics is through science. Problem solving can change the world, and I want to be an engineer. When I see a problem, I analyze the primary cause of the problem and get started on a way to solve the problem. That is an admirable life plan, a plan to use one's talents in the service of others.

Weaknesses: What precisely does engineering have to do with solving the problems mentioned in the essay: HIV/AIDS and poverty? Wouldn't biochemist, doctor, economist, or not-for-profit business manager make better sense as career paths for someone who wants to solve the problems provided in these examples? The writer tries to tie in engineering in by saying that it requires critical thinking and problem solving, which would also be required to solve problems like the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the many ills caused by poverty. "Critical thinking and problem solving" are very generic terms, generally cited as desired in applicants, and merely naming and claiming them does not give me evidence that the writer actually possesses them. This essay feels like it was written a smart kid who is being encouraged to become an engineer because it's a sure-fire way to make money, but knows that "service" is a good topic for a college essay. I'm not saying I can really see who this writer is, but the writer has constructed an essay that gives that picture. This can be fixed. Either focus on the passion for engineering (if that passion truly exists) and come up with examples of problems engineers solve. What has this writer seen or experienced that constitutes an engineering challenge that really got the writer fired up about becoming an engineer. It does not have to be a problem directly connected with solving epidemics, poverty, or world peace. It just has to be real. If the writer is actually not passionate about engineering, now might be a good time to come to grips with that. Alternatively, focus on the service work and what the writer learned through the service work. I need to be convinced that the writer was observant about what happened during the service work. Speaking of critical thinking, let's see some critical thinking applied to the writers experience with the service project. Trying to jam "I want to be an engineer" and "I did service work in high school" into one essay isn't working. Genuine enthusiasm and believable commitment to either one or the other needs to be demonstrated. Demonstrating critical thinking and problem solving are much better than claiming them. If the writer demonstrates the possession of those qualities, mentioning the words themselves won't be needed.

Plumber Departs

2010-01-04T18:00:00.003-05:00

Plumber 1: Betcha didn't think I was going to be here for that long.

Me: No, I did not. I didn't want to call you in for no reason, but I didn't think it would be that bad.

Plumber 1: (To Plumber 2) Reminds me of New Year's Day. Thirteen hours straight.

Plumber 2: Actually, I was on 17.

Me: Well, you make good money dontcha.

Plumber 2: Sometimes it isn't enough to make up for the times you missed at home.

Me: Yeah. (Trying to remember the last time I had to trade off good money for good time and pondering whether I've taken the right path.) I can see that. Yeah.

Plumber 1: It wasn't as bad as that lady with the exploding trap. Remember?

Plumber 2: That was bad.

Plumber 1: It exploded and hit him right here. (Gestures just below chin.)

Plumber 2: Filled my clothes right down to my shoes.

Me: Eew. Yes, I'm sure...

Plumber 1: Yeah, when we got back to the shop, just put on these...

Plumber 2: We have these thin paper smocks.

Me: Mmm.

Plubmer 1: Yeah. Just put those on and went home. Just chucked those clothes in the dumpster.

Plumber 2: Chucked them right out.

Me: I can imagine that you'd want to do that.

Plumber 2: Now, we did break the hinge on the door. So we'll just put a hold on the account. Nine times out of ten, it's Joanne you'll get when you call. You just tell her, take off $25 off. Just tell her.

Me: (Hesitantly. Working our way toward the door.) OK.

Plumber 1: Buy a lottery ticket. And tell them I told you so.

Plumber 2: (Wincing. He has already tried to pin door breakage on Jimmy and direct any ire I may have in that poor soul's direction.) As I said, just call, there's a hold on the account. It will say "Hold until customer calls."

Me: OK. Good night.

Plumber 1: You have a good night now. And remember, best not to put things on the rahdiator. My mother used to dry her clothes on them things, but best...

Plumber 2: (Interrupting Plumber 1's slightly too mid-Pennsylvanian assumptions.) So just call Joanne...

Plumber 2 and Me in unison: (Him thinking I made him late for dinner. Me thinking I'll be paying this off until June.) Good night.

Me: (Staring down at a bill that cites 2.5 hours with two plumbers. And the cost of ripping out a garbage disposal and replacing all the hardware under the sink. And wondering about the time/stress/cost coefficient of battling with them over the cost of fixing the door they broke.) Good night.

Blackwater Mercenaries off the Hook

2010-01-01T11:11:00.008-05:00

On Thursday, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina threw out manslaughter and weapons charges against five Blackwater guards because he said prosecutors had violated the men’s rights by building the case based on sworn statements that had been given by the guards under the promise of immunity.

See
New York Times: January 1, 2010

This is not a good way to start off the new decade. I am not a news junky, but this horrific event stands out in my memory as one of the most hate-filled acts perpetrated by Bush's corporate-sponsored mercenaries. For me, it seemed to make visible the true, fundamentalist and crusade-inspired agenda of George Bush.

I felt at the time that although Cheney, who I always imagined as purely inspired by greed, was in charge of most things, you could see in this act the effects of George W. Bush's influence. This made visible the wacked-out religious fervor aspect usually not right on the surface. You would hear about this in Bush from a gossip-mag perspective (or MSNBC) because they said Bush had allegedly quit using through accepting Christ as his savior, being born again, or what have you. But you would usually not see a lot of this side of Bush from the evening news because of the presidential facade--the dark suit, red tie, approved facial expressions, imperial waving, brisk officious strides on the way to Airforce One, etc.

I remember the pictures on TV from this slaughter. I think that crushing Blackwater the corporation is more important than bringing the idividual perpetrators to justice, but those men did commit a horrific act. It seemed like they did it based on their own beliefs (perhaps partially brainwashed into them by the company) about why they were really in Iraq (to kill the infidels). It did not sound to me as if they were just following commands, and if that is true, they are primarily responsible. So yes, this is a bad decision.

If this is a sign of how little we are able to accomplish in the way of justice under a new administration, this is cause for great alarm. The benches are packed with Bush appointees, though I don't know how Urbino in particular got there. At least there is appeal, but the prosecutors must be very inept to bring a case so shoddily constructed that it can be "thrown out."

The Contours of the Barrah

2009-12-20T07:35:00.032-05:00

Water seeks its own level.

-Proverb

West Chester Borough, two words, is a little less than two miles square, the county seat for Chester County, Pennsylvania. If you are spry and can pick up your feet to miss tripping over the uneven brick sidewalks, it’s the walkable urban community of city planners' dreams. As a place--just a physical space comprising walls, insides and outsides, parks, pavement, and sidewalks--I like little West Chester because it was not planned. It happened.

The borough built up gradually over the course of more than 250 years. Human flow pulled stone in from surrounding quarries, gray fieldstone flecked with mica and an unusual green stone called serpentine. In the nineteenth century, the courthouse at the corner of High and Market rated a veneer of sandstone from Nova Scotia to make its classical design look more authentic. Fieldstone facing is the ultimate status symbol now, and buildings made of every other material ever invented fill in the gaps where the stone ran out or became too expensive.

The county's court was originally seated in Chester, on the Delaware River, which was more than a day's ride for many of the county's residents. When the farmers in the northwest won their battle for a shorter commute, the site for West Chester was chosen--almost in the center of the county and on top of the ridge that divides the watersheds of the Chester Valley and the Brandywine Valley. That is why High Street is high street. At noon every week day in the 1920s, the clock on the top of the courthouse both chimed and shot out a baseball so school children could have a game of running onto the middle of High Street to catch it and play with it at lunch. This is true.

The most obvious recent piece of construction in town is a massive new county courthouse, jammed in on the west end of Market Street like a toddler's Lego block. City planners predict restaurants and shops will be pulled down Market Street toward the eye sore, which looms visible from the crest of any of the hills to the West.

The borough, pronounced something like “barrah” in some versions of the regional accent, contains all the lawyers the court’s proceedings can accommodate, and more. Their offices fill much of the available modern commercial space at the center of town, and their shingles spill into the residential neighborhoods bordering the downtown.

In between the lawyers are the notaries, title companies, and church-sponsored charitable organizations. Surrounding both are the banks. Also numerous are restaurants and the watering holes frequented by university students. Tenaciously squeezed in are expensive boutiques whose price tags beggar credulity. There is a store that sells only olive oil, a store that sells only hand made chocolate, a store that sells only expensive cigars, women's clothing boutiques that sell nothing under $70 and nothing larger than size 10.

The Chamber of Commerce calls the borough a “shopping destination” for Chester County, which is the wealthiest county in the Commonwealth. In the twenty-first century, Chester County's money has little to do with its proximity to Philadelphia, thirty miles to the east. The Chester Valley was once imporant economically, but that was centuries ago. These days, money flows into Chester County from the southwest moving up along the verdant Brandywine Valley from Wilmington Delaware’s tax-free corporate haven.

The borough is divided east and west by High Street and north and south by Market Street, and each street address bears a North, South, East, or West designation. Neighborhood demographics vary almost half block by half block, but roughly speaking, the southwest corner of the borough has Everhart Park, the largest of the borough's parks, and most of the big old fieldstone houses--the "oh, that's a nice neighborhood" part of town.

The southeast quadrant used to house the borough’s rail connection to Philadelphia, which is thirty miles to the east, but the passenger line was shut down about twenty years ago and freight long before that. It now contains most of the repair shops and warehouses, and the neighborhood is divided by a color line, with the area closer to the abandoned railroad tracks being primarily African American. The neighbor also has a lot of student rentals and frat houses.

West Chester University sits at the south edge of the borough on High Street and divides these two neighborhoods. The campus does not nearly contain beds for its 13,000 students, many of whom live in rentals in town. Walnut Street, one block east of High, is legendary in the local high schools as a sure place to blend into a good party almost any night of the week. A few hardy upper-middle-class professionals, especially university professors who didn't see much difference between buying a house on the east or west side of campus in the dizzying time after being hired, have to put up with having their shrubs watered by the steady stream of north-south bar traffic.

Up north of Market and to the east are two venerable Quaker institutions, an elementary school and Barkley Friends, a retirement home. Chester County, unlike the counties further west, which were originally settled by Germans, was a Quaker stronghold in the colonial era. Like the southwest, the northeast also has its park rimmed with big old houses, and one of the old factories, now converted into a 1980s-chic apartment house.

The northwest, however, like the old industrial quadrant to the south is less affluent. Topography originally made this corner of town less desirable than others. A formation that would have been called a ravine before it became eroded and smoothed by asphalt and housing has its sharp end inserted almost to the center of town, and cuts the southwest quadrant in half on the diagonal.

On the lower lying land at the north side of the ravine is a neighborhood of row houses and twins. Row houses are the poor cousin of the townhouse. Many of Philadelphia's working class neighborhoods are filled with them. They are tiny, built flush with the sidewalk, and like townhouses, each is conjoined by common walls on either side. Some of the row houses at the north side of the ravine are so minute that the front door is wider than the walls to either side of it.

A twin, on the other hand, the more dominant housing form throughout the borough, is divided into two separately owned residences with a common wall in the center. Though twins may be so close set that neighbors can reach out their arms and almost touch each others houses, each twin is free standing, so every residence has windows along one side.

The flow of commerce and demographics is plainly visible in its architecture, the paths water used to take are less obvious. The drop to the Brandywine on the west side of High Street is sharp. Water runs to the west of High and drains in the east. I have been told that my driveway on the west side, which slants at almost a 45% angle west from the street along my half of a twin, used to be a small brook. In the winter, when it snows, I or my more conscientious neighbor, make sure to dig a trench away from the back of my twin so melt doesn't back up into the garage. Throughout the summer, I have to make sure to keep a path open through the ground cover in the backyard so storm water can keep moving along the old streambed.

The Friends of Everhart Park at the western margin of the borough struggle with water. A spring bubbles up in the park, feeding a rank stream also fed by small pipes meant to carry storm water. The Friends, most of whom keep lovely gardens at home also volunteer many hours to spruce up the park. They have posted a sign with the keywords "wetland" and "native plants" to lend dinity to the swamp surrounding the spring. They would nonetheless like to raise funds to engineer a drainage system so the swamp does not continue to spread, as it does. They would also certainly prefer that tampon applicators not show up on the banks of the stream, attesting that storm water sometimes mixes with raw sewage when the borough’s antiquated sewer system is overwhelmed by a heavy rain.

In those summer thunderstorms, the kind where motorists crawl along with wipers at full speed and noses pressed to the windshield, the bottom of the northwest ravine--now paved over with Hannum Avenue--can fill with three or more feet of water. When the bottom of Hannum does turns into a pond, a car will occasionally stall out in it, causing a significant traffic jam because two of the major routes west out of town sprout out of that bowl.

Traffic on Hannum runs one way only, counter to the water, swooping up into town along the contour of the ravine, pulling up cars from the two westerly routes. At the top of the ridge, Hannum merges with New Street and continues to climb--past looming St. Agnes Church at Gay Street on the left, and onto level ground at the intersection of Market where the new courthouse sits.

Near the top of that hill is a blind intersection where New Street jumps onto the ridge out of the neighborhood below. Here cars hang at a stop sign at the top of the hill, nose out gingerly, and with a punch of the accelerator join the faster-moving traffic from Hannum.

There are fewer accidents there than you would think, but one night, a boy on a motorcycle coming uphill on New collided with a car moving upstream from Hannum. My friend, who lives on West Gay Street across from the imposing gray stone of St. Agnes, says she came out of her house when she heard the screech of tires and the impact. She saw so much blood seeking its course, she knew the boy was dead.

Love and Research

2009-09-22T14:04:00.004-04:00

Last night as I was getting ready to hit "send" on the last e-mail of the day, a student came into my office to talk to me. She said she just wanted my opinion on this guy she was thinking of dating because she knew I knew him. She said she also knew that I was a good judge of character.

Her question answered my question. What is the difference for her suddenly this semester? She seems happier. She's a tutor in the writing center I run, and her happiness infects everyone she talks with, everyone she works with. Now I know. She's in love.

Her question to me was did I think he was maybe a little full of himself, maybe a little conceited. She said that some of her friends who knew him had "warned her against him."

I do know him. He's had a lot of successes lately, won prizes for best this and that. I also know that she's just as smart as he is. I know that success breeds success. Often times the nominating process for awards is more or less a bunch of professors sitting together in a room and nominating the first student who comes to mind. So the students who get awards get awards. Not very fair.

I think I said the right thing. I tried to. I said that I liked this man/boy and that I'd worked with him and seen that he was very passionate about his work and also that he could be compassionate toward others. I said that the question seemed to be more what he would be like in a relationship with her. I said I thought that she should try to see whether he had a sense of humor about himself and his successes that he could share with her and whether he really understands that she is just as smart as he is. I want her to know that she's smart.

I said, here you are sliding down that slope, and you actually have the presence of mind to do research on this?

And I'm thinking how unusual it has been in my experience for a man to value in a partner her equal ability and intelligence, how that has devolved into bitter competition in my own marriage. But I did not say that to her.

When I left the office, she was sitting at a table in the writing center with her glow around her, and I told her how happy I was for her because isn't that the only thing that really needs to be said when someone falls in love.

Facebook as Step 8

2008-08-29T17:17:00.022-04:00

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Amends. Right. Now did these people ever stop to wonder whether the injured parties actually want to hear from this new and improved version of the old jerk? Does she really want to relive the day he ran his car into a tree and paralyzed her brother for life? Does he really want to remember the time she yelled obscenities at his friends, dragged him out of the party, and threw up on him in the cab? Some things are just better left buried--with the only thing left visible the flowers growing on top.

My first instinct when I get "friended" on Facebook is "Great! Blast from the past!" And I've had good luck with those blasts, in the past. My best friend from when I was twelve got in touch with me. I lost touch with her 30 years ago, and I've thought of her from time to time and wondered how she was doing, and where she was. Turns out she's living in Japan. Her husband is in the navy. We talked for an hour over Skype. Amazing!

I started to think of Facebook as a kind of happy place, maybe a bit overpopulated with narcissists, but generally a benign-to-neutral way to occasionally waste time. Then I made the mistake of getting in touch with an old boyfriend because a mutual friend told me, "He thinks you hate him." After the friending was confirmed, the old boyfriend wrote "BTW--thanks for "friending" me. I don't deserve it." Now, why did I let myself in for that? Facebook as the eighth step.

I don't need to hear that someone was so mean to me that they need to apologize to me 20 years later. I had completely forgotten about any unpleasantness, about him for that matter. I think if I'd tripped over him in the supermarket, I wouldn't have recognized him. If he had recognized me, then he would have said hello, and I'd have been perfectly glad to say hello back.

In fact, if I'm going to make up two rules of Facebook etiquette, they are 1) Act like you just bumped into them in the grocery store. And on another completely tangential gripe, 2) Don't "friend" someone unless you are going to at least put in a brief "Hope you are well"-type greeting. No one wants to feel like they are being collected like a Beanie Baby. Facebook should be "Here we all are, mindful of others' space and simultaneously hopeful of one another's well being."

With this allegation that there was cruelty once committed so severe that it has to be atoned for 20 years later, my usual glad reaction to striking up old acquaintances changed. It came back to me gradually in a series of painful flashbacks. Doesn't deserve it? Why? Oh yeah, he broke up with me. Ouch, now I remember. I think it was something about how I wasn't smart enough for him. He was in a PhD program at Princeton, and I was teaching sixth grade.

Wait now, did he actually say I wasn't smart enough for him in so many words, or just imply it, or am I just paranoid and imagining that part? It must be something bad if he still remembers it. What is the guilty deed he is thinking of? I do remember that he got back together with me by leaving roses in my mailbox on my birthday only to break up with me two days later. OK, that was mean. Maybe that's it. I hope it's not the "too stupid" thing.

Did he make me cry? God, I hope I showed some self-respect. What IS he remembering? What does he think he did that was so horrible that he "doesn't like to think of it" 20 years later? Was it even worse than I am remembering? Did I seem like I wasn't going to recover, or something humiliating like that? I swear I had forgotten him. I hope he got that I said that in my e-mail.

And you see, you could also cause a person to relive other crap parts of their life by association, because it wasn't just him that I remembered. I rewound the whole horrible time between the ages of 23 and 27--during which he was a three-month interlude--with a picture of myself in mind as a possibly-too-stupid and definitely jilted school teacher. It was bad back then, for reasons I needn't elaborate with my name on this blog. That I am not imagining. But if he had just said "Hi. Hope it's going well," I would have been spared the humiliation of wondering what terrible things he remembers.

One funny thing I was reminded of by this amends maker was my housemate Peter, who was also a graduate student at Princeton. He once asked whether it was true that I had actually gone out with that "odious loser." Ugh, how did he find out about it. The interlude occured before Peter moved to Princeton. "I saw him slithering across the dining hall today," he once reported. Now that's funny, but I wouldn't have remembered it that way unless cornered into it.

"Hey, how are you doing? I was just thinking about you," is a perfectly civilized way to approach just about anyone from your past. No need for this "I'm so sorry" nonsense, which can only bring back bad memories. Step Number 8 is bad advice.

New Orleans

2008-04-05T00:35:00.003-04:00

This morning I joined a throng of attendees from the Conference on College Composition and Communication and walked from the Hilton Riverside to Mother's, a popular breakfast restaurant. As we walked in we were greeted with directions to take a menu and stand in line at the counter. Grits, eggs, meats of several kinds, including real ham and substantial sausages were arrayed behind greasy panes of glass. As I was waiting for my turn at the cash register, a short, slight woman in her late thirties came in through the side door and asked the cashier whether there were some of those 50-cent bags of ham. The cashier, double-tasking effortlessly, made change for the customer ahead of me in line while asking the woman how many bags. One, she said. While the cashier punched in my order, the woman who had asked for the bag counted out fifty cents in dimes and nickels. Without seeming to turn away from me, the cashier reached into a box behind her and pulled out a bag of greasy bones. She waved away the nickels and dimes, handed over the bag, and said, "See you later," not unkindly. I paid for my six-dollar breakfast with a twenty and went off to a table with my friends to eat a pile of sausage and drink a mug of coffee brewed with chicoree and adjusted to a caramel color with condensed milk.

My Beef with Ira Glass

2008-04-01T01:50:00.006-04:00

For a couple years now, I’ve been a big fan of “This American Life,” produced in Chicago for American Public Radio and hosted by Ira Glass, who has a strange lisp and speaks with the voice of a poster child for Gen X. I like the unique approach to reporting. The show gets at the way truth is stranger than fiction and the way a close look at a specific life and a specific situation can put all manner of generalizations in doubt. I guess there is also an element of voyeurism to the pleasure I get from the show, an illusion of getting to know someone and peering through the windows of a real person’s life.

Voyeurism aside, there have been some remarkable episodes, particularly one titled “Habeas Schmabeus,” which challenges the listener to think about what the term actually means. Do you really know? It means that the body must be present, originally meaning brought before the king, before it is determined whether that person can be lawfully detained. This is one of the most basic legal precedents, dating from English common law, yet it is being denied to all prisoners at Guantanamo with the excuse that these prisoners are merely being detained and furthermore not in the United States, with the propaganda surrounding this that all these people are evil doers and so perhaps not fully human. Sure, everyone knows this, but do they really know what the term habeus corpus means, its total ramifications?

Interviews with people who have been “detained,” a euphemism for imprisoned, at Guantanamo are included in the episode. It brings home the real experience of torture (without in fact being voyeuristically graphic) and the denial of the legal rights of these people, most of whom were turned in by a mere personal enemy for a bounty, in way that objective reporting of the facts never did for me. The voices are not filtered through the detached voice of a journalist. The survivors of imprisonment and torture speak. Their voices are audible, with all the ums, ers, and likes unexpurgated--no radio voices, just ordinary voices like yours and mine. This is “This American Life” at its best.

Then came the recent essay collection, a fundraiser for the episode, titled “The New Kings of Non-Fiction.” As a feminist, I bridled instantly. The essays represented are good, but they are mostly by men, the women, or maybe it’s just one woman, Susan Orleans, is included but simultaneously excluded by the title of the book. Since that time, I have come to realize that sexism, if not outright misogyny, pervades “This American Life.”

First I noticed an interview with a transgendered person who changed over from female to male and testified to the fundamental and immediate change that testosterone, life before T and after T he called it, wrought in him--including the fact that he instantaneously became very good at math and experience graphic visual fantasies when catching sight of a woman’s ass on the street.

This interview is not aired just once. It is repeated and used in two episodes because Ira Glass is so taken with the subject that he has to move the interview from an episode that glances upon the topic to another episode wholly dedicated to the subject of testosterone. Next I noticed an episode that included a woman who created a game show to demonstrate that girls are as smart as boys and had to admit that she was wrong. Glass forced her to admit that she was wrong. She fesses up. The episode exists to prove that girls are stupid. The producer of the game show whom Glass is interiewing, a woman who had to come to the terrible conclusion that girls are generally stupid, couldn’t dumb down the questions enough to get the girls to get the answers right.

Throughout each of these cringingly sexist episodes, Ira Glass emits an inane and gleeful giggle, so pleased to have been able to debunk the myth that women deserve a place in the world equal to that men enjoy. The votes are in, men are superior. So there we see the flaw in the design. Hand picked stories are compelling, but they can be used to sell either a story I agree with or one I find repugnant and wholly misguided. The repugnant stories put the whole project in doubt, just as the show originally seemed to me to put some misguided generalizations in doubt. Anecdote truly is an unreliable source of information, an insidious, seductive, and fallacious form of evidence. I can hardly listen to Ira Glass’s voice anymore.

Still, the objective voice of the traditional journalist is often no more than a screen for the same kind of anecdotal evidence. Glass proves that a story can be used or misused, and all journalism is a story, whether it announces itself as such or not.

Cubicle Hell

2007-03-02T22:42:00.000-05:00

From the window of this hotel in Atlanta, I can see almost nothing but traffic, miles of headlights and tail lights oozing through the city. There is a constant rushing pounding noise that is the highway, off to my right. In the foreground, just across the street, is an office building, and I look down into the cubicle of a worker who has left for the night. It is beige with modular parts--panels, drawers, and work surfaces. I can make out, well enough to imagine, the family pictures pinned to the fabric walls, and I notice that the whole work station has been set up so that the worker's back would be to the window, and at a jaunty angle that strives to deny the name cube-icle. There are more rakish little cubicles just like it further in.

I have a front row seat on hell should I choose to come up here and watch tomorrow. Of course it is possible that some people love their cubicle jobs, and I have seen first hand that others like those jobs well enough not to care. This I don't get. How could you not know, even if you weren't standing in the window of the hotel across the street, that your cubicle waited there for you 24 hours a day under the same flourescent light with the only missing module being you, the removable part that goes home once a day to eat and sleep. And if you did know, the torture of being the only living thing on that floor that sees the irony would drive you slowly insane.

The Power of Stigma

2007-01-08T22:59:00.000-05:00

I didn’t have a real understanding of the word “stigma”--not the function of stigma, that is, but function of the word itself—until I taught a book by Lizzie Simon titled Detour: My Bipolar Roadtrip in 3D.

One of Lizzie’s readers wrote on a web site I read, maybe Amazon, that Simon writes at a fifth-grade reading level. This is true. The writing is not complex, nuanced, or even good. Rhetorically, however, the text is brilliant. Students who say they have never actually read a whole book tell me that they couldn’t put it down. Lizzie speaks to them. Her story is “relatable,” and she is bipolar. That is exactly the response she set out to get. She wanted to challenge the stigma of mental illness, and she did it by writing a book that erases the distance between her, a mentally ill woman, and my students, with their need to be normal.

I asked my students to write about stigma in other contexts, and they wrote, “I have no stigma against gay people,” and “people used to have stigma for black people.” They didn't know how to use the word correctly, but I think they were making an intelligent mistake. They made me think about something I had never thought about before: the precise reason that the word “stigma” is not interchangeable with the word “prejudice.”

Stigma forces the speaker to acknowledge a collective, tacit marking of a person or a group. Stigmatization is a social act, but not the multiplied cognitive error of wrong-minded people. It is well known that Americans are individualists, and the logic of prejudice suits the American notion of individualism. Prejudice is at heart an individual mistake. Hundreds of individuals thinking the same way gives rise to a prejudiced society. The cure is education. If we teach our children to love and respect others and celebrate Martin Luther King Day, prejudice will cease.

But stigma will live on. Stigma does not come about through the faulty thinking and feeling of individuals. The origin of stigma is indefinable, though its presence is undeniable. Its origin is social and collective, yet it cannot be broken down to an individual thought or act. An individual cannot, as my students' mistake wishes to imply, have stigma against anyone or any group.

Stigma and shunning seem to go together. Shunning is also a collective action, one that often is carried out without the need of any spoken order (with the exception of the Amish ritual shunning). Did anyone get up one day and decide to hate the fat kid with glasses? Maybe, but most of the people who shun him are doing so out of fear of being shunned themselves. They don’t want the stigma to rub off on them. No one put the mark on this kid, but it’s there as if he were wearing it on his forehead.

What Simon identifies in her book is that the cure for stigma is "coming out," though she doesn't use that term. The gay community originated the idea, and it's brilliant. First of all there is the idea of community, of safety in numbers. Then there is the idea of proving to people that the Other is within and around and already (accidentally) loved. Especially important are the Ellen Degenerises and the Ron Reagans who prove that famous people and the children of famous people are sometimes gay too. The way to combat stigma is to force everyone to own some connection to the stigmatized.

The difference between this approach and the notion of combating prejudice through education is that coming out doesn’t pretend to solve the problem. In fact, there is a hint of the notion that though stigma may be lessened, it will always exist. The fear of psychosis is primal in our society, though it may have been revered by cave peoples. Edicts against homosexuality are allegedly located in foundational texts, such as the Bible. This makes attempts to eradicate prejudice against the mentally ill or homosexuals futile, at least in the short term, so coming out is a brilliant adjunct to attempts at education.

To return to that boy in elementary school that everyone is afraid to be seen speaking with, it's clear that the attempts of the teacher to educate the class about bullying are only going to be marginally successful. She can’t watch the children all the time, and if he doesn’t actually get beat up, his ego may take a permanent hit. What is the solution for him if there is no one to band together with? He can laugh at himself, distancing himself from himself. He can acknowledge the traits that make him stand out and seem to look at them through their eyes. He can fend off hostility with self-deprecating humor. Or try.

I think that ultimately stigma is a far more powerful word than prejudice. Prejudice is mere prejudgment of others, but it says very little about the consequences of the prejudgment and implies that education is an easy cure.

Those who are stigmatized, from the lesbian, to the mentally ill guy who sleeps in the park, to the fat kid with glasses, know that their social disease has its roots in a collective belief that there is something transgressive present within them for which there is no cure. Even if there were a cure for the fear of otherness, how would it be effected? Not as an act of will by the group that considers itself normal, for they cannot exist as normal without the presence of the others. It won’t come from hand washing on the part of the insiders. The maintenance of cleanliness is what the majority are clinging to through distancing themselves from the stigmatized, be it through jeering, shunning, or other forms of ridicule. They can adopt a veneer of political correctness, but still, they are so glad it isn't them.

Children used to be told that the way to handle a bully was to tell her that her actions were hurtful. That misguided piece of advice just leads to more abuse and a beating, either physically or in the form of jeers and renewed hostility. As the third least popular girl in my eighth grade class, I learned this the hard way. Nor can I imagine anyone cast as other reforming his tormentors by making the rational suggestion that he is human too.

Short-term solutions that acknowledge the power of collective hatred and the indellibility of stigma are self-deprecating humor, success by some widely accepted standard, and finding a group of like people. Simon calls it “finding my herd.” The stigma against the mentally ill, homosexuals, little fat boys who wear glasses, the poor, and any number of ethnic and racial minorities is likely to outlast our generation. What can we do about it in the meantime? Educate, yes. As an educator I am bound by oath to believe that. But far more powerfully, we must find little subversive tactics, subtle ways to lessen the distance between us and them. The word stigma explains why this is so.

Further Snatches of Talk

2007-01-01T21:46:00.000-05:00

According to our host, grass-fed beef is as good for you as fish. It has the correct Omega fatty acid content. Since she knows a lot about food, I asked her where Canola Oil comes from. She said that it’s rape seed oil. No further explanation is needed as to why it isn’t named for its source. And Canola stands for Canada’s “ola.”

There were pictures on their wall developed from negatives that one of their friends had picked up from a yard sale. There were some of Paris and a couple of a circus. We compared notes about who had been to Paris. I had been once, in the mid eighties, and we talked about being a young woman in Europe and having to settle for a lot of verbal and sometimes physical harassment. I remembered asking my hosts whether there was anyone the French hated more than the Americans, and the answer was the Germans. Others agreed that this was their experience. Germans were the most obnoxious. That was the 80s. America is now number one, no doubt.

Our hosts live on a street that’s the highway for college-student bar traffic. A month or so ago, one drunken reveler kicked their front door in, just for the hell of it. They’ve had a glider stolen off their porch. They don’t feel particularly in fear for their lives, mostly just harassed. Their neighbor stopped by before midnight, and they laughed together over the situation. A mountain lion chained in the back and loosed at closing time?

We were served a delicious cherry pie. Our host had been teased throughout the evening about the organic grass-fed beef, so she joked that the cherries from her neighbors yard were organic as well, fertilized by dog and drunk-college-student pee.

Another guest described her child's birthday party the day before. One of the girls when seated at the table to eat cake, raked at the plastic table cloth with her fork, damaging the table underneath. The woman called this child the forker and said she had names for all the children who had like annoying habits: the shredder, the twister, the twirler. The forker tops them all.

Item of Conversation on New Year’s Eve: Child Abduction

2007-01-01T18:47:00.000-05:00

We spent the evening at a friend’s house with other folks our age and their children, trying to stay awake and talking before we could finally make it to singing Auld Lang Syne. We wandered down many paths, some dark.

How common is child abduction by a stranger? Our children can’t go out to play in the park by themselves or walk to school the way we did. When I read my daughter the classic Romona the Pest, written in the 60s, she heard about Romona, age 5, walking to school on her own. That was unthinkable in 2006. I said my biggest fear is that the other moms might run my daughter down in their SUVs. The majority of Americans would argue I should be fearing the very real threat of child abduction.

Is it possible our fears are unfounded, that we are being duped by the media, that we are the victims of mass hysteria? One of us had read an article in The Washington Post claiming that the vast majority of abductions of children are by a family member who lost out on a custody battle, or something of the like. That’s the story I want to believe, but I thought I’d check out what 2006 had to say.

I couldn’t find the article from The Post, but a recent article in The Boston Globe dated September 18, 2006, cites 204,000 cases of abductions by family members in the U.S. out of a total 1.9 million abductions—a small fraction. The Globe did not acknowledge the source for that data. Another article in the Buffalo News, August 25, 2006, cites a group called Take Root, which comprises adults who were abducted by family members. Take Root says that the 200,000 cases of abduction by family members accounts for 78% of all child abductions. They claim the Department of Justice as their source.

So I followed that up as well. I found a 2002 Department of Justice web page on http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ titled “Highlights from the NISMART Bulletins." The numbers cited there are from 1999, but I couldn’t locate more recent statistics. Presumably it takes some time to accumulate and analyze the data? Here’s what the number crunchers hired by the Department of Justice say:

The total number of children who were missing from their caretakers in 1999 (i.e., their caretakers did not know their whereabouts and were alarmed for at least an hour while trying to locate them) is estimated to be 1,315,600.

Nearly all of the caretaker missing children (1,312,800 or 99.8 percent) were returned home alive or located by the time the study data were collected. Only a fraction of a percent (0.2 percent or 2,500) of all caretaker missing children had not returned home or been located, and the vast majority of these were runaways from institutions who had been identified in the survey of juvenile residential facilities.

The number of missing children who were reported missing in 1999 (i.e., reported to the police or missing children’s agencies in order to locate them) was estimated to be 797,500, which is equivalent to a rate of 11.4 children per 1,000 in the U.S. population.

Most of the caretaker missing children became missing because they ran away (48 percent) or because of benign misunderstandings or miscommunications about where they should be (28 percent).

Children who were missing because they became lost or injured accounted for 15 percent of all caretaker missing children.

Less than one-tenth (9 percent) of caretaker missing children were abducted by family members, and only 3 percent were abducted by nonfamily perpetrators.

The Globe was right. Take Root can’t do math. Still, these statistics are not what watchers of the 11:00 news believe. Last night I trotted out one of my favorite anecdotes about one of the Brownie moms who e-mailed the group when a strange (delivery?) van was seen in the neighborhood. I believe the wording in the e-mail was “we said we’d let each other know when something like this happens.” When what happens? Nothing happened.

Still, peer pressure, and maybe a little overprotectiveness of my own, keeps me from imagining letting my daughter play in the park on her own until she is 30.

Bait and Switch

2006-12-14T13:41:00.000-05:00

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report issued in February, of the twenty-five fastest growing jobs for 2006, only five required a college degree at all. The growth opportunities lie in low-paid fields like food preparation, health aide work, janitorial, landscaping, and retail sales. (http://www.bls.gov/emp/emptab3.htm)

-Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch

In order to write Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich legally changed her name back to Alexander and went about creating a resume to sell herself as a PR executive. An expensive appointment with a fashion consultant who did her colors and advised her on her wardrobe completed the transformation. After almost a year, still shut out of the corporate world, she gave up on her mission to research white collar work from a mole's perspective.

There is so much about Ehrenreich’s work in this book and in Nickel and Dimed (the story of her infiltration of the ranks of the working class) that I like. It's more entertaining to read the her story than to simply go to the bureau of labor statistics site to read the numbers, and she seems genuinely to care about the plight of the working poor and the downwardly mobile middle class.

There are problems though. She gets some facts wrong. In one case she makes a pronouncement about the vulnerability of employees to loss of health insurance for pre-existing conditions, seemingly unaware of one decent piece of legislation that’s been passed in the past 10 years, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. She also fails to mention that one of the jobs that is most likely to increase from 2004-14 (incorrectly cited by Ehrenreich above) is post-secondary teaching, a projected increase of about one third. I found that particularly interesting, though I'm not sure what to make of it.

Above all, she didn't seem to be trying very hard to get a job, being more interested in observing what it’s like not to have one. I wince at the hundreds of dollars she spends on coaches and makeovers. It's insensitive to people who really are unemployed that she wasted money on things that obviously have no possibility of helping her get a job.

I spent five years remaking myself from an educator into a nonprofit version of the corporate publications and communications professional she aspired to impersonate. How arrogant of her to think that she could walk into a job like that just with a new haircut and some blush. I got there by handing a peeled down version of my resume to a dozen temp firms for editing work. I worked my way into a full time job from there. There were women in their forties working with me as temps, lest she think age would have disqualified her, and we made the equivalent of 35 K. No benefits. If she were serious about getting a job, she’d need to devote at least two years to it and start out by jamming on her copy editing skills for six months as opposed to spending money in order to make fun of career consultants.

But I don’t think she really wanted to spend day after day actually doing the “white collar” work. She wanted to people watch and take notes. As with Nickel and Dimed, she seems to hold herself above class. There is a hint that she is sneering at the people she disagrees with as much for their poor taste or ugliness as for their opinions and actions. Here she describes the man who is coaching the laid off executives:

Patrick, who had boomed confidently on the phone, is not the commanding presence I pictured. Partly bald, with colorless protruberent eyes and a distinctly uncorporate paunch... (67-68)

In Nickel and Dimed, she mocks the people whose houses she is cleaning by noting that the stains on the carpet indicate that they eat dinner in front of the television. This seems to imply that she holds herself as superior, a member of some sort of academic/journalistic overclass, which has been very irritating to my students when I’ve asked them to read Nickel and Dimed. First she lies and tricks people. Then she sneers. This leads them to question her ethos, and unfortunately, this gets in the way of her message.

I have been thinking about all of this because I ordered an exam copy of Bait and Switch thinking that I might assign it as an alternative to Nickel and Dimed. I though students might be more interested in a fate that more closely resembles what they are about to get themselves into. But I can already tell this is going to be an even harder sell than Nickel and Dimed. I don’t think they will want to believe her.

Here’s why I’m going to assign it anyway. It’s a perfect companion to Lizzie Simon’s Detour, in which she explores the concept of stigma as it relates to mental illness. In this case, what Ehrenreich will likely evoke for my students is the stigma of joblessness. She references this explicitly in her afterword to the 2006 edition.

They feel shame even for their own injuries. They are stigmatized by their condition, although they did nothing to incur it, as illustrated, in the case of the unemployed, by the management consultant who advises corporate recruiters to avoid job fairs: “Who goes to job fairs? People without jobs! All you get are worthless resumes and lots of germs.” (247)

This is something students might not want to consider, but it would work with Detour, which already has a proven track record as a popular text. Are these people really lepers? What is going on with employment now? And what if it happened to you? And what should you do once you know?

To Be a Generous Reader

2006-10-24T22:26:00.000-04:00

I have only had a few truly generous readers of my writing, and their readings are still with me today, not so much for the praise they gave me as for the time they took and the care with which they read.

In my college experience, writing was taught oddly. There was a first year "expos" class in which the goal seemed to be for the instructors to cut our over-sized egos down to size by doling out Cs and Ds. It wasn't just that the grading was harsh, the instructor didn't seem to care what I had said or whether I had even tried. I never even knew the standard against which I was being judged. My expos teacher was the least generous reader I have ever encountered, poised to dig into my paper and root out error before he had finished reading the piece, rather than see meaning.

I was often successful with my writing throughout the rest of college, so there seemed to be a gap between the expos teacher's expectations and those of the rest of my instructors. Maybe the expos teacher had whipped me into shape, but I refused to give him any credit for changing my writing, his only input having been marginal scribblings such as "really? hm why? OK do you really think so?".

And what is a generous reader? A generous reader approaches the work convinced that it is important. One can immediately see that it is a challenge for a writing professor who encounters over 50 essays a week to remain generous. But who can learn anything except from a generous reader? The writer has labored to create the work, the 6, 8, or 10 pages of writing. The least the professor can do is to read the piece as if it has importance. This cannot be faked or forced or forged. It must be real.

The most generous reader I encountered in college was a friend of my father's who was a creative writing professor at Columbia University. To my profound embarrassment, my father once sent one of my college papers to him because it was on Light in August and Flint had been a great fan of Faulkner when my father knew him. My father was proud of me, and he didn't dole out praise easily, so I was pleased that he sent the paper along, though a little embarrassed.

My father's friend wrote me a letter, which I still may have filed away somewhere. It was not long, but it indicated first, that he had read the whole piece on its own terms, and generously--that is, with the assumption that it had been written with care and was meant to say something. Having read the piece generously, he came to the conclusion that it did in fact say something interesting, and he shared with me his interest in what I had to say, not at great length, but with great sincerity. And I suppose the question of whether it is possible to manufacture and fake sincerity is a worthy one, but I prefer to think that I have a sixth sense about this and can simply tell. He was sincere.

A generous reader does not lie and tell a student that something is well said or important or well crafted if it is not. A generous reader is truthful about her evaluation of the work. Furthermore, a generous reader in the context of a writing class would be constantly communicating the basis on which she made the judgments she made, sharing her vocabulary with the class and teaching them to read generously as well.

She would. When exhaused and overwhelmed, she does mentally cut and paste praise in order to spur her students on. She must admit that she is not always absolutely truthful. She is sometimes too tired for that. But she strives always to be generous, to find that place in which she can find the spirit and the time required to be so.

The Virtues of Being Wishy Washy

2006-10-17T22:39:00.000-04:00

That last post about my child and the educational system is me every fifth day--gonna take charge and protect her rights. That makes a lot of sense until I realize that I can't keep it up. I simply can't keep up with the demands of righteous indignation when it comes to seeing myself and my child and my family as the center of the universe. Sooner or later sanity reasserts itself. Then I fall prey to anger again. I'm not sure why, and I don't want to give into this cycle.

When I was in my 20s, my younger sister got into a relationship with a boyfriend who was abusing her physically. They were living together, so it was hard to break things up. I and my other sisters wanted to save her, get her out of there. So I did some research, called support groups, halfway houses, and the like. Out. Just get her out. But all I kept hearing from those professionals, like a mantra, was "she is in the cycle of violence." The problem seemed to be that she had a role in this cycle and helped to perpetuate it. This was not what I wanted to hear from them, and I was hating them as much as I was hating him. She did get out eventually and with bruises but not broken bones, so things could have been worse. As far as I know, that's the only guy that's actually hit her. So again, as far as I know, she actually did get out of the cycle. With this distance it is easy to see that they were right, or to see their point, but at the time I just wanted a quick solution. Out. Now.

I seem to be in a sort of cycle now, with vacillating inclinations. I want my daughter's problems in school to be solved, vanished, disappeared. That is what I want. I also want to be a different sort of parent, a generous parent, a parent who honors her for who she is and accepts her with her strengths and her weaknesses, as she was born. Because I am of two minds, when the school says there is a problem I will either react by thinking it is their fault because they are not able to honor difference, or I will react by thinking there should be a way to erase this difference. This is me back in my 20s, furious with the professionals for not having the solution to my problem and now. But since I am not in my 20s, and also because parenting is not a full-time job for me, I am not completely bonkers and in their face on a daily basis. It seems I have been saved by fate: I had a child in my 30s and I needed and wanted to have a career in addition to parenting.

In addition to that, I am not an energizer bunny sort of person who keeps punching away at the drum endlessly, changing direction but still drumming the same drum, which I imagine would be either the drum of change the system to meet her needs or the drum of get 20 specialists on it and fix it tomorrow. So by circumstance and by constitution, I am not cut out for the role of Erin Brocovitch or twenty-first century mom. I admire both and envy both. I feel a little wishy washy, and in the role of mom, I feel outclassed, which isn't a great feeling. But that's OK, some days.

We aren't the only family with the only child. There are people who know what they are doing, just as there are the annoying people who do not. We can put up with delays. It's not the end of the world. I trust that if there is a time for a big battle, I will know when to fight it. But for now, and I don't mean that as a threat, generosity of spirit is something I can afford, and I trust it will be returned in like kind.

My Child's Best Teacher?

2006-10-08T11:41:00.000-04:00

From the LD Online "LD Basics" pages:

Parents are a child's first and best teachers.

This phrase, or a version of this phrase, is widely used to placate parents or cajole them into cooperating or to support them in the decision to home school.

"You are your child's first teacher." Well, OK. Maybe parenting is part teaching, so we'll go with it. "You are your child's best teacher," though? I'm surprised education professionals want anything to do with that mantra, but it's been sent home on at least one flyer from school. Maybe more, it's hard to keep track of those things.

As a college professor and education professional myself, I think that my child's teachers in the school, the ones who have master's degrees in elementary education, should be my child's best teachers. If they aren't, what's going on? I am not willing to completely give up on the educational system, quit my job, and home school, and I don't want my child's teachers telling me that I am her best teacher.

Read to her, drill her on "sight words," do this, do that. OK. It's being done. And what exactly is happening during the school day? Your job is to be her best teacher. What are you doing for her? How well do you even know her as a learner? My most important job, as I see it emerging, is to glue her back together and shore up her confidence, so she can go to school the next day.

She is in second grade reading at a level about a year behind her peers, and of course the writing skills follow. When I teach her, I have to navigate tantrums and frustration because she knows it's safe to indulge in those with me. I'm fairly certain she doesn't behave that way in school. Doesn't this fall more under the skill set of psychologist?

My other role, and I think this fits more under the skill set of lawyer than teacher, is to figure out the laws. Nothing is mandated, as it turns out, until that child has been determined by the system to have a disability. There is a clock for doing that testing, and I need to learn the rules and start "advocating."

The Rules of Fun

2006-09-25T09:23:00.000-04:00

Because it is banal and meaningless, the phrase “sounds like a lot of fun,” has endless applications. It is in the same family with “How’s it goin’?” and “Take care,” but it is more versatile. Where those are relegated to the status of greetings, “sounds like a lot of fun” can actually be embedded in conversation for numerous purposes.

When I was 19, I used to say, “It’s so fun.” I knew it wasn’t grammatically correct, but “It’s so fun,” delivered in upspeak, signified a whole attitude toward life—unthreatening blank enthusiasm. Alternatively, “It’so fun,” delivered with a grave, awestruck tone, indicated the possession of valuable knowledge that could be traded on the open market of pleasure. Each of these were socially adaptive.

I once said “It’s so fun” in front of my aunt, who was at that moment knitting something modern in cotton on bamboo needles. She looked up, plunked her knitting in her lap in frustration, and said, “I simply can’t stand it. I must say something because otherwise you speak so beautifully. It is NOT “so fun.” One says “such fun,” or “so much fun.”

I was primarily humiliated but also furious that I was related to her—to people like her who had made me half conscious in the first place that “so fun” was wrong, and so articulate otherwise that I absolutely needed “so fun” to get me through interaction with normal people. So fun made so much more sense in so many contexts, so many places where there was such fun to be had, so much more fun than knitting modern sweaters in cotton.

Lately I’ve been noticing a new use of the word “fun.” When you hear what someone does for a living, you say, “Sounds like a lot of fun.” I remember once e-mailing a friend after years of silence and being asked what I was doing these days. It took a moment of resolve to tell truth. I keyed the answer back to him. Copy editing. I dreaded his response. He was a published author. He wrote back, “Sounds like fun.” The irony was painful. My job was killing me sentences by sentence, misplaced modifier and semicolon, by hyphen. Of course he was just trying to be polite and neutral.

I have been running across “fun” a lot recently because of my husband’s job, which brings him into contact with wealthy Philadelphia socialites. They are preserving the land, putatively for the birds and other little “creatures,” as they like to call them, but in fact for their horse trails and “way of life.” My husband’s job is to help them do that. One of them invited us to his mansion, traditionally called a “cottage” in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Making small talk, he mentioned my job, indicating that he was politely aware of what I did for a living. “Sounds like a lot of fun,” he intoned, lock jawed.

What do people like him mean when they say someone’s work is “a lot of fun,” especially when that work makes no money. Their work is generally not fun but makes oodles of money, which they use to supplement their inherited wealth. Often their jobs are playing with their money to make more dividend income. But I digress. In the case of a woman, of course, any work is simply a diversion and therefore has to be fun in order for her to have an excuse to do it. It is acceptable as long as it doesn’t distract her from her duties as wife and mother.

I think there is something else there too, a sense of politeness, of pretending that those who clearly do not vacation for months at a time in “harbors” do live lives that seem effortlessly worn and are encrusted with carefully doled out and modulated fun. In other words, he was saying, as you are my guest, I will pretend that you know how to have fun in our way. Isn’t this fun?

The saddest use of fun I have encountered comes from my drunken cousin who gravely intones, “It’s a lot of fun,” regularly as he perpetually tries to focus his eyes on the thing right in front of him, always swaying slightly. Maybe he doesn’t sway from the drunk but from the imbalance between his two legs, resulting from the metal that solders one leg together since he nearly killed himself and someone else in a car crash while he was driving drunk. “It’s a lot of fun,” he’ll say again and again, not lightly, as in either sense I used as a girl. He uses the grownup’s version, the sad version of the man in the harbor, a desperate use of fun.

The "No Child Left Behind" Recruitment Clause

2006-09-22T23:19:00.000-04:00

The military recruiting requirement of No Child Left Behind law has forced many schools to overturn longstanding policies on protecting student records from prying eyes. My local high school, like most in the country, carefully guards its student directory information from the countless organizations, businesses, and special-interest groups that are itching to tempt impressionable teens. Now, parents and schools are being shoved aside, and the military is being given carte blanche access to our children. Not surprisingly, abuse has followed closely behind.

This quote comes from an editorial in the Boston Globe by David Goodman, September 16, 2006. Goodman goes on to voice his concern about allegations that recruiters frequently (he cites 1 in 200) sexually harrass female prospective recruits. This is the news piece. But I, behind the times, am still shaking my head at the news that the "No Child Left Behind" bill contains a clause requiring school to submit names of potential recruits to the government.

I checked it out. Yep. Where have I been? This is from Mother Jones in 2002:

There, buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student or face a cutoff of all federal aid.

There is also an opt-out provision, but as the Globe columnist points out, miss that piece of paper in the September blizzard of permission slips, and your kid is getting glossy lit from the military and/or being groped in a recruiter's minivan.

One of my students recently came in for a conference with me on her personal narrative essay, as did the rest of the class. She is writing about how she is going to be leaving college to join the marines next semester. It was too late for her parents to get their money back this semester, so here she is, biding her time until she can realize her dream of being in the military. What got her was one of those ads on TV that begins with a man scaling a cliff and ends with him saluting a flag in full regalia. I think I know the one. There's a chin strap involved. He's almost holding back the tears. That one really got to her. I just hope she doesn't get hurt and doesnt' have to kill anyone and doesn't see anyone be killed. I guess I mean I hope she changes her mind.

It's interesting seeing these personal narratives from the students in my class. There are ones about lessons learned from car crashes, drug abuse, alcoholism. But war? That's the answer?

"No Child Left Behind" is double speak to begin with. It really means we will make sure there is a number attached and blame assigned to the fact that children are left behind. It's the reification of children being left behind. But this provision is startling in its bold-faced cynicism--the placement of military recruiting within a piece of "education reform" legislation. More startling is the fact that it's been right there, signed into law in 2002, and very little publicized in the mainstream since then.

As one critic I glanced at put it, "Oh, now I know what they mean by 'no child left behind'..."

Words

2006-09-15T21:23:00.000-04:00

My husband and I can rarely gouge any information about school out of our daughter. My one trick is to say, “Oh, I know what happened in school today." Then I'll make up something wild. "Ms. C. told all of you what sound ‘ea’ makes and you learned about ‘each,’ ‘teach,’ and ‘reach.’” That gets her. She can’t resist correcting me and telling me what really happened.

Surprisingly, today I wasn't far off. She said, “No, Mom! We learned ‘l’ groups: ‘sl,’ ‘bl,’ ‘cl.’”

I say, “Oh! I know. Clown, close, club...” I’m not very fast about thinking of all the words. What goes before “l”? Are they called blends? I think they are called blends.

Some sounds are just better than others. I particularly like slink, slide, slither, slow, slip, and sludge. But all of those “l” blends have a nice clingy, elastic texture.

Who knows what really happens in school. How will we ever know? Tonight there was an ice cream social at 6:00 in the gym. The principal was there, holding his own, wearing his blue jeans as opposed to his usual brown suit. The PTO volunteers were out in force, wearing primly printed name tags.

I shouldn’t poke fun. What good was I doing, shifting from one foot to the other by the ping-pong-ball toss and skipper-loop-thingy games?

Kids kept coming up to our daughter to say hello. One mom said she’d heard so much about our daughter from her daughter. Is that good? Or is she the class clown? Why does she hide her head and cling when all the children wave and greet her by name?

Who knows, kneads, knells?

Carnival of Feminists

2006-09-09T13:51:00.000-04:00

Since September 6, the 22nd Carnival of Feminists has been up on Redemption Blues. My Owning Beauty post is on there. Each carnival is hosted by a different feminist blog. Different hosts have different styles. This one gives a fair amount of commentary that contextualizes the posts she is linking to and quoting. She made a reference to Sandra Bartky in quoting my post. I haven't read her Femininity and Domination, in all honesty. Now it is on my list.

Carnival of Femininsts, in my opinion, is the best femininst blogging activity on the Web. I have a piece coming out in November in the fall issue of the Barnard Center for Research on Women's S & F Online, and it contains a plug for the Carnival.

A blog carnival--and the feminst carnival is one of dozens--works well for feminism because there are so many varieties of feminism out there. Each carnival pulls together some passionate and creative thinking and writing on femininst issues from a wide array of viewpoints, some scholarly, some not. We aren't all members of the same community and don't have to try to be. (If you want to submit to the carnival, just go to the blog carnival site.)

BlogHer.org (also an interesting, and I will claim the title for it, a feminst project) allegedly ran into trouble at it's second-annual face-to-face conference this summer when "mommy bloggers" went head-to-head with non-mommies and "geeks" and others who saw the purpose of the conference differently. Some felt that the mommy bloggers had dominated the conference and cited, for instance, the presence of a bib and a condom in the conference goody bag as evidence that the agenda had been coopted.

This is an example of the challenge that attends cramming people under one tent when the only connection is "women's issues." Even adding "online" doesn't narrow the field much. Not that it isn't a worthy effort to create a women's community, and BlogHer does a good job of fostering community, but it's the kind of effort that is notoriously fraught with difficulty. (See Women's Studies departments for countless examples of this phenomenon--worthy but tendentious.)

What I like about the Carnival is that it sidesteps all of that. If we see each other's writing on the Carnival and like each other, we get in touch. If we don't, we don't. For feminists, not having to struggle for common ground leaves more room for productivity. We can all move forward in different ways forming alliances and disbanding as the need arises. The Carnival is an eclectic reader, and by virtue of being on the web it is also a fluid vehicle for communication and community building. It would be nice to have some face-to-face interaction, the way BlogHer does, but it isn't absolutely necessary. There seems to be enough thinking and writing going on out there to keep the carnival running.

"Ragin' on the River"

2006-09-05T22:16:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday we went canoeing down at the Chesapeake, in Perryville, with friends who have a son a couple years older than our daughter. They are 9 and 7 and get along miraculously well. They can play for hours without fighting with each other, which never ceases to amaze and please us as parents.

As we were gearing up--taking the boats off the car, sorting this and that into waterproof bags, and gently bickering--the boy and the girl were deep in their imaginary world, throwing rocks at the dragon flies, who were somehow the enemy, and making up their own version of the Geneva Convention: no throwing rocks at the ones that are mating.

Because it was Labor Day weekend, the bay was crowded with people trying to get in a last blast before summer’s end. As paddlers, we were well in the minority. There were jet skis, party boats, and cigarette boats, to name a few. Among them, they rendered every motorized interruption of silence from an annoying, banging whine to a deafening roar.

We enjoyed ourselves the most in the shallows, where the power boats never ventured. We saw countless Great Blue Herons, Terns, Gulls, Cormorants, and half a dozen Bald Eagles, as well as a couple false alarms in the form of Turkey Vultures. There were even a few gold finches frisking around on the shore for color.

When we ventured further out, boats roared past us in either direction, never bothering to slow down. One boat passed us with a bunch of 8-year-olds jeering at us. I couldn’t make out the exact taunt. It sounded like it actually began with “Nya, nya.” Were they feeling superior because they were going faster?

I became increasingly nervous as boat after boat seemed to be headed straight for us. They did change course when they saw us, but I worried what would happen if they didn’t see us.

Like the middle-aged mom I realize I have become, too much aware of my own mortality and that of my daughter and husband, I took to raising my paddle over my head and waving it when I saw a boat headed for us. Most uncool. But what if they were drunk or distracted, or couldn’t see us because they were seated so high up? Better safe than sorry, I thought.

After finally landing safely and packing up, we went out to a pub in Havre de Grace (pronounced Have Her Dee Grayce) for dinner. Then not finding an ice cream store that was open, we headed to Port Deposit, where we found what we were looking for—a “muddy sneakers” cone for each of the children.

The kid behind the counter told us that they were dragging the river, even as he scooped, because there had been an accident during Ragin’ on the River, their annual Labor Day power boat race. One person had been killed, and they couldn’t find the body. That explained the flashing lights we’d seen out on the river. (They finally found him today.)

It was just sunset, a spectacular array of pinks, grays, and blues, and we walked down to the promenade by the marina and looked down the Susquehanna at the red and white Coast Guard boats that we could just make out in the twilight.

We spoke in hushed tones about how awful it was and what a terrible waste. Just words, in a sense, for that is what you say, but then again not. Having children has made me more aware of the reality and consequence of death because the death of my child is an imaginable horror, something from which I know I would not recover. As it turns out, the person who was killed was a father with a son who survived the crash. Losing a parent that way is quite a horror too.

Little children can be quite cold blooded. Is it because death isn’t entirely real to them or that they haven’t reached a particular stage of moral development? “What if the body floats up right here?” they said excitedly. All day long, after all, they had been playing war, with the lives of dragon flies hanging in the balance.

I can excuse a child playing at war or failing to imagine the horror of death, but how is the lesson lost on adults? I also was once young and did stupid life-threatening things without even fully realizing it, but why would grown adults, the town's elected officials, sanction an event called Ragin’ on the River? What did they expect would happen during the ragin? In this case, a boat hit a powerful wake and split in two. The driver, strapped into his seat, went down with his boat. Is it like what they say about NASCAR? Do they create these races hoping for a crash, maybe a death? I feel even we were the potential victims of a minor version of that Labor Day raging and love of speed and power when we ventured out of the three-foot zone on that inlet of the bay.

What the Faculty Union Does to Improve Writing Classes

2006-09-02T08:04:00.000-04:00

West Chester's union is all about West Chester (and the other 13 schools in our state system). This benefits students because negotiations and bargaining affect their schools directly, unlike faculty that are represented by an umbrella union that covers multiple professions and interests. Our union doesn't represent Penn State, for example. The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) is our system. We are the universities that offer master's, but not PhDs, and for the most part, we are former teacher colleges, retaining a strong emphasis on teacher training. You probably know many of the schools: IUP, Ship, etc. Because APSCUF represents PASSHE alone, it can focus attention on our specific concerns.

One of these concerns has been the over-reliance on part-time (non-tenure track) professors. This is by no means a problem specific to the PASSHE schools. It is a national problem. English departments especially, but also other departments who need a lot of professors to cover the general education courses, produce more PhDs than can be hired.

This isn't so much a problem for the students. They are still being taught by PhDs with extensive teaching experience. It is more a problem for the adjuncts. The result of this inequity: PhDs who make $3,000 per course and have to run around to three different schools teaching 6 courses, just to make $30,00-$40,00 per year. All that schooling, intelligence, and talent, only to be exploited, so the colleges don't have to pay as much as they would for a full time person. In Washington, DC, we called these adjuncts Beltway Bandits, and I'm sure there's a similar nickname up here.

In order to address this problem at West Chester, the union negotiated two clauses: the most important is a decent wage for adjuncts. These are highly trained professionals, and they deserve to be treated as such. They get approximately $5,000 per course and if they get a full-year contract, they get health insurance and other benefits. In addition, if a course is taught for more than several semesters by an adjunct, a full time hire must be made. Unfortunately, the adjunct who was teaching the course is seldom the one to get hired because a national search is conducted.

As a full-time assistant professor, I owe my job to the clause that requires a full-time hire after a certain number of semester of a course being taught by a part timer. I know there is some adjunct at WCU who applied for my job and has been polite enough not to say anything about it. I am one of 14 full-time professors in the Composition department, and the majority of us were hired becauase of the same rule in our contract.

What do the rules that have been negotiated by the union mean for students? It means the highest level of writing instruction you can find almost anywhere. It isn't that the PhDs who are adjuncting all over the country aren't excellent professors, but in many places they are running around so much and have so little job security that they don't have time to fully learn the job at any specific institution. West Chester not only has an excellent group of full-time faculty with the time and resources to develop a first-rate program, we also attract adjuncts with high credentials and keep them on board long enough for them to become experts in WCU's culture and writing classes.

I also would add that the second tier of writing classes is a good example of an innovation that benefits students. Coming into WCU most first year students have to take WRT 120, but the next semester, if they register promptly, they they have their pick of courses with themes that meet their interests. And even if they don't get their first choice, they know what the theme of the course is ahead of time. The courses are focused, interesting, and innovative. That's what you get when you put 14 full-time Composition professors together at one school. Here's a link to the Composition page at WCU. The 200-level classes are as follows:

WRT200: Critical Writing and Research Read about, discuss, and research some of the academic, personal, and social purposes of research itself. Design, conduct and write individual and collaborative research projects.

WRT204: Approaches to Popular Culture Read about, discuss, and research how music, movies and advertising influence our values and attitudes. Write about these and other forms of pop culture.

WRT205: Investigating Experience Read about, discuss, and research how people analyze their own and others' past and present experiences. Write about individual experiences and their social components.

WRT206: The Multidisciplinary Imagination Read about, discuss, and research how people get ideas in various fields of knowledge and professions. Write about theories of creativity and consider how imagination contributes to success in your personal, academic, and professional lives.

WRT208 : Entering the Public Sphere Read about, discuss, and research how publishing happens in newspapers, magazines, web pages and other venues. Write about public issues (such as current political events) and publish your own writing in a class-produced newsletter.

WRT 220: Special Topics Special theme designed by the instructor. See course catalogue for details each semester.

Interviewing Timmy

2006-08-30T21:31:00.000-04:00

In 1985, Gary Trudeau did a series of Doonesbury strips that his syndicate wouldn't distribute. They dealt with abortion, and lampooned the notion that an embryo was accorded the rights of a birthed human being. I remember there being a Fox Newsesque reporter (unborn as yet himself, as it were) saying, "Let's call him Timmy," then proceeding to interview the embryo.

I might be wrong about the name Timmy, but that's the name that comes to mind. My friend had the cartoons tacked on her dorm room door, with multiple tack marks on each page from being taken down, photocopied, and passed around. That's the way we did it before the Internet. I can't find the strips now, but I do see that the University of Michigan has them in their archives.

Ah, how Trudeau's outlawed frames come to mind now, as scientists in search of cures for birthed human beings try to circumvent what one might call the Timmy factor. As the Mercury News puts it

Researchers typically obtain human embryonic stem cells from embryos that are due to be discarded by fertility clinics. But many people abhor harvesting such cells for laboratory studies. As a result, President Bush has limited federal financing of such research to a few government approved stem-cell lines that are self-replicating colonies.

So in order to avoid using Timmies, who will never be anything but embryos, we must use embryos that are to be implanted because implantation is the ultimate sign of respect for the life potential of the embryo. Potential is the word I prefer. And if we don't harvest stem cells from those unimplanted embryos, will that mean they don't exist? It will mean we can pretend they don't.

The notion of farming embryos is abhorrent to me, as a matter of fact, just as the rent-a-womb, (or surrogate mother) service, in place before in vitro became so successful, was abhorrent. I don't like the idea of homeless people selling body parts, either. My objections are along those lines.

Nonetheless, I find Trudeau's satire on abortion works in this instance. We're mired in perverted Calvinist thinking here (granted the Catholics are on board too). Embryos are the gold standard, the rest of life a fall from grace. The Mercury News again on the task force appointed by Bush,

Although the technique hadn't produced human embryonic stem cells when the report was written, the panel noted that it seemed safe in theory because at least 1,000 babies had been born without noticeable harm after having had a cell removed for genetic testing. Nonetheless, it said children born through such a procedure would have to be studied for years to be sure the technique poses no health risk.

It's remarkable the way the standards for allowing this harvesting are stricter than the ones already in place for doing the test. Am I missing something here? Doctors and parents are saying OK to the test, but it doesn't pass the Timmy test?

There's that reporter over there, solicitous of the rights of that little embryo. Invisible, yes, but he has more rights than you or I. "How are you doing there, Timmy? Can you wiggle a cell for us to let us know you're OK? What do you think of this recent development? Would it be OK if we just harvested one tiny cell and then just took half of that. You've got more, and you'll still be viable if we do it."

Owning Beauty

2006-08-29T22:39:00.000-04:00

I can see no reason why progressive activists, men and women, should be careless about their bodies, enemies of beautifulness...
-Paulo Freire

Many years ago, I sewed myself a beautiful dark blue dress. It was cotton with a satin finish, fitted at the waist just perfectly, with a full skirt and 3/4-length sleeves. I cheated at the end and used iron-on tape to do the hem. I wanted to do a perfect sewing job, so in my mind, that was points off.

After letting it sit in my closet for a bit, I took it out and decided I liked it anyway, taped hem and all. I wore it to work and my women friends were impressed that I had made it. Imagine, I once had time to bother with hours of sewing and caring about impressing my colleagues.

I was wearing that dress once at a SEEDS meeting. I don't remember what SEEDS stood for, but it was a faculty development group that met independent of the schools where we worked. This was when I was teaching in a middle school. We met monthly at different SEEDS host members' houses, mostly the ones who had just done remodels to their kitchens that they wanted to show off. The group was slightly subversive, or we felt ourselves to be so, within the context of upper middle class Princeton, NJ. We talked about change, about problems of race and class and gender. We asked important questions, and sometimes (provisionally) answered them.

I was sitting in someone's perfect living room, wearing my beautiful blue dress, my arms resting on the arms of the chair, my skirt spread out around me. One of the men in the group said that, as a typical male--taking it upon himself to speak for "normal" men--he tended to notice visual cues, beauty. His eye was drawn to these things. As an example, he pointed out my blue dress and the way it contrasted with my red hair.

Then later that evening, what were we discussing? Something to do with feminism? I told the story of walking down the street and being told to smile, commanded in fact to "Smile!" I talked about how that often happened to me. "Smile!" Why did these men think they had the right to tell me to smile? I had plenty of reasons not to smile. Did they want me to look more decorative? Why were they telling me, a perfect stranger, to please them? For that matter, though I didn't mention it, what right did the man in our group have to comment on my blue dress and the way it complemented my red hair?

I'm sure it was all well meant. The compliment about the blue dress and the hair was patronizing for sure, but intended to flatter. I could have set aside the fact that the man was using it to make some bogus essentialist point about the way men are attracted by visual cues. Perhaps it is true that men are so-called "visual." Biology may have some imperatives. Even accepting that argument, it is nonetheless also true that men exercise their cultural privilege when they tell a woman how to look in order to satisfy whatever little charge they get when they see a redhead in a blue dress or catch a woman's smile--or praise her for meeting the standard, as if her worth depends on it.

Then I finished my story. I said that one day it was one "Smile!" too many, and I told the unlucky last-straw-of-a-sexist-pig, in so many words, to "Fuck off."

I told this story, the anger rising again in my voice, and "Fuck off!" ringing in the air of the still, tastefully appointed living room, liberal school teachers staring uncomfortably at their Birkenstocks. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. There I sat in my lovely, feminine blue dress, which had been identified as attractive to this man's gaze. I had given in to my impulse to interrupt that illusion, but not because I faulted my dress or my hair. I faulted him and patriarchy.

For the man's part, he heard the startling "Fuck off" coming out of the blue dress and thought to himself that it was entirely unwarranted. Perhaps the man I cursed out had been making a helpful suggestion, or maybe he was telling me, in his way, to cheer up. Maybe he was just wishing me well, the equivalent of saying "Have a nice day." The man who remarked on my dress never showed up at a SEEDS meeting again. A couple other men who seemed to hang with him also left that day for good. I accomplished nothing as far as changing their minds. They did not understand anything but that I was angry, crude, and ungrateful. This signified nothing of worth to them, nothing but a blot on my character. Wow, she's angry. You know what they say about red hair.

It crystallized something for me then, and even now. I still believe that beauty is more than something a woman carries around with her to protect and display for men. It is of her. Her expressions are are reflections of her inner landscape, not put on, like dresses. And as for the dress, mine was an artifact, something to show off, proof that I could do something with my hands. That I could feel something and create something, was the essence. To miss those things was to miss the beauty. I don't sew much any more. I don't have time, and it is read the wrong way. I am busy now doing work that is more readily acknowledged, though teaching the 4/4 load is a sign of professional failure among the larger cohort of professors. But my work is never confused as a decoration or ploy.

I could have gone on from that experience to shave my head and stop wearing the dress. My friend, Jenno, a PhD student in physics at Princeton did shave her head. "I look at pictures of myself with long hair, and I can't believe I went around looking like I had a furry animal on my head," she once said. I felt otherwise. I liked my beautiful dress. I liked my hair. I was not going to punish myself and deny myself beauty just because both were misconstrued.

Surviving the 4/4 Load

2006-08-27T09:47:00.000-04:00

I will just add this post to the hundreds out there that have been written on this topic (interestingly enough in the same template on Blogger)...

When I started at West Chester, a friend gave me an article with the above title, or something like it. (If I can track it down, I'll come back and post the reference or a link.)

The author said you have to be brutal about protecting your time. It's possible to publish--books even--with a 4/4 load, but only if you learn to work in snatches of time: work for one hour, teach for two, come back and pick up where you left off.

We have five hours a week of office hours when students often don't show up, unless it's the beginning of the semester or you schedule them to do so or you are buddies with your class. A couple of my colleagues are especially good at warding off unwanted collegues (not students of course) during office hours. One in particular wil say, "What is it? If you can tel me in three minutes, say it. Otherwise, go away."

What a humiliating encoutner that is. But it works for him. I haven't stopped in during his office hours since.

I'm not as good at managing my time. I'm working on it though. I am learning never to put something down without making a little to-do list that tells me where to pick up when I come back. I'm not good at naturally compartmentalizing and keeping track of multiple starting and stopping points in my head.

It also seems to be inevitable that I get caught up in the teaching. I get interested. This semester, out of my teaching, 1) working on an article on blogging, 2) giving a presentation with my student teachers at NCTE, 3) conducting an ongoing experiment in my classes on teaching listening. The only thing these have in common is teaching. As research interests, they look disjointed and unfocused.

My research on Margaret Fuller has fallen away. I have to go back to that article and work harder at this time management problem, setting aside my aversion a cold-blooded, practical approach to every human encounter. "Hello, dear. What is it? This is my time you are wasting here."

Tolerance for Ambiguity

2006-08-25T17:19:00.000-04:00

In Derek Bok’s book, Our Underachieving Colleges, he discusses “critical thinking,” that function all educators seek to nurture. He says that most colleges teach less of this than they claim because instructors tend to lecture rather than spending class time on helping students learn the underlying principles of the subject through problem solving.

I can see how this comes to be, despite research that says lecturing doesn't help students learn. I have colleagues who say they don't lecture, appearing unaware of the irony as I smile and nod for ten minutes while they deliver a mini-lecture on student-centered pedagogy.

I have had students comment on my course evaluations that I need to do some lecturing, and stop making them do all the work. Students don't like it when professors stop lecturing. They are used to it, and they see those who do it as delivering on the promise: students don't have to do any work during class time.

The qualities that are necessary in the student, he says, go beyond doing the reading and playing along with cooperative learning. Bok says those who have a flexible, contingent notion of epistemology do better than those who believe knowledge is a matter of learning facts. Moving from the concrete to the abstract, which is similar to what he is describing, is considered by many educational theorists to be a higher order of reasoning. But it isn't acquired automatically.

This is an idea I would like my students to understand. Why don't I lecture? What is the nature of knowledge? Is knowledge really a matter of knowig the facts? Perhaps some things are cut and dried, but even most so-called facts are subjective.

For instance, since I’ve been beating up on grammar lately, it springs to mind as a perfect instance. Language functions independently of the rules. Take the predicate nominative. That is notion that made its way into prescriptive grammar from Latin. It’s more honored in the breach than in the observance (which means that it’s more honorable to ignore it).

“It is I.” Well, say that if you want to sound pompous and prissy. “It’s me” sounds more like someone I’d be glad to see. Which is right then? It depends on the context.

This is an interesting article originally printed in the Atlantic Monthly that makes the case for and against prescriptive grammar in a much more nuanced fashion. This is the contingency upon which grammar is founded:

Linguists, of course, have been arguing for a long time that the rules of traditional grammar have no scientific or logical justification, and that the only reason grammarians consider certain usages "correct" is that they happen to have been adopted by the privileged classes in the past.

To return to the notion of epistemology, students need to be able to tolerate ambiguity, not get derailed by it and decide that it is all bullshit. I have to come up with some better ways to help them see the value of ambiguity. For one thing,without understanding that perspective changes everything, we cannot "respond thoughtfully to diversity," to quote the general education requirements at WCU.

Out of Control

2006-08-23T13:59:00.000-04:00

Life is a mess. Sometimes it’s a beautiful mess, and other times it’s an ugly mess. I’ll even admit that there are times when a person has to get to work straightening things up. But nothing stays straight for long. It’s like one of those magic eye pictures. If I turn my head a little to one side or the other and squint, I can see either chaos or a pattern. But the default is chaos.

Personality is partly inherited and partly shaped by events. I don’t know what part is innate, but I can see how my tolerance of chaos and tendency to step back and watch was adaptive in my family. My mother was difficult. She was inconsistent and unpredictable, and my sisters and I spent a lot of our energy avoiding her rages, and if that was not possible, navigating them. I can imagine a person reacting to this environment by taking charge, stepping up, and controlling. I seem to have gone the opposite way.

I never liked my job as an editor. At times I could squint my way into believing that it mattered, and at others, I just didn’t see the point or couldn’t get my brain to do its work of ferreting out error. When I am writing, my desk becomes progressively messier, until piles of papers and books surround me and I am seated in a cockpit of clutter. If I switch into the frame of mind required for sorting and tidying, I can’t write.

In my teaching, tolerance for ambiguity is an absolute requirement. I am not an Energizer Bunny teacher. I don’t take on the eradication of error like a holy crusade. And what do students learn from the control freaks anyway? I think they learn that someone else has it figured out for them.

The Contingency of Grammar

2006-08-22T10:20:00.000-04:00

I have been e-mailing with a former student who recently landed a job at a charter school. He is going to be teaching six classes and directing three plays. I didn't ask about the pay, but that's all another story. He was asking me about teaching grammar and what books he should choose, so I suggested Eats Shoots and Leaves. I also suggested sentence diagramming.

I feel I have to IMMEDIATELY qualify the diagramming lest my name be associated with such a thing. He wrote back to say that "sentence diagramming on a large scale" would be frowned upon, as the school advocates discovery learning. I had to laugh. I formed an image of sentence diagramming murals, students perched on scaffolding while diagramming on the walls of the school.

I said I wasn't implying large scale and also advocated such a practice only in the context of texts, or discovery as they say. I didn't talk about diagramming in the methods he took with me for fear a rumor that I teach and outmoded traditional form of grammar would get started. But my secret (no longer) opinion is that it isn't the worst thing in the world. The principle of diagramming is making the structure of sentences concrete and visible. I think the most important thing, maybe the only important thing students will get out of diagramming, is understanding that each sentence has a subject and predicate (an actor and an action if you want to avoid the traditional). You don't have to get into diagramming much else. If students can pull those out and diagram them in a consistent fashion, then they have the concept. No need to make a fetish of it the way the nuns in Catholic school used to. Subject/predicate is important only because many key punctuation rules, sentence boundary rules, are founded on that distinction. It doesn't work to put a comma where you take a breath. You can't get comma usage until you get the abstract concept of subject and predicate. I won't get into the whole why-is-correctness-even-important thing except to say that it doesn't help students write, necessarily, yet it's what people are going to look at to judge that they can write.

Muriel Harris has written about concept formation in grammar. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Students can't get the concept until they get the feel for pulling a subject and a verb out of the sentence, no matter where they are hiding. Putting them into a diagram, OK circles instead of lines if you choose, doesn't mean you are excluding experiential learning. It might be a very small part of the way you teach.

He said he preferred using sentence combining, which we did talk about in class. Sentence combining will probably go over better at his school. It sounds more creative. But the objective of sentence combining is different from the objective of diagramming. Sentence combining encourages varied sentence structure and a sort of problem solving approach to style. You'll find people who will go to the mat arguing over which is more important to students' development as writers. We're talking lifelong feuds and professional reputations. Harris, for example, is considered quite reactionary by some. There are those who think grammar is a tool of oppression, and I'd agree. But where do you go from there? Burn all the books? If the observers didn't understand WHY you were burning them, there would be no point. Education is probably a better route.

The answer so often proposed is to make students aware of the debates. Theoretically. This is somehow not easy, and perhaps even impossible, because students from an early age have had it etched on their brains that grammar is as immutible as the law of gravity. My student teachers are just not interested in that discussion at all. They are consumed by anxiety that they will be caught up and humiliated in front of the class, never mind the broader societal implications. Who can blame them. Occasionally, I have had a student for whom the notion of the contingency of grammar takes hold. They sit up startled and get a burning gleam in their eye. But this is very rare.

I told Paul thanks for giving me an opportunity to articulate something that needs to be articulated better the next time I teach ENG 392. I also told him that if he has some success with teaching students that grammar is a matter of context, to let me know, and I would bring him in as a guest lecturer.

I'm not saying I'm giving up or that I have no ideas what to do next time, but let's leave it on a self-deprecating note. I'm always more comfortable that way.

Are Blogs Public or Are They Private?

2006-03-18T17:15:00.000-05:00

Maybe that isn't really the most interesting question in the world. Obviously, they are both. Blogs are private in that most bloggers seem to see the ideas they are posting as "their own personal opinions," even if not every last bit of information from phone number to social security number is posted on the site. On the other hand, how much more personal are many blogs than an op ed piece in the New York Times? Are op ed pieces therefore private?

So, this personal/private distinction is fairly meaningless. But the media in the last several weeks have whipped up a tempest in a teapot over the issue of whether teens, or "young people" as those under the age of 25(?) are called, are revealing too much information online, information that will jeopardize their future chances of getting a job. I've seen little clips on the local news about it, and most recently something on NPR titled, “Student Gladly Shares Life Details on the Web.”

In this interview, Jonthon Coulson says, and rightly so, "I don't know anyone who has personally had any sort of difficulty getting a job outside of just the problems with our economy. I don't know anybody who has faced university sanction, but I do know a number of students who have taken down personal information based on the threat of those things." In one of his blogs, jonthon.blogspot.com, he seems in the past few days to have backed down off this position. OK, yes, do not post half nude photos of yourself on myspace. That would be stupid. But I think he should stick to his guns. The threat is exaggerated.

We do need public forums for debate, and we need to teach "young people" to use their voices and develop their rhetorical skills. Yes, this is a democracy, and citizens need to be alble to engage in debate.

This would be one of those times when you feel tired of carrying the basket.

Composition Program Sites

2005-06-08T09:52:00.000-04:00

I want to find out how many composition program Web sites use a completely different design from the one used by their home institution or department. There's a useful list of links to composition programs on the Electronic Educational Environment site. There are a lot of broken links in the list, but most of the ones that work lead to compostion programs that use the same template as the English Department they are housed in. Then there are sites like the University of Oregon that have a completely different design. At least that site is clear about what university it is affiliated with.

I think you shouldn't be launched into a new universe (visually speaking) when you click on a link to a program within a department. It makes it seem as if the program has little or nothing to do with the home department. That could be a positive if that is the impression the compostion faculty wants to give. On the other hand, in a situation in which the faculty is arguing that they should be better integrated into the department, a site that says "we have nothing to do with you" is counterproductive. (That is, to the extent that anyone within the faculty ever really looks at the Web site.)

The main reason for keeping a consistent look and feel, aside from the politics of the department, is the USER. It's just confusing to keep learning new navigation every time you click to a different department or program within a department.

Job Hunting

2005-06-01T10:25:00.000-04:00

Looking for a job is the worst. There is so much anxiety and anticipation involved, and so many rejections. Even if you have the biggest ego in the world, rejection has to hurt. (Or does it? I don't know what it is like to have the biggest ego in the world.) When I was on the search, I had to keep telling myself that all I needed was one job. It didn't matter that I was rejected 20 times, I just needed one job. I heard from several people that a typical job search takes about six months, and that turned out to be true for me. I think that entry-level searches may take less time, but I'm not sure. Courage, strength, and good chear to all the job hunters out there. Don't bother applying for a job that you don't really want, and set yourself a goal of applying to so many jobs per week.

Usability Testing

2005-05-25T12:58:00.000-04:00

I'm working on a site redesign project with a student for an individualized instruction. These kinds of projects take so long that it's difficult to imagine we'll have a testable product at the end of five weeks, but if we do, I'm finding that there is some good (and free) advice out there about usability testing, coming as most good, free informaiton does from a university Web site. I like the protocol on Indiana's site. Their IT department has a chunk of pages (http://www.indiana.edu/~usable/) devoted to helping units within and without the university test their sites. They actually do the testing. They also have a good page of links to usability resources.

The Polar Bear Book

2005-05-24T08:53:00.000-04:00

From the perspective of someone who is not an information architect, it's great to have Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville describe some useful categories for evaluating a Web site. Sometimes I know a site is rotten, but don't know exactly what would make it better. Rosenfeld and Morville give me some useful terms.

This is really oversimplifying and pulling out just a few small bits (grains as they would say?). In terms of site architecture, they identify four systems that organize information on a Web site: organization systems, labeling systems, navigation systems, and searching systems. Not every site has to use every system, but sometimes one of those doesn’t work (e.g., search) and sometimes one of those is broken or missing (e.g., good labeling).

Some other useful vocabulary they identify:

Chunks: logical units of content (which Jakob Nielsen points out should not require linear organization)

Granularity: the relative size and or detail of the pieces of information

Ambiguous organization: the arranging of information into categories that are not absolute and mutually exclusive (topic, task, audience, metaphor)

Exact organization: the arranging of information into categories that are mutually exclusive (alphabetical, chronological, or geographical)

User testing: evaluating a site by getting users to navigate it and questioning them about their experience

Mental model: the pattern, image, model that a user forms in using a site that is used to make predictions about the Web site

Taxonomy: a hierarchical arrangement of categories within the user interface of a Web site or intranet

Clicks: you know, when you click the mouse to get to the next level, as in, “how many clicks did it take me to find it”

Hypertext: those internal links within content, when you can click on a word and go to a new page

Good Resource for Web Writing and Design

2005-05-23T12:01:00.000-04:00

Jakob Nielsen, the king of self-promotion, continues to monopolize searches on "writing for the web." His tone is so grating, self-important, and nasty that I can't stand reading him. Finally, I decided to look elsewhere. After a fair amount of digging, I found this excellent resource, the Web Style Guide. The material is copyrighted 2004, which gives me some hope that it is fairly up-to-date. I especially like the chapter on site design, which gives a great basic introduction to some of the principles of information architecture. The design of the site itself is very clean and meets usability requirements (so domineeringly pioneered by Nielsen) as well as accessibility requirements. Note the right side navigation. Most of all, it's clearly written without the snarky tone.