Humanities: April 2006 Archive Page

In graduate school, I ransacked the library in my quest for inspiration: it was a kind of archaeological excavation. Today, because of online catalogs and specialty Web sites, information can be targeted with pinpoint accuracy and accessed with stunning speed. Hence I doubt whether that kind of untidy, often grimy engagement with neglected old books will ever appeal again to young scholars. But it was through the laborious handling of concrete books that I learned how to survey material, weigh evidence, and spot innovative categorizations or nuggets of brilliant insight. Many times, the biggest surprises revealed themselves off-topic on neighboring shelves. --Camille Paglia --Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother (Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics)

Paglia is always stimulating, if not always comprehensible. (This is actually one of her more accessible essays.)

Alloy's team craft the proposal, shape the plot and create characters. Even the writing of the book is often farmed out to a team of authors. The process is more similar to television writing than most readers' idea of the creation of a novel and the packaging closer to creating a boy band than promoting a new literary star.

Among Alloy's hit series are The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, recently made into a film, and the Sweet Valley High books, which became a TV series. This weekend Alloy had three books in the New York Times children's paperback bestseller list. It did not return calls for comment.

After Alloy's input, Opal was picked up by Little Brown, a division of media giant Time Warner. Little Brown, too, was unavailable for comment. --'Lit chick' debacle that damns the publishers (Times Online)

If this is true, then it may be true that Kaavya Viswanathan really didn't intend to plagiarize from Megan McCafferty's novels, since it's theoretically possible that a ghostwriter did the plagiarizing for her.

It was in Romania, while making a film about Ceausescu, that I first stumbled across the historical legacy of the communist joke. There I learned that a clerk from the Bucharest transport system, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, had spent the last ten years of Ceausescu's regime collecting political jokes. He noted down which joke he heard and when, and analysed his total of over 900 jokes statistically. He measured the time gap between a political event and a joke about that event, and then drew up a graph measuring the varying velocity of Romanian communist jokes. He was also able to assert--somewhat tenuously--that there was a link between jokes and the fall of Ceausescu, since jokes about the leader doubled in the last three years of the regime. The story of Stefanescu, the statistician of jokes, was, ironically, much funnier than the jokes themselves. It seemed to capture the prosaic reality of the little man struggling against the communist universe. --Ben Lewis --Hammer & Tickle (Prospect)

"Rock is so important to me," Harris said, gesturing to a cabinet where he files articles concerning all of the live shows he attends and detailed transcriptions of interviews with artists who live only blocks away. "If I couldn't write about music and collect music, I have no idea what I'd do instead."

The social misfits who chronicle rock seek not only to log facts, but also to influence public opinion about obscure rock issues, something most people care little about. --History Of Rock Written By The Losers (The Onion (Satire))

In Georgia this week, the campaign manager for a candidate for governor resigned amid allegations he doctored the Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the Democratic primary.

Morton Brilliant was accused of revising the entry for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor to add his son's arrest last August in a drunken driving accident that left his best friend dead.

The information was accurate and had been in the news. --Shannon McCaffrey --Wikipedia Ripe for Political Dirty Tricks (Breitbart | AP)

Thanks for the link, Mike.

Student Mike Rubino and I have been talking via e-mail with the director of our writing center, about how to get students thinking about the relative value of Wikipedia as a source.

I tell students that it's fine to refer to Wikipedia when preparing for an informal oral presentation, or as part of a blogged response to a reading assignment. In a research paper, however, it's not a credible source -- except if the research paper is on a very geeky, very rapidly changing topic related to the internet, or a meme that's currently spreading through youth culture, in which case the Wikipedia article is likely to have more up-to-date content than what you find in the mainstream media.

When I find significant errors in student writing, I chalk it up to one of three reasons: they don't care, they don't know, or they didn't see it. And I believe that the first and last are the most frequent causes of error. In other words, when push comes to shove, I've found that most students really do know how to write -- that is, if we can help them learn to value and care about what they are writing and then help them manage the time they need to compose effectively. --Laurence Musgrove --The Real Reasons Students Can't Write (Inside Higher Ed)

I have written about how traditional chess engines are constructed and about how they go about figuring out what moves to make. I have speculated on how Rybka, a new and powerful chess engine is constructed. I have written a software specification for a new way to estimate the value of a chess position, or a new "evaluation function".

My task now is to convince everyone that my speculation is sound. Although I lack time, I am slowly starting to create software to test these ideas. I suspect that someone else will have some code togther to experiment before I will, but nevertheless it is worth a try to see if these ideas have any merit.

It would sound like a good project for a grad student or someone who has time to give it a try. --John Jerz --RandomVisitor (chessgames.com)

My big brother has been blogging on chessgames.com under the name "RandomVisitor." He just recently revealed his identity there.

My son, who's eight, can already whip my butt in chess if I don't pay close, close attention. Until recently he has been too willing to sacrifice his queen for little gain, and after he does that I can often win. But not always. At any rate, he's far better than I am at openings and the endgame, because those are easy to practice on a computer.

Every so often, after he beats me, he asks, "Am I ready to beat Uncle John yet?"

I tell him, "Keep practicing."

At Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops, we believe in doing the right thing. Our products are intended for adults and as such, we only market to them. While some studies suggest that over 80% of our adult customers started eating Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops before the age of 18, the intent of our marketing efforts is to encourage customers to switch glass pop brands and not to get young people to start licking. In fact, we've introduced a million dollar youth prevention campaign with the highly effective slogan "Licking Glass Pops as a teen? Then you're missing the point!" --Responsible Marketing (Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops)

Preceded by the SNL "bag o' glass" skit from the 1970s. Still pretty good.

She was supposed to slam the door, but Baldwin held the door so tight, she couldn't close it.

"He made a drastic change in the blocking," she said. "He was showing me the door, metaphorically. The stage management apologized to me about it later."

Baldwin said, "If, in one show out of the scores of shows we have done, I changed the blocking in some modest way that wasn't to Jan's liking, I sincerely apologize. But Jan never said the lines in the play as Orton wrote them, and it wasn't my inclination to tell The Post."

Maxwell insists she knew all her lines: "Did I ever make goofs onstage? Yes. Did Alec? Yes. That's just live theater." --Curtain-Razing Baldwin Blow-Up: Off B'Way Star Quits Over Tantrums (NY Post)

Oh, those crazy artistes.

I'm not blogging this because I care about the personal lives of the actors. Instead, I'm amused by the different spins the two parties put on a core of facts about which they agree.

This is unusual because it doesn't seem to be the reporter acting independently to put a scandalous spin on a routine event. Each of the two parties is trying to use their celebrity, and the reporter's desire for juicy quotes, in order to attack the other.

The 23 blank pages, which literary experts presume is a two-act play composed sometime between 1973 and 1975, are already being heralded as one of the most ambitious works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting For Godot, and a natural progression from his earlier works, including 1969's Breath, a 30-second play with no characters, and 1972's Not I, in which the only illuminated part of the stage is a floating mouth.

"In what was surely a conscious decision by Mr. Beckett, the white, uniform, non-ruled pages, which symbolize the starkness and emptiness of life, were left unbound, unmarked, and untouched," said Trinity College professor of Irish literature Fintan O'Donoghue. "And, as if to further exemplify the anonymity and facelessness of 20th-century man, they were found, of all places, between other sheets of paper." --Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play (The Onion (Satire))

The Connections class for fall 2006 is going to do a session on SHU etiquette centering around how students can appropriately present themselves to faculty and staff on campus. E-mail, phone, meetings, classroom, verbal encounters are all open for discussion.

With this in mind, will you please give your replies to the following so that we can relay to the students what SHU expects of them.

E-mail me your comments when done.

YOUR COMMENTS WILL BE ANONYMOUS!!!!

Thank You,

Lynda Sukolsky

Please share with others on campus that will have some comments to make on this subject


What is your best piece of advice on how to interact with faculty/staff appropriately?

What is your pet peeve in the classroom around student behavior?

How would you instruct a student to e-mail and/or phone you?

When meeting with a student, the student should....

Additional advice or "don't ever do this".

BONUS-- anyone have any real life stories they can share of what not to do? ALL PARTIES REMAIN ANONYMOUSWhat is your best piece of advice on how to interact with faculty/staff appropriately? (Seton Hill University -- Connections)

It's our obligation as members of an educational community to tell our students what behavior is appropriate, and to reinforce our expectations on a regular basis. Asking students to investigate the boundaries is a great opportunity to get them thinking about such expectations. This time of year, I'm sure plenty of SHU faculty and staff will share horror stories.

But I'm concerned that our contributions may contribute to the impression that we hate students, or that we think they aren't capable of improvement.

It's not only students who violate social norms. I've worked with professors or staff members who put girle pics on their screen savers (visible from the hallway), abused their positions of authority in the classroom during election season, mocked students behind their backs, misused university equipment (taking laptops home over the weekend so their teenagers could play games with it, then returning the laptop on Monday infested with a virus that incapacitated the software I was hired to use... I'm still bitter about that, in case you can't tell), hit "send" without thinking, and left telephone messages when they were too angry to see straight.

And while I have plenty examples of student missteps to contribute, every day I work with students who are better writers, more advanced thinkers, more socially conscious citizens, and simply better human beings than I was when I was an undergrad.

This world premiere will blend Rock, Tango, Jazz and Punk music with contemporary dance to re-imagine Karel Čapek's original 1921 classic, R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots). Čapek's play that started it all, introducing the word ROBOT into the world's lexicon and into our fantasies, is reexamined for the 21st Century. --R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Futurist Folk Opera (Adhesive Theater)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary. I love the play (R.U.R.). Wish I could be there.

Dear Candidate: Thank you again for meeting with us at the American Historical Association's annual conference. We have narrowed down the applicant pool to three very strong candidates, yourself included, but we just can't decide among them! We hope you would be willing to come to the campus, along with the other candidates, and fight to the death for our amusement. --"Dexter Coisson" --Groundhog Day on the Market (Chronicle)

Five hundred quatloos on the newcomer!

When people drink they become totally different people and I do not feel that I should put myself in that situation because if something were to happen, I would mostly likely have no chance to protect myself from a 200 pound kid, who isn't even thinking rationally. Next thing, I'll wind up dead in a ditch. Now do you see why I think I have a problem? hah

I do not feel that people should be as paranoid and protective as I am, but I do think that there are precautions that people should take. I feel that I should be aware of who lives around me and I reguarly check my state's sex offender registry website. It is called Megan's Law and I think that it is important for people to log in and see who their surrounding neighbors are. --Gina Burgese --PA Megan's Law Website Info (GinaBurgese)

Gina is not currently taking a class with me, but from time to time she uses her blog as a soapbox. This entry really impressed me.

I've had some difficulty with this last paper, no doubt, but I finally think I'm on the right track. However in my oral presentation, I wanted to include some goals, not only for this paper, but also to outline what I hoped to take from this class, once it's over. --Matthew Hampton --Achievable goals for Paper III (MatthewHampton)

Matt is a student in my writing-intensive American Lit II class. I've been impressed by the quality of work all the students are producing in the class, but this list of goals (part of a handout he created for an oral presentation) really impressed me. One of my favorite is "To be able to look at a series of work by an author, analyze and remove the ideas I need, assess that information and then possess the ability to recognize a critical perspective from which I can write." That goal is so much more advanced than "remember key quotes" or "summarize the stories we read" or "apply the stories to my own life."

Agent Marks and I were uncertain how to end it, but thankfully, our undercover agents came to our rescue. They mounted a joke insurgence and effectively re-took the NJZ. It started off with each undercover agent coming into the zone, one after another, telling jokes in a town-crier fashion. --Guerilla Improv: No Joking Zone (Improv-Abilities)

A great piece of activist anti-comedy.

If more people did this, we could just walk out on the streets for our amusement, and wouldn't be lashed to the TV set.

Worried that I would not like him, my victim had used his humor to engage me, to make me laugh, to join in his witty barbs, and because I did like him, I had joined in. But we were not on equal footing and my comments contained a much more powerful threat because I did not have to like him, and he knew it. --Amy L. Wink --Navigating Whitewater (Inside Higher Ed)

A professor reflects after shutting off a class by getting too chummy with a jokester, and losing sight of where her obligation to teach must overpower the desire to join in the fun.

A recently-published novel by Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan '08, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty -- the 2001 novel "Sloppy Firsts" and the 2003 novel "Second Helpings."

[...]

Little, Brown signed Viswanathan to a two-book, $500,000 contract while she was in high school. This is the first book that the Harvard sophomore has produced for the publisher under that deal, and it reached 32nd on the New York Times? hardcover fiction bestseller list this week. --David Zhou --Student's Novel Faces Plagiarism Controversy (The Harvard Crimson)

This week I am going to ask you to participate in a media fast for TV Turn-Off Week, as part of the Media Fasting Reflection due on May 3.

If you give up TV, but watch DVDs on your computer, are you really making any progress? If you turn off the TV, but turn up your iPod, are you really taking control of the technology that defines our lives?

Confession time:

While we don't have cable TV, we do have a fairly big library of kid videos. Sometimes I'll put on a video for them and sit on the couch with my laptop, answering e-mail, despamming my blog, marking a paper, or fiddling with my digital camera. If the movie ends and I'm not finished, I'll get them interested in the bloopers or deleted scenes. So my desire to spend time on the internet leads directly to their exposure to more TV.

I've tried to address that by creating "the book game," which involves Peter (8) picking out a book, Carolyn (4) picking out a book, and me picking out a book. Peter and Carolyn will sit on the couch, and Peter will read all the books to Carolyn. Yes, on one level this is very good, but I'm conscious that I use "the book game" when I want to see what's happening on the blogosphere.

I also sometimes use "the book game" to avoid playing with my daughter's Barbie. So while naturally as an English teacher and a parent I'm going to say that books are good, here I'm turning to media -- books -- when my daughter is asking me for one-on-one attention. (It's not the idea of playing dolls with my daughter that bothers me. Why, the other day I was playing with my daughter's pony castle, and I made an army of insect peasants rise up in rebellion against their pony overlords. They fought an epic battle, and our leaders -- a horned beetle and Pinky Pie (tm) agreed to settle this dispute in single combat, then had a tea party, had a bath together, and took a nap. But Barbie just kind of lies there staring up at me.) --Dennis G. Jerz --Introduction to Media Fasting (Introduction to Literary Study)

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." --Hunter S. Thompson --Hunter S. Thompson on the Music Business (QuoteDB.com)

Happy thought of the day.

One item to discuss today is the final project for the class, your blogging portfolio. And among the items we need to consider are these:

* What should it include? (Will it highlight your best blogging, be an overview of what you tend to blog about and/or how you tend to blog, or a combination, or...?)

* What should it look like? (Will it be a blog entry? Will it be a separate web page?)

* How will it be assessed? --Donna Strickland -- Blogging Portfolio (English 4040)

I really like this teacher's effort to involve students in the discussion of how the blogging portfolio should be evaluated. Blogging is a means to a very specific end in the lit classes I'm teaching right now, but in the fall I'll be teaching Writing for the Internet again, and I'll want to be sure to include criteria that reward expressive and outrageous blogging, in addition to the intellectual and introspective blogging that I typically expect from students in lit classes.

Anyway, this is a great way of implementing in the class structure the kinds of collaborative, interactive communication structures that make blogging different from traditional essay writing.

"We cannot determine whether the addition to the letter was made by someone within the office or by someone with access to the office, but it is on my letterhead and the responsibility for it lies with me. A valuable lesson has been learned and new procedures will be adopted as a result." --Lawmaker Puzzled by Obscenity in Letter (AP|Yahoo!)

Passive verbs are loved by people who are found (by someone) to have been involved in actions that are considered (by some) undesirable.

Emphasis was added (by me).

Don't think you're addicted to TV? Then why not prove it by going cold turkey for a week? You'd be surprised how difficult it can be to disconnect -- and what a profound week of self discovery it can be. --TV Turnoff Week April 24-30, 2006 (Adbusters.org)

I'm planning to ask my Intro to Literary Study students to participate in a media fast. (If they can't go cold turkey, they can at least exercise their self-control by being more selective about how they spend their time.)

Video game studies? Yes, please. And I don't just mean in gaming schools. Critical perspectives have been developing as well. Metafilter is already wise to ludology,but what about its mother discipline, ergotics? Don't forget narrative and storytelling. Of course, if cultural studies, or education is your thing, that's covered too.

Other programs focus on application and aesthetics.

Perhaps MeFites are catching on? --The seedy academic underbelly of video games (Metafilter)

You can like a poem before you understand it, and be moved by it, and in fact, that is a sign that you're starting to understand it, that you're reading the poem in a good way. Being moved by a poem -- laughing or feeling sad or full of longing -- or being excited by it, or feeling (maybe you don't know why) the "rightness" of the poem is a serious part of reading and liking poetry. You may find what you read to be beautiful, or be reminded of places and times, or find in it another way to look at things. All this can help you to understand the poem because it brings it closer to you, makes it a part of your experience. And the better you understand a good poem, the more you'll like it. --Kenneth Koch --Reading Poetry -- from Sleeping on the Wing (Random House)

I came across this passage out of context on another website, and recognized it as being from the introduction of a collection of poems I've taught from before.

Five, the television channel, denied it was disappointed that Diamond, a radio and TV presenter and outspoken Daily Star columnist, had decided against being crucified. No date has been set for the broadcast of the programme. If shown, it may have to change its original working title, Crucify Me. --Nico Hines --'God made me cancel my own crucifixion' (Times Online)

In my Intro to Literary Study class, I'm teaching Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues -- a play about a TV commercial director hired to film the crucifixion of a rebel leader in a Central American country.

The key word for me here is not 'Fun'. The concept of fun is well understood, I should think, after many years of games and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of releases. There are theories of fun, analyses of fun, examinations of the fun of one aspect of a game or another, and whole schema devoted to separating out different kinds of fun.

No, the key word for me here is 'meant'. Meaning is an interesting concept, in both positive and negative, because it suggests purpose or exclusion. Saying that a product is meant to be a certain way can implicitly imply that it is not meant to be another way. Big Macs are meant to be tasty pleasures, they are not meant to be nutrition supplements, for example. They are designed with that intent.

What I'm driving at here is a kind of pre-judgment, and video games are unique as a medium (that I'm aware of) in that the greater majority of its creators, designers and producers otherwise actively pre-judge themselves and their work according to a 'fun' standard not as a key trait of enablement, but as the end goal in and of itself. --Tadhg Kelly --''Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun.'' (Particle Blog)

Via Grand Text Auto.

I liked this author's argument that in video games, "fun" is a means, not an end. Still, this passive-verb-heavy passage prompted me to post a bit about the intentional fallacy:

Novels need to be readable. Their basic craft requires that readers are invited to keep turning the pages until they get to the end. But what are novels 'meant' to be? Nothing. They're meant to be whatever the author intends for them to be. Ditto music, ditto poetry, ditto television, sculpture, comics and so on. In all these forms, the basis of aesthetics or pace or whatever are regarded as the core necessity.

The saccharine sweet family shows of the 50s and 60s gave way to harder biting social commentaries like All in the Family. In 1967, the same year that CBS television ended a 17-year blacklisting of folksinger Pete Seeger, President Johnson signed legislation to establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), asserting that "we have only begun to grasp the great promise of the medium and noting that noncommercial television was reaching only "a fraction of its potential audience -- and a fraction of its potential worth. As part of the legislation, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was to launch major research on instructional television in the classroom. The $9 million investment in CPB in 1967 (about $47 million in today's dollars) has grown to over $300 million in annual funding today. Unlike television, the meteoric rise of computer and video games over the past decade has gone largely unnoticed except by the digiteratti and cultural anthropologists cruising web zines and blogs. This may be because games are not a technology per se, but applications that slip into our lives on the backs of existing technologies, from computers, to televisions and cell phones. They are less hardware and more software. Like many mass culture phenomena, games are understood more on the basis of prevailing myths than reality. Few people realize that the average gamer is 30 years old, that over 40 percent are female, and that most adult gamers have been playing games for 12 years.

One reason myths shape public perceptions is because few universities have seen computer games as worthy of serious academic study, robbing the discourse around games of robust data on their use characteristics, effects, and potential value. There is, of course, the annual Congressional attack on the game world and its denizens, calling for more control of violent games and, like our TV-addicted forebearers, warning of dire consequences to mind and family. Politicians have conveniently made computer games a target of derision rather than a pedagogical ally or tool for public engagement.

The best kept secret in the world of computer and video games is the rise of a movement -- now in the thousands -- of gamers dedicated to applying games to serious challenges such as education, training, medical treatment, or better government. The Serious Games movement is in many ways today's equivalent of yesterday's advocates for non-commercial, educational TV, who knew that the potential of the medium was unrealized and went far beyond pure entertainment. --David Rejeski --Why We Need a Corporation for Public Gaming (Serious Games Source)

Science for non-majors offers an important chance to reach out to students outside the sciences, and try to give them some appreciation for scientific inquiry. This is critically important, as we live in a time where science itself is under political assault from both the left and right. People with political agendas are constantly peddling distorted views of science, from conspiracy theories regarding pharmaceutical companies and drug development, to industry-backed attempts to challenge the scientific findings regarding global climate change, to the well-documented attempts to force religion into science curricula under the guise of "intelligent design." It's more important than ever for our students to be able to understand and critically evaluate competing claims about science.

I worry, however, that our approach to teaching science as a part of a liberal education is undermining the goals we have set for our classes. --Edward Morley --It's Time to End ''Physics for Poets'' (Inside Higher Ed)

I took "Physics as a Liberal Art," which did include equations and formulas, but which was more like watching an episode of Cosmos, in that the instructor (James Trefil) focused on the cultural backdrop that indicated why this particular discovery or refinement was important to civilization and the advancement of knowledge. A lesson that has had lasting impact involved the professor giving you a phase of the moon, and requiring you to correctly place the moon, earth, and sun on a diagram. (I mentally give myself that test question whenever I look up at the moon.)

The course that I took was definitely softball science, but it was heavy on humanities content, so I did find it intellectually challenging. (Trefil co-authored The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, with E.D. Hirsch, Jr.) So the course I took does not sound like the trendy "ripped from the headlines" course that Morley criticizes here. To quote Morley,

Science is more than just a collection of difficult facts to be learned. It's a way of looking at the universe, a systematic approach to studying the world around us, and understanding how things work. As such, it's as fundamental a part of human civilization as anything to be found in art or literature. The skills needed to do science are the same skills needed to excel in most other fields: careful observation, critical thinking, and an ability to support arguments with evidence.

I never took a college science lab. In fact, about a year ago I took my molecule-obsessed son to our school's science labs for a tour with one of the faculty (John Cramer), and that was the first time I'd ever been in a college science lab.

Of course, at the time I had no idea that I would end up teaching technical writing to engineering students, or that my first full-time job would be a technical writing instructor. I'm not sure that taking a science lab would have automatically made me a better tech writing teacher.

At any rate, since these last few years I've taught an American Lit survey course that includes many gen-ed students, I can certainly understand what's at stake when an instructor is faced with the question of stoking the fear and wrath of students who don't want to be in the class in the first place, or simplifying and lowering your expectations, thus robbing the committed students from a truly challenging classroom experience.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. --The Bill of Rights: Amendment I

The First Amendment, among other things, prevents the government from arresting or silencing a citizen for expressing an unpopular or offensive opinion that powerful people may not want to hear.

It is also popularly misunderstood as a magical powerup that protects authors from the consequences of exercising free speech.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. Or, as the Ninth Amendment puts it, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Thus, your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness takes precedence over my freedom of speech.

The owner of a theatre has a right and obligation to other patrons to eject someone who falsely shouts "fire," just as an airline has a right and obligation to single out for extra security screening someone who makes a joke about carrying a bomb.

If an employee makes a racist or otherwise insensitive remark, the employer has the right and obligation to discipline the employee. Even if that employee remark does not amount to libel, the livelihood of co-workers who are not responsible for the employee's remarks may be affected if customers see the company as permitting insensitive behavior.

If a football player insults an assistant coach, the head coach can order him to run laps. If the player isn't willing to do the punishment, then he's free to quit the team. The coach is free to order the team to wear pink tutus and ballet slippers, and the NFL is free to discipline the coach, or give him a raise if they want to. But whatever happens, it's not a First Amendment issue, because the laws of Congress have nothing to do with the matter.

The First Amendment does not require that a citizen be furnished with a platform from which to speak. Thus, if group X invites Sally to speak at a meeting, and Joe shows up with a bullhorn to interrupt Sally's speech, Joe's rights are not being violated if the police show up and escort him out of the building. The First Amendment is also not a shield behind which one can hide after publishing libel, defamation, or threats against specific individuals or small groups. It does not insist that owners of private property permit protestors to camp on their front lawns, or spray paint graffiti on their walls. It does not require that city authorities stand by idly while marchers tie up traffic. It does not prohibit schools from disciplining students who post vulgar or offensive MySpace entries.

There are many good arguments for why tolerance and open-mindedness are the best default practice, particularly in educational communities where people need to be free to make mistakes in order to learn from them. However, in no case does the First Amendment protect the speaker from the consequences of the choice to speak freely. Those consequences might range from losing an election to losing your job; from losing a friend to losing your good name.


It's purely a coincidence that I'm blogging on the First Amendment the day after some Seton Hill students launched a petition to cancel classes on the Monday after Easter. That calendar had been set over a year in advance -- almost two years, really. I know both the students who spearheaded the petition, and think of them both as upstanding citizens. I have no sense that the administration can, will, or even might respond with sanctions.

The First Amendment protects their right "to petition the government for a redress of grievances," but since the Seton Hill administration is not "the government," the First Amendment would have absolutely no relevance.

None.

But if those students had chosen to libel, harass, threaten, or make personal attacks, the university would be perfectly within its rights to respond with sanctions.*

If you want to say something that violates a contract with an employer, jeopardizes your enrollment with an educational institution, or flaunts the conditions of membership in the local treehouse club, the government won't arrest you. But your employer, your institution, and your clubhouse president are likewise free to apply whatever sanctions they feel are appropriate.

* Just in case any student is worried that I've gotten inkling of some administrative crackdown, let me repeat -- I'm not actually blogging this First Amendment piece out of concern that there was anything wrong with the petition. (I signed it, by the way, and told my class that as long as they do the work that's due Monday, and participate in a discussion via their blogs, that's fine with me.)

One of our administrators pointed out that she actually proposed the Friday/Monday plan that the students want, but was pressured to change that to Thursday/Friday because, as a Catholic college (so the argument went) we should be more sensitive to the liturgical significance of Holy Thursday (the day Jesus shared the Last Supper with his apostles) rather than the Monday after Easter (which is.. I don't know? the day the apostles showed up to work late because they didn't make it back from Jerusalem in time).

I called a disabled colleague a spaz after hearing he'd spilt coffee over yet another expensive bit of computer kit.... I use the term with irony as someone who was regularly called a "spaz" in the school playground, though I'm visually impaired and not what we once called "a spastic".

To confuse the issue, a non-disabled colleague had overheard and told me that she found that term offensive and thanked me not to use it in front of her. I was offended that she was offended because I didn't feel it was her place to be offended... after all, it's not her word and she wouldn't have been taunted with it. --Damon Rose --The s-word (BBC News)

Because I regularly teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and because this year I'm teaching a collection of Flannery O'Connor short stories, I've had plenty of class discussions about racially charged language.

Lately I've been spending time in each literature class introducing the concept of disability studies, in part because physical characteristics such as missing limbs or scars are often used by authors as a short of shortcut to characterization.

But hearing that a company recently marketed a wheelchair called the "Spazzo" makes me completely confused. Perhaps I shouldn't be.

At any rate, this article reminds me that language is power, and that terms used by mainstream society to label subgroups, and terms used by subgroups to refer to themselves are often points of conflict.

A merchant adressing a debtor
Remarked in the course of his lebtor
   That he chose to suppose
   A man knose what he ose;
And the sooner he pays it the bebtor. --Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling (The Simplified Spelling Society)

Michael Smith, professor in Temple University's College of Education and coauthor of Reading Don't Fix No Chevys, said the language of crisis was overblown but noted that the facts are plain: Boys read later than girls and lag them in both reading and writing across grades. They read fewer books, and value reading less.

"If you go to your local high school, the basic-track classes are dominated by boys, and the AP courses are dominated by girls," Smith said.

It's not that boys aren't reading, he said. It's just that the things they are reading - comic books, video game manuals, sports magazines - aren't valued by schools.

"We have to create the conditions that support the boys' areas of strengths," Smith said. --Gender Gap Greater in Reading (Philly.com)

"We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do," said Prof Jardine. "They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals." Women readers used much-loved books to support them through difficult times and emotional turbulence, and tended to employ them as metaphorical guides to behaviour, or as support and inspiration.

"The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading," she said. Ideas touching on isolation and "aloneness" were strong among the men's "milestone" books.

The researchers also found that women preferred old, well-thumbed paperbacks, whereas men had a slight fixation with the stiff covers of hardback books.

"We were completely taken aback by the results," said Prof Jardine, who admitted that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliche, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle. --Charlotte Higgins --A tale of two genders: men choose novels of alienation, while women go for passion (Guardian)

Not exactly a scientific study, but still interesting.

This list of Best Geek Novels Written in English certainly fits the stereotype of male literature, though I wonder how that list would change if you separated it into male geeks and female geeks.

He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. --Robert Frost --Birches (Bartleby)

When I was five my family moved from the world of sidewalks and fenced-in backyards to an underdeveloped area where, at night in the winter when all the leaves were down, you couldn't see the lights from any neighboring houses. We had a gravel driveway that led up from an unpaved, very bumpy road that had no official speed limit. The shoulders of the road were very high, so that the road really ran in a kind of a trough, and I could play in the woods and climb up the trees and watch the cars go zooming by, far beneath me.

I have no idea if it was a birch, but one tree in particular had long, smooth limbs that stretched out over the road.

I'm stunned as I think back on it, but I did sometimes climb out across the road and ride a tree limb down to the ground. There really weren't all that many cars on the road, but the shoulders were little cliffs, that loom in my memory two or three times my height. I picture them as 20 feet high, but I was shorter then, so maybe they were only about 12 feet.

I loved the freedom that this image suggests.

It was great to be a kid when I had that much space to move around in. My son doesn't have that kind of freedom. We do have a nice backyard and friends in the neighborhood. In a pro-videogames article, ""Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" Henry Jenkins writes,

My son, Henry, now 16, has never had a backyard. He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street. Children were prohibited by apartment policy from playing on the grass or from racing their tricycles in the basements or from doing much of anything else that might make noise, annoy the non-childbearing population, cause damage to the facilities, or put themselves at risk. There was, usually, a city park some blocks away which we could go on outings a few times a week and where we could watch him play. Henry could claim no physical space as his own, except his toy-strewn room, and he rarely got outside earshot. Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my son's constant presence around the house, I would forget all this and tell him he should go outside and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask "Where?"

But, he did have video games...

Not quite the same thing as dangling by a tree branch over the road, but serving much the same desire to explore and to take risks.

My Students Impressed Me Today (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In my "Intro to Literary Study" class, I assigned Arthur Miller's recent play, Resurrection Blues. At the beginning of the class term, I told my students that it wouldn't be in the bookstore yet because Amazon.com said the book wouldn't be published until early February, just a few weeks after classes started.

When the book did arrive, I let them know it was in the bookstore. Because I know that the bookstore returns unsold copies shortly after midterms, I warned them in early March to pick up their books, or to order them online.

A week ago, I reminded them that the next book we were going to cover was the one that arrived in the bookstore late, and I asked who had already picked up a copy. Only one student's hand went up.

Then, the other day, one of the other students stopped me in the cafeteria and said, "The bookstore already returned that book, and there are about nine of us who don't have copies."

I tried to be pleasant, but I didn't say, "Oh, that's too bad, we'll have to reorganize the syllabus to account for your lack of planning."

This morning, fully expecting most of the students to show up unprepared, I collected their 200-word reflection papers (which is something I usually don't do, though I warned them at the beginning of the term that I might do it sometimes), and announced that I was reorganizing the syllabus.

I didn't go on to say "to account for your lack of planning," but that was only because I was sure it didn't need to be said. I was tsk-tsking at them and pointing out how I kind and magnanimous I was, since I wasn't giving them a pop quiz to slam their grades, that really affected the beginning of the class. But then I looked more closely, and saw that at least three students had copies of the book on their desks, and it turned out that most of the other students had managed to borrow whatever copies were available.

While a few students still weren't prepared, enough of them were that we could have had a decent discussion. I told them that I had come to class all prepared to be crabby and disappointed, and that I was sorry I had underestimated their responsibility.

Also known as yupster (yuppie + hipster), yindie (yuppie + indie), and alterna-yuppie. Our preferred term, grup, is taken from an episode of Star Trek (keep reading) in which Captain Kirk et al. land on a planet of children who rule the world, with no adults in sight. The kids call Kirk and the crew “grups,” which they eventually figure out is a contraction of “grown-ups.” It turns out that all the grown-ups had died from a virus that greatly slows the aging process and kills anybody who grows up.

[...]

“You have to have a little bit of Dora the Explorer in your life,” he says. “But you can do what you can to mute its influence.” Okay. “And there’s no shame, when your kid’s watching a show, and you don’t like it, in telling him it sucks.” Yeah! There’s no—wait. What? “If you start telling him it sucks, maybe he might develop an aesthetic.” Sorry, son. No more Thomas the Tank Engine for you. Thomas sucks. Stop crying. Daddy’s helping you develop an aesthetic. Now Daddy’s going to go put on some thunder music. --Up With Grups -- The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who are Redefining Adulthood (New York Mag.com)

Despite the retro-cool Star Trek reference, this essay is so absolutely not me. From the plastic lawn furniture in my study basement, the dining room table that's been home to a race car playset since I put it together three Christmases ago, to the inflatable ball pit in my living room (occupying the space vacated by the Christmas tree) to the Hello Kitty dollhouse on the coffee table, I am so not a Grup.

When I play Neverwinter Nights or The Elder Scrolls, my character -- usually a battle mage or a paladin -- is always "DaddyMan."

The article describes a pop-cult manufacturers fantasy world in which the arrival of children doesn't change people's lifestyle, or, more importantly, their spending habits.

My favorite music at home is my son's Suzuki practice CD. I really dig those "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" variations. But then again, I never was much into popular music.

And fashion? Fashion, my aunt fanny pack.

According to the nonprofit Electronic Literature Organization, within the broad category of electronic literature are several forms and threads of practice, including hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web; kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms; computer art installations, which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects; conversational characters, also known as chatterbots; interactive fiction; novels that take the form of e-mails, SMS messages or blogs; poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning; collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work; and literary performances online that develop new ways of writing. --Digital writing gives new meaning to a good read (My San Antonio)

In 1969 the US Senate had a hearing on funding the newly developed Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The proposed endowment was $20 million, but President Nixon wanted it cut in half because of the spending going on in the Vietnam War. This is an video clip of the exchange between Mr. Rogers and Senator Pastore, head of the hearing. Senator Pastore starts out very abrasive and by the time Mr. Rogers is done talking...
--Won't You Be My Neighbor? (YouTube.com)

While you wait for that 6-minute video to load (it took a long time, but it's worth it), you might want to check out "It's a Didactic Day in the Neighborhood" and "A Sudden Case of 'Routine Maintenance' in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe."

This clip is like a real-life "David and Goliath," except that Rogers, in his simple eagerness, doesn't defeat the powerful adversary. He does something even more heroic -- he wins him over.

--Evolution of the Latin Alphabet (Evolution of Alphabets Page)

A very interesting animated GIF that shows how the Latin alphabet (which is basically the modern English alphabet) developed from the Phonecial alphabet.

O'Connor's depiction of humanity's struggle with surrender and submission touched me more deeply than most of the modern works I've read lately. At one point--when Hulga starts shushing the boy and trying to seduce him into atheism--I actually felt some kind of strong internal reaction and inexplicably threw the book across the room. I felt repulsed, furious, and horrified all at the same time. Very few stories have ever drilled that far into my core, and it was certainly a surprise to me. --Chris Ulicne --O'Connor, Good Country People: What is the meaning of this? (Below Zero)

For the past few weeks, in my American Lit class we've been reading A Good Man is Hard to Find, a collection of short stories by Flannery O'Connor. The students have responded very well to the stories, though Chris's reaction is unusually strong. I'm glad to know these works are having an effect on my students. I've been trying to get the students to discuss how O'Connor uses dark images and themes because without them, there's no way to emphasize light.