Business: May 2008 Archive Page

Who would think of working a casual reference to Aliens into a blog entry about a trip to Disneyland. Nobody but James Lileks, that is.

Usually I hate turbulence, but I was too tired to care, and I slept through it like Hicks on the drop down to LV-426.

A thoughtful post about the fate of film criticism.  Much of this boils down what happens when film criticism leaves the world of print journalism and adapts to the TV -- not only in the content of the review but the context of celebrity/insider/gossip in which movies are pressnted to the public. (Armond White, New York Press, via)

In the Ebert age of criticism, the Aesthetic of the Hit dominates everything. Behind those panicky articles about critics losing their jobs (what about autoworkers and schoolteachers?), lurks the writers' own fear of falling victim to the same draconian industry rule: Most publishers and editors are only interested in supporting hits in order to reach Hollywood's deep-pocket advertisers. This is what makes traditional criticism seem indefinable and obsolete, leaving web criticism as a ready (but dubious) alternative.

The Internetters who stepped in to fill print publications' void seize a technological opportunity and then confuse it with "democratization"--almost fascistically turning discourse into babble. They don't necessarily bother to learn or think--that's the privilege of graffito-critique. Their proud non-professionalism presumes that other moviegoers want to--or need to--match opinions with other amateurs. That's Kael's "layman" retort made viral. The journalistic buzzword for this water-cooler discourse is "conversation" (as when The Times saluted Ebert's return to newspaper writing as "a chance to pick up on an interrupted conversation"). But today's criticism isn't real conversation; on the Internet it's too solipsistic and autodidactic to be called a heart-to-heart.

Tomorrow is the last day of classes, but it's not too late to bring up a new topic.  Many of my students in "Intro to Literary Study" were fascinated by Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, so I thought they might appreciate hearing about Card's dismissal of J.K. Rowling's suit against a fan-created reference work devoted to the world of Harry Potter.

The author of the Ender series has some choice words about the author of the Harry Potter series. Note that he's not actually accusing her of stealing his ideas, he's just pointing out how ridiculous he feels her claims are.

The idea of paying for positive coverage at a scholarly conference is 0% original.

Inside Higher Ed reports on Turnitin.com's awkward efforts to get positive coverage at the 4Cs next year.  (Via KairosNews, which links to blogger reactions.)

The issue of paying professors to attend the 4C's meeting is particularly sensitive because of the make-up of the association. Many of the people most knowledgeable about teaching composition are adjunct professors or full timers who are off the tenure track and who frequently don't have the same access as tenured professors to travel budgets and research support. As a result, there is arguably more discussion within the 4C's meeting than at some others about issues related to who can afford to attend and present. The conference has a fund to help those without travel budgets attend the meeting -- but applications for such support are not based on whether or not someone favors using Turnitin.com. Kent Williamson, executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English, of which the 4C's is part, said he had never before heard of a company offering to pay people whose papers on selected topics are accepted for the annual meeting. He stressed that Turnitin.com did not ask permission to involve itself with the conference in this way and that the payments it makes are "not in any way a 4C's initiative."

I do use Turnitin.com. I can only think of one time when the service identified problems with a paper submitted by a student who wasn't already showing serious signs of trouble in other areas (such as excessive absences or not turning in the pre-writing).  I've even had a false positive where a student who had posted her pre-writing on her blog was surprised to find Turnitin.com calling the resulting paper "unoriginal" when it found her blog and compared its contents against the submitted work. Of course I explained to the student I would never even think of taking action on a Turnitin.com report without first investigating thoroughly, but that student was still distressed.