Month: December 2005

Happy Solstice! (And Christmas and Holidays and whatever…)

According to this page, this post is dated at the exact moment of the Winter Solstice in EST this year, even though I’m writing it after this time (by several hours). So hey, let the belated goat blood sacrafices and orgies begin!

Seriously though, it seems that people have gotten awfully worked up this year by the whole Christmas versus “Happy Holidays” thing. I guess it is more or less the sign of the times of an increasingly conservative and (supposedly) religious nation, and I guess it is also the right’s way of distracting folks from what’s going on. Or maybe it just makes for good newspaper fodder, I don’t know.

For my whole life, Christmas has largely been a secular holiday. Sure, I go to church when I go home to see my family (because they go to church), but that’s about it. For me, Christmas has never had the overt religious feel of, say, Easter. Christmas goes on WAY too long and is WAY too commercial to be a completely religious holiday, in my opinion. Personally, I’ve always thought about Christmas as a time to be with family, to see old friends, to exchange gifts, to eat and drink too much, and to huddle together in the cold and rejoice in the coming light.

Oh wait– that light bit is solstice. Because after all, as this page suggests, a lot of the things that we associate with Christmas are really more the result of the Celtic traditions of the Winter Solstice. And when the whole “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” thing came up on the ABC Sunday morning show “This Week” this past Sunday, Cookie Roberts said that the solstice used to be celebrated on December 25 because that was the first day that people without basic astronomical and time telling tools could really tell the days were getting longer again. And if Cookie Roberts says it’s true it must be true.

In any event, it seems obvious to me that the early Christians saw the Winter Solstice as a nice and symbolically significant date to claim as the birth of Jesus– you know, “light” of the world, yadda-yadda-yadda. Anyway, good for them, and 2000 years later, we get a fat guy in a red suit, excessive shopping and credit card debt, the best Peanuts cartoon of all, and happiness and goodwill.

Which is all my way of saying hey, say Merry Christmas, say Happy Holidays, say Happy Hanukkah, say Happy Kwanzaa. Oh yeah– Festivus is the day after tomorrow, so get out that pole.

It Turns Out that Intelligent Design is Kinda Dumb (at least in Dover)

The Dover, PA “Intelligent Design” case was decided today. In the nutshell, the school district’s use of language in science classes of how evolution was “just another theory” and that Intelligent Design was a competing theory was a violation of the separation of Church and State since Intelligent Design is really creationism in a fancy coat.

Good for the judge, who, according to this New York Times article, is a Repubilican and Bush administration nominee. Here’s a good quote from this piece:

Judge Jones also excoriated members of the Dover, Pa., school board, who he said lied to cover up their religious motives, made a decision of “breathtaking inanity” and “dragged” their community into “this legal maelstrom with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”

Another good piece on this was this commentary piece by Lawrence Krauss on All Things Considered. I don’t know if Krauss is right, but he claims in this commentary that about half of Americans believe that the Earth is actually the center of the universe, the sun revolves around it, and it is about 10,000 years old, as suggested by the Bible. (BTW, just in case you’ve wandered into this blog for some strange reason, none of these things are true.)

In any event, it’s nice to hear that at least something smart came of this.

Christmas-time is Pepper Nuts Time

My Grandma Krause passed away this past year, just a few days shy of her 89th birthday. I of course have a ton of memories of my grandma, but one of the best was when I called her up a few years ago and asked her how to make her famous “Pepper Nuts,” sort of her version of the German Christmas cookie, Pfeffernusse. She told me and I made them– the year before last and last year, too.

So, in her memory, I decided to make not one but two batches of these things to send to my immediate family, my aunt and uncle (thank goodness my father has just one sister), and their four children/my cousins. I was happy to do this– this year– but I probably won’t do it again. I have to say, I have a whole new respect for Grandma Krause. It was a heck of a lot of work for her to make all of these things for all of this family every Christmas season, and yet she did.

Anyway, I’ll make one batch a year from now on. Here’s my recipe, slightly refined from last year:

Grandma Krause’s Pepper Nuts (Pfeffernusse)
Every family has their “Christmas thing,” and this is pretty much mine. This recipe is different than the traditional version of the German Christmas cookie in two important ways. First, it gets its flavor not from ginger but anise oil. Second, my grandma always prepared these as tiny tiny cookies– really, more like “nuts” than anything else.

You can make this recipte without a standing mixer, but be warned that it will be a workout. Regardless, it’s a project. It’s not a particularly fussy recipe (if you can mix stuff together and make snakes out of clay, you’re set), but it is a time-consuming one.

1 cup dark karo syrup
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup butter, softened (or margarine or crisco or, in the old days, lard)
1 1/2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup hot water
2 tsps baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp anise oil
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
7 cups (or so) flour

1.If you have a standing mixer mix together the syrup, molasses, butter, sugar and hot water until well combined. If you lack a standing mixer, you can do this with a large bowl and a hand mixer.

2. Add everything else but the flour and continue mixing until combined.

3. Start adding the flour, about a cup at a time, mixing each time until the flour is well incorporated. If you have a trusty KitchenAid standing mixer, lucky you! You can keep mixing this until all seven cups of flour are combined. I shift from the regular mixing paddle to the bread hook attachment after about the fifth cup of flour.

If you don’t have a standing mixer (unlucky you!), you’ll probably have to give up on the hand mixer after the fourth or fifth cup of flour and knead the rest of the flour in as you might with the making of bread or pizza dough.

Either way, you may have to add a little more or a little less flour to get a dough that is moist but not sticky.

4. Take about a handful of the finished dough and roll it out on a lightly floured surface in long snakes that are about the width of your pinky. Lay these out on a cookie sheet. You can create different layers of the dough snakes by separating them with parchment paper or plastic sheeting.

5. Chill these dough snakes. Grandma Krause’s recipe said to chill “overnight or for at least a couple of hours,� but I stick the dough snakes in the freezer for about a half-hour or so and that turned out fine.

6. When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350 or 375 degrees. Take each snake and cut them into tiny pieces. The smaller you cut them, the more crunchy the cookies will be. Grandma Krause used to cut hers about the size of pencil erasers. Put the little dough pieces onto a cookie sheet, being sure to spread them out so they don’t touch either. The cookies will expand slightly in size.

7. Bake about 9 minutes or until golden brown. Cool them on a clean counter or a clean cookie sheet and store them in a sealed container.

This recipe makes what Grandma Krause used to call “a pail full.” Serve them in little bowls as is they were nuts.

Krause's Textbook Post-Mortem, #1: Never write a textbook

I found out a week ago Friday that my textbook project, which is under contract with McGraw-Hill, is finally dead. By “dead,” I mean McGraw-Hill isn’t interested in trying to publish it anymore, and I am not interested in working on it anymore. This wasn’t surprising news since I had seen the reviews that came back from readers in late October, and they didn’t have the “yes, I would certainly change the way I teach to use this book just as soon as it comes out” kind of clarity that publishers (at least my publishers) are seeking.

So, after about five years and many revisions, it is pretty much dead– I say “pretty much” because I am still talking with them about some options I don’t want mention now. Further, because they paid me an advance on the project, they own it. The good news is I don’t have to pay them back; the bad news is if I wanted to send it to another publisher, I would have to buy it from them. (This is pretty standard practice in the textbook biz, by the way).

Am I bitter? Yeah, I’m a little bitter. I mean, on the one hand, I (as a still Happy Academic) don’t have too much to complain about because I like my job at EMU, my wife just started a tenure-track position here, and this project had nothing to do with me getting tenured and promoted. Plus, as a colleague of mine (who is literature) pointed out, I made significantly more money off of this failed book project than he has off of successful academic book projects.

And I have learned a lot about myself as a writer, a lot about myself as a teacher, and a lot about the textbook business and my field’s weird relationship with it. But those are different posts.

But yeah, I’m a bit bitter because, basically, I worked on this thing (off and on) for about five years and now it is dead and that’s that.

Anyway, this morning, I wanted to write about what I see as the most important lesson I learned by writing this textbook:

Never Write a Textbook

Why? Here’s a few thoughts:

  • It is so not worth the money. That’s how textbook companies get people like me to do this in the first place: they wave around dollar figures that seem like a lot at first blush, and then they point out (indirectly, of course) that if a book catches on, well, the sky’s the limit. But of course, that doesn’t happen with most textbooks, which makes the money and time spent to earn it suddenly not that good of a deal. Let me put it this way: I would have made much more money if I had gotten a minimum wage job at a coffee shop for five hours a week over the last five years instead.
  • The kind of money “capital” you can get from a textbook isn’t the same as the symbolic “capital” that you get from a more academic book. Maybe this is just obvious, but I guess what I’m saying is while you can make some “real money” writing a textbook (especially if you get lucky), the kind of symbolic capital an academic can make from an academic book is ultimately worth more. And it can even lead to some “real money” in the form of career advancement, etc.
  • I think the review process for textbooks (at least the process I went through) is problematic at best. Without going into any great detail about it now, it seems to me that the way that textbook companies test a manuscript’s chances of selling is what leads to the many textbooks out there that are trying to be all things to all people.

Having said all that, I can imagine writing a textbook again. Sort of. But what I think I would do is write the “book” first, maybe make it available on the ‘net, maybe try to generate an audience that attracts a publisher instead of the other way around. After all, this has been the great dream and promise of many a blogger; why couldn’t something like that work with textbooks?

Driving the porcelain bus

Uuugggghhh…. I’m moving a little slow here this morning after spending the better part of last night either puking or thinking that I was going to have to puke.

I presume the cause is a stomach bug that’s been going around Will’s school and which he had on Thursday. I had thought I had dodged the bullet because I had felt fine on Friday and while I was kind of pooped yesterday evening, I went to bed thinking all was well. Then, about 1 am, I woke up from a sound sleep, and sitting bolt-upright in bed, I knew I was going to be ill. That was pretty weird.

Anyway, if my case is similar to Will’s, I’ll be fine by dinner. Right now, I’m testing my luck with a cup of coffee.

Hurray! Wikipedia is just as bad as real Encylopedias!

Wikipedia has faced a number of challenges to accuracy lately, particularly from supposedly more “accurate” sources, like newspapers and academics and such. But the scientific journal Nature had an article that said, basically, Wikipedia is just as accurate– or really, inaccurate– as Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s a good discussion about it on the if:book blog, and there was also a good story about it on NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday.

The Building Blues (or, Yet Another Reasons to Teach and Take Online Classes)

There’s a discussion going on right now on the Tech-Rhet mailing list started by Bradley Bleck, who was looking for ideas for the “ideal” technology-friendly academic building. I don’t know all the details, but they are apparently in the planning stages at Spokane Falls Community College (where Bradley teaches) for a new and (hopefully) state-of-the-art building. Bradley said they are planning completition for 2011, so the challenge will be to not equip the place with things that seem like a good idea now but then quickly become obsolete. For example, when EMU built Halle Library, they spent a lot of money on ethernet cables and ports. They turned on a wireless network and turned off the wires about two years after the building opened.

Anyway, good for the folks at Spokane Falls CC. But I have to say that it makes me feel all the more worse about the situation here.

Now, don’t get me wrong– EMU is a great place to work. I believe in the mission and purpose of the university (though it is shifting all the time), I think we have great and interesting students, and I have incredible colleagues. Plus EMU is in a really interesting part of the country: close enough to Detroit to get access to “big city” activities, and right next to Ann Arbor, which means even easier access to one of the coolest college towns in the country. It really is a fantastic gig and I’m really happy to be here.

But (there’s always a but)….

I think there are two seemingly chronic and closely related problems with my job as a faculty member in the English department. First, parking is a pain in the ass, mostly because of the many commuting students at EMU but also because there just isn’t enough parking near the building I work in for all the faculty and staff who work there and in nearby buildings. But parking, that’s another post.

Second, the building where I work, Pray-Harrold, is one of the worse academic buildings I have ever been in, and it is by far one of the most unpleasant buildings where I’ve had an office. Built in an era in which the thinking was “bigger is better,” the seven-story behemoth has 75 classrooms and lots of offices and is still far too small for the thousands of people who use it every day. It was built in 1969, long before these new-fangled computer things, and the result is it is woefully ill-prepared for anything beyond chalkboard technologies. And beyond all that, the place is just generally falling apart.

Earlier in the semester, I was cautiously optimistic about the future of Pray-Harrold because the new president came in saying this was an important priority and because the Board of Regents approved a tuition hike that would be used specifically to help pay for remodeling Pray-Harrold. But the Provost and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences came to a department meeting earlier this week, just when the discussion about the ideal building came up on Tech-Rhet, and, without going into unnecessary detail, this visit put a damper on all that. For one thing, it looks like the money EMU was hoping to get from the state is simply not going to materialize.

For another, even if we do get at least most of the money we’re asking for, it sounds like they are literally going to do a half-assed job by focusing on the first four floors of the building. Now, it is true that this is where most of the classrooms in the building are located and it is probably where most of the remodeling needs to take place. However, there are plenty of classrooms on the other three floors, and the top three floors of the building are also where the faculty offices (including mine) are located.

Interestingly enough, the Dean’s office is on the fourth floor. Oh, and it’s also worth mentioning that, as far as I can tell, the administration has not asked for any input on Pray-Harrold reconstrcution from any faculty members.

In short, they were hoping to spend $50-60 million dollars on remodeling, but it looks like we’ll have significantly less than that to work with. But even if they could spend that much money on remodeling, it would certainly not help enough. So while the discussion on Tech-Rhet about ideal building configuration wish lists rages on (wireless networks, plenty of outlets, projectors, sensible lighting, moveable furniture, comfortable chairs, etc., etc., etc.), we’re stuck, and, unless something really unexpected happens, it looks to me that I’ll be working in Pray-Harrold in the current configuration for pretty much the rest of my career.

And I’m left with two thoughts. First, because the reality is EMU is unlikely to do the right thing about Pray-Harrold, my wish list is a bit more modest. Here’s what I want:

  • Furniture that isn’t broken and/or that is not as old as the average student’s parents.
  • Lighting, wall coverings, paint and decor that looks a bit less like a prison.
  • Windows that open. Or, in the case of my office and many of the classrooms, any window at all.
  • Floors that actually get swept and mopped once in a while.
  • Elevators that routinely work instead of the other way around (though I must say that my “marching up and down the stairs” exercise routine has been good for my calves).
  • Bathrooms that don’t routinely have standing water on the floor.
  • Some version of a heating/cooling system that actually maintains a normal temperature and that does not seem to have been designed by a climate schizophrenic (it is not at all uncommon to have a 20 or 30 degree temperature shift between rooms on the same floor).
  • An electrical outlet that doesn’t come up out of the middle of the freakin’ floor (which it does in my office).

Second, this is yet another reason why teaching online makes good sense for both teachers and students at EMU.

Kong Me

Last night, on the Turner Classic Movie channel, I watched King Kong, the original 1933 version of King Kong. I watched it both for its entertainment value and also as homework for the Peter Jackson version of the movie, which we’ll (hopefully) be seeing this weekend or so.

What a hoot! Definitely worth a rental or, if you can catch it on TV. A few thoughts in no particular order:

  • Like a lot of other stories of the early 2oth century (the most obvious example to me are both the book and film versions of Tarzan), the 1933 version of things is pretty racist and sexist. It’ll be interesting to see how Jackson handles stuff like that.
  • The storyline is ridiculous of course, but if you haven’t seen it before, I am here to tell you that it is even more ridiculous than you might think. Basically, a nature film director gets a map under somewhat mysterious circumstances that shows the location of “Skull Island,” which is home to a group of “natives” who live on a narrow pennisula on a small part of this island. The part where the natives live is protected by a mysterious and enourmous wall that is so old, no one remembers where it came from. There are strange animals behind said wall– dinosaurs (okay, uh, I guess a land of the lost kind of thing, I can go with that) and, of course, one– and only one– giant ape. Hijinks ensue.
  • The original film was basically a special effects flick too. Even if you haven’t actually seen the movie, surely you have seen some of the images of Kong on the Empire State Building and such, so I was of course expecting to see a fair amount of that sort of thing. But I was surprised just how much of the movie was even then about the effects. It’s no wonder that Jackson said this is the movie that inspired him to be a filmmaker.
  • The original was about an hour and 45 minutes, and that includes a lot of King Kong fighting-type scenes; the Jackson movie is supposedly about 3 hours. Damned if I know what he’s done to nearly double the length of it.

More on the new version later….

Stop the madness of MLA: a modest proposal

Here I am, in the last weeks (days, really) of wrapping up my teaching for the term. I have some grading to do, there are some student revisions out there, some other teaching loose ends, and I will also have a few meetings between now and December 22 or so. I don’t have any finals to give, but it’s still a busy and hectic time. Then there are the pressures of traveling to see family. And of course I still have plenty of things I will need to get done before school starts again in the winter term, which always comes here about a week or two early.

But with all of that, the thing that I am right now most looking forward to is I won’t be going to damned MLA.

Ah, the annual Modern Language Association convention, the meat market of English studies, and, IMO, ample evidence for the contempt that the field and profession has for family, impoverished graduate students, and “lives” in general. This is because:

  • MLA is always held right after Christmas, the one and only time of the year in which language-types in the Western World are more or less guaranteed a necessary break to regroup and reconnect with family and friends. I think the MLA’s position on this is “this is the only time of the year where we know everyone is free,” which is a pretty strong indicator of what the profession thinks academics ought to be doing (and not doing) with their “free” time.
  • Everyone in any field that has to do with languages or “English” (and see the discussion in my preivous post to see what that word “English” is in quotes here) who are looking for a tenure-track job are expected to go to this conference to interview for jobs. Now, that’s okay for the likes of me, an already employed professor, and it is okay for the interviewers who have their ways paid by the school. But it’s just wrong to make impoverished graduate students cough up what could end up being well over a $1,000 (plane, hotel, food, etc., not to mention the standard protocol black suit) for the privledge of sitting on a bed in a hotel suite and/or a ballroom with a couple hundred other people and to talk about your dissertation and your teaching philosophy for twenty minutes. What’s worse is that for those specializing in various versions of Literature, these grad students might be enduring this expense and experience all for just a couple of interviews that don’t work out. I’ve known any number of “lit types” who literally spent several years going back to MLA and coming up empty.
  • And God forbid if, while at MLA, one has a life! Oh, the many stories I have heard and how the many times I have seen for myself the stereotypical MLA scene of a crowded hotel bar, all full of people in black or rumpled herringbone jackets, drinking and talking and simultaneously looking for someone else to talk to, or, just looking for someone famous (or, relatively famous, like Stanley Fish or someone).

English can be rather ironically inhumane.

I don’t want to be a complete downer about this. As I suggested on my official and unofficial blogs last year, I had a good time at that version of MLA in Philadelphia. Annette and I had a nice hotel room (while our son was with Grandma and Grandpa), I had fun with some old friends, and the food was fantastic. And my experiences on the job market have been pretty good because, over the years, I’ve had a lot of interviews. I’m not bragging when I say that; rather, I’m pointing out the difference between the markets for someone in, say, 19th Century American Literature and someone in Composition and Rhetoric.

But I’m not going this year because my wife started a tenure-track job here this year and we’re almost certainly here for the rest of our careers– unless something strange happens, of course. And if I can help it, I hope never to go to MLA ever again, not to interview for jobs or to give a presentation or to interview job candidates.

I think there is a solution to all that is wrong with MLA, but I doubt it could ever happen: I think the MLA ought to encourage or require people to conduct phone interviews for jobs and stop interviewing potential job candidates at the conference. Stop facilitating this abusive system with things like the infamous “ballroom” interview room, and proactively encourage the use of old technologies (e.g., the phone) and new technologies (e.g., video chat, a feature that is soon going to be built in to most computers anyway– check out the new Apple iMac to see what I mean) to screen candidates.

I know that there are reasonable people who think I’m wrong about this. I have one friend/colleague here, in favor of the traditional MLA interview, who has said if it is just about saving money, why not skip the on-campus interview too and just hire people based on the CV materials they put together? This person has a point. And I also have colleagues here who did phone interviews for a particular search last year and these colleagues are convinced that not doing MLA interviews was the cause of the “bad search.” I’m not sure this point is as accurate.

Nonetheless, I still think I’m right about this. I think the advantages of phone interviews outweigh the disadvantages, and it might actually make the MLA a pleasant experience. Sure, it’d be a much smaller conference, but at least the people who were there might actually want to be there.