Culture: January 2007 Archive Page

It's hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai's lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. "They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop," he says with a laugh. The 450-page course reader tells them otherwise. Those who stay get a view into Weller's two worlds. For example, his class at Syracuse on Hollywood and the Roman Empire requires watching toga-and-sandal epics (Ben Hur and The Last Temptation of Christ among them) and reading primary-source Roman authors in an attempt to reconcile big-screen Rome with the real thing. "The Romans were an unbelievably complex people, and we are an unbelievably complex people," Weller says. "We can learn so much about why things are the way they are by looking at what they did." He goes on to explain how the absence of the concept of zero in Greek antiquity laid the foundation for Western philosophical thought. --Mike Daisey --RoboCop, Ph.D (Wired)

Peter Weller, the actor who played RoboCop and Buckaroo Banzai is working towards a Ph.D. in classical history. Cool!

Even now, the thought of going on the academic job market seems so spiritually suicidal that I would rather abandon my career altogether than submit to the scrutiny of another semihostile search committee. As far as I can tell, the hiring process in English favors psychopaths with ice water in their veins, which explains a lot about the changing climate of the profession.

Mind you, I am not bashing the leadership of the MLA -- which is, of course, full of well-meaning mandarins (God bless them, every one) -- so much as I am lamenting the unstoppable transformation of a gentle, harmless occupation into a cannibalistic nightmare straight out of Goya. --Thomas Benton --A Christmas Present from the MLA (Chronicle)

This is the most cynical, bleakest essay I've seen from Benton. Perhaps he feels he's doing his duty by scaring away more would-be graduate students. I regularly share Benton's "Conference Man" reflections with students who are thinking about graduate school, but I think this essay goes well beyond unpleasant realism.

Benton refers to a 4/4 teaching load in a list of the "just about anything" that successful job seekers will have to face on the road to tenure.

That's my load.

There are times when it drives me crazy. Fortunately, I haven't been getting any pressure to publish a second book; I've been getting lots of positive feedback from my chair and my dean, I can't think of a single colleague whom I dislike; we have an active support staff that takes a lot of the pressure off of me when it comes to dealing with students who have bad attitudes. I've taught some students four, six, or eight times, which means I get to watch them develop from doe-eyed freshmen to intellectually mature adults; I've taught certain courses enough times that I have the luxury of tweaking my teaching materials to optimize them, rather than scrambling to figure out what to do each week. I've got the opportunity to propose new courses in areas that interest me. My dean hasn't turned down a travel funidng request yet. (In fact, the limiting factor on my conference travel is not travel support from the dean, but the amount of time my wife is willing to let me spend away from home.)

Quite frankly, a 3/3 load would make a huge difference in my productivity. Last semester, my dean asked me to take an overload, so a normal load will feel like a break. But when a January course that I had planned was canceled, I asked not to be assigned a replacement course. So this term, I'll get a taste of what a 3/3 load would really be like.

As a grad student, I never imagined that the biggest barrier to getting published would be time -- as in, at any moment there are a half dozen CFPs that are jumping up and down screaming my name, and one by one the deadlines whoosh by.

This term, I have a MWF class, and then a class that meets only on Tuesday, and another class that meets only on Thursday. Of course, with committee work and office hours and such, the day fills up pretty quickly. Also, because my wife is now teaching an evening course, I have to leave work early in the afternoon order to watch the kids while she prepares her lecture.

Last term, I was so tightly scheduled that I only had one four-hour block of unscheduled time -- that was the only spot where I could hope to get any serious reading or writing done. This term I'll have several such blocks. And I plan to use them.

"I was going to do gift bags, but I was going to do them right," Zwicky recalled. The party had a train theme, so she got sticks and bandannas and made "hobo packs" that included animal crackers and bubble solution.

Zwicky said that party was a turning point for her. She helped found Birthdays Without Pressure. --Parents turn against birthdays gone wild (Yahoo | AP (will expire))

Moms get sucked into planning and organizing overly complex birthday parties.

They get fed up with the competition among moms.

Moms get sucked into planning and organizing a movement to abolish overly complex birthday parties.

They get fed up with the competition among movements organized by moms who are fed up with competition among the organizations devoted to abolishing organizations that are competitive movements.

Moms get sucked into planning and organizing a movement against moms being sucked into planning and organizing movements devoted to... um... oh, forget it.

Six students, led by Engineering junior Tal Raviv, began a ceremonious walk outside Huntsman Hall at noon and processed east toward College Green, where they chanted phrases like "No more protests!" and "Down with activism!" -- Daily Pennsylvanian, "A Rally to End All Rallies

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.

The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good. --Charles Murray --Aztecs vs. Greeks: Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise. (Opinion Journal)

Wow, some challenging, exciting stuff. I'm taking a break from polishing my syllabi, and I'm glad I came across this.

When I was preparing for my dissertation defense, I knew in advance that my evaluators had every intention of pushing me until I broke. I don't mean that I thought they were out to get me, just that their goal was explicitly to see how well-prepared I was to be a fully-fledged member of the community of scholars. If it had been a job interview, I could have imagined a scenario in which I gave the "right answer" to every question, such that the evaluators would stop asking questions once I satisfied their concerns one way or the other.

Not so with the Ph.D defense. My goal there was to delay the point where I cracked, so that it was as near the end of the hour as possible. In order to support a minor point in my analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire, I mentioned Blanche's reference to Edgar Allan Poe. I know I looked it up when I originally wrote that chapter, but years later when my reader asked me to comment further on it, I drew a blank. I said "I could speculate if you like, but I'd feel more comfortable looking that up."

That was when I saw my professors clicking their pens shut and sitting back in their chairs. Even though I didn't answer the question, I was comfortable enough to admit my limitations.

Am I wise yet? Can I really teach wisdom if I still make stupid mistakes? It's a challenging task.

I'd like to think I've gotten better at teaching students rather than teaching a subject. I'd like to think that my students are learning ethics and other intellectual virtues, along with where the punctuation marks go.

The science fiction drug is available everywhere to kids, in superhero comics, on TV, in the movies, in books and magazines. It is impossible to avoid exposure, to avoid the least hint of excitement at Marvel Comics superheroes and Star Trek reruns and Star Wars, impossible not to become habituated even before kindergarten to the language, clichés, basic concepts of science fiction. Children's culture in the contemporary US is a supersaturated SF environment. By the time a kid can read comic books and attend a movie unaccompanied by an adult, his mind is a fertile environment for the harder stuff. Even the cardboard monsters of TV reruns feed the excitement. The science fiction habit is established early.

In some cases, accompanied by the hosannas of proud parents, a bright kid focuses his excitement on the science part and goes on to construct winning exhibits in school science fairs, avoid being arrested for computer hacking, obtain scholarships, and support proud parents in their old age with his honorable gains as a career corporate technologist. Most often, a kid freezes at the gosh-wow TV/comics/movies stage and carries an infatuation with fantastic and absurd adventure into later life. But sometimes, usually by the age of twelve, a kid progresses to reading science fiction in paperback, in magazines, book club editions-wherever he can find it, because written SF offers more concentrated excitement. This is the beginning of addiction; he buys, borrows, even steals all the science fiction he can get his hands on and reads omnivorously for months or even years, sometimes until the end of high school years, sometimes a book or more a day. But the classic symptom is intense immersion in written SF for at least six months around age twelve. --David G. Hartwell --Age of Wonders

I was 12 in 1980. I had finished all the Lester Del Ray classics that were in my local library, and I was getting into Larry Niven (particularly the Ringworld series). There were also a handful of Star Trek paperbacks -- and the publication pace was picking up, since the Star Trek movies had just started coming out. My brother was into the Foundation and Dune epics, but for some reason I never followed him there.

I found a reference to this essay on Machina Memorialis, and thought I'd see what Google would turn up.

"The 2007 National Freshman Attitudes Report," a survey by Noel-Levitz of nearly 100,000 incoming freshmen at 292 public and private two- and four-year colleges, finds that men and women share high expectations for getting a degree, "no matter what obstacles get in my way." But male students at the same time report coming into college with far less ambitious intellectual interests and sharply lesser study habits than their female counterparts. Even so, male students in general express greater confidence in their academic abilities than do female students. --Doug Lederman --Clues About the Gender Gap (Inside Higher Ed)

The [Association of American Colleges and Universities] report outlines curricular goals for all colleges, but they are not of the "two semesters of science, two courses in writing" variety. Instead they are four broad "essential learning outcomes," with the idea that different kinds of institutions would assure these outcomes in different ways. Generally, the outcomes would encourage rigor of preparation, interdisciplinary and team learning, and links between experiences in and out of the classroom.

The outcomes are:

• Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world, which would include study of traditional arts and sciences disciplines.
  
• Intellectual and practical skills, such as critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, and quantitative literacy.
  
• Personal and social responsibility, such as civic knowledge and engagement, "intercultural knowledge and competence," the ability to reason about ethics, and understanding of lifelong learning.
  
• Integrative learning, including the ability to synthesize information and engage in both general and specific study.

--New Definition for Liberal Education (Inside Higher Ed)

The report is called College Learning for the New Global Century (PDF). I think SHU's educational objectives hold up pretty well against this document.

Mexican food in the united states is like the bow legged asthmatic cousin of real Mexican food. --Jonathan Stewart --Tacos, toilets and a glass of tap water! (Mexican Civilization)

I have been enjoying the blogging that is currently being posted by students of my division chair, John Spurlock.

To "pluto" is "to demote or devalue someone or something," much like what happened to the former planet last year when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto didn't meet its definition of a planet. --'Plutoed' chosen as '06 Word of the Year (Yahoo | AP (will expire))

There are no lithe leaps, perfect pirouettes or pointed toes here. Most girls cannot walk or stand, much less make a shallow curtsy. Their crutches and walkers lie nearby and their customized ballet slippers are stretched over leg braces. --Corey KilGannon --Given a Chance to Be Little Ballerinas, and Smiling Right Down to Their Toes (NY Times)

I never understood why the dead were painted and made to look alive, but now I see that?s not really the purpose. Watching Joe at work, I see that he restores bodies to a restful state, rather than an unnatural one. They don?t look like they?re going to sit up in the casket and say howdy, they look dead. But they look readied for a journey; dressed up, cleaned, and arranged just so. He creates an environment that helps people say goodbye.

I suppose what my brother in law does for a living gives a lot of people the creeps, and sure, there are some creepy aspects to it. It?s not a career for everyone. But when I picture the great web of people he has influenced, whose tears have soaked the shoulder of his suit jackets, whose loved ones? bodies he prepared for their last reunion, I am incredibly proud to know him. --Kicking buckets and whistling in the dark (All & Sundry)

How did I get here? I have no idea, but I was captivated by this story. Had to skip a few paragraphs, but this was beautifully done.

Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.

Not everything in human lives is culture. There is also biology. Human senses, emotions, and thought existed before language, and as a consequence of biological evolution. Though deeply inflected by language, they are not the product of language. Language, on the contrary, is a product of them: if creatures had not evolved to sense, feel, and think, none would ever have evolved to speak. --Brian Boyd --Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique (The American Scholar)

Excess is possible in any discipline. A nuclear scientist who ignores ethics can do far more damage to the world than a literary theorist who is overly fond of semiotics. Perhaps there is a good reason why Boyd chose the invective tone for this essay, but I would have rather read an attempt to synthesize and seek common ground, or to seek out particular schools of literary criticism (Marxism? gender studies? ecocriticism?) that deal specifically with the nature of humanity in its environment. Any assertion that human behavior has a biological foundation is an ideologically charged claim, a rejection of the assertion in gender studies that gender is socially, so perhaps choosing this particular tone is Boyd's way of bracing himself against a likely backlash.

I don't know how Boyd's English department is doing, but English is the only non-vocational major that's still in the top 10 (according to the Princeton Review). Last semester my own English department had a huge influx of majors -- about as many new freshmen as there already were in our sophomore, junior, and senior classes.

I would like to see more English majors minoring in science, or vice-versa. But I've always tried to bridge that chasm. During my high school production of My Fair Lady, the cast bought T-shirts that were one color, and the crew bought T-shirts that were a different color. I asked my mom to do a sleeve transplant, so I could show my allegiance to both cast and crew. That sort of thinking served me very well as I worked on my Ph.D. thesis, which looked at technology as a theme and as a staging component in American drama from 1920-1950.

And while, as I stated earlier, it is possible to get overly fond of any theory, cultural studies that deal with robots, aliens, cyborgs, mutants, zombies, vampires are full of references to the biological. In the last few years, as the World Wide Web has become mainstream in the humanities, we have seen much less breathless gushing about the endless (but vague) possibilities in hypertext (see a rather snarky review I wrote a few years ago, critiquing the navigational hoops through which readers were forced to jump when they attempted to use an issue of the journal Kairos). While undergraduates rarely get much exposure to it, a close ally of the study of literature is the study of books themselves, or more generally the technical, social, and economic forces that influence what gets distributed as "literature". (I'm looking forward to Matt Kirschenbaum's forthcoming book, Mechanisms, but Nick Montfort's conference presentation on the role of continuous paper in early computer history is a great introduction to the subject.) Montfort and Ian Bogost have announced a series of computer game platforms. See also Shelly Jackson, Sherry Turkle, the body of existing scholarship on the study of MUDs, and the emerging scholarship on multiplayer games. While these studies are multidisciplinary rather than purely English, they are firmly rooted in the humanities. And while they don't focus primarily on biology, their emphasis on the materiality of the texts reminds us always of the embodied nature of the act of reading.

While this short list is not likely enough to redeem the excesses of all English departments everywhere, it does offer one possible direction that may avoid the obstacles Boyd sees in the path of traditional literary theory.

Slamdance finalist Super Columbine Massacre RPG has been officially kicked from the festival due to mounting pressure from protesters and the loss of sponsorship, the game's creator told Kotaku Thursday night.

This is the first time in the Slamdance Festival's 13-year history that a game or film has been removed from the festival due to criticism or outside pressure. --Exclusive: Columbine Game Kicked From Competition (Kotaku)

I cited this game as an example in a paper I gave at the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education in November. My point was that the young audience that Holocaust educators want to reach has a different set of moral and aesthetic responses to games than the adults who don't have much to say beyond dropping their jaws. The Holocaust deniers and other promoters of hate and violence already have their issue-oriented games out there. While I think it's exaggerating to suggest that a Jew-bashing game is going to have much impact (those games, like the Christian-themed evangelical games typically have poor production values and won't really attract the interest of someone who doesn't already share the world view that the game is trying to promote). There is enough social commentary embedded within this particular RPG that I think it moves beyond cynical exploitation, and really attempts to use a popular medium in an effective way.

The designer, Danny Ledonne, speaks eloquently and thoughtfully about his creation (in this article and elsewhere on Kotaku).

Update, Jan 6: Ian Bogost offers a good overview of the Slandance controversy. It looks like it wasn't external pressure from advertisers after all, but one person's concern about what MIGHT happen if the game were to be part of the show.

I teach plenty of safe classics, but I also teach books that contain disturbing and threatening ideas. I find it amazingly hypocritical that Slamdance (an indie film festival, founded to protest commercialism at Sundance) would override the artistic decisions of the panel that agreed to let the Columbine game into the competition.

In Galway, I went out busking on the streets, singing the filthiest, most debauched lyrics I could think of to see if anyone would understand. No one did - old women smiled, tapping their feet merrily, as I serenaded them with filth. In Killarney, I stood outside a bank promising passers-by huge sums of money if they helped me rob it, but again no one understood. --Manchán Magan --Cá Bhfuil Na Gaeilg eoirí? (Where are all the Gaelic speakers?) (Guardian)

Speaking Irish in Ireland leads to some very interesting encounters. A fascinating slice of post-colonial life.