Humanities: June 2004 Archive Page

The reason most pre-1940 musicals are unrevivable is that their books tend to be both slapdash in literary quality and fanciful to the point of absurdity. It was only in the late 30’s that the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart began to emphasize dramatic plausibility, most notably in Pal Joey (1940). And it was not until Rodgers joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II in 1943 to write Oklahoma! that the "book show," whose songs are integrated into a more or less realistic plot, became the norm. --Terry Teachout --Is the Musical Comedy Dead?  (Commentary Magazine)

I'd make a comment, but I can hear the pit orchestra is gearing up for a big dance number, so I'd better go.

Chunking | Forms | Frames | Fitts Law | Flash Usability | Guidelines & Principles | Link Rot | Liquid Design | PDF | ROI | Writing, Reading & Content | Articles & Related Links --Usability (The Net Place)

Great collection of links to practical online articles on each of the above subjects.

--No Train, No Gain

A great collection of short articles focusing on such topics as how to find an interesting story in a boring budget meeting, the basics of interviewing, and taking notes. For the first time this fall, students will be able to get credit for working for the student paper (of which I am the adviser). Blogging this so I can find it in the fall.

Let's say a mother finds an application to Duke University's Ph.D. program in English under her daughter's mattress. Obviously the mother is devastated. If she does nothing, in a year her daughter will be dressed in black and sneering in obscure jargon at the Thanksgiving turkey and Aunt Sally's cranberry Jell-O mold. Where can a concerned parent turn for help?

To serve this need, former academics could reinvent themselves as counselors; they could coordinate interventions with the friends and loved ones of people who are flirting with graduate school, or who have been enrolled for several years but lack the will to leave, or who are trapped in dead-end adjunct positions. These "academic exit counselors" could foster the kind of loving, supportive environments that "academic captives" need to return to a normal life. --"Thomas H. Benton"

--Is Graduate School a Cult? (Chronicle)

I had a pretty good experience in grad school, though it was research assistantships on humanities computing projects that made me want to get out of bed each morning, not really the classes or the solitary work on my dissertation (a literary and theatre-history examination of the theme of technology in American drama).

She was witty, sexually adventurous and intimate with her readers, sharing photos of her travels and exchanging private e-mails and instant messages with fans. She posted messages to other people's Web logs and created personal profiles at social networking sites. Many readers felt deeply connected to her.

Then, three weeks ago, the "Plain Layne" Web log mysteriously disappeared from the Internet, sending her fans into a tizzy.

Now the person behind Layne has come forward and admitted that it was all an elaborate hoax. --Michael Bazeley --Net fans jolted by man's blog hoax (Twin Cities Pioneer Press)

The story of John Henry, told mostly through ballads and work songs, traveled from coast to coast as the railroads drove west during the 19th Century. And in time, it has become timeless, spanning a century of generations with versions ranging from prisoners recorded at Mississippi's Parchman Farm in the late 1940s to present-day folk heroes. --Carlene Hempel --John Henry: The Man - Facts, Fiction and Themes (ibiblio)

I've got a John Henry project I've been sitting on for several years... I'm planning to dig it out soon. This site has a good biography (which actually cites the online abstract of a talk I gave at the MLA years ago, though that was 3 websites ago.)

Update. 29 Jun: A few other nuggets: NPR (good bibliography), Garst (recent research claims Alabama, not West Virginia, as source of the legend).

Those who complain loudly about how many jobs have been “exported” to other countries because of international free trade totally ignore all the jobs that have been imported to the American economy because of that same free trade. Siemens alone employs tens of thousands of American workers, and Toyota has already produced its ten millionth car in the United States. --Thomas Sowell --Low Taxes Do What? (Hoover Digest)

I'd never considered this perspective before. Here's another fascinating quote, an attempt to counter the meme that Regan cut taxes for the rich and soaked the poor, leading to defecit spending:

What Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” actually cut were the tax rates per dollar of income. Out of rising incomes, the country as a whole—including the rich—paid more total taxes than ever before.

As Sowell puts it, "Simple stuff like this is not very exciting for economists, and there is no payoff in one’s professional career for clarifying such things for the general public." That kind of explanation won't fit on a bumper sticker as easily as something designed to get you in the gut, like "AIDS: The Reagan Vietnam."

Sadly, I think that regardless of their political persuasion, this topic would probably put the average freshman comp student to sleep, so I won't bother Googling for a good counter-opinion to present as a pair of readings. Someday maybe I'll teach an upper-level rhetoric course...

On his way into District Justice Mark Bilik's office, Harris, wearing a "Flamehead USA" T-shirt, told reporters "Yes, I did," when asked if he set the fire. --Jason Lesher --Latrobe men admit setting apartment building fire (Tribune Review)

Note to self... if ever going anywhere near someone involved in the investigation of an arson case, change out of "Flamehead USA" T-shirt before speaking to the media.

A Canadian man, driving a car packed with weapons and ammunition, was intent on killing as many people as possible in a Toronto neighbourhood but gave up the plan at the last minute when he encountered a friendly dog, police say.

--Puppy prevents Canadian killing spree (ABC (Australia))

There... do you see how nice Canadians are? And the puppy didn't even need a little keg of Molson strapped around its neck.

Chappelle's harshest words were addressed to those audience members who worship entertainers and athletes.

"Stop listening to celebrities," he said. "They do what they do for money - that's all. I don't even know why you're listening to me. I've done commercials for both Coke and Pepsi. Truth is, I can't even taste the difference, but Pepsi paid me last, so there it is."

Celebrity worship harms the object of affection as well, Chappelle said. "One day people love you more than they've ever loved anything in the world. And the next, you're in front of a courthouse dancing on top of a car." --Jim Carnes --Chappelle lets rude crowd have it  (Tribnet)

The 40-year-old male teacher handed the boy a box-cutter and paper and told him to write an apology in blood. --Japanese boy writes apology in blood (CNN)

Now that's harsh. Looks like the Reuters reporter did some independent checking of a story that appeared on local news... if not for that line, I'd wonder whether this was one of those "too strange to fact-check" hoaxes that often one finds slipping past editorial filters.

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.

How did Eats, Shoots & Leaves land on the best-seller list? I'd like to think it reveals a late-blooming hunger for self-improvement by the ignorant masses. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Truss certainly doesn't seem to be addressing such people as her readers. "What happened to punctuation?" she wails. "Why is it so disregarded when it is self-evidently so useful in preventing enormous mix-ups?" This isn't what Henry Higgins would say to Eliza Doolittle. It's what Higgins would say to Col. Pickering, his linguist sidekick. Truss wants you to read her book not to learn the rules of punctuation but to join her in bewailing, as you review these rules, the sorry ignorance of those who don't know them. It's to feel superior, and smug, and, well, almost ? English. --Timothy Noah --Reads, Chortles, & Smirks: Why nobody's learning anything from Lynne  (Slate)

I've got this one on back order at the local library. I'm thinking of using it in "Intro to Literary Studies" next spring -- the course is a kind of sampler of the flavors of English major we offer (lit, creative writing, & journalism) and I'm trying to find a way to more nonfiction and grammar into the course.

Full disclosure: I played Col. Pickering in high school, and it was mostly the reference to him that made me want to blog this.

I would guess that people are either buying the book to give to friends who like writing, or they are buying the book precisely because they want to be spoken to as if they know this stuff already. If the book really is that basic, then maybe it's designed to flatter people who pick it up and tsk-tsk at all the examples of mistakes.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery. --Christopher Hitchens --Unfairenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore (Slate)

Woah... Hitchens is known as one of the few to attack pop-culture saints such as Bob Hope and even Mother Teresa, so it can't be easy to dismiss his attack on Moore. He's not a conservative who's annoyed that Moore has trumped Rush Limbaugh-style politics-as-entertainment by using images (which speak directly to our emotions, as opposed to words, which at least sometimes engage our minds).

Hitchens, who has made a few documentaries himself, sounds a bit bitter in the following quote, but I think it's an important perspective to consider:

[A] documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them.

Materials that could jump-start organic evolution have shown up in interstellar dust clouds and dusty planet-forming discs around many stars. These findings fuel an increasingly strong suspicion that the raw material of planet Earth was primed for life. --Robert C. Cowen
--Outer space: not so lifeless after all (CS Monitor)

Today Juneteenth commemorates African American freedom and emphasizes education and achievement. It is a day, a week, and in some areas a month marked with celebrations, guest speakers, picnics and family gatherings. It is a time for reflection and rejoicing. It is a time for assessment, self-improvement and for planning the future. --Juneteenth

Happy Juneteenth.

Weblogs, Comments, and Law (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

IANAL ("I am not a lawyer"), but here are some links I found interesting.

While a newspaper has a responsibility to check the accuracy of letters to the editor, if person A were to start a cafe, and person B walked into the cafe and made statements that the court deemed libelous, it doesn't seem likely that person A should be held responsible.

If Person A rents a hall, calls a public town meeting and invites people to walk up to a microphone to say whatever they like, and Person B makes statements that a court deems libelous, would person A be legally responsible for any offense committed by person B?

Last year, in Wired, the article "Bloggers Gain Libel Protection" described a ruling involving the re-use, in electronic form, of information taken from elsewhere. Thus, if a blogger were to quote an excerpt from someplace else, and the author of that excerpt was charged with libel, then according to this ruling, the blogger would not be responsible. Let the reader beware -- the title of the Wired article mentions blogs, but the case actually centered around an e-mail.

I missed it when I blogged the original article, but Jack Balkin quickly put it into perspective:

This does not mean that bloggers are immune from libels they themselves write. It means that they are immune from (for example) libels published in their comments section (if they have one) because these comments are written by other people and the blogger is merely providing a space for them to be published. Congress wanted to treat operators of chatrooms and other interactive computer services differently from letters to the editor columns in a local newspaper.

Balkin also notes that corrections, clarifications, and retractions are part of the weblog culture, in ways that traditional print journalism doesn't provide.

If that's so, when blogger A posts an inaccurate statement, visitors to blogger A's website can publish corrections -- by commenting on the post (and thus adding their text to the main text), or perhaps simply by sending an e-mail. The technology and practice of weblogs makes it easy for bloggers to correct their mistakes or give space to opposing views. This built-in series of checks and balances is part of what makes the online media so exciting, from a "power to the people" perspective.

We highlight U.S. prisoner abuse because the photos aren't too offensive to show. We downplay Saddam's abuse precisely because it's far worse ? so we can't use the photos. And that sets the stage for remarks like Sen. Ted Kennedy's claim that Saddam's torture chambers have reopened under "U.S. management." --Deborah Orin --Reporting for the Enemy (NY Post)

An extremely interesting argument. Two wrongs don't make a right, so if it's true that the US media are downplaying Saddam's tortures and hyping the US tortures, that doesn't make what the US did right. But it's still fascinating to consider, in terms of a media perspective, that the US torture was just outrageous enough to get coverage (after all, these photos don't document removing limbs or executions).

What If... There Were No IF? An Alternative History of Games, sans Crowther's Colossal Cave (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

During a break in the Princeton video game conference a few months ago, David Thomas asked me, what would computer games be like today if Will Crowther hadn't created Colossal Cave Adventure? I pulled Nick Montfort into the brief discussion that followed, but then the next panel started, and the topic went onto the back burner.

Here is a possible alternative history of computer game design, based on the premise that Will Crowther never wrote his 1975 original.

For want of Adventure, the magic word XYZZY is lost. (Computer users around the world are forced to think of less-guessable passwords, and information technology is more secure.)

For want of Adventure, Zork was lost. (But now everyone uses a really cool spreadsheet called VisiCalc.)

For want of Zork, Roberta Williams does not create "The Mystery House."

For want of Adventure, Adventure International was lost.

For want of Adventure International, Ken Williams does not work briefly for Scott Adams.

For want of Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra was lost. (A generation of youngsters don't bother nagging their parents to upgrade their video cards from CGA to SuperVGA; when an explosion at a factory in Japan cripples the world's supply of memory chips, about six people notice.)

For want of Sierra Online, Leisure Suit Larry was lost.

For want of Leisure Suit Larry, Grand Theft Auto was lost.

For want of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Text Auto was lost. (The creators choose the name "Rogues' Gallery" instead, because it got more votes than "The Pong Throng" or "VisiCalc User Forum.")

For want of the text adventure genre, the entire field of computer science seems lifeless and boring to a significant number of young men and women who briefly consider it in the late 70s and early 80s. They drop out in droves. The ones who don't end up running computers at financial institutions, but are eventually put out of work by high-school dropouts using VisiCalc.

For want of the text adventure genre, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre is lost.

For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, scholars groping for a way to describe hypertext to their non-technical colleagues think harder and come up with a better metaphor, one which magically prevents the premature dismissal of hyperfiction, leading to its rapid acceptance into the literary canon.

For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, a generation of youths watches more TV. Later, in college, these youths daydream during their hyperfiction survey courses, wondering how their life would have turned out if they had dropped out of high school like their stoner friends did.

Oh, and Dave Thomas has a scar, Nick Montfort has a beard, side-scrollers all scroll the opposite way, and all ships have funky spikes on their warp drive nacelles.

A bit more seriously, now...

I've read many anecdotes from programmers whose early experience with interactive fiction games turned them on to computers, so I do think that without text adventures, some of these people might not have considered careers in computing. While it's a meme that Adventure set the field of computer science back two weeks, I'd prefer to think that after everyone finished Zork, they went back to their jobs energized by what computers might be able to accomplish, and perhaps they shifted their expectations in such a way that might have affected the development of CS in positive ways.

Since the average computer user didn't have access to CRTs that displayed fancy graphics, and since a significant chunk of computing took place on printer terminals, I suppose that ASCII genres such as Rogue, and strategy games such as Wumpus and mainframe Trek would have attracted the attention of the amateur hackers and students who, after playing Adventure or Zork, tried their hand at creating their own amateur interactive fiction.

Hosting the wild speculation up to the next level...

Perhaps the players who lost countless hours playing interactive fiction would have instead spent more time getting their game fix at the arcade. If coin-op video arcade games developed a little faster, then perhaps users of personal computers wouldn't have been at all satisfied with the bleeps and blips that they saw on their home computers... maybe they would have been so disappointed by the offerings of home computer entertainment that they would have preferred dropping coins in the arcade, playing games that emulated familiar TV shows (however badly), to typing in lines of code from magazines in order to play games on their home computers. This might have delayed growth in the market for PC games, paving the way in the future for a direct transition of loyalty from the video arcade to the gaming platform.

Rich, beautiful, coastal types are liberal precisely because their lives are so wonderful. They want to preserve their lives exactly as they are. If I were a rich movie star, I'd vote for peace and poverty relief. War and domestic insurrection are the greatest threats to their already-perfect lives?why mess with it? This rational fear of the peasantry is frequently misinterpreted as rich guilt, but that's not the case. They just want to pay off all the have-nots to keep them from storming their manors and impaling them on stakes.

Republican elites don't set off the spite glands in the same way, and it's not only because of a sinister right-wing propaganda machine. Take a look at a photo of the late billionaire Sam Walton, a dried-out Calvinist in a baseball cap and business suit, and you'll see why. If Republican billionaires enjoy their wealth, they sure as hell hide it well. As far as one can tell, Republican billionaires genuinely like working 18-hour days in offices. Their idea of having fun is a day on the golf green (a game as slow and frustrating as a day in the office) or attending conferences with other sleazy, cheerless Calvinist billionaires. If that's what all their wealth got them, let 'em have it?so says the spite bloc. --Mark Ames
--Spite! It Wins Votes! (NY Press)

Another of the "doesn't quite fit into one camp or the other" essays that I find interesting reading these days. (Starts with some salty language.)

The way that desks and chairs are arranged in a professor's office send subtle signals. If you use your desk to block your doorway with a confrontational barrier like they do at, say, a police station, well then you're not only being uninviting, you're also responsible for all those nervous tics the students make when they do come talk to you. Think of the angles of the furniture: are they more "open" than "closed"? Do they invite conversation and informality, or do they put too many barriers between you and the student. While it's true that you may not want to be completely open and intimite with your students -- like, say, sitting beside them on a big puffy couch -- you might find that rearranging the furniture liberates some of the angst students have when they come to your office. So will little details like having family pictures on the desk, putting art on the walls that reflects your personality, having knick nacks or other things that students can look at when they want to avoid eye contact, or conversation pieces to get the shy ones talking...etc., etc. Be professional, yet open. --Mike Arnzen --Tips for Office Hours (Pedablogue)

A good collection of musings on office hours.

I've always arranged my office so that there isn't a barrier (such as a desk or bookcase) between me and the door, so that students who stop by won't feel they are imposing.

I generally work with the office door open. I will shut the door partway or completely in order to signal various degrees of isolation that I desire. When I really want to concentrate, of course, I take a stack of papers or a book and I find a quiet corner on campus.

Slow-motion Nightmare (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I had a busy day yesterday, with adventures that included diving fully-clothed into a large kiddie pool to retrieve my 2-year-old daughter, who had slipped and was floating face down, unable to straighten herself out.

An older girl had taken my daughter's hands and lured her to the center of the pool, where I doubt she would have gone on her own.

It was a very big, in-ground kiddie pool, maybe 20 feet across... and by the time I scrambled over to her, I had slipped several times and was soaking wet all over.

Carolyn was fine, fortunately -- she couldn't have been face-down for more than four or five seconds, but the horrible impotent feeling one gets when trying to run in a nightmare is remarkably similar to the feeling one gets when trying to run through water.

When I showed up at my wife's deck chair, dripping wet, Carolyn chirped, "Daddy took me out of the pool."

Fortuantely I had handed my fanny pack (containing my PDA and a digital camera) to my wife before taking my daughter to the pool, but the contents of my wallet were soaked. Small price to pay.

While hardcore online gaming remains the preserve of young men, research firm Screen Digest found that "bored housewives" are fuelling the growth of other games offered on the net. --Net games lure 'bored housewives' (BBC)

It's not clear from the article whether the term "bored housewife" is used in the report, or whether it was just a joke made by report co-author Nick Gibson.

See a good reflection from Ian Bogost on Water Cooler Games:

This is a very dangerous kind of thing to say, and it suggests that even researchers who seek to expose the viability of online games don't take them seriously. As I have argued before here on WCG (1, 2, 3) the reasons women play casual games seem complex, deliberate, and worthy of both serious study and respect. Joking about "bored housewives" is a pretty dismissive and derogatory way of treating both the players and the market. What a foolish thing to do.

The bad words we removed, meaning that "The meteor is going to be pissed" was changed to "The meteor is going to be mad." Howie Rubin of Jaleco (the company that was going to publish the game under license) advised us the that the baddest bad word is Kill. The central activity in most Nintendo games is killing things. The image and the act are good, but the word is bad, even if the word does not suggest the image or the act. --Douglas Crockford --Now You're Really Playing with Power: The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System (Crockford.com)

A bizarre story. Quotable quote: "Nintendo is a jealous god."

Want to play a game that involves Monty the Mole? Commander Keen? David "Knight Rider" Hasselhoff? With RoN you can. The fact that anyone can freely contribute to the series means that its potential for growth is unrivaled. Indeed, at the time of writing this article, there have been over sixty RoN games. Even King's Quest could only manage eight... --Robert Lacey
--Deconstructing Reality  (Adventure Gamers)

Hmm... this is more about the communal construction of virtual reality than it is about the deconstruction of reality, but it's a good article nonetheless.

It must be the painkillers, we thought. Or maybe hypoxia, the oxygen deprivation in the blood that often contributes to delirium in sick people. Or that the cancer now was destroying his mind, just as it had racked his body.

But then our cousin Lynne mentioned that her parents had done a lot of similar traveling in the last days of their cancer battles. Uncle Larry (Lynne's father) had insisted that his passport and fanny pack be kept by his bedside; he was intent on keeping an imaginary 3 p.m. appointment with the emperor of Japan, where I was living then and where he had hoped to visit. He too had asked for a map — of Japan. Aunt Lois, who had died four years before, had talked about needing to catch a train, asking Lynne to buy her a ticket.

There seemed to be a pattern. --Valerie Reitman --Taking Life's Final Exit (Yahoo!|LA Times)

I don't usually blog articles that will expire soon, but this one really caught my interest. Very intersting.

Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered sheep prefer smiling or relaxed human faces, over angry or stressed ones. -- Sheep like smiles say researchers (BBC)

What about sheepish grins? Okay, that was a ba-a-ad joke.

The news story says this research took place three years ago. What is the "news hook"? Is this article discussing recent research? If so, where was this recent research published? A web link or journal name would be immensely helpful. National Geographic reported on Kendrick's sheep memory research in 2001.

(Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.)

An atheist's attempt to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance failed on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court avoided the constitutional question and ruled he could not bring the challenge on behalf of his daughter.... The ruling came on Flag Day and on the 50th anniversary of the addition of the words "under God" to the pledge. The U.S. Congress adopted the June 14, 1954, law in an effort to distinguish America's religious values and heritage from those of communism, which is atheistic. --Top Court Rejects Atheist's Challenge to Pledge (Reuters|MyWay)

Oxford and Cambridge interviews have long been the stuff of legend, or more probably, urban myth. Most people have heard the story of the candidate who is supposed to have set fire to his interviewer's newspaper when asked to surprise him, or the student who, when asked to describe bravery, said "this" before walking out of the interview.

Other questions asked of Oxbridge applicants included:

English: "How does the author use hay fever as a metaphor in Howard's End?

Philosophy and psychology: How do you test social stereotyping?

Philosophy and Spanish: "If everything is predetermined, should we punish criminals?"

English: What is the point of me teaching you?"

History: "To what extent is it possible to trace the history of the use of sound?

Social and political science "What do you think is the effect of the Japanese mafia on Brazil and America?"

--Sarah Womack --How Santa's reindeer can lead to Oxbridge (Telegraph)

Several thousand Dubliners, tourists and literary experts filled the capital's major boulevard Sunday to celebrate the fictional anniversary of "Ulysses," James Joyce's famously complex epic set on a single Dublin day 100 years ago.
--Thousands in Dublin celebrate 'Ulysses' (AP|Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

June 16, 2004 is Bloomsday. The mad cow disease scare means the thousands re-creating Leopold Bloom's breakfast of "grilled mutton kidneys" had to do without. Quote of the day: "It's awfully hard to serve offal at all."

When Sandy called to tell me that she had been fired over the essay she had written for class, I felt like Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial?arrested without charge, guilty of something, but uncertain of what. I had been teaching writing since 1971, and to my knowledge a student had never before been fired for writing an essay for class. After the phone call, I tried to convince myself that I had done nothing wrong, merely given an open-ended writing assignment. I wanted to believe that my sense of having been arrested was caused more by moral outrage over an abuse of political and economic power than by anything for which I personally could be held responsible. Now, nearly a year after Sandy's phone call, I still feel a sense of outrage; but I also recognize that I was culpable, that in my teaching I had perhaps not committed a crime of commission, but that certainly I deserved to be charged with a crime of omission: in my naivety, I had failed to tell students the whole truth about writing. --Michael Kleine, in an article co-authored by Sandy Moore
--Toward an Ethics of Teaching Writing in a Hazardous Context?The American University (JAC)

Via This Public Address.

After six years of regulations and restrictions that have cost builders, local governments and landowners on the western fringe of the Great Plains as much as $100 million by some estimates, new research suggests the Preble's mouse in fact never existed. It instead seems to be genetically identical to one of its cousins, the Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse, which is considered common enough not to need protection.
--Research: Endangered mouse never existed (CNN/AP)

When young writers describe characters, they almost universally make them flat goodie-goodies who might have problems, but little psychological depth. Or they don't have enough conflict at all. Waggoner has students first write a character description, then pass that description to a neighbor. The neighbor is told to "do something mean to the character." Then they pass it back and the writer must work with the problem that's given -- often a violent one. --Mike Arnzen describes a talk by Tim Waggoner. --Waggoner on Teaching Creative Writing (Pedablogue)

In order to limber up brain-dead students (after they have turned in a major assignment) I sometimes use something similar -- a "tandem writing" exercise, modeled after what is almost certainly a fictional e-text that I first received in e-mail many years ago.

When I use it, I'm not so much intersted in what they do with their characters, but instead in getting them to see the value of having actual, significant opposition within their academic papers.

The Sound and the Fury. 75 years ago, William Faulkner finished his fourth novel. It was published later in the fall (October 7, 1929), and for the first fifteen years sales totaled just over 3,300 copies (an appendix was added in 1946, when most of Faulkner's books were out of print. Of course, a few years after that he was awarded the Nobel Prize). It was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he said, because he considered it his "most splendid failure".

--The Sound and the Fury [at 75] (Metafilter)

When I finished reading this book as an undergraduate, I immediately re-read the chapters in chronological order. I've got an XML version of the "Benjy" chapter, and had a graduate student mark up the dialogue and the multiple timeframes, and I created a few simple utilities to sort and sift through the text on those criteria. Maybe someday I'll do something with it, but thanks to the unholy alliance between Disney and Sonny Bono the text is still protected by copyright.

But when a piece of derivative fiction starts with a premise along the lines of "all the characters on Buffy are human EMTs in New York and vampires don't exist" -- or, less creatively, "in this story Angel dies in Season One and Buffy gets together with Xander because I always liked him better anyway" -- it is usually a lousy narrative on its own merits and always awful as fanfic, because it is almost never telling a story which can sustain any kind of relationship, nevermind fruitful tension, with the source narrative. --Naomi Chana is not too impressed by with reports from Troy. --In Which Woes Are Unnumbered  (Baritaria)

I was very surprised to learn that the recent movie Troy edits out all the gods from the plot.

The grading system for courses offered by CCS is focused on accomplishment, a combination of Pass/No Record grading and variable unit credit. For each course taken in the College, the student enrolls for a specific number of units of work that he or she plans to do during the quarter, from 1 - 6 units. (See Course Descriptions and ask your instructors regarding unit level guidelines in various courses). At the end of the quarter, the instructor of each course determines the number of units each student?s work merits (based on the quantity of work done at high quality level). If you earn no units of credit, the course does not appear on your transcript. You should request specific information from your instructors at the beginning of each quarter on what is expected in order to earn the number of units you desire. Though there are no letter grades in CCS classes, students are expected to maintain a high level of quality in all the work they do to fulfill academic requirements. --CCS Grading System (UCSB College of Creative Studies)

Fascinating. Students still need 180 credits to graduate, but a bright student could theoretically graduate in half the time.

I have done something like this on a small scale at my previous job, giving students some flexibility in setting their own deadlines. I did have some problems with students turning in no work for a month, then doing all-nighters to turn in three papers in the last week of class -- expecting me to get them back in enough time for them to revise and resubmit the next week. So I had to set some limits -- e.g. students couldn't submit paper 2 until I've approved paper 1; they couldn't submit first drafts of paper 2 and paper 3 in the same week (since the point of paper 2 is to give the student practice that will help them produce paper 3).

I spent a lot of time explaining this method, and I think it really did help me spend most of my time with those students who were most motivated to learn, but I'm not sure it helped those students who overestimated their abilities and only got serious about the course in the last month. Some of the same students who hated being nagged early in the term complained that I gave them too much freedom... and the more I tried to emphasize the importance of sticking to deadlines, the more negative my "welcome to the class" lecture got to be.

I really think the sequenced assignments were a beautiful thing, because they established a direct link between a student's academic habits and their consequences. Students who chose to take a little vacation ended up running out of time before they got to the major assignments -- and the class was designed to reward those who kept up... which is a polite way of saying it was designed to make sure that student procrastination didn't create extra work for me.

My thought is, in a writing class, I'd rather a student write and re-write two papers until they are A-level quality, even if it means they run out of time and can't even start the next two papers, than get Cs on all four papers without revising any of them. I greatly simplified my system when I came to Seton Hill, but I'd like perhaps to bring it back on a smaller scale.

Link found via Jocalo.

Men and papers who had opposed his policy and vilified him personally, now vied with his adherents and friends in lauding the rare wisdom and goodness which marked his conduct and character. --The Death of Lincoln (Harper's)

From an 1865 article.

Alzheimer's had done what many feminist leaders fantasized about doing themselves, if only they could get away with it.

Today, I am still pro-choice, and I still support fetal tissue research. But I now realize that those who disagree with me also have good points. I hope they reflect on their position as often as I do on mine, because both camps are on the razor's edge. I have made my commitment to women and reproductive freedom, while my compatriots on the other side of the fence, mostly because of their religious faith, have made a pact with what they call "the unborn."

We will have to agree to disagree, but only now do I consider those on that other side decent people -- as decent as I, but with a different focus. --Tammy Bruce --President Reagan Changed Me (FrontPage Magazine)

I have a policy of not permitting freshman to write academic research papers on abortion, because I've never seen such a paper move beyond one-sided rhetoric... students turn in papers full of slogans taken from activist websites on whatever side of the issue the authors already aligned themselves with before they started writing. (Next year, I'm probably going to add same-sex marriage to the list.)

Regardless of what you think of Bruce's opinion, this is a good example of an argument worth making. The author treats her ideological opponents with respect. A footsoldier who hates the footsoldiers on the other side is efficient and formidable; but leaders who simply hate, without understanding and respecting intellectual differences, end up losing, becuase they fool themselves into believing their own rhetoric.

This is a school with no set hours, no required classes, no grades, no parent-teacher meetings, and no rules except for the ones the people here make up and vote on themselves. It's a school where youngsters have a say on everything - from whether sipping soda should be allowed in the sound-proofed music room to which staff should be fired at the end of the year. --Danna Harman --This is School? (CS Monitor)

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is a web journal dedicated to furthering comics scholarship in a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. --ImageText 1:1 (University of Florida)

Via join-the-dots. Bobby, take note!

Huckleberry Finn opens with a warning from its author that misinterpreting readers will be shot. Despite the danger, readers have been approaching the novel from such diverse critical perspectives for 120 years that it is both commonly taught and frequently banned, for a variety of reasons. Studying both the novel and its critics with an emphasis on cultural context will help students develop analytical tools essential for navigating this work and other American controversies. This lesson asks students to combine internet historical research with critical reading. Then students will produce several writing assignments exploring what readers see in Huckleberry Finn and why they see it that way. --Critical Ways of Seeing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Context (EdSiteMent | NEH)

I've taught Huck Finn numerous times... when I mentioned it during the job interview that led to my present position, one of my colleagues expressed surprise that I teach this risky book.

That colleague accepted another position over the summer, so I never did have a full-length conversation with her over the subject.

From an excellent collection of curricular resources. Blogging it in honor of Jason Rhody's new position with the NEH (and new URL for his Miscellany is the Largest Category).

The York Corpus Christi Cycle, a collection of brief plays that together tell Biblical history from Creation to Doomsday, was the most complex of the medieval mystery cycles. The surviving manuscript of 48 plays (with a combined length four times that of the longest Hamlet text) and the civic and guild records of the town of York give us much information on the nature of those productions, which took place annually on the feast of Corpus Christi from the late 14th century to the early 16th century. The scholarly debate over how the plays were performed has settled down in favor of what had been the traditional view -- that each short play, mounted on an individual stage-wagon, was pulled through the streets of York, stopping to perform for audiences that had gathered at predetermined "stations" along the route. --Dennis G. Jerz --The Staging of the York Corpus Christi Plays (PSim: York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator)

This article is getting musty, but I like trotting it out as the Feast of Corpus Christi nears.

I update the home page fairly regularly, considering I did the programming 10 years ago (during the summer before my wedding) and got the article published 7 years ago. (Egad, what a horrid background image I used...)

We have often noticed, as we stroll down the hallways of academic buildings, how the doors of the faculty beckon to us -- with whispers and insinuations, exhortations and declamations, jeers and jests -- via a motley collection of decorations: cartoons, articles, quotations, posters, advertisements, photographs, and artwork.

What motivates such postings by that increasingly threatened species, the North American professor? How do those office doors reflect upon the professors or the disciplines in which they study and teach? --James Lang --Office Doors of the North American Professor  (Chronicle)

On my office door:

A printout of my home page (redesigned so it fits on one page).

A brand spanking new nameplate (everyone on the floor seems to have gotten one, which sends a nice unifying, inclusive message).

A small number of business cards, stuck by the corners in the windowpane and fanned out for the taking. They disappear at the rate of about one a month. (Every so often I rearrange them so it looks like one has just been removed, and then for some reason they disappear quickly after that... maybe because they fall out and get swept up... I don't know.)

To the side of my door:

Articles from The Onion: deconstructing a Mexican take-out menu, and "English Replaced to be New Syntax With." Maybe one more that I can't remember. (I'm blogging this from home.)

A feature from the local paper on Pittsburgh weblogs, forwarded to me by an administrator. (Two pages, with artsy pictures of computer keyboards and bloggers.)

Mr Crystal, a professor of linguistics at Reading University for 20 years, said Yoda - a Jedi master in the Star Wars films - was a good way to get children interested in how preferences in English word order changed from the Anglo-Saxon era to that of Middle English. --Finlo Rohrer --Yoda 'speaks like Anglo-Saxon' (BBC)