Steven D. Krause

Hey, guess what? Even The Chronicle of Higher Education agrees that composition and rhetoric PhDs have a better chance of getting a job that folks in (for example) literature. See “Anticipating Offers by Maxwell “not his real name” Fischer. Basically, Mr. Fischer is working right now on finishing up his degree and becoming Dr. Fischer, and he is assuming that he’s going to be getting a job as an assistant professor next year because he’s a specialist in composition and rhetoric.

For the most part, this essay is a big “duh, I knew that” sort of piece for anyone who is in composition and rhetoric. It is certainly something I’ve been writing about under the “Happy Academic” category of things for some time. But I will mention a couple of things:

* Mr. (soon to be Dr.) Fischer ought to not count his chickens before they hatch. He’ll probably get an offer, but the job market in comp and rhet has tightened up a tad in the last couple of years, I think. So he’ll probably be okay, but he might not get the job at the school or location that he wants, especially if he isn’t done with the dissertation and if he doesn’t have much else on his CV.

* At one point, Fischer writes:

“Some fellow graduate students in my field might be thinking, “Shhh! Don’t advertise the fact that there are more jobs than people to fill them!” Well, in my estimation, the field will benefit when more people are involved in teaching and research. With more people writing articles, presenting papers at conferences, and applying for jobs, each of us will have to work more diligently and become better as teachers and scholars.”

Don’t worry, Maxwell and “fellow grad students.” I too think it would be better if more people were involved in the teaching of writing, and I do think more people are going into comp/rhet nowadays, in part because there are jobs in it. However, writing instruction at all levels (not just fy comp) is one of those things that most academics agree is important, and, simultaneously, it is something that most academics don’t like to and/or don’t know how to teach. When you do something that people think is “important” but not desireable to actually do themselves, then you have job security.

Of course, “job security” isn’t the same thing as credibility, respect, decent pay, etc. Garbage collectors and house cleaners have job security, too. But that’s another post for a different time….

Here’s post #2 here, and then I get to work:

I came across Apologies Accepted– the World’s Answer to sorryeverybody.com this morning. It’s a pretty cool variation on the “Sorry Everybody” theme, being a sort of response from “the rest of the world” to the “Sorry Everybody” site. Check it out.

I should be at the gym this morning– or, if not there, I should be doing something more “productive” than blogging. But two things I wanted to post about before I forget. This is the first thing:

Yesterday, I was at the gym, and I came out to find a note under the windsheild wiper of the “piece o’ crap” minivan, which has kind of become the defacto “Steve car” as of late. The note said:

I love your bumper stickers!
Thanks for the needed laugh

You’re welcome.

Oh, and for the record, the bumper-stickers on the van say the following:

“Support your Local Rhetorician” (that’s a composition and rhetoric teacher/scholar joke– funny, huh?)

“What would Scooby Do?”

“Someone Less Dumb for President”

“Is it 2008 Yet?” (which is pictured in this post)

I just noticed that I recently had a few spam messages on this blog– something about Texas Hold ’em Poker. It was only a four or five posts fortunately, and Haloscan makes it relatively easy to clear the junk out, but it does worry me. As I’ve noted here before, the main reason why I moved away from MT and to Blogger is I was spending 30 or 40 minutes a day clearing away spam, even with MT-Blacklist. I don’t know how other options handle (or not) spam, but I do know that the Blogger/Haloscan combination have done a great job of blocking unwanted messages.

Well, until now. It’s just a couple of messages at this point, but I’m worried about what might be coming….

I have several options, of course. I could just suck it up and delete the spam messages that get through– and that’s probably what I’ll do for a while, at least. I could go back to the Blogger comment scheme, which I find kind of clumsy but which works. I could go to a system (Blogger has this, but I could use some other content management system like Drupal or something) which requires users to log in, which I suppose would pretty much eliminate spam.

Or I could just turn comments off entirely.

I know that Jenny did this a while back, but just briefly. She decided that the comments were too much a part of the whole “blogging thing” for her. For me, I’m not so sure. I don’t get that many comments, for one thing.

For another, comments aren’t that much a part of the blogging experience for me. Don’t get me wrong– I like comments. It’s always nice to know someone is reading this stuff, and I do get info and such from comments. But I mainly keep this blog as a sort of notebook/reading journal of stuff I come across online, stuff that has to do with my academic work (mostly) and stuff I want to get back to later. I could still do that with no comments allowed.

Well, I probably won’t do anything in the near future. I’ve been contemplating some larger scale web remodeling around here anyway, and maybe I’ll contemplate a new blog scheme then. Unless I start hearing a lot more about poker, sex aids, cheap meds, etc.

Just to round out/add to some of the previous posts about maps: On Monday, I heard this story on NPR “All Things Considered” about the death of cartographer Arthur Robinson, who died in October at the age of 89. According to the report, Robinson’s major contribution to the field of cartography was redesigning world maps in order to put the size of places like Greenland and Alaska in proportion, which get distorted all the time because of cartographers trying to account for the curve of the earth. “All Things Considered” interviewed one of Robinson’s students (he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin) who explained that Robinson changed the way cartographers thought about map making to account for the “look” of a map– the colors, the proportion of different geographic regions, etc. Interesting stuff.

Just an effort to reach out to my millions of readers: I’m obviously playing around with the layout here a bit, trying out some new looks. Whadda think? You like? Not? I’m not sold completely on the red and the picture is looking to me like something I might need to change at this point, but I like the look in general….

Here’s a link to an article from the Des Monies Register that mentions my sister’s fair trade store. They opened this place, Fair World Gallery, last spring. So far, so good….

Anyway, congrats on the write-up, Christine!

Just in case others have had the same issues, here’s how I solved my problems with Firefox on the Macintosh and Blogger:

For months and months, I was having problems with Blogger and Firefox, even though the Blogger people kept saying that Firefox was the preferred browser on the Mac. I had tried everything (I thought): resetting the preferences, turning stuff off and on, re-installing the software, you name it. So last night, I did a search on my laptop for “Firefox” and I discovered a couple of different sets of preference files for Firefox. I threw all that stuff away, went to the Mozilla site, downloaded and installed a “clean” version of Firefox, and now everything works hunky-dory. Now I can use the Blogger spell-checker and HTML composer feature. Life is good.

And now I can also spread the word on Firefox….

See the homepage for the ElPub 2005 Conference, which is going to be held at the “Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium’s oldest and largest university,” in the Arenberg Castle, which the web site describes as “a beautiful 16th-Century castle situated in an impressively green scenery in Heverlee near Leuven.”

I think I’m going to investigate this. For one thing, I think it’d actually be cheaper for me to travel to Belgium than to San Francisco (again) for the C&W conference. For another, I’ve never been to Belgium….

I had told myself that I wasn’t going to post anymore post-presidential election mourning pieces, but I came across this Molly Ivins essay, “Don’t Mourn, Organize,” and I said to myself, okay, one more.

Here’s the passage from the beginning I think is most relevant:

Some people think you cannot break a dog that has got in the habit of killin’ chickens, but my friend John Henry always claimed you could. He said the way to do it is to take one of the chickens the dog has killed and wire the thing around the dog’s neck, good and strong. And leave it there until that dead chicken stinks so bad that no other dog or person will even go near that poor beast. Thing’ll smell so bad the dog won’t be able to stand himself. You leave it on there until the last little bit of flesh rots and falls off, and that dog won’t kill chickens again.

The Bush administration is going to be wired around the neck of the American people for four more years, long enough for the stench to sicken everybody. It should cure the country of electing Republicans.

This might be wishful thinking, but it’s a good wish, and I think Ivins’ point is merely wishing doesn’t make it so. We have to keep working at it, and we have to keep reminding people who tied that dead chicken around our neck.