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Books Republicans love to hate

Here’s an interesting list: “The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” put out by the obviously conservative group called “Human Events.” Pretty funny list. The “usual suspects” are there– The Communist Manifesto is number one, The Kinsey Report is number four, and The Feminine Mystique is number seven. The commies, sex, and them “damn feminists,” that seems consistent with the right.

But then there are some surprises. There’s Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which I suppose they put on there because Hitler is everyone’s number one “bad guy” of the twentieth century. But considering the fact that Pat Buchanan recently said that the U.S. and Great Britain should have been with Germany during World War II to fight the commies, I’m sure there are a few conservatives saying “hey, hey, wait a minute: lay off the Nazi.”

And then, oddly at number five, there’s John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, which I suppose is on the list because of the word “Democracy” is too close to “Democrat.” And then there’s a bunch of philosophers on the list that are pretty much “common reading” in graduate programs in this country: Nietzsche, Foucault, Adorno, Gramsci, etc.

Update:
Via Maud Newton’s blog, I came across this article, “Better read than dead,” which was published in the Toronto newspaper, Eye Weekly. Here’s my favorite paragraph:

Likewise, the harmful nature of many books on Human Events’ shit list — selected by a “panel of 15 conservative scholars” — can’t really be quantified in the loss of human life or destruction of property; rather, the selected books have been deemed most harmful because they dared to question the individual’s God-given right to accumulate maximum wealth despite the social consequences and to go home and be cared for by a dutifully subservient wife. (However, none of the books is so harmful as to escape the grasp of capitalism; the list comes complete with purchase links to Amazon.com.)

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Friday afternoon time kill/meme

Okay, I never do this sort of thing, but I just got off the phone with Annette and I have about a half hour to kill and I don’t want to do anything productive. So I’ll do this meme, which I stumbled across here and here.

My uncle once: I don’t know, which one? My great Uncle Martin gave me a ride on a snowmobile a long time ago.

Never in my life: Have I jumped out of an airplane (nor will I).

When I was five: My kindergarten teacher was named Mrs. Cotton and we called her Mrs. Cotton-candy.

High school was: Okay; better for me than for most people, I think.

I will never forget: The night my son was born and I went home from the hospital to pick up some things and I noticed outside that the sky was full of stars.

I once met: Nobody– I can’t think of anyone “famous” that I’ve met.

Once at a bar: Just once? Um, I saw Detroit beat LA at 3 in the afternoon (said bar was in Hawaii).

By noon I’m usually: Ready for lunch.

Last night: I watched Detroit lose to San Antonio and I stayed up too late monkeying around on my computer.

If only I had: Uh, a million dollars, the concentration to finish writing my textbook, a decent chip shot.

Next time I go to church: I’ll certainly be sitting near my mother.

I have a confession to make: Uh-oh; did they catch me?

When I turn my head left: A poster that is a detail of a picture by Howard Finster.

When I turn my head right: A picture Will made when he was 3, a poster from the College Hill Arts Festival (in Cedar Falls), and a sleeping dog.

You know when I’m lying when: I brag about my chipping and straight drives.

Every day I think about: Umm, what’s for dinner, what will Will be like when he’s older, when will I write something really good, etc.

By this time next year: Getting ready to Europe and getting ready to be done teaching (again).

I have a hard time understanding: Math and foreign languages.

If I ever go back to school I’ll: …be WAAAAYYY too educated, but I’d probably study elementary education.

You know I like you when: Um, I’m not sure… if I invite you to dinner?

If I won an award the first person I’d thank is: Depends on the award, but probably Annette and Will.

My ideal breakfast is: Just coffee; or eggs (just the whites) mixed with cheddar cheese and Canadian bacon; or plain yogurt mixed with high fiber cereal with a bannana on the side (But I’m getting sick of eggs and my cholesterol is too high, so I think I am going to be eating the second one more and more…).

A song I love, but do not have is: Jeez, I don’t know; I’ve got like 4000 songs on my iPod right now….

If you visit my hometown, I suggest: Go by UNI, have coffee at Cup o’ Joe, go to the Ice House Museum, go to The Brown Bottle. Oh, and go during Sturgis Falls Days.

Why won’t anyone: Just do every single little thing that I tell them and do it exactly right?

If you spend the night at my house: You’ll probably be staying in the room I am in right now.

I’d stop my wedding for: Ah, I can’t really do that. I’m already married.

The world could do without: Oh so many things, but I’ll go with dumb people and ill-fitting pants.

I’d rather lick the belly of a cockroach than: … think too hard about this metaphor. Icky.

Paper clips are more useful than: Watermellons (I’m getting kind of worn out by this at this point…)

If I do anything well: It’s writing and teaching. And maybe cooking.

And by the way: I’ve got to go walk the dog here soon.

The last time I was drunk: It depends on what you mean by “drunk,” but if you mean “DRUNK-drunk,” like can’t get up in the morning at all and/or pukin’ in the bushes drunk, that was a long time ago….

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The fine line between blog as prewriting tool and procrastination enabler

For the record, let me say at the outset that, despite the fact that I played golf today and I am temporarily a “single parent” while Annette is at a children’s literature conference in Canada, I actually did get to work on chapter 2 this evening. I now return you to the blog….

I came across two different blog postings today that spoke (at least in part) about the practice of blogging. The first was Collin in this oddly titled post, where he talks about writerly habits and how keeping a blog can figure into that in a positive way. Collin writes a lot of interesting stuff here, but one brief quote:

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that bloggers write better dissertations, but I do think that there’s a case to be made that weblogs can provide an opportunity for daily writing, an opportunity that will serve a blogger well when it comes to a larger project. Keeping a weblog may help students develop the kind of procedural knowledge that receives so little attention in the formal venues of academia.

Okay, fair enough. Then, over on Maud Newton’s blog (which isn’t all by Maud anymore but which covers a variety of issues of interest to “creative” writers/literati-types) there’s this post by Maud, “celebrating” the third year of her blog:

Frankly, the anniversary depresses me. Three years, and I still haven’t finished my goddamned novel. Worse than that: I abandoned the first one in late 2003 and started a second. Meanwhile, my OCD tendencies rage unabated. I’m still a slob. And I remain estranged from my parents.

The post kind of goes downhill from there.

Now, I think what we have here is the proverbial double-edged sword that is blogging. On the one hand, I completely agree with Collin. I find blogging to be an excellent invention/prewriting/thinking/note taking activity for me. But beyond that, I’ve found blogging to more or less be an end in itself. I mean, I’m not getting huge amounts of hits here, but I am pretty sure more people read my blog every month or so than have ever read my official “scholarship,” at least the print versions of my scholarship.

On the other hand, Newton has a point. I will be the first to admit/confess that posting to my blogs (this one or my unofficial one) is all too often a way of me avoiding something else I should be doing, things like grading student projects, reading, doing stuff around the house, and, of course, writing. It isn’t fair to say that I could be spending all of this blogging time doing “something more productive.” Still… uh… I could be doing something more productive.

Ultimately, I think that Collin is absolutely right when he offers the same advice that I give to students and anyone else who asks: when you’re working on some academic (or other) writing project, you should work on it every day, even if you can only work on it for a little bit. Of course, it’s a lot easier to give advice than to follow advice.

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Will the freakin’ NBA Finals start already, please?

I got Will to bed and sat down to watch the NBA Finals promptly at 9 pm, as advertised. There was some sort of little video montage on at the beginning, so I did a bit of channel surfing. A couple minutes later, I flipped back and the sports guy talking heads were saying the obvious– “Well Al, the team that wants to win is going to have to score the most points.” Okay, whatever.

More channel flipping and there’s some military guys bringing out the flag and Alanis Morissette, who’s there to sing the “National Anthem.” BTW, she apparently became an American citizen a couple days ago. I’m not sure I get that; Alanis says it’s because she loves the U.S. along with Canada, but I have to think there must be some kind of tax advantages or something. Anyway. I’ve heard the “National Anthem” before, so I don’t need to do that right now.

Flip-flip-flip, I take my time to get back, and when I do, there’s some kind of enormously elaborate, well, “half-time-show-like” show on, featuring Will “Once the Fresh Prince but now an actor who raps once in a while” Smith doing something. WTF?! Isn’t there a basketball game on tonight?

More flip-flip-flip, I decide to stay put for the stupidly elaborate introduction of the home team players, and finally, finally, the game starts, at 9:22.

Man, they better not pull this crap in Detroit….

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Annette out of town, part 1

Annette is at a children’s literature conference in Winnepeg, Canada until Saturday, so it’s just me and Will (well, and Sophie, but that doesn’t really count, does it?). Here’s how the first day without Annette went:

  • Took Annette to the airport with few problems, though Annette had a “computer issue” at the airport. I’ll spare the details.
  • Got Will to school late (he was thrilled to be late to school), went home and got cleaned up, went to work.
  • Worked, taught, downloaded CDs I checked out from the library the other day to the computer in my office, and bought the new Coldplay release via iTunes (cool stuff).
  • Went on grocery shopping trip from, well, not hell, but from purgatory or something. It was in the mid-90s here this afternoon, which doesn’t make driving around between stores a lot of fun.
  • Is the air conditioner upstairs broken or not? I am not sure, but it turns out we have a warranty, so I’ll sort that out later.
  • Talked with Annette a couple of times; turns out that she’s staying in the finest hotel in all of Winnepeg. I’m tired and sweaty and dealing with a little kid and a spastic dog. La-di-freakin’-da. (Okay, actually, it isn’t that bad).
  • Turns out that Coldplay had a show on VH1 tonight that was pretty cool
  • Collin Powell is explaining his ass off about the Bush administration on the Daily Show. High comedy…..

Tomorrow? Why, golf, of course!

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Preschoolers online

Via a site called eSchool News comes this article, “More preschoolers going online.” Here are the leading paragraphs:

Before they can even read, nearly one out of every four children in preschool is learning a skill that even some adults have yet to master: using the internet. Some 23 percent of children in nursery school–kids ages 3, 4, or 5–have gone online, according to an Education Department (ED) report. By kindergarten, 32 percent have used the internet, typically under adult supervision.

The numbers underscore a trend in which the largest group of new users of the internet are kids ages 2 to 5. These figures have important implications for school systems, which must adjust their methods of instruction to accommodate an increasingly tech-savvy generation of new students, experts say.

I have some first-hand experience with this with my son, who is now 7, and his school. It probably isn’t surprising around our house, but Will has been on the computer since he was quite tiny, either in my lap or in his mother’s.

And last year, I did some volunteer work in Will’s first grade class, where they had a little mini “computer lab” of five or so older machines in the corner. I came in once a week for an hour or so and, when they were working with the computers, I helped the kids play some little educational games. This experience spoke to the opening paragraphs of this article in good and bad ways.

On the one hand, I was surprised that just about all of the kids had some basic computer literacy: most of them could effectively use the mouse, they understood the concept of clicking on links or other things on screen, and some of them could handle the menus for things like MS Word. That might not sound like much, but these kids were 6, and these are skills that, 10 or so years ago, many many college students didn’t possess. And I’m not just talking about the “rich white kids;” Will’s school is quite diverse in terms of race and the income level of the students, and the students from less privileged backgrounds handled the computers well, too.

On the other hand, computers and instructional technology had a tiny tiny role in Will’s first grade, and I think the same is true for his second grade. The teachers don’t know how to use what they have effectively, they equipment they have is pretty old, and the “educational experience” with the classroom computers seemed to me to be limited to educational “games” where the object of the game, at least from the point of view of these kids, is to click on stuff as fast as you can. I did a review last year of Todd Oppenhemier’s The Flickering Mind, a book that I found to be “problematic” at best, but I do agree with him (sort of) that integrating technology into teaching shouldn’t be a priority in elementary schools. At least under the current circumstances.

As the technology gets better and teachers have a better idea about what to do with them, that will change. But just because kids are used to computers and can play games with them doesn’t mean they necessarily know how to really “use” them, and it doesn’t mean that they are using/engaging in technology in meaningful ways.

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Oprah and Faulkner: the summer begins

So, I am now a registered member of Oprah’s Book Club. No kidding.

I was actually watching Oprah last Friday afternoon under the only circumstances in which I find myself watching Oprah: I had some time to kill and I was too lazy to do much of anything else. At the end of her show (a love fest Nicole Kidman and Will Farrell about the upcoming Bewitched movie), she announced “A Summer of Faulkner,� in which she (and her “club�) will be reading As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August.

Now, you can say what you want about Oprah and her book club stuff, and a lot of literati-types have plenty to say about the O., much of it kind of bad. There’s a good sum-up of some of these feelings on Maud Newton’s blog, including a smug little “debate� between the positions “Oprah is evil� versus “Oprah is okay, I guess.�

I actually know (knew? I haven’t really talked with her in years) a writer who had an Oprah book, Sheri Reynolds, and I did see second (or third) hand how getting picked as an Oprah book was indeed like winning the equivalent of a literary lottery. So it’s no wonder that contemporary writers are pleading with Oprah to start picking contemporary books again (instead of the classics she’s been picking for four or so years now). Simultaneously, a lot of these same literati-types complain and say that Oprah picks light-weight books and that she and her minions are kind of dumb about what they’re reading anyway.

I am reminded of a phrase of certain types of girls when I was in junior high: jealous much?

Anyway, the O. said that you really can’t call yourself “a reader� until you’ve read some Faulkner. I guess I’m a reader because I’ve read all three of the books on the summer reading list, though I haven’t read any of them in close to 20 years. So, with Oprah’s inspiration (it is making me a bit weepy just thinking about it) and a desire to re-read books I remember liking a long time ago, I decided to take the plunge.

Thus my “club membership,� thus this new blog category.

First things first: I went to Oprah’s book club web site, and after free registration, I got in. I have to say I am impressed. She has tips for reading (and Faulkner is certainly a writer that requires some tips on how to get by some of the complicated issues with reading him), links to lectures given by professors (the first one apparently broadcasts yet tonight), a schedule for reading, a place for “Q&Aâ€? for the professors (as if they know anything…,), etc. Why, there’s even a bookmark I can print off! It’s a little confusing to navigate, but a pretty good site overall, and a lot of good “supportâ€? for tackling what I see as a relatively difficult reading assignment.

Second things second: I went and bought the Oprah boxed set this morning. We have older paperback versions of these books around the house, but Annette is in the midst of doing a project that involves As I Lay Dying (meaning that she’s hogging using that book right now), and I didn’t want to share anyway (I think Annette might actually try to read along with Oprah, too). It’s a handsome enough boxed set and includes a little insert titled “William Faulkner: A Reading Experience,� which includes a note from the O. herself, a little Faulkner bio, and some more “reading tips� (with all these tips, they might be making Faulkner too difficult here). Nice.

And third but not last: I’m already behind on the reading assignment– I was supposed to be to page 84 of As I Lay Dying by now. Oh well….

I distinctly remember reading As I Lay Dying the first time around. I’m pretty sure it was the first Faulkner book I read, and it was when I was a freshman at the University of Iowa in an intro to literature class. I recall liking the book quite a bit, though I also recall that class to be kind of crazy in terms of the workload. I remember that we had to also read The Odyssey and parts of Don Quixote and about a zillion other things I don’t remember. But I remember As I Lay Dying.

So, a little bit of reading tonight, but hey, it’s the season premiere of Six Feet Under. I have my priorities.

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Apple to Intel: the beginning of the end?

Apple computers are making the transition to an Intel-based Mac.

Uh-oh.

Actually, I don’t know how much difference it will make for users like me, but the posts on the discussion on the Apple Insiders discussion of the article (see the above link) are kind of interesting. Not that the people commenting here really knows anything, but conceivably, it will be possible in the future (like 2007 or so) to run MS Windows on a Apple-manufactured computer.

It also seems, based on the discussion here, that it will not be possible to run the Apple OS on a Intel PC (like a Dell or something). Personally, I think that’s the wrong strategy. I think if Apple abandoned the manufacture of computer hardware entirely and just focused on producing the OS and support applications, Apple would probably get a lot more converts and sell a lot more software. Of course, Apple apparently makes a ton more money on their very nice (albeit overpriced) hardware.

Hmmm. I wonder how long it will take someone to write the hack that will allow you to run the Apple OS on any Intel-chipped computer?

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The omniscient narrator

The scene I saw while walking this morning:

Driving west down Cross, a large red pick-up truck, the driver honking the horn repeatedly. Three people in the cab, all of them waving their arms out the windows. They speed up. They are trying to catch a dark colored station wagon (a Subaru, I believe) in front of them. It appears that there is a purse or some other sort of bag on the roof of the station wagon on the driver’s side.

The scene (I presume) for the people in the red pick-up:

“Catch ‘em, catch ‘em, Earl! That crazy woman left her purse on the roof!�

“That’s gonna be a big mess when it falls….â€?

“Can you imagine leaving it up there? I hope they don’t have a baby.�

“I’ll speed up.�

The scene (I presume) for the people in the station wagon:

“What are those people doing back there?�

“I don’t know, but I sure as heck am not stopping for them. Let’s get outta here!�