Category: Uncategorized

-13 (or -12) pounds

Thought #1:

I can’t really “diet” when the in-laws are in town. Even when they are encouraging of the whole dieting enterprise, we still end up going out to eat, having desert, etc.

Thought #2 (and this is a real thought):

Exercise is key.

I haven’t had a very good schedule this summer in terms of getting to the gym, certainly not as good as I had in the Spring before we went to Hawaii. When school was on for the winter term, I was able to go to the gym at least three times a week. In May, I went to the gym every day. And that was the time when I lost the most weight and I felt (physically, emotionally, etc.) the best I’ve felt all year.

Don’t get me wrong– I feel good right now too, but I haven’t been able to get to the gym that much and I haven’t been as loyal to the diet, either. And now with the in-laws in town, it’s hard– we just got back from being out to a lovely dinner, for example.

The good news is that starting soon (the end of the summer term is almost upon us, and the beginning of Fall term is just around the corner) I’ll be able to get myself on a more regular schedule both in terms of the diet and the key. In fact, I have a schedule for Fall where (except for meetings and such) I don’t have to be at school until 2:30 in the afternoon. This has certain disadvantages (I’m teaching two night classes), but one of the main advantages is I’ll be able to go to the gym every day. And did I mention this?

Exercise is key.

Because when I’m on this diet and not exercising, I maintain weight. When I’m on this diet and working out, I lose. Simple as that.

BTW, I ended up going to the gym today. Boy, did I feel like a weak little girl. When you haven’t done much in the way of “excercise” for a week or two or so, you really feel it when you go back. So I can’t wait until the end of summer and the beginning of fall.

I really like what Collin Brooke has to say here in this post about blogs and scholarship. I think he’s right on the money– read what he has to say about it instead of what I have to say about it because what he wrote is probably going to be better what I’m going to write now. Also, I have written a bit about this before, and in that entry, I link to this fine entry from Mike “PEDABLOGUE” Arnzen, who also has some good links to more about blogging and scholarship.

So, do I think blogs are scholarship? Sure, sorta. Several thoughts:

* I think Collin is dead-on when he talks about how blogs in comp/rhet in general (and computers and writing in particular) are a place where folks in the field actually “talk” to each other in different ways. And participating in that conversation makes you a part of the “scholarly community.” I see the same thing with electronic mailing lists, which is one of the reasons why I’m on “tech-rhet” and on the WPA-L mailing list (even though I don’t really do writing program administration).

I don’t know if the benefits for participating in these electronic conversations are quantifiable, and it isn’t the sort of thing you would list on a CV. On the other hand, I have been to academic conferences before where people have seen my name tag and then approached me and said something like “Oh, I’ve read your posts on tech-rhet” or “I read your blog entry about such-and-such,” and that has been a starting point of a conversation. Oh, and I’ve certainly done that too people, too.

Now, I suppose I could join these scholarly communities– the mailing lists or the tiny little world of academic blogging– with a pseudonym of some sort. But I don’t think it would work as well.

Let’s say I had a blog where I identified myself only as “Batman” (which, btw, has a ring to it for me: “Batman’s Blog.” I can even imagine entries that complain about that stupid kid, Robin, and that Joker, he thinks he’s sooo funny, etc….), and let’s say it was a blog where I sometimes posted about academic issues. In terms of the academic/scholarly value of the site, I think I’d have at least two problems. First, I might not be seen as credible even online, especially on the academic electronic mailing lists where folks who post with pseudonyms or anonymously tend to be ignored. Second, I might have a hard time identifying myself as Batman in “real life,” which I would inevitably want to do if at least part of my purpose in blogging in the first place was to participate in the discussion of an academic community.

Picture the conference “hallway chat.” “You know, I’m really Batman on the web,” I’d say.

“Riiight, sure you are,” the nervously smiling and confused conference attendee would say as she slowly turned away.

AND JUST TO BE CLEAR HERE, FOLKS– I’M TRYING TO MAKE A LITTLE JOKE WITH THE BATMAN THING. I’M TRYING TO DO THIS AT MY OWN EXPENSE. I’M NOT TRYING TO DIS’ ANYONE’S PSEUDONYM. DO WHAT YOU WANT. And again, several folks have commented here already about how they maintain both an “academic” presence on the ‘net (perhaps including a blog) along with a pseudonym presence.

* Inevitably, a lot of this also comes down to the definition of “scholarship.” I wrote an essay called “Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites” that sort of talks about blogs (though that wasn’t what I was thinking about at the time). I don’t want to recap the whole article here, but I did want to cut n’ paste one part where I talk about “Scholarship” versus “scholarship:”

All of us working in academia strive for “Scholarship” in the sense that we want our work to advance the knowledge of our fields; but we also want our work to be considered “scholarship” for the purposes of recognition by our institutions. Usually, “Scholarship” and “scholarship” are overlapping terms. But emerging and hybrid forms like self-published Web sites represent a point of disconnection between these terms, one that also points to other ways in which what we philosophically believe to be “Scholarship” is not always institutionally counted as “scholarship.”

Of course, the notion that these Web sites have to “count” toward tenure and promotion is one that most directly pertains to a relatively small audience: tenure-track faculty members, particularly those seeking tenure, promotion, or other institutional recognition. These Web sites have value (and thus “count”) for an audience that is much larger than this, an audience that includes teachers working in non-tenure-track positions, those teaching at schools where the tenure requirements have little to do with scholarship, graduate students, Web readers interested in the topics of the sites, and so forth. I also think it’s important to say that the creators of these Web sites put together their pages for reasons that exceed the question of how it might (or might not) fit into their own cases for tenure and promotion, much in the same way that most of us who are trying to publish our S/scholarship in journals and books are presumably motivated by more than simply how it looks on our cv.

* Sometimes the work we do in spaces like this does lead to “real” scholarship, too. I had a (very little) article come out recently that was an “invited” piece, based on stuff that I had written on a mailing list and on my blog. There have been some other things too, but that’s enough self-promotion for one post. And like Collin mentioned, blogs are chances to either post sorts of “pre-writing” projects and/or drafts of essays to see if anyone else has anything to say about it.

Anyway, like I said, Collin probably said it better. But I had to say something…

From the Ann Arbor News yesterday:

Ann Arbor residents report naked man

Heavyset man knocks on windows, stands on porches at night

Tuesday, August 10, 2004
BY AMALIE NASH
News Staff Reporter

Residents in at least three homes on the western edge of downtown Ann Arbor have discovered a naked man on their porches late at night, city police said.

The most recent incident occurred early today in the 800 block of McKinley Avenue. A 21-year-old woman called police at 12:30 a.m. and said she discovered a naked man in front of her home, city police said. The man was not found in the area when officers arrived.

On Saturday, three women were in their living room when they heard a knock on the window around 11:15 p.m., then discovered a naked man on their porch fondling himself, police said. That incident occurred in the 400 block of Cross Street.

Funny what posting something that rubs people the wrong way will do for hit-counts. I’m used to getting somewhere around 25 or so a day; yesterday, it was just over 100, and today, at the current rate, it looks like I’m going to top 150. That’s not huge by most standards of course, but for someone who keeps a pretty modest little “academic” blog that has mostly to do with comp/rhet, technology, and EMU, that’s pretty impressive.

Anywho, I thought some folks here might be interested in some of my “happy academic” posts of the past. Sadly, Blogger doesn’t support categories, so if you’re somehow interested in what I’ve said lately about these things, you’ll just have to sort through it.

HA! comments I’m especially happy about include:

* The posts last October that started it all.

* “Should I get a Master’s Degree? (scroll down all the way to December 1 for this one.

* “Should I get a PhD? which is an unusually “unhappy” piece of advice.

* “How to survive a PhD program (assuming you decided to go into one in the first place).”

* “Should I get an MFA in Creative Writing?” a good news/bad news story. (In case you were wondering: yes, I have one of these degrees, too).

There are other posts too, but isn’t this enough, especially in terms of self-promotion?

And for those of you who want to skip all these links and wonder what makes me a “Happy Academic,” I’ll boil it down to two reasons:

* I had a “real job” once, the kind of thing described in “Dilbert,” and the best day of that doesn’t come close to the worst day of this; and

* Given that there are millions of people in this world who have to make a living by doing stuff like mining coal, sewing carpets for pennies an hour, digging ditches, scrubbing toilets, selling their bodies, selling drugs, committing crimes, practicing law, farming rice, begging, or nothing at all, I feel like I ain’t got nothing to complain about, ultimately.

I would have written this in response to the profgrrrl here, but I didn’t have enough space in Haloscan to respond, and then I remembered the article I was trying to grab on to in my head.

profgrrrl asks in part “To me, the “problematic” case, if there were to be such a thing, would be the pseudblog that hides its pseudonymity (pretends to be under a real name). Don’t know if those exist, but …” I don’t know either, though I suspect there’s at least one blogger out there who is trying to pass with a “real name,” and I’d bet that that person is an academic.

But the point is identity is always a big ol’ convoluted mess, only more so in electronic spaces like the web. One good explanation of this comes from this article I recall from way back when and which I actually found through a google search just now, Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” This is a somewhat dated piece of course (published originally in 1991), but in it, Stone goes to great lengths to theorize the problems of identity in a very literal sense in cyberspace. Here’s an excellent example of what I mean:

Let us begin with a person I will call Julie, on a computer conference in New York in 1985. Julie was a totally disabled older woman, but she could push the keys of a computer with her headstick. The personality she projected into the “net”–the vast electronic web that links computers allover the world–was huge. On the net, Julie’s disability was invisible and irrelevant. Her standard greeting was a big, expansive “HI!!!!!!” Her heart was as big as her greeting, and in the intimate electronic companionships that can develop during on-line conferencing between people who may never physically meet, Julie’s women friends shared their deepest troubles, and she offered them advice–advice that changed their lives. Trapped inside her ruined body, Julie herself was sharp and perceptive, thoughtful and caring.

After several years, something happened that shook the conference to the core. “Julie” did not exist. “She” was, it turned out, a middle-aged male psychiatrist. Logging onto the conference for the first time, this man had accidentally begun a discussion with a woman who mistook him for another woman. “I was stunned,” he said later, “at the conversational mode. I hadn’t known that women talked among themselves that way. There was so much more vulnerability, so much more depth and complexity. Men’s conversations on the nets were much more guarded and superficial, even among intimates. It was fascinating, and I wanted more.” He had spent weeks developing the right persona. A totally disabled, single older woman was perfect. He felt that such a person wouldn’t be expected to have a social life. Consequently her existence only as a net persona would seem natural. It worked for years, until one of Julie’s devoted admirers, bent on finally meeting her in person, tracked her down.

The news reverberated through the net. Reactions varied from humorous resignation to blind rage. Most deeply affected were the women who had shared their innermost feelings with Julie. “I felt raped, ” one said. “I felt that my deepest secrets had been violated.” Several went so far as to repudiate the genuine gains they had made in their personal and emotional lives. They felt those gains were predicated on deceit and trickery.

Now, to me, this serves up the reason why identity in general is problematic on the web, and why it is particularly problematic when folks use pseudonyms. If it all stays online and if the participants in these conversations acknowledge the fluidity of identity in these spaces, then I don’t see any harm. But when it starts to cross into RL and/or the realm of the academic, well, then I see some potential problems.

How do we ever know if someone is authentic and real? Well, I suppose it’s always a crap-shoot until you’re right physically there, and even then it can be tough– this is why we wear nametags at conferences. But there’s a pretty good chance that I’m real, for example, because if you do a google search about me, you’ll find my name in other academic settings– listed as part of the EMU web sites, my name on other web sites, a publication here and there, a mention in some mailing lists, etc.

How do I know any of the folks who have been posting here with pseudonyms (like profgrrrl or bitchPhD, for example) are authentic and real? Well, I suppose in one sense in the same way, but it’s also pretty clear that both of these folks are writing as personas in a way that creates a certain separation between their pseudonym and their “real” selves.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” as they might say on Seinfeld. But the tricky thing is when these things leak into each other, much in the same way that (I am just guessing) that an actor/comedian like Jerry Seinfeld is always having to re-explain to fans and such that he didn’t really hang around with those people in that New York apartment and have those wacky times.

Something that popped into my head while walking the dog this morning:

Some friends of the family (I’ll just leave it at that) recently bought a new car, a VW station wagon of some sort. It’s a nice car and all of that, but when asked why they got a station wagon instead of a mini-van, both of these friends expressed strong aversion to the concept.

Now, I too am not a fan of mini-vans, and I drive one. Why, you ask? It’s a long story, but we thought it was a good idea at the time. It’s a Plymouth Voyager, a ’98 or ’96 I think, and it’s a piece of junk. Don’t buy one. Unfortunately, at this stage of things, we’ll probably end up driving this heap into the ground because upon the purchase of our Honda Civic last spring (thumbs way up on that car, btw), the van became an “around the town” car. We’ve put less than 5,000 miles on it in the last year, and I can easily imagine driving it like that for another four or five years.

So I understand the idea of not wanting what I have. But it seems to me that most people who want the features of a mini-van but not the actual mini-van end up buying an SUV. I think that’s kind of dumb because, IMO, SUVs are dangerous, a waste of gasoline, and completely unnecessary unless you live on the side of a mountain or something like that.

At the same time, I don’t get the station wagon thing. I mean, I’m not a hater of the station wagon; in fact, one of my fondest car memories was the piece-o-crap ’79 Chevy Impala station wagon that was abandoned to me by my parents in the late 80s/early 90s. And I clearly understand not wanting an SUV (I think these friends aren’t all that crazy about them either).

But is it possible to think of a station wagon as somehow “cooler” than a mini-van? Didn’t station wagons used to be the equivalent of mini-vans? In fact, didn’t the mini-van come along as a sort of “cool” replacement for the station wagon?

Questions to ponder as my work-day begins….

An interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed this morning, “Don’t be that guy” by Sarah “not her real name” Ben-Al. I think that Ben-Al is offering some interesting and good advice to folks who teach and she tells some amusing stories of some bad teachers she’s had in the past. It’s certainly a lot easier to “teach badly” than to “teach well,” and I especially agree with her arguments against teachers who try to “trick” their students with obscure test questions. Education isn’t a contest of “teacher vs. student,” and teachers who treat it that way aren’t playing fair ’cause the teacher wins every time.

However…

* Not that this is the purpose of this article, but it would probably be more useful for teachers– especially relatively young teachers– to think in terms of what to do instead of what not to do.

* Why is Ben-Al using a pseudonym here? Because she’s on the job market? Quite frankly, I would think an article written under your “real name” for CHE about teaching would look pretty good on a CV and in a job letter.

* I can’t but help contemplate the “guy” part of all this, especially in light of gendered-tinged discussion about anonymously written blogs. Have all of her bad teachers really been “guys?” And can you imagine an article written by someone named Samuel Ben-Al titled “Don’t be that gal?”

I have a busy rest of the week coming up here, with an “end of the summer term” grading push coinciding with a visit from the in-laws. But I had to post about this one more time after reading what Collin said about all this over on his blog. I don’t want to drag him into this (and I don’t think he really wants to be dragged in, either), but I like what he mentions with this post about the difference between academic blogs and blogs written by people, anonymously or not, who happen to be academics.

I wish I would have said/thought of that in the first place.

I’m a lot more interested in academic blogs than blogs that happen to be written by academics, as I think is evident in what I’ve written here in the last few days.

THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT THOSE OF YOU WHO KEEP PERSONAL BLOGS WRITTEN UNDER A PSEUDONYM ARE JUST WRONG, NOR IS THIS MY WAY OF POLICING OR JUDGING THE WAY OTHERS BLOG! Short of posting pictures of kiddie-porn and other similarly appaling things, I don’t really care what people who may (or may not) be academic post on their blogs. Do what you want.

Just thought I’d make that obvious– folks didn’t seem to get that before.

The problem I have as a reader is the line between “academic blogs” and “blogs written by people who happen to be academics” is constantly shifting. Again, Collin talks about this in smart ways here, and he more or less exemplifies the way that “the personal” shows up in academic blogs right here.

I’m not saying it’s “wrong” for Collin or anyone else to mix the “personal” with the “professional!” But what I am saying is I think it potentially problematizes the way us academics who want to “count” and “cite” blogs. This is the reason why I personally keep my “academic” musings here, and my “non-academic musings here. This is of course a completely artificial and leaky separation in aspects of my identity, but it works for me.

The last thing I would ever do is try to propose the answer. I’m just thinking with my fingers here, which is pretty much the purpose of this blog for me. (And that’s a sentence that could be dissected quite a bit– a blog with a purpose, a blog where the purpose is more for the writer than the reader {I think of the distinction between “writer-based” prose and “reader-based” prose…}, a blog where I’m trying to “think” and put on my “academic” persona, etc.)

Been an interesting day around here. As I mentioned earlier, I have found myself in the midst of a “discussion” about the use of pseudonyms in blog authorship, something I kind of feel like I stumbled into with a sidebar comment about the blog where I found the article I was discussing– see this to see what I mean. And boy (and girl), let me tell ya: if there’s one thing I know now from all this is that the people who blog under pseudonyms take this stuff seriously.

Two thoughts and then a thought with some questions:

Thought #1: I don’t know if I want to say that I’ve “seen the light” or not, but the discussion here and elsewhere has been educational in that I can see some of the reasons why folks might want to blog anonymously and/or under pseudonyms. Clearly, most the people who do this are women in “real life,” and they point to reasons why it’s important for them to preserve their privacy. I can’t critique that. Some of the folks who blog anonymously say they do so because of the unpleasant work situations they find themselves in, something I can relate to (my first academic job was less than ideal), but that isn’t the case for me now. As much as I complain about EMU, I know that on the whole, it’s a good place to work.

Now personally, I’m not sure I would blog about EMU or anything else if I felt like I might get canned or “in trouble” for what I might say, anonymous or not. But that’s a slightly different issue…

And hey, let’s face it, using a pseudonym is fun. I guess I was trying to be cute with my last post on this, but it really is like putting on a costume, isn’t it? By day, I’m a mild-mannered academic named Steven D. Krause; by night, I’m a blogger named Batman! Has a ring to it, right?

Thought #2: I think part of my “problem” here is the idea of writing under a pseudonym is so unappealing to me. I would never write scholarly things under a pseudonym, and I would only write fiction under a pseudonym if I was absolutely forced to do so. (This kind of happened to an old friend of mine. He published a couple of science fiction novels under his real name, and when they didn’t sell that well, his new publisher said he’d have to switch names).

Why wouldn’t I write under a pseudonym? Part of it is my own desire over “ownership” of my writing. Theoretically, owning your own words is impossible; but at the same time, I want to receive credit from folks who quote and cite me, and I especially want to receive the meager awards that come from academic publishing.

The other part of it is I see my writing as “public” anyway. Except for writing in a private journal (which I do occasionally) or email messages to some close friends, I always write with the a larger and “more public” audience in mind. The idea of writing for a larger and public audience is a part of conventional writing pedagogy nowadays, too. It’s one of the reasons why I would never give students an assignment like “write about a very personal and important event” because assignments like this create situations where students write an essay about something so personal that they are unwilling to share it with classmates and where they are putting me in the position of being a sort of therapist.

Thought #3 (with questions): One of the basic measures for “credibility” and (dare I say it?) “authenticity” on the web has always been authorship. In the (not so) old days, just about everyone dismissed newsgroups as an incredibly non-credible source for information on the ‘net. Why? Because posts were so frequently made anonymously and/or with pseudonyms and because there was absolutely no filtering mechanism out there. I mean, my Lord, anybody could say anything, and you really had no idea who they were!

Now, if I am to believe the folks who advocate for the use of pseudonyms on blogs, it seems the tables have turned. Now, in this medium where literally anyone can create their own “fake” identity and have a blog up and running in minutes, the use of a pseudonym frees the writer completely from the restraints of identity, and this allows her or him to truly speak their mind. By eliminating the person behind the name, the writer can speak about the personal. By using an identity that is intentionally “false,” the writer can speak “the truth.” I’m tempted to say something like “peace” through “war” and “freedom” through “policing,” but you get the idea.

So, the questions I have here:

* When did the tables turn on this idea of “not my real name” equals credibility and authenticity?

* I probably shouldn’t take this same attitude with newsgroup posts or spam messages; but why not?

* Blogs are still in the early stages of being seen as “legitimate” by the academy at large; how does the abundance of anonymous and pseudonym-authored blogs effect this effort at legitimacy?

* Am I to take seriously as credible, academic writers folks who only identify themselves by their pseudonyms, things like “proffgrrrl” or “Dr. Crazy” or “BitchPhD” or “Invisible Adjunct?”

* Does this make sense?

See this review from last week’s The New Yorker, “Bad Comma” by Louis Menand. It has a bit of a “Mr. Smarty-Pants” tone to it, but I guess since it’s critiquing a book that ias a bit of a “Ms. Smarty-Pants” tone about commas, it’s fitting enough.

For what it’s worth: I’m really glad I came across this on the web because I had intended to buy the issue of the magazine at the local book store for this article. Given some of my teaching, especially this course, I thought it might come in handy as a reading assignment. But I was too late to the store. Thanks to the web for saving the day, though who knows how long the article will be available for free.