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Me and Oprah’s book club: skipping ahead

I finished As I Lay Dying this afternoon, about two or three weeks behind schedule, at least according to Oprah’s Book Club’s schedule. Right now, I’m supposed to be halfway through The Sound and the Fury, but I don’t see me catching up anytime soon.

I did ultimately enjoy As I Lay Dying and I know I got a lot more out of it than I did when I first read it 20 some-odd years ago. In fact, judging by some of the things that happened that I simply do not remember at all, I wonder if I even managed to finish it way back when.

Still, the whole thing did (and does) feel a little like homework to me, complete with “Oprah’s classroom” and her staff of professor lecturers. (BTW, I did catch part of one of the lectures on The Sound and the Fury, and I like this professor– Thadious M. Davis, who has a fancy position at U of Pennsylvania— better than the last one). And, I don’t know, maybe a lot of the other people in Oprah’s little club are interested in that homework experience. Me, not so much. So since it isn’t likely to be on “the test,” I think I’m going to go ahead and skip it and go on to Light in August.

I have read The Sound and the Fury before, (slightly) more recently than As I Lay Dying and completely on my own.

It was the summer between my junior and senior years in college, when I was a night janitor at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Other than my current job, this was probably the best gig I ever had– certainly it was my best short-time/summer job. The pay wasn’t great (though I do remember it being more than minimum wage), but I got plenty of hours, from 5 pm to 1 am, Monday through Friday, and, for the young person I was, those hours weren’t even that bad. I’d sleep until 10 or 11, do various things around town, go to work, and go back home where (inevitably) at least one of my housemates was still awake.

Some of the janitor work was kind of grim. Since it was a hospital, there were some areas that were kind of… ah… bloody. But 95% of the work involved cleaning things like bathrooms and offices and waiting rooms, and that work was easy. REALLY easy. I almost always worked alone, and if I worked at a decent pace, I could clean up my assigned area in about four or five hours, leaving me three or four hours to sit around. For me, that meant reading. Just about all of these waiting rooms had great magazines– The New Yorker, Smithsonian, National Geographic, etc.– so I read lot of those things. But I was an English major and aspiring writer after all, so I also read a lot of “literature,” mostly good books. I remember reading a bunch of T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, I think I read most of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and, among all this other stuff, I read The Sound and the Fury.

To be honest, I don’t remember a whole lot about the book, and I don’t remember liking it that much. I remember it being a very difficult book for me to grasp, and I also remember someone advising me to keep in mind that the narrator for the first part of the book is retarded (Oprah’s web site refers to Benjy as “mentally challenged,” which strikes me as rather patronizing). Thumbing through it now, I remember that Benjy is watching some people play golf.

Anyway, maybe I’ll come back to The Sound and the Fury another time. The stuff on Oprah’s web site looks interesting and helpful, and it will probably be there for a while. But for now, on with Light in August.

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Maybe he can play basketball for us, too….

John Fallon, the new EMU president, starts work today. There was an article about him in the Sunday Ann Arbor News (login required… I think…) which was largely a fluff piece on what a great guy Fallon is. Among his other charms, he can shoot the three:

Fallon is athletic, trim and playful. At Potsdam [SUNY Potsdam, that is, where he was the president before coming here], he even dueled a local TV sportscaster in a 3-point shootout at half-time of a Potsdam game. Fallon won, earning the chance to do a live TV sportscast.

“He kept his poise and was funny,” said the sportscaster, Mel Busler of WWNY-TV in Watertown, who jokes that Fallon hustled him by warming up at a nearby gym.

Said Fallon: “I would refer to it as preparation, good sense and planning.”

In fact, as I type this, he’s talking on WEMU, which is our local public radio station (NPR, local news, jazz, and blues– check it out). A bit more of a fuzzy/honeymoon piece– Fallon even repeated a few lines from the newspaper article, including one about “taking the rear-view mirror off the university,” which is short-hand for “let’s not talk about the house anymore.”

He did say in this interview something like “The opportunity for education takes place between students and faculty. Period. The rest of us are here in support roles.” The right thing to say, but not as easy of a platitude to make real.

A couple of thoughts to add to all this:

  • EMU has lots of problems– we’re poor and getting poorer because of decreased funding from the state, we have buildings that are literally falling apart around us, enrollment is down, etc., etc.– but, if you ask me, Fallon is walking into a tremendous job situation. The immediate past president, Craig Willis, was just a place holder, though he was a pretty good place holder. The real “past president” was the infamous Sam Kirkpatrick, who did a pretty good job of almost driving the place into the ground with stupid projects like the “University House.” So, with Kirkpatrick as a point of comparison, there’s really very little the new guy can do to screw up. It’s always easy to start a job when the person you are replacing didn’t do a very good job.
  • The “word on the street” is that Fallon’s strengths are as a fund raiser and as creative developer of “revenue streams,” so to speak. As I understand it, one of the “revenue streams” Fallon started at SUNY-Potsdam is some kind of “health education facility.” I hope this doesn’t mean that EMU becomes even more “business-like” and I hope we don’t start going into some other “business” other than the one we’re in, but it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have someone who was able to raise money for the school. The previous three (well, two, since Willis doesn’t really count) couldn’t do that.
  • I for one don’t want Fallon to completely ignore that rear-view mirror for at least two reasons. First, we always learn from our past, and Fallon could learn a lot about what not to do from studying Kirkpatrick and a bit of Bill Shelton, too. Second, I think there are still people working in the administration at EMU who had a part in the whole house mess, people who were able to walk away and keep their jobs. Fallon ought to worry about these people and make sure they really have changed the way they are doing business.
  • I remain cautiously optimistic about Fallon. As I wrote back in March, a Google search of “‘John Fallon’ controversy” doesn’t return any meaningful results. That’s a good thing.
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Revenge of the Sith, English to Chinese to English again

My friend Chris sent me this link to a blog kept by a guy in Shanghai and his impressions of the pirated DVD version of Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith (or, in the English to Chinese to English translation, “The Backstroke of the West”). Unfortunately, a lot of internet traffic (brought about by links like this one) seem to be making some of the site unavailable this morning, but it’s still most certainly worth a visit.

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Summer time and the Happy Academic

It might seem odd to be posting this now, halfway through July, but summer finally started to sink in for me around here this week. See, I taught until June 22 or so, I was on the road for a family trip/vacation until July 3, and then my wife and I went off on a side trip to Niagara Falls for a few days, and then we were entertaining the in-laws until Tuesday. So while it has (obviously) been summer for a while, it is just now “summer” for me.

Other than my wife, no one in my family is an academic, happy or otherwise. My family is a pretty well-educated lot (almost all of them have undergraduate degrees, a few have some graduate work), and I have an aunt who was a high school teacher, but other than that, the academic life is pretty much a foreign concept to them. It is then perhaps not surprising that when I speak with these fine folks about work and such, they always refer to my summer “break” as “vacation.” During my recent family trip/vacation, I had at least one conversation where a well-meaning member of my family reasoned that, since I wasn’t teaching and I wasn’t expected to be in my office on a regular basis, I must be “not working” during the summer.

Ha! Happy academic that I am, I sigh bitterly at this naiveté!

Though they have a point.

Compared to people with “normal” 9-5 office-types of jobs (and this is what everyone in my family means by “working”), the work schedule of an academic can seem pretty bizarre, even in the middle of the normal semester. Take my schedule from last winter, for example: if I didn’t have any meetings or other obligations, I had to be at school two days a week. I almost always had meetings and such, so let’s say that on average, I was in my office, in class, and/or on campus 3.5 days a week. Needless to say, this is the kind of thing that really ticks off people who associate jobs with actually being someplace for 40 hours or more a week.

Of course, I do work 40 hours or more (usually more) a week; it’s just that I do most of my work at home, in coffee shops, and in libraries, and there’s often a kind of fuzzy definition of what and isn’t “work” for me. Furthermore, I (like most other happy academics I know) tend to work at kind strange times, at least compared to a “real job:” nights, early mornings, weekends, etc.

Anyway, this extremely flexible schedule becomes all that more problematic in the summer. On the one hand, I have a lengthy “to do” list, stuff I had hoped to finish earlier, stuff I need to absolutely get done before school starts up again in earnest in the Fall, stuff I said I would do over the summer, etc. I’ve got plenty of work to do over this summer, plen-ty.

On the other hand, the lack of any clear schedule markers– no teaching, no meetings, and the only reason why I need to go to school until late August is to water the plant in my office– my ultra-flexible schedule becomes a receipe for getting not much of anything done. The proverbial enough rope to hang myself.

Can you tell last week was a pretty unproductive one?

In any event, I need to start putting my “to do” list into action; maybe I need to get it all down on a hipster PDA….

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Did you hear? Some sorta Harry Potter or other book is coming out….

I feel pretty confident in saying that my wife won’t be reading this blog for a while because she’ll be spending her time reading the new Harry Potter book instead. Anyway, Maud Newton has a collection of nice and fun links about the latest book here.

Two other quick thoughts:

  • Personally, I kind of like the Harry Potter books. I read the first three– I liked the first one the best– and I’ll probably read the fourth one before the movie in November.
  • I guess you could argue that the Juggernaut that is J.K. Rowling, Inc. is so gigantic that it just rolls over other book in the store, children’s and otherwise. I think that’s part of what Newton is getting at. I dunno; I think that anything that gets kids to read is probably a good thing.

Update:
One of my official blogging colleagues has a pretty funny “summary” of the new book…

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We're not Afraid web site


While watching ABC Nightly News last night, I heard about the “We’re not Afraid” web site, which includes a whole bunch of images that express support for Londoners in light of the recent terrorist attacks. I’m linking it here because I think it’s a worthy tribute and also because I’m planning on including a unit/project/discussion in a class I am redesigning this summer on “visual rhetoric.” This site and a few others might be interesting to talk about.

One thing to think about though: in the ABC News story, they showed a bunch of images from the site– individuals, couples, animals, etc.– but they did not show one person of color. All white folk. When I went to the site itself to look around a bit, it took me a while to find anybody who wasn’t white. I don’t know exactly what that has to say, other than perhaps that’s a commentary on “we” and who ought to be “afraid.”

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“Come saw some wood with me”

You know those kind of weird/kind of goofy Brawny paper towel commercials, the ones where there’s this guy, who is dressed up like a lumber jack but with a look on his face sort of like romance novel cover model, cleaning up a frosting mess in a kitchen? The commercial ends with him holding a puppy in one hand and birthday cake in the other, somehow all brought to us by paper towels. I’ve never known how to take this commercial– are they kidding me? is this supposed to be weirdly sincere? is this supposed to be some sort of woodsy soft porn scene?

But a colleague of mine at work referred me today to the Brawny web site— specifically, the “innocent escapes” part of the web site. In these little vignettes, we are comforted/entertained by a Brawny-inspired man, masculine and handsome, and yet sensitive and attentive to our needs. In one clip, he’s throwing a pot on a wheel. In another, he talks us through a painting he made inspired by our beauty. And in another, which inspires the title of my post, he invites us to “come and saw some wood with me.”

These are freakin’ hilarious. I know someone who I have to send the one about hair to right now.

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The Daily Show and its Turd Blossom Coverage

There have been numerous NUMEROUS reports about Karl Rove’s lying and leaking ways on the web– Wonkette, Daily KOS, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, you name it. I’m not going to bother to link to these things because if you throw a brick at the blogosphere, you’ll hit a Rove critique. Or, if you are in a right wing mood, apologies.
But last night’s The Daily Show talk about all this was the best I’ve seen so far (be warned– this is a big QuickTime file). What I like most about this piece is that Stewart et al reminds us that this whole deal with Rove ratting out the CIA agent (and lying about it) really dates back to the beginning of the Iraq war when Bush claimed in his State of the Union address that we needed to take action because Iraq was trying to get the raw materials for making nuclear weapons (BTW, that turned out to be a lie, too).

Anyway, check it out, or watch the repeat of The Daily Show when you get a chance.

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Rating (studying, really) Ratemyprofessors.com

Via Clancy’s blog, I came across this colorfully titled article, “‘He Will Crush You Like an Academic Ninja!’: Exploring Teacher Rating on Ratemyprofessor.com,” which is in the current version of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. As the title implies, this is a study of how students use the infamous professor evaluation site, Ratemyprofessor.com.

It’s a problematic study for a variety of different reasons that the authors themselves acknowledge (for example, the focus group participants were all at one school), but it’s still kind of interesting reading, I thought. Here’s one long quote summarizing the answers to a focus group question about what motivates students to post ratings in the first place that kind of sums up my own doubts about Ratemyprofessor.com:

One theme that emerged when discussing posting practices was the notion of posting a comment about a professor only if the students really liked or really disliked the professor. “I only post when I have a really strong opinion of a teacher, either really good or really bad,” one student reported. In other words, neutral feelings about a professor did not motivate students to post. Students felt reporting about these specific instances would be most useful for other students. Particularly in the case of “bad” professors, other students could be warned about that teacher and the class itself. This finding confirms what Ahmadi et al. (2001) found; that is, students write specific comments for only exceptionally good or bad professors.

Besides posting to pass along important information to other students, several of the students mentioned revenge or venting. If they had a bad experience in a certain class with a certain professor, posting to the site was their way passing along information, but also of “getting back” at that instructor. For example, one student shared her reason for posting. “I do it so people won’t take that professor, but I think it’s more my revenge in a way. It’s my way of getting back at them.”

One of the results of this “love ’em/hate ’em” rating motivation is, ultimately, very few ratings. I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of students since I’ve been at EMU, and on ratemyprofessor.com, there’s a grand total of eight reviews. And there’s no way of telling if these students rating my class really were former students, either. And so forth.

Can you tell I don’t care much for ratemyprofessor.com?

I do think it’s kind of an interestingly difficult thing to study though….

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Niagara Falls

The

I’ve been meaning to post some about our trip to Niagara Falls for a couple of days now, but it’s still been busy around here with the in-laws and such. Anyway:

Annette and I had a two night/three day getaway to Niagara Falls while Annette’s parents watched Will and Sophie. Interestingly, Sophie warmed up to the strangers pretty quickly. Hopefully, the same will happen when my parents come to watch Will and Sophie at the end of the month….

Niagara Falls was a lot of fun, but also a lot of money. The main attraction is pretty impressive, one of those things it’s worth seeing live and in person at least once in your life. I’ve never been much of a fan of video cameras, but this is one situation where having a video camera would have been pretty handy because you just can’t capture the motion or the sound of the water in still images.

View of the

There’s two basic ways to get the “falls experience” (though there’s a package deal that includes a walk along a section of rapids and a tour of a butterfly conservatory, I guess a building with a bunch of butterflies– maybe if we go back with Will, we’ll give that a shot). The most famous is the “Maid of the Mist” boat ride, which, as you can tell from the picture, takes you into the mist of the falls on the Canadian side.

Me

Slightly less famous is the “Behind the Falls” attraction, which takes you to tunnels literally behind the waterfall and also to an observation platform right at the base of the falls (which is where I’m standing). We did the “Behind the Falls” thing first and decided that that was enough. Besides, neither one of us was in the mood to wait in another line and we didn’t feel like being bounced around in the boat, either. Though, for the record, I want to point out that I was willing to do the “Maid of the Mist” ride, despite my lack of enjoyment of boats.

Anyway, there was a lot of fun stuff for us at Niagara Falls. The park around the falls was quite lovely, we had a great hotel room with a spectacular view, we had a lot of fun at one of the big casinos, and on our drive out of town, we had a chance to go through the wine country and Niagra-on-the-Lake, which reminded me of Ashland in some ways.

Tourist trap central

But man, there’s a lot of tourist-trap crap there! It may be because we had just spent nearly two weeks being tourists out west, but there just seemed to be no end to the opportunities and obligations to spend money. Just about every bill included about 20% worth of tax, more or less wiping out the value difference between the American and Canadian dollars, and everything cost too much money to begin with. You get a couple blocks away from the falls and you run into a strip of arcades, haunted houses, wax museums, etc.– we went into the “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum.” Again, maybe this would be fun with Will, but it didn’t take much of this to hurt our heads.