20151008.0624

I have noted, I think, needing to address a call for submissions of "age appropriate" materials, making the note here. The call does helpfully include a list of things to avoid in the work, namely adult language and references to sex, violence, death, religion, magic, and evolution. This presents something of a problem, as everything serves as a reference to one of them, if examined with sufficient rigor and through a particular critical lens.* My sense of humor also lends itself to treating some or all of the things the call for submissions asks to avoid, and my general aversion to censorship rails against the restrictions (although I concede that my right to free expression does not entail a right to be rewarded by others for its exercise). But I could use the money promised for accepted submissions, and so I mean to offer some; I have been mulling over what to treat for a while now.

One idea came to me in the shower this morning. The Mrs. and I have been eating beans for the past couple of days; we made a large batch of them and, trying to be thrifty, ate leftovers until they were gone. One of the natural consequences of such dietary choices evidenced itself while I was bathing this morning, and the smell of it, making obvious its cause, called food to mind. I was reminded that eating is one of the universal human experiences--even more than sex is, since there are people who remain lifelong celibates--and that, while writing about it could be construed as references to sex or violence,† it is not likely to be unless I spend time and effort making it so. I could write something like "Tongues flicking across the squash / sliding up and down its length / whetting it for the knife that / thrusts" or "I can taste its death as I eat / the coppery flavor of blood spilled remaining / a hint of suffering in the steak / as I take the meat into my mouth," and that would likely get me into trouble, but I need not. There are other things that I can say about food and eating, not less true, but more likely to earn me a bit of compensation for my work.

I am glad to have stumbled into such an idea. Indeed, I already have a good one for the first piece I will compose--and I will do it soon, interrupting other work that does not necessarily pay as well for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious. Others will likely follow after the first, and I will send off something to see if I can sell it. Perhaps I will. But if I do not, I am sure I can find another use for what I would write. I keep records of my writing against the idea of being worth study later on. And, if nothing else, my work might amuse Ms. 8 someday--and that is something I endorse whole-heartedly.

*Indeed, in literature classes I have taught, I have occasionally been challenged to read such things as numbers as signifying sex. The ubiquitous 69 is, of course, easy. The numbers 10 and 11 are perhaps less so--although they can be sexual references. So can the number 52. Or, if Roman numerals are to be used, 30. The students are typically titillated.

†The former shows up in cucumbers and similar foods, phallic in shape. The latter manifests in meat--although particularly devoted pacifists might argue that the harvesting of root and stem vegetables such as potatoes and broccoli might also count as violence, since the plant does not survive in such cases. Not being a gardener, botanist, or pacifist, I cannot say how correct such an argument might be.

20150728.0654

When I opened up the program I use to write this blog, I found the following notice waiting for me:

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(I apologize for the odd spacing. Formatting is a bit wonky in this program.)

I am a respecter of laws, generally; while I acknowledge that many laws are unjust, I tend to adhere to traffic regulations and local ordinances as part of my contribution to a social system from which I benefit. (I am fully aware that I benefit in no small part because I occupy a position of privilege within that system, as I identify and am identified as an Anglo-Saxon-ancestried cisgendered heterosexual male Protestant of the middle class. Not all are positioned to similarly benefit, I know.) I am a state employee, after all, and I paid for my extensive formal education through a series of grants and loans, many of which originated in the federal government. It behooves me to be observant of law in principle--even if I may oppose some specific laws in practice.

Moreover, I am a big believer in fair warning. I do, for example, think bars ought to be able to allow smoking in them if they decide to--but they should have to post at the entrance, conspicuously, that the establishment is a smoking one. (Restaurants, to which children are taken without their consent, are a different matter entirely.) I am Texan enough to accept the validity of the "Trespassers will be shot" sign and the enforcement thereof. Annoying as it may be, I approve of the message that "This call may be monitored." And I tell my students far in advance what I want from them and how they will be assessed.

But I am not under the jurisdiction of the European Union at this point in my life, and I found myself somewhat annoyed at being obliged to comply with laws of lands that are not mine. I imagine that many will feel similarly. On reflection, though, I remembered that this platform is not mine; it is lent to be, but it is not owned by me. The owner has the right to establish rules for the use of what is owned, and, because I am adherent to laws and recognize the justice of "my house, my rules," I find that I have no problem with the policy--the more so because the work of it is done for me. That ought to be a help.

20150717.0731

Matters are improved since yesterday. My hands and wrists are not so stiff and sore, and the swelling has subsided. I appreciate this, for even though a new freelance order has yet to come in, I have other work to which I must attend--including some I would have done yesterday had things been otherwise--and I need my hands to do so.

For one, I have final preparations to make for the summer bridge program I noted being hired to help teach. This involves a meeting with the grader who will be helping with all three sections of the English class being taught. (I am teaching one; colleagues known to me are teaching the other two.) It also involves me running by the program office to retrieve materials--and I probably ought to get a start on reviewing them, as well, since it helps to know what is being taught before it is being taught. And I likely ought to see about integrating some discussion of those materials into my own revised teaching-and-other-information-about-me website.

That website itself needs some more updating. Freelance work has taken up a fair bit of my time, as I think I have made known, and while I have put some effort towards the new website, there is more that I need to do--and not just with respect to my teaching. I probably ought to see about putting up comments about and examples of my writing on the site, and more than just the abstracts and annotations that already appear there. (I need to see about adding to the annotations, as well.) There are a few "creative" pieces I have floating about that could be usefully linked on the site, and I need to see about pushing yet more into print. And I could see about monetizing the website, as well, although I am not entirely certain how I would do so and what the implications of my doing so would be. (I could use the money, though.)

Generally, I need to be doing more writing. I know that I am able many days to write a piece of approximately 500 words (exclusive of footnotes and citations) for this webspace, and I have considered re-situating the posts I make here to the other website as a means to build its contents further. Some of my earlier thoughts on monetization still apply, however; not all of what I post here is necessarily appropriate for the purposes to which I would put the other website, although I still think they bear noting. (I am also reminded that some of my recent posts have not carried all of the labels they ought to carry. That is a different problem, however.) In any event, a "daily" 500-word piece is not enough; if I am going to continue to style myself a scholar and/or writer, I need to make more text than that. Freelancing helps with this, obviously, although what I write in that capacity does not carry my name as it goes out into the world. (There is a metaphor in there somewhere, I am certain.) It helps my bank balance, but it does not help my prestige, and that prestige needs enhancement if I am to land more secure employment than I have. (If you have job openings, I am happy to apply; please let me know.) Accordingly, I have more writing to do--and so I am glad my hands are better.

20141001.0659

Entirely random notes:

My daughter's wet diapers somehow reek to me of commercial breakfast cereals. I do not know how this can happen, but it does.

I have not written in my journal in days. I do not know why, but I seem okay with it.

One of the cats, at least, has loose stool.

They are hypocrites who complain about wealth redistribution and benefit from it. Those at state schools and/or those who receive Pell Grants should be thankful for them and not gripe about them.

The same is true for those whose paychecks come from such sources.

Education is not content delivery.

Oaths coerced have no value.

Demanding that someone who cannot spell "allegiance" pledge it to anything seems coercive.

Punishing those who can spell the word and withhold their oath is coercive.

Both happen with astonishing regularity.

Education is not degraded by considering viewpoints other than those of one's grandfather.

Things were *not* better "back in the day" save for white middle class heterosexuals. I am not sure they are better now, though.

I am, theoretically, of the white middle class. I am also tens of thousands of dollars in debt with what entry into it has required.

I am less than theoretically heterosexual.

Some people do exploit "the system." Why would they not?

Many of those people make a *lot* more money than I do.

Prevailing wisdom is that they "deserve" it. Must be nice.

20131115.0619

During this morning's readings, I stumbled across Jonathan Stempel's 14 November 2013 Reuters article "Google Defeats Authors in U.S. Book-Scanning Lawsuit."  In it, Stempel reports upon the decision by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Author's Guild against Google which had claimed that much of the Google Books project violates copyright law.  The court ruled that Google's current practice falls under the fair use doctrine, in which short excerpts of a work may be used by someone other than the copyright holder of the work.  Stempel reports also that continued legal action is forthcoming, as well as noting the implications of the case for works in other media than print.

How to integrate source material, and how much of it to use, is a concern for me in both major components of my work: teaching and research.  I have addressed the former once or twice before (albeit a while back); one of the things that I have to do as a teacher of composition courses is discuss with students how to incorporate the ideas of others into their own work--correctly and responsibly.  It is not enough to simply cut and paste the words of others into another paper, and it is really not enough to put that text in quotation marks.  More must be done to massage the data into the writer's own expression of understanding.  As to the latter: I have to do much to ground my understandings of literature in the literature itself, which means have to do a fair bit of quotation and the like.  I also have to account for the understandings of those scholars who have gone before me, which ends up meaning the same thing.  Appropriately enough, then, when I saw a reference to a copyright case involving a major media provider which I use extensively (this webspace is a Google offering, after all), my interest was piqued.

As I note above, much of my work as a professor involves the effects of the fair use doctrine.  I am therefore invested in seeing it upheld and substantiated; its diminishment impairs my ability to do the work I have trained to do (if it can be called work).  At the same time, the frequency with which I am cited impacts how I am regarded as a scholar.  Too, as someone who does have creative work out in the world, and actually in print, I entertain the hope that I will be able to someday make a bit of money from my writing, and it occurs to me that the decision may well make it more difficult for authors to benefit from the dissemination of their works.  It takes thought to write, energy to think, food to get energy, and money to get food, so that if readers want writers to write, they need to buy what the writers write (the same is true for other media; piracy is generally bad).  And it seems to me that the snippets Google offers are ripe for copy-paste jobs by students.  How I ought to regard the court decision and what result I should hope to see from the promised appeals Stempel mentions elude me--which strikes me as a good thing.

It promotes thought and self-reflection, and both are good to have of a morning.

20131027.1119

The entries in this blog have, from time to time, carried the label NSFW, indicating that they are not safe for work.  Usually this is because, like this post (which itself carries the label), they use such words as fuck or damn, or they make...indelicate reference to certain parts of the body or functions of them, stating rather than euphemizing them.  But the idea of what counts as safe for work or unsafe for work makes a number of assumptions about the workplace, assumptions which may not always or even often hold.

Several sources of perhaps dubious validity discuss the matter (neither the online OED nor the online Webster do).  UrbanDictionary.com offers fairly cursory, user-generated descriptions here.  Wikipedia offers more detail here.  Know Your Meme offers still more here.  Each speaks to the idea that reference to such things as sex, drugs (but not rock and roll), profanity (variously defined), and gratuitous violence (usually indicated by the amount of blood shown and the degree of detail in depictions of inflicted injuries) bars a given item from being fit for discussion in the workplace.  Several comments note that the display of NSFW materials is likely to result in formal disciplinary action (it can be construed as one of several forms of harassment, for example, and easily as inappropriate use of company resources) up to and including termination (and possibly prosecution, depending on the material and the locality).

Again, though, what is true in one workplace is not necessarily true of others.  My work in the academic humanities, for example, often legitimately runs to notions otherwise NSFW.  One cannot discuss Mark Twain without addressing racial epithets.  One cannot meaningfully engage Shakespeare without running into issues of pedophilia (Romeo and Juliet), cannibalism (Titus Andronicus), possible incest (Hamlet), and sexualities overt and covert (Much Ado about Nothing, the sonnets, etc.).  Chaucer, Spenser's "well of English undefiled," rolls around in materials routinely considered objectionable; fart jokes and adultery abound in his Canterbury Tales, and in the Miller's Tale, well, it is difficult to interpret "prively he caughte hire by the queynte" as anything other than a rather intimate touch that anymore could result in sexual assault charges.  Yet I get to talk about such things (and more!) as a matter of course; on the rare occasions when people have complained about such content, I have been able to point to the texts and demonstrate "legitimate academic interest," so that what is otherwise NSFW becomes not just safe, but vital, for work.

Lest it be thought that it is simply an artifact of being a pointy-headed intellectual elitist, one who tries to undermine all that is right and good in the world and who does things no "decent" person would do, let us note also traditional depictions of sailors' talk--or that of any fighting folk, whose speech is sown with such terms as once got children's mouths well soaped.  Their work is highly valued by many, even by many who would abjure mine for some of the reasons noted above, and yet they speak freely of such things in the course of their duties.  And "real" doctors, of course, have to handle such things daily, eminently indelicately, yet they are not censured for having pictures of gaping wounds and festering pustulent flesh on their working screens.  What is safe for work changes depending upon the work, of course, but that the default assumption is as it is suggests things about what the default workplace is--and that is pretty much fucked up.

20130921.1018

While enjoying a cup of coffee and reading over the news in the internet, as is usual for me on a Saturday morning when I have access to the web, I ran across Matt Hamilton's 21 September 2013 article in the online LA Times, "Kansas Professor Put on Leave after Tweet Blaming NRA for DC Shooting."  The article notes that the University of Kansas chancellor decided to place journalism professor David Guth on administrative leave in the interest of maintaining an undisrupted learning environment for students.  It also cites a number of condemnations of Guth by his colleagues and others, ranging from disavowals of implied violence to calls for his termination.  Hamilton does note that the comments sparking actions against Guth appeared on Twitter and on Guth's personal blog, although his stance has softened since the administrative leave was enforced upon him.

There are many problems with this.  Not least of these is the chilling effect that silencing any speech has upon the freedom to give voice to opinion and inquiry, freedoms necessary to the improvement of any people and, ultimately, of us all.  Any censorship is a danger to freedom of mind, and thus to freedom of conscience and to freedom in its most rarefied and purest form--whatever that may be.

More specifically, Guth is an Associate Professor of Journalism, as his faculty information page notes.  Academic hierarchies are not always in the forefront of the general public mind, but in this case, the fact of Guth's position is relevant.  As an associate professor, Guth is tenured.  That means that he is supposed to be in a position of particular protection from persecution for voicing unpopular ideas, by tradition and, usually, by contract; tenure protections exist to allow the tenured to pursue truth without worrying that finding unpopular truths will result in their dismissal.  Tenure exists to prevent such things as happened to Galileo Galilei--to prevent truth from being silenced because some non-governmental political agency decides that it does not like what is revealed.  The free expression by a person of that person's opinion is an item of truth, one that should not be silenced because it happens to be unpopular--and one that should not be silenced even if it happens to be repugnant.

Also, Guth has a long history of public service, one that includes (per his faculty page) "years as the chief spokesman for the state's prison, probation and parole systems."  He is not speaking from the stereotypically-perceived professorial position of unending isolation in the mythical ivory tower, but as the result of years of work with some of the populations most directly impacted by guns and their use; he likely knows whereof he speaks from lived experience as much as from sustained academic study.  If he speaks out against a given group from such knowledge, his speech perhaps ought to be more closely attended--and if he speaks with authority, he ought not to be condemned.

Further, Guth is an Associate Professor of Journalism.  He teaches those who will become the press, people to whom particular protections are afforded by the highest laws of the United States.  As their teacher in the very thing that affords them their Constitutional protections, he has every right to consider himself also thusly protected--and his career suggests that he has done the work to earn those protections himself, not only through his students.  While Guth, according to the LA Times article, did not post his comments in his capacity as a member of the press or in his capacity as a professor, surely he had reason to expect that he would be able to give voice to what he saw as truth.

Ultimately, though, the University of Kansas, as a state school, is an adjunct of the state government and therefore, at some remove, of the government of the United States.  For a governmental agency to silence the speech uttered by a citizen in that citizen's capacity as a private citizen (i.e., not speaking through official channels, but through personal resources) is heinous, an abrogation of the principles underlying the First Amendment.  And if supposed proponents of the Second are offended by this, they are entitled to voice their opinions--but they ought to remember that the First Amendment is first for a reason.

The Second exists in service to the First, not the other way around.

20120501.1225

I was watching the news just now, and saw this piece.  I looked around a bit more, and found this article.  And I found myself annoyed.

The bit about teachers having "no expectation of privacy" is the one which concerns me.  While it is true that social media, being owned things rather than public domain, are monitored by their owners, and those who use them are putting things out so that others can see them, asserting that one specific group of people has "no expectation of privacy," singling that group out for examination, has unfortunate implications.  That the group is teachers reinforces the idea of teachers as somehow incompetent, as it is not those who are trusted who are monitored.

(And as far as the "co-parents" comment goes, what of the calls in the wake of school shootings and instances of bullying--or even in cases of student depression--that the teachers ought to have seen the signs of trouble?  Can we fault a person for not seeing what is on the other side of a door that has been barred to that person?)

My beloved wife points out that it is yet another in a series of such messages, that teachers are not deserving of the same protections as others.  And there have been no statements to other city employees demanding that they restrict their online interactions with those in their charge.  Despite the potential for inappropriate conduct between, say, police officers and persons who are nominally under their protection, or between administrators of various programs and those enrolled in the programs, there is no specific guideline in place to tell them who they can and cannot connect to online.  They are governed only by the laws already in place; teachers are being singled out, once again, as being untrustworthy.

Is it any wonder, then, that the quality of education students receive is perceived as declining?  Teachers work under what amounts to censure, and it is not as if the very web-savvy students whom the NYC DoE measures are supposed to protect are not aware of that censure; can they be blamed for resisting people whom they see as being denigrated by the community at large?

20120430.2030

My reading of the March 2012 PMLA has not yet ended--I have been sticking around home more than usual these past few days, and, as I noted, I tend to do my journal reading on the train.  But I went to the dojo today (and did not do so well there as I like to), so I was on the train, and thus I read.

Among today's readings was the short piece by Joan DeJean, "A Long Eighteenth Century?  What Eighteenth Century?" which bemoans the increasing presentism of foreign language departments in the United States.*  DeJean does not claim any scientific rigor or statistical validity, simply noting that "Enough of a trend emerged" from those surveyed for the author "to feel that it was time to sound an alarm" (317).  The alarm derives from the increasing dearth of new hires--and of faculty positions generally--in period specializations in pre-modern non-English languages, although Italian manages to hold onto its "holy trinity--Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio" (317), and Spanish, because of other factors, has enough enrollment to keep its variety to some extent (318).  Even so, DeJean paints a depressing picture, one which forebodes ill for the study of language in the United States.

Aside from evoking my sympathy for the departments affected (I stand in solidarity with my fellow students of older languages and literatures) and my fear for my own discipline (although DeJean posits that medievalists in English could take up some of the slack created by the elimination of medievalist positions in other languages' departments, I am not certain that administrators would see that as a viable work--and even DeJean is not pleased with the proposition [320]), the article gives me some things to consider.  One of them is DeJean's comment that "We are all intellectually poorer because of this drift to presentism [outlined in the article]" (320).  It seems to imply that there is something wrong with considering the language and literature of the present and near past, and I cannot agree with that implication; there is a lot going on now, and some of it is even worth attending to.  But my arguments against such rhetoric are on record; I need not rehash them here, and there is more to address in DeJean's comment than the implication.

Namely, DeJean is correct.

There is the adage about what happens to those who do not know their history, and those who know that history are aware that the "good old days" are anything but good.  Aside from proverbial wisdom, however, there is the issue--which DeJean points out in some measure (320)--that what happens now is a result of what happened then, so that to understand now we must understand then.  Similarly, failing to comprehend the then shuts out a large chunk of the comprehension of now that we can have, and that is a detriment to us all.  Too, we have a number of tools now that were not available then, and the application of those tools can illuminate then, enhancing further our understanding of the underpinning of now.  And, if nothing else, there are some amazingly subtle, witty bits that happened then, and we miss out by not looking at them now.

I would say that, though, being a medievalist.

My discipline has little to do, however, with my interest in another thing DeJean writes, this in the end-note to the piece: "I name no names so that none of them can be held responsible for my remarks" (320n).  There is something wrong with the world when a professor who is by title well-respected, one at a major institution, has to worry about repercussions upon colleagues for a piece printed in a major research journal.  Academic research is supposed to be one of the few places, if not the only place, where people can speak freely and openly, where they can state opinions sincerely held and supported from evidence, even if those opinions are not necessarily popular or easy to hear.  For such a figure as DeJean, who by all rights ought to be among the people who get to speak freely, to feel compelled to conceal her sources so as to protect them, to note that her sources may well need protecting, bespeaks something that I cannot call anything but evil.

Is this the world in which we live, that those who work to help others find truth must have it hidden that they have done so?  And if it is, can we complain of its sad, sad state?

*I am aware because of my readings (specific citations from which I do not recall at the moment, since I am working away from the set of materials from which I would pull them) and from the simple fact of living in New York after having lived in central Texas and southwestern Louisiana of the problems inherent in the term "foreign language departments."  The languages taught by such departments have a large number of native speakers among the native-born United States citizenship, so that their status as "foreign" is fraught, and the United States does not actually have an official language (the de facto English is not de jure).  The University of Texas at San Antonio calls its version the "Department of Modern Languages and Literatures," which I think a better solution--but it has not caught on as much as I should like.

Work Cited
DeJean, Joan. "A Long Eighteenth Century? What Eighteenth Century?" PMLA 127.2 (March 2012): 317-20. Print.

20120126.1832

As part of the teaching I am engaged in, I try to provide a number of examples to my students of how I want things done.  This semester, I am teaching three classes which have as explicit requirements the composition of summaries; I have them read and summarize articles from the New York Times Opinion/Editorial section, and because I want them to succeed, I show them what kinds of things I want done.  To that end, I recently put together the following summary, posting it to the teaching blog I maintain so that my students can more easily access it:

On 23 January 2012, Stanley Fish's "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation" appeared in the online New York Times.  In the article, Fish complains that the tools being developed and employed by digital humanities scholars are changing methods of study for the worse by eliminating the possibility and need for critical interpretation.  He opens by carrying out a mock-reading of Milton's Areopagitica, using it as an exemplar of the kind of work that digital humanities facilitates, pointing out the inadequacy of such work by asserting that the simple existence of a pattern does not suffice to support a given interpretation of that pattern.  Fish moves on to assert that the simple identification of patterns is the focus of digital humanities research, a paradigm diametrically opposed to the methods by which literary criticism has been carried out for nearly a century.  He assails digital humanities work because it does not, in his view, offer closure and meaning, but rather rejects the certainty of meaning that he presents as the end-point of his own critical analysis.  Unfortunately, the article fails to convince for several reasons: he indulges in reductio ad absurdum arguments based on supposition errors (such as a tacit assertion that digital humanities research never approaches a text with an idea of critical approach already in hand, that researchers wholly hand over their agency to the machines), over-simplification, and, in his last paragraph, an excessive degree of smirking sarcasm.

Fish exerts a certain influence on those working in the academic humanities.  For instance, more than a third of Profession 2009 is devoted to responses to and from Stanley Fish; for an annual publication to focus so narrowly on a single scholar bespeaks the importance of that scholar.  Even those people who take issue with him concede that he does have useful things to say.  Patricia Bizzell provides one example ready to hand for me.  Jonathan Culler provides another.  So it is clear that he is worth attention.  And even in critiquing digital scholarship, he is not entirely in error; there are, admittedly, problems with the field.  Some of the questions he raises are questions that need to be asked.  And there are other stress-points in doing digital work; one of the major ones is the shift towards an attitude and social context which facilitate what we currently regard as plagiarism.  It is a potential problem, as I have discussed.

The great opening of information that digital work performs does set up a climate in which anyone can access and contribute to information, and the concepts of ownership of ideas and the receipt of credit for articulating them are becoming more contested.  That Fish makes claims that grate is not a reason to reject him out of hand; he does make a number of good points, and even when he does not, the fact that he does pose questions, that he compels them and the defense of ideas that they entail, is a good thing.  One of the tenets of critical thinking, that chimera we are exhorted to pursue in our classrooms, is that one must question ideas and claims, and in the questioning, they are either strengthened or shown to merit being discarded--an idea DePalma lays out quite succinctly in his article.

That he says what he says is not the problem.  What he says can be argued against--and any scholar should expect that there will be argument against it.  Certainly, Fish's position against the value of the digital humanities is argued against.  Purdy and Walker, for example, assert the need to integrate digital scholarship into the rubrics used for hiring, promotion, and tenure, noting that it is "often more likely than print to be read and used" (190).  Their position is hardly in line with that of Fish.  In addition, Profession 2011 gives as much of itself to discussion of digital scholarship as Profession 2009 devotes to Fish, and it would not likely do so were there not something to discuss about the matter.  In it, Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen make the point early on that "humanities disciplines must find ways not simply of evaluating but also of valuing digital scholarship" (123).  The position is one more or less diametrically opposed to that Fish outlines in his New York Times piece, and it is one supported by a number of other scholars.  Excellent speller Geoffrey Rockwell, for instance, remarks on the potential for the development of new modes of inquiry by digital scholarship, viewing it as one of the assets of digital work (154-55).  Jerome McGann, whose “On Creating a Usable Future” I have discussed, even asserts digital scholarship as a potential corrective to the crisis in which the academic humanities currently find themselves.  It is hardly a condemnation of the field of study.

No, the problem is not that he says what he says.  The problem is where he says what he says.*

Many people read the New York Times, whether in printed or online format, and so Fish is positioned to be able to address a wide audience through writing for it.  The position is one that not many in academia have; most of us speak to our students and our colleagues about our work and the views we come to have through it, and we try to publish articles and books, but in reality few people outside the academic establishment (and not as many within it as should be the case) pay attention to what goes on within the walls of the proverbial ivory tower.  The affairs of those descended from Chaucer's Clerk do not often penetrate the perceptions of the bulk of people in the United States, something I think I have commented on before (here, here, here, and here, if not elsewhere).  So what Fish writes has the opportunity to exert disproportionate influence on popular perception of the work done by those in the humanities.  When he decides to condemn a field of study, then, he does more than simply express a divergent opinion of scholarly discipline--which he is certainly within his rights to do, both as a human being and as a scholar.  He marshals opposition to the ability of others to do their work--and in that, he undermines himself, for in saying that any one of us working in the academic humanities is wasting time to no good purpose, the accusation that any others of us, or even all of us, are similarly wasteful becomes not just possible but viable.

After all, if even our own are calling into question whether or not the work we do is actually worth doing as a field, as opposed to simply disagreeing about results or specific methods...

Works Cited**
~Bizzell, Patricia. "Composition Studies Saves the World!" Profession 2009 (2009): 94-98. Print.
~Culler, Johnathan. "Writing to Provoke." Profession 2009 (2009): 84-88. Print.
~DePalma, Michael-John. "Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching: A Pragmatic Response to the Challenge of Belief." CCC 63.2 (December 2011): 219-43. Print.
~Fish, Stanley. "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation." NYTimes.com. New York Times, 23 January 2010. Web. 24 January 2012.
~McGann, Jerome. “On Creating a Usable Future.” Profession 2011 (2011): 182-95. Print.
~Purdy, James P., and Joyce R. Walker. "Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work." Profession 2010 (2010): 177-95. Print.
~Rockwell, Geoffrey. "On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship." Profession 2011 (2011): 152-68. Print.
~Schreibman, Susan, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen. Introduction. Profession 2011 (2011): 123-35. Print.

*I understand that this comment is somewhat problematic.  I think I explain the reasoning behind it in the following paragraph, but I do know that I appear to tread dangerously close to advocating censorship.  For the record, here as often, I am not generally in favor of restricting speech, particularly academic speech (do I need to make a full disclosure statement here?).  Fish has every right to voice his opinion, and he goes to great length to support that opinion, so that he is exercising sufficiently due diligence--even if he is wrong.  And the Times has the right to print what it pleases, both as an instrument of "the press" and as a business providing a product.  That does not mean that I have to be happy, or that I in fact am happy, to have seen it pop up where it did.  There is a lot of potential for damage in it, and since I am one of those who may be damaged by it, I think I have the right to express my displeasure at the decision no less than did Fish and the Times to make it.

**I am aware of the irony of my employing a preponderance of print sources in discussing digital scholarship.  Many of my sources, however, discuss the necessity of interplay between traditional print and new digital media.  I hope to be aligned with the practice current research suggests is preferable.

20120115.1153

I am well aware that it has been some time since I wrote anything in this space.  I am just recently returned from a break in teaching, and I actually took the break more or less off.  So I feel reasonably well rested and ready to proceed into things.

Among those things are the ever-present dissertation--which I am still working on, if perhaps too slowly--and my ongoing readings.  I am in the middle of the most recent CCC at the moment, and, as usual, I have found much to provoke thought in it.  I have no doubt that my responses to it, belated though they are, will appear here before too long.

Some of the materials I prepared for my teaching have served to remind me that I do view a large part of my role as a scholar as being bringing new information and understanding to people.  I have discussed this before, and so I am not going to rehash it, but I do find my commitment to that idea renewed as I begin again on the many projects that I have facing me.

And now I need to move on to another couple of them.

One of note, one to which I should like particular attention paid, is my proposed special session for the South Central Modern Language Association conference, which will be in San Antonio, Texas, this November.  My session is titled Bullshit Studies, and it looks at the forms and deployment of various written and spoken instances of "bullshit"--as defined by Frankfurt and a number of others--so see how they work in their given iterations.  I would like to drum up some more support for it, especially since the existence of the panel has occasioned some negative comment.  So please, take a look, and if you know some folks--scholars or not--who might be interested in putting together short papers on the topic, let them know.  Submissions can be emailed to me at geoffrey.b.elliott@gmail.com.

20110131.0908

The online New York Times ran Lisa W. Foderaro's "Brooklyn College Revokes Instructor's Appointment to Teach Mideast Politics" on January 27, 2011. In the article, Foderaro notes that the official reason for the appointment's elimination is a lack of qualification on the instructor's part; the person in question only has a master's, and so Brooklyn College thinks it inappropriate that the instructor teach master's- and doctoral-level students. Foderaro also notes that there is an unhappy alignment of student complaints about some of the (decontextualized) views expressed in the once-instructor's unpublished work and the elimination, leading to the conclusion that the elimination of appointment is politically motivated.

While it is extremely unusual that a doctoral student would be in line to teach master's or other doctoral students, if qualifications alone were a problem, then why did Brooklyn College, affiliated with the school where the once-instructor is working towards a PhD, ever offer the appointment? While it is understandable that a local, city school would seek to respond to the beliefs and desires of the community in which it exists, it is part of the task of the academy to offer divergent and opposing views of matters. It is for that very reason that the principle of academic freedom exists. Once appointed for a term, an instructor or professor should be free to advance views regardless of their lack of alignment with popular belief, as long as they are put forth in a rigorous, scholarly manner as agreed upon by others in the field. And if they are not published, and the viewpoints in question are reported as unpublished, then they have not actually been formally advanced, and the presenter is presenting as a private citizen--a type of presentation which is supposed to enjoy extensive free speech protection.

Either way, I am suspicious of this. Something has been done wrongly.

20110114.0839

The recent events in Arizona have attracted a significant amount of attention to the inflammatory rhetoric that pervades the American political discourse. The rhetoric deserves attention, certainly, and it had been receiving it, but not to the degree that it ought to have--except as it has followed the tragedy in Tuscon.

Shame on us that we needed that to happen to actually pay attention for a moment.

I deplore what was done, whatever the motivation. There are ways to address grievance. Spraying bullets around a peaceful gathering is not among them.

I do not, though, and cannot fully agree with such commentators as Paul Krugman, who on January 13, 2011, wrote in "A Tale of Two Moralities" for the online New York Times that "both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds." It seems to me that resorting to legislation to enforce civil political discourse will be ineffective. It also seems to me that curtailing "any language hinting" at anything opens a dangerous, dangerous path.

I realize that this is a bit of the camel's nose fallacy. But I also make my living working with hints and implications. It is not difficult to cast relatively innocuous statements as "hinting at the acceptability of violence." Also, who would judge whether or not such hints have been dropped? Do we leave it to the lawyers, who carefully parse language according to strict legal interpretation that passes beyond what the theoretical "common" person perceives? Do we put it in the hands of those such as myself, all too often labeled as effete in large part because we spend our time gaining the kind of expertise that allows us to make that kind of determination?

And is it not true that there are, in fact, times when violence is acceptable? I seem to recall that one call to it begins "When in the Course of human events..."

I am wary of the kind of blanket pronouncement Krugman offers, and even more so at those coming from our lawmakers. I am wary, indeed.

20110104.1020

During my morning reading this morning, I came across Stanley Fish's "Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet" in the online New York Times. I have been active in support of Net Neutrality* and free speech more generally, and so the article, which discusses the implications both of Internet anonymity and its elimination, piqued my interest.

So, too, did a number of the comments. I have not read them all as yet--there are quite a few--but they seem to speak generally to the tension between anonymity protecting those who abuse the protection (also known as trolls) and it protecting those who require that protection (whistleblowers and the like). And I can understand both arguments, certainly. It is vital, at times, to keep hidden the names of those who put forth information that needs to be put forth--the old adage about rightness and popularity comes to mind, as do the comments from poster Doc regarding Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. But Fish is right to note that the source of the information is itself part of the information--which may or may not cross over into logical fallacy, but which people often do anyway (the boy who cried wolf did, eventually, do so honestly, after all, but his final honesty did not save him). And the posters who comment that there are a lot of idiots and assholes who use the anonymity afforded by the Internet to attack others without regard to factual truth or even simple human decency are not wrong in condemning that behavior--though I would add that there is a lot of attributed, mainstream media that does the same thing and is yet held blameless...

Ahem.

It becomes a question in my mind of what must we pay to enjoy the benefit. The benefits of free speech are immense and have been readily accepted in a number of places across a fair stretch of time. To follow the Good Doctor, if trolls and asshats are the price we pay for good work and the ability to get and give information as rapidly as the Internet allows, then we are still getting the better part of the bargain.

*In this regard, it seems to me that poster Paul Turpin moves toward a fine point. Internet providers are currently protected in a manner like common carriers--if they want the control that publishers have, then they ought to have to bear the same burdens, including liability for what they put forth.

20101214.0941

I do a lot of reading, and I do a lot of thinking about what I read. As I do so, I sometimes find myself in uncomfortably strained positions, largely resulting from my being (politically) moderate-by-the-law-of-averages.

For instance, I believe in the value of the military as an institution. I also believe that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for certain crimes, as corporal punishment is an appropriate response to certain childhood behaviors. I have heard the arguments against them, and I understand (most of) them, but I find that they suffer from a supposition error. Quite frankly, there are people who will not amend their behavior without the application of physical force, and some will not amend their behavior even then.

At the same time, I am cognizant that I speak from a position of privilege. Being definitionally a WASP, I am very much the kind of person who is serviced by the prevailing traditional cultural practices of the United States at large (and I am aware of how nebulous and inexact such a descriptor is). I believe in the worth of a great many social welfare programs and the ability of an active government to make things better for those who are less fortunate, particularly as I have derived benefit from them--I went to public schools, state colleges, and I paid for the latter with federally-subsidized loans.

It comes up even in discussion of speech acts. I want to believe in free speech; I want to believe that I should get to say what I want to say, when I want to say it, and wherever I happen to be. But I cannot set aside what are reasonable restrictions upon that principle (the classic shout of fire in a crowded theater, for instance). And I find it difficult to determine where humor stops being a joke--which ought to be protected--and becomes something restrictable.

Free speech necessarily involves giving offense. But at what point does "offense," which we may execrate as being in bad taste or contrary to prevailing social standards, become "harm," and therefore restrictable? How much do I, do any of us, have to worry about causing "harm," so that we have to censor ourselves? And cannot the instillation of such fear itself be construed as "harm?"

These are the kinds of questions that bounce around my mind. These, and "Ought I to stop off and get a beer after work tonight?"

20100925.1229

In College English 73.1, Timothy L. Carens writes in "Serpents in the Garden: English Professors in Contemporary Film and Television" that the dominant paradigm for portraying English professors is as out-of-fashion older men who perpetrate sexual predation on intelligent female students through manipulation of access to the ability to perform interpretive criticism. In his view, the work of the English professor is that of providing access to a reified, ethereal deeper meaning of text and therefore of humanity. It becomes attractive through the seeming provision of power; the professor serves, at least initially, to enable students to form and substantiate their own interpretations of literary events, thereby assisting them in gaining power over a part of the prevailing cultural context in which they find themselves. But, as Carens notes, the professor can only permit this to a certain point, beyond which it serves to undermine the authority of the professor (who, of course, only permits the access so as to be able to indulge his--and the gender matters--own sexual desires, normally frustrated because of the manner in which the profession of professing English is devalued).

The article is fairly well-written and provides an interesting summary of depictions (though it could, of course, be more comprehensive, and could use a better set of examples than episodes of Dawson's Creek). And one of its central points--that collegiate English as a discipline is attractive because greatly permissive--is not far off the mark. Similarly on target is another, that there is "resentment and distrust reserved for those who preside over a body of knowledge and analytic skills invested with positive desire" (23). And I think that the resentment and distrust--not just of English and the humanities, but even at times the "hard" disciplines in the sciences--is something of a "sour grapes" phenomenon.

From speaking not just to a number of the students I have had over many years, but also with members of the various communities I participate in outside the academy (my family, for instance, and the church, as well as the aikikai and the occasional conversation in a bar), I have come to believe that there is a prevailing perception that the academic world is one analogous to the religious (a parallel that Carens also draws). That is, people often believe that those of us engaged in the profession of professing have access to knowledge and understanding utterly beyond that which the "normal person" can attain, and that we have it not because of long years of study that anyone could, at least in theory, similarly undertake, but because of what may well be termed a "divine ordination."

We do what we do because it is what we are meant to do, and unless a person is meant to do it, that person cannot do it. Or so the idea asserts.

Like the religious life, many hold the academic in high regard; they view it as a noble calling, even if they claim to not understand what actually goes on inside the walls of the ivory tower. In their minds, it is a thing that, because it allows greater understanding of more of the world, ought to be venerated to some degree; academics are special.

The disdain comes in when, as is often (and not wholly incorrectly) pointed out, those of us in the academy focus our attentions on extending human knowledge in small, small ways. To what end studying how it is that Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur became the standard text of English-language Arthurian legend, for example, or which chemicals result in the particulars of fecal coloration? And if to no end, then is it really a good thing that time and effort is spent upon the study? And with such questions, some of those who have not devoted themselves to the intellectual life repudiate it.

Sour grapes, as I said.

I'm not interested here in justifying the ways of academia to man.* But I do think that the attitude, which is often remarked upon, lies at the root of what Carens has to discuss. And, just to clear the air a bit, while there are some English professors who do successfully seduce their students (not always or only the female ones), most keep eleven-foot poles on hand to handle the issue of sex with students.

Unless I am completely wrong. Which might be the case. Though I hope not.

*I probably ought to apologize to Milton for this. But he was an arrogant asshole, and he's dead anyway, so I'm not sorry.

Work Cited
Carens, Timothy L. "Serpents in the Garden: English Professors in Contemporary Film and Television." College English 73.1 (September 2010): 1-27. Print.