. . . in the new Achewood. “The Ghost of Freefallin’ Personal Standards Yet to Come” — love it.
Chris Onstad is a genius.
I wonder if this strip would work as part of my mini-collection of Dickensian stuff (cigarette card, action figure, finger bowls, etc.)?
In 1857, Hans Christian Andersen was invited to stay at Gad’s Hill for 2 weeks with Dickens and his family. He stayed five. Apparently, Andersen never had a grandmother teach him that “fish and guests stink after 3 days.”  Dickensian snark has recently been unearthed by antiquarian bookdealers. A sample:
The Danish man of letters, a tall, gaunt and rather ungainly character, extended his visit to five weeks. Dickens dropped polite hints that he should leave, but they were, perhaps, too subtle. After he finally left, Dickens wrote on the mirror in the guestroom: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!”
This all is coming back to public attention thanks to an antiquarian named David Brass, who’s quotable himself:
David Brass, a Californian antiquarian dealer, who is bringing the volume to the Olympia book fair, said: “To Andersen, the visit was timeless Elysium, a holiday, a fairy tale come true. To Dickens, his wife, and particularly his children it was eternal torment, a holy hell, a horror story made real.
. . .
Mr Brass said: “This is the greatest Dickens discovery since I’ve been in the rare book business, over 40 years. It is a legendary literary artefact. I feel like Indiana Jones. It’s like finding the Lost Ark but without the curse, aggravation and people trying to kill you.”
(Via the Bookninja.)
Those interested in more Dickensian fairy-tale controversy may well enjoy “Frauds on the Fairies,” his vitriolic review of George Cruikshank’s politically-correct fairy tales:
If such a precedent were followed we must soon become disgusted with the old stories into which modern personages so obtruded themselves, and the stories themselves must soon be lost. With seven Blue Beards in the field, each coming at a gallop from his own platform mounted on a foaming hobby a generation or two hence would not know which was which, and the great original Blue Beard would be confounded with the counterfeits. Imagine a Total abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe, with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum left in. Imagine a Vegetarian edition, with the goat’s flesh left out. Imagine a Kentucky edition, to introduce a flogging of that ‘tarnal old nigger Friday, twice a week. Imagine an Aborigines Protection Society edition, to deny cannibalism and make Robinson embrace the amiable savages whenever they landed. Robinson Crusoe would be “edited” out of his island in a hundred years, and the island would be swallowed up in the editorial ocean.
This morning, the most e-mailed story on NYTimes.com is Sara Reistad-Long’s “Older Brain May Really Be a Wiser Brain,” which argues that so-called “senior moments” are not a sign of deterioration, but rather the marker of a mature brain’s command of a wider array of information, and a better sense of what’s important. You can just see people of a certain age forwarding the article to each other, or twenty-something children forwarding it affectionately to their parents.
I don’t doubt at all that there mental benefits from age and long experience, but there is something odd about the way this phenomenon is described:
But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.
“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,†said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.â€
We’ll pass over the fact that this may be the first time “wisdom” has ever been defined as “possessing lots of information” (honestly, what happened to concentration and reflection?), and also note this:
In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.
The scientists go on to posit a link between this inability to ignore excess data and wisdom. That’s all fine, and as someone who’s easily–ooh, shiny! what?–distracted (just ask a student) I’m glad to have it recognized as a virtue.
But it is striking to think that if these minds were teenaged, rather than older, we’d probably be calling their “distractability” a sign of ADD, and deploring the effects of growing up in a hyperlinked culture. There is a certain kind of psychological argument that I just find terribly unconvincing, no matter how dressed up in the trappings of science and statistics. Even in this article, “wisdom” gets so many different definitions that it’s hard to understand exactly what’s being claimed. Actually, I think the *reason* this style of argument is unconvincing is that it pretends to be scientific.
And, snarkiness about psychologists aside, I would be interested in seeing a debate between these pro-distraction authors and the authors of the well-known study that describes the distractions of multitasking as worse than marijuana. Maybe that’s a 2008-era shortcut to wisdom: some pot and ten windows open in Adium, plus, of course, Twitter.
Update (June 17):Â Hey, I got one right: Here’s William Saletan speculating on ADHD as an evolutionary advantage. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
Anyone who’s been to downtown New Britain knows that it needs development badly. (And replacing Famous Dave’s with a Denny’s isn’t a step in the right direction.)Â But today’s report in the Herald is a little worrisome:
But there were no members of the public there Thursday to see the clear Plexiglas mockups that towered above existing buildings.
Only officials sat in the seats of the council chambers.
. . .
When the panel moved to close the public hearing, after hearing no comments from the public, Harrall urged them to keep it open while the commission considers the proposed zone changes that go with the master plan.
It’s not very encouraging that the *consultant* has to be the one urging the city to keep the process open.
(The “no comments from the public” bit isn’t very convincing, either: Neither the city nor the Herald make it very easy to find out information, or to recognize that input is being called for.)
I think everyone who’s ever seen Friends will agree that Ross Geller’s academic career is depicted with scrupulous accuracy. His career path from adjunct instructor, to keynote speaker at prestigious conferences, to tenure at NYU (without ever spending time on research!) is, it’s fair to say, one that faculty emulate every day.
Kidding aside, I do think that anyone who’s been involved in a grading binge at the end of a semester can identify with this moment:
It’s no penis pump, but this “Victorian-age video phone” is still pretty cool:
As the first splinters of sunlight spread their warmth upon the South Bank of the River Thames this morning, it became clear that after more than a century, the vision of Victorian engineer Alexander Stanhope St George had finally been realized.
In all its optical brilliance and brass and wood, there stood the Telectroscope — a 37 feet long by 11 feet tall dream of a device allowing people on one side of the Atlantic to look into its person-size lens and, in real time, see those on the other side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. (Think 19th century webcam. Or maybe Victorian-age video phone.)
Particularly fun is the story’s footnote, which looks as if it may have come straight from the press release:
 The Telectroscope will be on display and open to the public 24 hours a day in London and New York until June 15. Artichoke is arranging requests to synchronize special reunions between friends and family or, the company hopes, maybe even a marriage proposal.
[I had written this for our campus listserv, but a configuration problem rejected it. Then, I thought better of it, and decided that it would make a better blog post. The context is the semi-annual complaining about student writing that crops up at the end of the semester, invariably by people who don’t teach a lot of writing-orientated courses such as composition, and which invariably turns into, ‘How could this student have gotten a B in composition when he can’t write a lick?’.]
The causes of bad student writing are complex and generally poorly understood by those who haven’t studied it.
While it is comforting to cast aspersions on the integrity of faculty in intro-level writing classes (whether here or at community colleges), who are alleged to grade on effort, improvement, or other nonacademic reasons, this misses a key issue.
I have an ex-wife who, after graduating from law school, frequently taught adjunct sections of legal writing. At first, she was surprised by how poorly her students’ writing was–even students who’d sailed through college with A averages, and who had worked on literary magazines or newspapers.
Research on student writing, however, indicates that student writing regresses–sometimes falling utterly apart–when students encounter unfamiliar material, or are asked to think about that material in new ways. Common milestones for such failures include: entering the major, writing capstone projects, entering graduate school, taking courses in wholly unfamiliar fields, etc.
What my ex was seeing, then, was good students who were momentarily baffled by the requirement to “write like a lawyer.”
Some students are bad writers; some students are good writers outside the university, but are bad academic writers; some students are good writers who are struggling with new concepts.
Some students are good writers encountering bad or unfamiliar assignments. For example, I have a carefully sequenced set of assignments that, early in the semester, asks students to exaggerate certain qualities of their writing, in order to reflect on the process of literary analysis. The results are, at least initially, almost always “bad.” But the eventual payoff can be quite startling, as students begin to transfer the targeted skills to other assignments. Other times, I’ve been so enthralled by a specific concept that I crafted prompts that produced unreadable prose.
And some students just aren’t that into you. My wife is the most insightful reader of student writing I know, and we’ve had students in common who were good writers for her, but not for me, and vice versa. In each of those situations, the problem was that the student just wasn’t connecting with the class, whether because of differing styles, or the content, or home/work struggles, or some other reason.
I’ve taught a lot of composition, at 4 different universities, and am not blind to the challenges inflicted on us by student writing. And I’m pretty old-school in my expectations. But vague complaints about student writing in December and May are . . . unhelpful, except as meaningless venting or gratuitous insults.
For the boy’s birthdays, we provide in the goody bags mix cds of his favorite songs. Here’s the playlist for today’s party:
1. The Hold Steady, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”
2. Everclear, “Speed Racer”
3. Beefy, “I’m No Superman”
4. Ozzy Osbourne, “Iron Man”
5. Ookla the Mok, “Super Powers”
6. Alvin and the Chipmunks, “Witch Doctor”
7. Alvin and the Chipmunks, “Bad Day”
8. Ralph Covert, “Four Little Duckies”
9. Flogging Molly, “What’s Left of the Flag”
10. Bruce Springsteen, “Jesse James”
11. Bruce Springsteen, “Old Dan Tucker”
12. The Wild Colonial Boys, “Kookaburra Sits on the Old Gum Tree”
13. Bruce Springsteen, “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?”
14. Counting Crows, “This Land Is Your Land”
(Beefy & Ookla the Mok I found via the Geek Dads‘ new HipTrax podcast.)
From one spring when I was teaching Atalanta in Calydon, two mock-Mother’s Day cards with loving sentiments from Swinburne:
There’s some chance this is recycled from a previous year, but I think I purged that post in the great WordPress changeover. And, anyway, this weekend is grading + the Boy’s 5th birthday party + Mother’s day.
Random Mother’s Day gripe: Soccer practices were pre-emptively canceled for Sunday–because of the holiday–but our last practice, complete with trophy presentations and such, is on Father’s Day. Where’s the justice?
From this morning’s InsideHigherEd.com:
The college social scene is the setting or context for much of the unwanted sexual contact that happens on campuses, as a new report by researchers at the University of New Hampshire, exploring the experiences of the university’s undergraduates, details.
For both female and male students, unwanted sexual contact occurs where they live, at social events, and often when the perpetrator and victim have been drinking. The vast majority of incidents occurs between UNH students, and an acquaintance is most often the perpetrator,†the report states.
Wait! You mean incidents of “unwanted sexual contact”–ranging from violence to profound misunderstanding–tend to happen among . . . people who are around one another a lot? When *both* people are drunk?
Who *ever* would have guessed such a thing?
At first I thought the report was just burying the lede, but no:
“I think the main point we’re trying to make is that there are situations in which students find themselves, where they have these kinds of experiences, and they’re not situations that they would define as threatening situations,†said Sally Ward, a professor of sociology and one of five faculty authors of the report, which is based on paper- and Web-based surveys completed by 2,405 New Hampshire undergraduates, male and female, in 2005-6.
“It’s part of the normal social scene. People go out and they party and things happen that they aren’t expecting to happen. That is, we think, a consistent finding over time in this research,†said Ward.
So . . . when you’re drunk, sometimes events slip out of your control, especially in contexts where boundaries are ambiguous. Oh, mysterious universe!
