Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
I’m watching American Idol in the background while doing some other stuff on the laptop, and I just found out that Jason Castro and I share the same birthday, meaning today. Of course, I am very much old enough to be his father and that is not the kind of thing I necessarily want to be reminded of on my birthday, but there you have it.
Loyal readers already know that today is my actual birthday, but one day is frankly not enough for anyone. While Bill HD claims that no one older 8 ought to be allowed to have such a perversion as a “birthday week,” I am of the opinion that it is exactly the opposite: the older you get, the longer you should be allowed to celebrate. Ultimately, most retirees are simply celebrating their birthdays year-round.
In any event, there were a few family snags with my usual birthday plans I won’t go into now, but all in all, a good time. I have received many fine wishes on Facebook, some family cards, I’ve had some cake (albeit a low-fat/low-calorie one), I’ve been able to goof off a little, I’ve enjoyed my new iPod Touch quite a bit, etc.
One kind of weird thing over the weekend though. This is a picture of the birthday card (and its contents) I received from my parents:
The black parts are my sloppy ways of blocking out address and other info; the problem here is that the envelope and enclosed card had about the bottom third of it sheared off. The whole thing came in a plastic bag from the post office that basically said “we’re really sorry, but this was damaged.” It does make you wonder why this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often– this is the first piece of mail I’ve ever received that was damaged like this– and my bank still cashed the check, so all is well.
I have a Twitter account, but I think I’ve used it about twice and I am still not getting it. But this post on elearnspace makes me think that it might be worth the time to figure it out.
From Inside Higher Ed from last week, “Tenure, the Movie,” which aims to be a movie about the tenure process. Some people smarter than me and/or ones interested in taking this more seriously comment in the piece. I presume this will be a comedy, and I am smelling straight to video….
Nick Carbone sent this to the WPA mailing list last week, and I thought I’d post it here so I remember it for teaching either this summer or next year: “What’s the matter with kids today?” from Salon.
Logan | 115 West Washington | Ann Arbor, MI| (734) 327-2312
I guess mostly as a result of my whining about it (because I knew what I was going to get) and partly because my actual birthday is on a night Annette is teaching, I got her and Will to give me my big birthday gift, an iPod Touch. Sweet! (Actually, I tried to post this from my new pod/touch yesterday, but I got tired of trying to make it work, so I’m posting this from a regular computer. But I’m still back dating the post).
For those not in the know, the pod/touch is basically the same as an iPhone but without the phone: that is, it’s an iPod, you can watch videos, and, assuming you have a wireless connection, you can track your stocks (my vast portfolio, of course), you can buy stuff from iTunes, check your mail, and sort of surf the web with Safari. When the iPhone first came out, my first reaction was “I don’t need a phone, but if I had something that had the rest of this stuff, that’d be cool.” Well, here ya go.
Anyway, I haven’t taken it out “in the wild” yet, so I don’t know how well it will respond/connect to wifi networks in coffee shops and stuff. I guess it’ll work fine. The email app works great, and the google sites I use all the time (reader, news, etc.) have iPod/Phone/Touch -specific versions, which is nice. And now there’s a whole bunch of web sites specifically made for the iPod/Phone/Touch, which is a potentially interesting topic of “Writing for the World Wide Web” this spring. I finally figured out how to use HandBrake to rip a DVD to an iPod/Phone/Touch format, meaning I can watch Spirited Away on a tiny screen in fantastic resolution. This is cool, but I am not sure I can watch a 2 hour movie like this– David Lynch probably has a point.
Oh yeah– it plays music too.
Anyway, mucho thanks to Annette and Will!
My birthday is Tuesday, March 25, and so I’m getting a bit of a late start on my traditional birthday week/birthday month. I guess there really isn’t anything that “special” about 42, although, as this helpful entry on wikipedia points out, there’s a lot to good ol’ 42, including (and how did forget this?) the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
My actual birthday itself is Tuesday, and my big plan/gift/surprise to myself is I am taking the day off and I absolutely refuse to go anything school. My hope is to spend some time playing around with the “surprise” I know I’m getting. Since Annette teaches Tuesday (and hey, it’s the middle of the week too), we’re going out tomorrow, a real surprise for me. Stay tuned for the details on that.
This was on my mind because of the surprise CD set I received today, Vee-Jay: The Definitive Collection, was waiting for me. This was surprising for two reasons. First, I didn’t order/buy these CDs; rather, they were the extra/gift item we received for the donation for the WEMU fund raiser. What I’ve heard so far is pretty cool, but it isn’t the sort of thing I would have bought directly. Second, it seems like we sent in the pledge card about three days ago.
Anyway, surprise CDs are always good, birthday week or not.
Last week, I posted about protests by grad students at the University of Iowa about putting their theses up online. Apparently, the MFA students won. And thus the title of this post.
(Deep sigh, followed by chuckle.)
For what it’s worth, my dissertation has been online for about 12 years now. Now, for a bunch of reasons I won’t go into now, I wasn’t really thinking about turning it into a book. But if I had tried to make it into a book (I think its too late at this stage), I would have had to revise to a point where I would have ended up writing a new book based on the diss, meaning that the print version would be notably different from the online version. I think this is pretty much par for the course for anyone trying to take a thesis or a dissertation to the next level, creative or not. Conversely, I can think of nothing but good things that have come from putting my diss up online. A couple of different scholarly things have come my way over the years because of this, I get emails from people who stumble across the site once in a while, and I still get around 100-150 hits a week on the site. So for me, putting my diss up online had no downsides and modest positives.
I appreciate that these MFA folks are hoping to be the next Vonnegut or ZZ Packer or something. But I dunno, this guy seems to do okay and he puts all of his fiction out there for free.
Here’s a link to an image of the keynote talk at the 2008 SXSW conference by Henry Jenkins and Steve Johnson. I’d post the image itself, but it’s pretty dang big.
It’s kinda cool, kinda makes me want to go to SXSW (though it also makes me think that I might be in the wrong age demographic), but it actually makes me think that I might have students in ENGL 516 do some kind of “end of the semester” project where they make a “map” like this of the course so we can post them someplace. As long as it’s something that would fun and not too much busy work.
