Culture: September 2008 Archive Page

Every door on every floor is closed, whether or not students are present. This seems so different from my days as a student, when you always left your door open if you were in, I suppose to signal your willingness to talk and to avoid homework if you could just find the smallest pretext to do so. It helped with circulation as well, also a crucial matter in our un-air conditioned rooms.

These days you could launch a flare and not harm a single student. The students who answer their doors invite us in kindly, and seem generally pleased with the attention. Some of them have maintenance complaints, which we address. All of them have television sets connected to cable (cable TV had not yet hit Southwestern in my era), and of course each student has a computer, and an Ipod, and usually video games. Each room seems so self-contained, so independent, and seemingly so isolated from any group activity. -- Todd Diacon, Inside Higher Ed

My provost sent this link to the English faculty, inviting us to share our responses.

My father succinctly summarized his feelings about my choice to dedicate my 20s to writing fiction. "You're not living in the real world," he said. I reacted with a young man's defensiveness, but in retrospect his assessment seems less critical than a matter of fact.

Which is where teaching comes in. It provides all the practical things that can help prop us up above the morass of our insane callings, not to mention something we can wave at the world like a badge. And don't forget this bonus: other people. How delightful to work on this thing called a hallway, populated not just by colleagues but by students, all committed to, or at the very least interested in, writing. And this is all without even mentioning the teaching itself. I love teaching. There is a deep pleasure in sharing the things that you have labored to learn in solitude. It's inspiring work -- rewarding, interactive, human work so different from what we do at our desks -- and it turns out that writers, many of us natural entertainers, often do it quite well. (David Gessner, New York Times)

Coming from a school where the teaching load is 4/4, his 2/2 load seems like luxury, though of course I'm aware that the reduced teaching load carries with it an increased expectation of publication.  After almost 10 years as a full-time faculty member, I'm still adjusting to the feeling of watching conference deadlines, opportunities to contribute to anthologies, and the ghosts of book proposals go whizzing past me as I patiently explain to yet another class of freshmen how to download an e-mail attachment or how to do the pagination in an MLA style paper. As a grad student, I feared that I wouldn't have enough to say; my reality is that I have plenty to say -- both to my students and my colleagues, but never enough time.

Or, to be more precise, the conventions of the student-centered classroom mean I have to make my points in parallel to or as part of the substructure for the student conversation. I don't have 45 unbroken minutes to speak (saving 5 minutes at the end for questions), so I never quite get to drop the kinds of pearls of wisdom that I recall and treasure from my own undergraduate experience.  And at this phase in my life, I never have the 8 or 12 hours of uninterrupted time that I found were necessary to churn out the chapters of my dissertation -- and even the once or twice a week that I can get to the office during the summer are often only useful to dig myself out from under the backlog.

Nevertheless, I will never find myself in the soul-sucking position of working on  writing project because I *have to* -- everything I've written, I wrote because I wanted to, and it just happens to be a benefit that I get to list it as an accomplishment on an annual report.

Renowned scientist Stephen Hawking is going to unveil a remarkable clock that has no hands and shows time with the help of light. Known as the Corpus Clock, the machine has been invented by and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building. The Clock will be unveiled on 19th September by Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time. Dr Taylor, an inventor and horologist, has put 500,000 pounds of his own money and seven years into developing the clock, which has been inspired from a design by a clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude. Of John Harrison's many innovations, he came up with the 'grasshopper escapement, explained Dr Taylor, referring to the device used by Harrison to turn rotational motion into a pendulum motion for timekeeping. No one knows how a grasshopper escapement works, so I decided to turn the clock inside out and, instead of making the escapement 35 mm across, it is 1.5 m across, he said.

In many ways, things have never been better for book readers. Amazon puts reviews at your fingertips, we have easy access to out-of-print titles through eBay and efficient inter-library loan services, and tons of out-of-copyright classics are only a click away. But as this NYMag article ("The End") spells it out, the publishing industry is reeling from the changes.

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century--through wars and depressions--the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It's one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a "mature" industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York's oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won't find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what's coming next. Two, five years from now--who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn't.

Most gamers have never heard of Braunstein. Sad but true. In the hierarchy of self-awareness you'll find the circle of gamers who know what D&D is (a very, very large circle), then inside of that is the circle of gamers who know what Greyhawk is (large but smaller), and inside that the circle who knows what Blackmoor is (smaller still). And then in the very center, vanishingly small, are the people who've heard of Braunstein. Which is a pity, because Braunstein is the granddaddy of them all. (Metafilter)

Great use of 3D technology to enable the study of an historic art form. Virtual Vaudeville:

Watch legendary comedian Frank Bush in a vaudeville performance from a variety of perspectives in the theater, from the most expensive boxes to the cheapest balcony seats. Compare the reactions of different spectators and even experience the act through the eyes of the performer. Switch between any of eight perspectives at any time and read the extensive hypermedia notes to gain a richer understanding of the performance in its historical context.

Because the children were rarely bored - at least, when a television was nearby - they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. "The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere," Belton says. "But that's a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice."

[...]

"The point is that it's not enough to just daydream," Schooler says. "Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight." -- Jonah Lehrer, The Boston Globe

This article should be required reading for all aspiring writers and professionals -- not just women.

I have spent too much time being rattled by terse e-mail from editors, agents who have told me that I'd never get a book deal, and bosses who have berated me as not being "detail-oriented." I think that in order to break through any kind of glass ceiling, or simply to get through the day, you have to become impervious to the daily gruffness that's a part of any job.

I used to think that perfection was the pathway to success. Not so, according to women I have interviewed who have reached the apex of their professions. Rather, it can lead to paralysis. Women, I have found, can let perfectionism stop them from speaking up or taking risks. For men, especially if they are thick-skinned, the thought of someone telling them "no" tends not to be viewed as earth-shattering.

One tactic I've found useful in getting over the perfectionist tendency is a shock therapy called soliciting feedback. Not only does it demystify what your boss thinks about you, but it also gives you the data to become a more valuable employee.

The other dose of shock therapy I've undergone is reprogramming my brain to think that, yes, girls do brag. I've indoctrinated myself with the idea that my job is a two-part process. One part is actually doing the work and the second part is talking about it, preferably in bottom-line terms. --Hannah Seligson