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I went to the EMU-AAUP faculty union meeting Tuesday afternoon, where I suppose the “big news” was a vote to authorize a vote to give the chief negotiator to take a “job action” of necessary. If we actually wanted to go on strike, we’d have to have another meeting to authorize that, so this is just a first step.

It was a good meeting because folks on the negotiating team explained some of the issues on the table and there was a chance for “questions and answers” from faculty. In brief, the main issues on the table (as I understand them and in my own personal ranking of importance) are:

* Hiring more faculty. There is some debate about some of the numbers here, but basically, under the Kirkpatrick administration, faculty numbers have been decreasing, while the ranks of administrators at EMU have been increasing. The administration has announced more searches in the coming year, but given the fact that these same administrators cancelled 25 or so searches last year, there’s reason to be a bit doubtful about these “promises.” What the faculty want is some kind of contract language that pledges a commitment to hire a certain number of folks over the next few years.

* Money. We want more of it (duh). The administration hasn’t made any offer on this yet, so it’s hard to say what they are willing to give us versus what we want.

* Insurance. Right now, faculty can choose among three (I think it’s three…) different insurance programs. The administration wants us all to be in one program called “Community Blue PPO.” The union doesn’t like this for a variety of different and obvious reasons, including the fact that about a third of the faculty have one of the programs the administration wants to eliminate. What the faculty want is for the insurance choices to remain the same. Personally, I don’t care as much about this one because I’m already enrolled in the program the administration wants everyone to be in, and I think it’s pretty good insurance, too.

There are some other issues too that might be significant (including pay rates for Continuing Education classes), but I think these are the big three…

A few other thoughts:

* The argumentative practices of unions in general and of these meetings in particular are always so crude. It’s always a “us versus them” kind of discussion, when the reality of it is most of “them” (the administrators) were in recent memory one of “us” (faculty). I saw a guy at this meeting sitting in front of me who used to be the dean of the college of arts and sciences, then he stepped down and was a faculty member, then he was an interim department head, and now he’s back to the faculty. And on some of the issues, even issues that would seem black-and-white, how good or bad the situation is depends a lot on which set of numbers you use. I guess that’s the fault of the format of these things, but you would think a bunch of academics could be more subtle than this.

* Along these lines, I’m not sure that a faculty union meeting looks a lot different than an automotive worker union meeting. For example, this meeting featured speeches peppered with “call and respond” sorts of lines along the lines of “are we gonna take that?!” It’s like someone holding up a big sign that says “Faculty response: NO!” Of course, I’ve never been to an auto worker union meeting, so…

* I believe in unions, I really do. I think faculty at EMU are better off in general with a union, and there is no question that Kirkpatrick would have made things a hell of a lot worse here in his time had there not been a union to at least slow him down a bit. But at the same time, one of the downsides of unions is they end up protecting and preserving a certain level of mediocrity among workers, because in its efforts to protect all workers, unions end up protecting some workers who probably don’t really deserve protection. And the result is unions don’t really promote a culture that encourages individuals to over-achieve. I could go on about this, but I think that’s enough. I’m glad I’m in the union– honest, I am. I just wish there was a better process.

I’m reading this collection of essays called Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, Editors, Duke UP, 2004) right now because it kind of has to do with the book project I’ve been working off and on now for a while. The emphasis here is more on “media” as in visual and audio and less on writing and pedagogy, but still really interesting and useful for my research nonetheless. This morning, I’ve been reading this essay by Lisa Gitelman called “Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, the Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls.” I don’t want to simplify her point because, like most things that have to do with copyright, it ain’t simple. But I thought I’d offer two slightly out of context quotes:

… “new media” resemble each other to varying degress in their newness, whether they happen to have been new a long time ago or new today. So the phonograph records and piano rolls of 1900 or 1910 compare to the downloaded MP3 files only in the most banal regard because they are all musical forms for private consumption.

If the popularity of self-playing pianos help to challenge the material meanings of printed music at the beginning of the twentieth century, one need hardly be surprised that the popularity of Internet downloads is helping to challenge the material meanings of compact disc at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Like I said, Gitelman problematizes this comparison in this article, but you get the idea.

I remember reading a novel many years ago– I can’t remember the name of it right now– where the narrator, an academic, reflects on how the end of summer is the end of the year, and how the fall semester is the start, and how odd that is in relationship to the way that “real people” think about the way the year works. The beginning isn’t September for most; it’s January. It’s just another way in which academics are in a sort of parallel universe sometimes.

Classes don’t start here until next Wednesday, but practically speaking, it feels like the semester is underway already. There’s a union meeting tomorrow afternoon (Will we or won’t we strike? Which rumor do you want to believe? This meeting Tuesday might help answer both of those questions), a department retreat on Thursday, meetings and meetings next week, and whammo, classes. I’ve managed to stay out of the (seemingly seasonal) arguments about plagiarism and other things I’m not following too closely on the WPA-L mailing lists, and instead, I revised my official web site and posted the web sites for the classes I’m teaching this semester. So teaching-wise, I’m pretty much ready to go.

By the way, for my loyal readers who were following some of my earlier musings on my fall teaching: After thinking it over, I decided to go with the e-reserves option because it’s free for students and it gives me some needed flexibility with picking assigned readings. Also, for folks who offered advice and comments on this post about a list of books for students in my grad class to review: The assignment is posted here, part of the class web site. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m supposed to be revising an article and some other projects as I type, things I should have probably finished over the summer. What did I do over the summer? Well, I did do some scholarly things, including the excellent Computers and Writing conference in Hawaii. I taught a couple of classes this summer which both went well, but which were also draining and time-consuming and all the rest. I had some fun, though I played golf quite poorly this summer, and the garden has done bad because of bad weather here– too cold– and lack of interest on my part. I managed to finish reading The Da Vinci Code, which after a while seemed more like a chore just to get to “the answer” about “The Grail,” which you do get to, literally on the last page.

And I blogged a lot this summer, which I think has had its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, blogging gets my brain moving and gets me to the keyboard to write. On the other hand, blogging is also a procrastinating tool, too. So in the fall, I think the trick is going to be to find ways to maximize the benefits of blogging while still finding time to read and write, scholarly things and otherwise.

Anyway, happy new year.

… judging from my limited viewing of the Summer Olympics on NBC, it seems that the most important sport at the whole thing is women’s beach volleyball. Every time I turn it on, unbelievably fit and tall women in bikinis are pounding the ball at each other the net. As if there’s nothing else going on at this thing. But not that I’m complaining. If I wanted to watch something different, I’d turn it over to CBC…

See this article, “Armed Robbers Steal ‘The Scream’ in Oslo.” Basically, that most famous of Munch paintings was stolen the other day, along with a less famous but still cool painting by Munch called “Madonna.” A few thoughts:

* I’ve been a big fan of Munch’s work and all of the various parodies of “The Scream” for years. In fact, I used to have a web site about it, one where I had pictures of various “Scream” things I collected (a keychain, blow-up dolls, posters, pillows, coffee mugs, etc.) and pictures of “Scream” things I came across on the ‘net and such. The site was popular to the point where I was quoted at one point in time in a newspaper story that ran in The Des Monies Register and then various wire services. The Internet is a weird place; put up a web site that goes into enough detail about something, and before you know it, people quote you like you knew what you were talking about.

Anyway, this makes me think that maybe I’ll set up that “Scream stuff” site again.

* Another story I read about it here, this one an AP wire story, said that the paintings had virtually no protection or security around them. Basically, the robbers came in, waving guns around, and yanked the pictures off the wall, and ran away. Considering the fact that a different copy of “The Scream” was stolen about 10 years ago, you’d think that they’d have at least a little security around this thing…

Annette and Will and I spent the day at the Michigan Renaissance Fair in Holly. Actually, it was a lot like it was last year. Some highlights

* I bought some very comfy and warm sheepskin slippers, which I am wearing as I type this. Not usually my kind of thing, and I’m sure I got ripped off in some fashion, but hey, when you gotta have slippers, you gotta have slippers.

* Will is now set for Halloween with a pretty cool knight costume, including a wooden shield and sword. It was more expensive overall than your “regular” Halloween costume fare, but it might last a little longer than that plastic crap you get at Wal-Mart. Here he is looking knightly:

* The jousting was cool, sort of like a professional wrestling match with horses and sword-play. Here’s a picture to set the stage:

* I don’t know why, but I think one of my favorite things at the whole thing was this puppet show that involved the main puppet trying to gather a crew of pirates. It looked a little like this:

* Mostly what you do at the Renaissance Fair is sort of wander around and look at stuff. Here’s a picture of Annette and Will standing near one of the sorta “alley-like” streets:

* Annette and I kind of figured out something on the way home today. It isn’t that this thing is set in “the Renaissance” or that it is full of inaccuracies per se; rather, it is more or less set in a fantasy role-playing game like D&D. Funny. I just heard a story on NPR the other day about how that game just celebrated its 30th anniversary….

I wasn’t going to put anything up here this week, but I was surfing around this morning and I stumbled across this, the MLA’s Guide to Doctoral Programs in English and Other Modern Languages. This is pretty cool. It isn’t necessarily complete, but the features include the ability to look for a “key word or phrase” (and if you’re thinking about a PhD in English, that key word or phrase ought to be something like “composition,” “rhetoric,” or “writing,” especially if you want to get a job), and you can also limit your results to schools that give their students insurance and such. Neat stuff.

-13 pounds

Since Sunday, I’ve been loyally back to phase 1 of the South Beach diet– well, okay, last night, I cheated a bit with a couple of glasses of wine in celebration of the end of the summer semester. But other than that, I’ve been quite good, and it seems to be working quite well. I swear I’ve lost 5 pounds since the in-laws left. I’m not sure if it’s so much the result of the diet per se, or just the result of simply ending the “eating and drinking fest” I was on whille the in-laws were in town. But whichever, I’m back on the right path.

By the way, I heard a good story on NPR yesterday about the high cost of healthy eating. This is something I knew before– both because I’ve heard this before, and also because I’ve experienced it directly with the SB diet. But what was different about this story was there was statistics about how much it costs per calorie to eat stuff like lean meat, fish, veggies, fruit, etc. (pretty high) versus eating fast food (pretty low).

See this site, FTheVote.com: Trade Sex for Votes. I don’t know if these people are serious or not, but here’s a blurb from the site:

“Believe it or not, even the most deeply rooted right-wing ideologue can be manipulated by sex. As we all know, the sex drive is a powerful beast that has the potential to change people. People lie for sex, they cheat for sex, they even kill for sex – and you can be sure that they will change the way they think (and therefore vote) for sex. All you need to be armed with are your sexy progressive values, a razor-sharp wit, your genitalia, and a mindset that doesn’t mind taking one for the team.

“At Fuck The Vote we provide a Pledge Sheet that can be used conveniently before becoming physically intimate with a conservative. The Pledge Sheet asks the signee to make a promise to vote for anyone but George Bush in the November election. FTV has not endorsed a single candidate but recommends strategic voting. We also encourage FTV fans to take road trips this summer to swing(er) states to collect pledges. If you collect a pledge let us know about it on the Swinger States page! Have safe fun fucking over Bush while fucking for votes.”

Well, I’m happily married, ahd she’s a liberal too, so I guess I’m out…

I just finished up the grading for summer school–EMU runs a “spring” semester in May and June, and a “summer” semester in July and August. It’s a lot of work because everything moves twice as fast (7.5 weeks instead of 15), but I had good classes and enough of a break in the spring.

Now it’s a mad rush into the fall term in two weeks– though really, it’s more like one week since I have meetings and stuff starting August 25. Sigh. Where does the summer go?

Anyway, I’m going to take a short “semi-break” in terms of blogging, probably a week, maybe a bit longer. I need to spend some time getting my classes ready of course, but I also want to spend more time actually reading blogs for a while. Oh, and I wouldn’t mind doing a little gardening, playing a little golf, goofing off a bit, etc.

See ya in a week or so.