Author: Steve Krause

There’s a good conversation over at the blog leuschke.org about anonymous academic blogs. This link was working earlier, but it doesn’t seem to be working now… Anyway, Leuschke (I think his first name is Graham) writes:

Is it as simple as fearing that your colleagues will find out you say the word “fuck�? Or believing that you’ll never get tenure if the dean knows you have a hobby outside the office? Or thinking that your students will respect you less if they know you didn’t really think Fahrenheit 9/11 was all that good a movie? What exactly is it that you and your department have agreed to pretend: that you’re a robot? No, of course not. But there must be something, and I’m starting to feel a little dumb for not seeing it.

Perhaps it has nothing at all to do with academia. Plenty of people have anonymous blogs, and plenty of people who don’t have gotten in trouble for their blogs. But today’s informal survey led me to wonder if I’m missing something. Is there a plausible reason to think that I, as an untenured professor in a new gig, could suffer from the existence of this here .org?

I posted to this thread– or I should say I tried to, because, as I mentioned, there seems to be some server glitch happening as I type this message. I wrote there:

I think some of the best blogs that I’ve read are anonymous; on the other hand, I also think that some of those anonymous blogs don’t/didn’t need to be anonymous. Invisible Adjunct comes to mind. I think she would have had a lot of good stuff to say in blogland if she had put her name on it, too, and I also don’t think she would have suffered any sort of retaliation from the “academic establishment” (whoever they are) because of what she had to say. Actually, I think just the opposite; look at the positive attention she got in places like the CHE, for example.

I guess one thing strikes me about these responses, and keep in mind I say this as someone who agrees with our host (I personally wouldn’t keep an anonymous blog either). It seems to me that one of the main reasons why people keep anonymous blogs is so they are free to bitch and/or complain. This strikes me as a bad reason to keep a public blog in general, and perhaps a good reason to keep an old-fashioned journal or diary. Perhaps with a lock.

Obviously, I’m not anonymous, but I think I maintain a blog about my life outside of academia for some of the reasons that other people decide to be anonymous. And I guess I don’t worry to much about my identity being out there because a) I’m tenured, b) I don’t really use my blog as a space to “bitch” about my colleagues or students (and truth be told, I don’t have much to bitch about on those fronts, anyway), and c) not that many people read my blog, about 20 or so on a good day.

-14 pounds

I’m a bit surprised that I have lost anything this week. We had a VERY big party at our house last weekend, a sit-down dinner of Indian food with about 20 people. Lots of fun, too much work, and not exactly stuff that is on the diet. Tuesday, we had over Jim and Rachel for “Indian food leftovers,” which was a lot of fun but, again, not on the diet. And then yesterday, I played golf with Jim and Steve B., which involved a hot dog lunch and a few carb-rich beers after the game.

But here I am, a half-pound lighter.

This is just a guess, but I think the reason why I’ve managed to lose a bit even with this naughty behavior is I have been forcing myself to eat less, especially if it is not South Beach friendly food. Tuesday was typical: I had a real big breakfast, not really any lunch (a couple cheese sticks and a handful of nuts), and then dinner. This seems to work well, and since I don’t have much of a lunch break at school while teaching this summer anyway, it works well with my schedule.

One other positive diet thing: the other day, while I was getting ready for school, I realized that I couldn’t wear a particular pair of pants because they were too big on me. They weren’t “clown pants” big– I mean, it’s not like I could have worn them for some weight loss ad, standing there grinning and stretching the pants out to show how I used to be twice as big. I haven’t lost that much weight. Still, the pants were clearly too baggy, even with a snuggly fastened belt, so I had to change. For me, it reminds me that I am both losing weight and sort of “shifting” weight around, too.

I don’t have time right now to think too hard about this, but I like what I can see from skimming the article “Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs.” Yet another reading that might work for the grad class I’m teaching this fall.

I’ve been alerted to two pretty funny flash media sorts of presentations about the presidential campaign:

* The first is called “This Land.” As the description on the atomfilms web site puts it, “He’s a liberal wiener. He’s a right-wing nut job. See John Kerry and George Bush square off and trade insults in this can’t-miss campaign spoof of ‘This Land is Your Land.'” I guess it kind of depends on where you’re coming from, but I’d rather be called a liberal wiener than a right-wing nut job. Anyway, it is very very funny. It’s a big file (3.7 MB, I think) and it is a bit noisy, too.

* The second is a flash presentation of the spoofs of the Bush/Cheney Sloganator. The back story is this: The Bush/Cheney campaign had a feature on their web site where you could add slogans to a Bush/Cheney poster. Obviously, their intended audience was people who were for the Bush/Cheney ticket. But when correct/left thinking people got a hold of this thing, they started generating slogans like “We can detain you, you know” and “First retraded president!” Funny ’cause it’s true; it contains a probably unnecessary soundtrack, so be aware of that if you fire this thing up at work or something. These folks have a Yahoo Group web site here.

… called BLOG:CMS. I don’t know anything about it yet, ‘cept it is one I haven’t heard of before, it looks “feature-rich,” and it’s open source.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is in some trouble now for referring to democrats who opposed to his budget deal out there as “girly men.” He’s being accused of being a big ol’ sexist homophobe for the remark.

Okay, look: I’m a card-carrying, politically correct, pinko-liberal, gay/bi-sexual/trans-gendered embracing family man who would rather chew on shards of glass than vote for a Republican, let alone the Arnold. But c’mon here.

It probably is worth remembering that the “girly man” line comes from a Saturday Night Live sketch that explicitly makes fun of Arnold and his attitudes. So the fact that he used it as a throw-away joke line in a speech demonstrates that he has something resembling a sense of humor.

This is one of the problems of liberals, and one of the reasons why I’m such a big fan of Al Franken.

In my on-going service as a happy academic who nonetheless feels it important to offer cautionary tales to those who would themselves venture into the academic world, I’d like to offer this ad for a job that was posted on the WPA-L listserv:

WRITING SPECIALIST
Southwest Missouri State University is accepting applications for a Writing Specialist for the Academic Support Center at the West Plains Campus. Responsibilities include serving as an Academic Affiliate by teaching four assigned courses annually; supervising and training undergraduate writing tutors; providing tutorial writing assistance to students; working closely with students across the curriculum; assisting students in developing research, grammar and composition skills; working as a staff member of the Academic Support Center; administering English placement examinations to entering students; and evaluating the examinations and reporting results.

Master’s degree is required; an emphasis in English Composition and/or Writing is preferred. One year of teaching experience; excellent oral and written communication skills; and interpersonal skills are required. Occasionally the position requires working evenings and weekends. Salary range: $23,000 – $26,000/annually.

Now, I offer this for a couple of different reasons:

* The salary range, while undenibly horrible, is not the main problem with this job. There are many places where non-tenure-track faculty (some places called adjuncts, others called visiting assistant professors, at EMU called lecturers) make this kind of money. The really horrible thing about this job is all of the other stuff the applicant would be expected to do in this position for that kind of money.

* I have students every once in a while who say that all they want to do is finish an MA and teach in a community college. Well, if you can get that kind of work (and that is indeed a big “if”), this is what it looks like. Or I should say what it can look like, because the community colleges around here pay better and have more humane demands on their staff.

* Despite the fact that West Plains, MO is located literally in the middle of nowhere and they are paying a wage that is barely what folks make who teach part-time, I’ll bet they get 100 applicants for the job. The school is trying to exploit the job market woes of folks in English, and they are likely to succeed at hiring one of them, too.

“How can I avoid this?” you ask? There’s no simple and complete answer, but I’ll offer a few quick tips (assuming you’ve already thought very VERY carefully about going to graduate school and then pursuing an academic career in the first place):

* Go into composition and rhetoric, particularly if you are interested in things like the connections between technology and writing, and get a PhD.

* Don’t apply for such highly exploitive jobs. It just encourages schools.

* If you decide you want to be an academic and you stop at the MA or if you go into the unfairly competitive world of literature, recognize that this might be the sort of position you will end up holding.

Good news: I can use Safari again to post with blogger.

But…

Bad news: The spell-check feature seems to not work right now in Safari. This bums me out since the spell-checking is something I missed in MT and really like about blogger. Hopefully, it will start to work again soon.

and…

Bad news: None of the “features and improvements” part of this recent upgrade with blogger appear to work for me. That isn’t really bad news though since I didn’t want any of those features anyway.

But…

Good news: At least blogger is attempting to make improvements to their service and they have been more responsive to me and other folks who had problems than MT ever was. I realize there’s a different business model at work here, that blogger is essentially an advertising/PR scheme for Google, while Movable Type is how Six Apart tries to make money. Still, while I like MT’s product, I like “free and supported” better.

and…

Good news: Since I have switched to blogger, I have had ZERO blog spam posts. None. Nadda. Conversely, I had about 25 or so blog spams dumped on my old official blog since I last checked it.

So, on the whole, I’m back to liking blogger better again. On the other hand, I just noticed that MT 3.0 is being developed. Oh-oh…

You are the the Hierophant card. The Hierophant,
called The Pope in some decks, is the preserver
of cultural traditions. After entering The
Emperor’s society, The Hierophant teaches us
its wisdom. The Hierophant learns and teaches
our cultural traditions. The discoveries our
ancestors have made influence the present.
Without forces such as The Hierophant who are
able to interpret and communicate traditional
lore, each generation would have to begin to
learn anew. As a force that is concentrated on
our past and our culture, The Hierophant can
sometimes be stubborn and set in his ways. This
is a negative trait he shares with his zodiac
sign, Taurus. But like Taurus he is productive.
His traditional lore can provide a source of
inspiration for the creatively inclined, and
his knowledge provides an excellent foundation
for those who come into their own in the
business world. Image from: Morgan E.
Cauthers-Knox.
http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/loth/m/o/morganc/morganc.html

Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Like any other one of these things, there’s some truth to this, there’s a lot of bunk to it. I don’t put a lot of faith in any of these kinds of things, though I am told that the reason I don’t believe this stuff is because I’m an Aries…

I don’t know if this is an “official” kind of blog entry or not, but I thought this was pretty cool…

Basically, these people are looking at a painting of a screen shot of the Google web site. The image itself is from a web broadcast which has been reproduced on the web. Sort of one of those images in a mirror reflected in a mirror and then another mirror and in a photograph.

See the whole story at Natural Process : Process Flow.