The Salt-Box

The interoffice mail has brought word from the provost’s office that I’ve been recommended for tenure, which will officially be conferred in May by the Board of Trustees.  Longtime readers will remember that I was promoted last year, but denied tenure for “insufficient achievement in years in rank.”  And so, after continuing to breathe for another year, I’ve made it.

It was my understanding that the university would have been in precarious legal position not to offer me tenure after promoting me,* so this is hardly a surprise, though it’s welcome all the same.

I will say that the timing’s all wrong: We’ve still got 2 weeks of classes, plus exams . . . it’s not as though I can kick back or anything.  In fact, taking a peek at the calendar for the next couple of weeks, we may not even get a dinner out of this.  And the pay raise came last year, so I’m not sure what effect this will really have.  Maybe it’ll be clearer in a couple of months.  (More blog posts with a mid-afternoon timestamp?)

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* A friend of mine on the promotion and tenure committee has been joking since *last* April about convincing the committee this year *not* to tenure me, in exchange for a finder’s fee from the inevitable lawsuit and fat settlement.

From the looks of this subject line, today’s spam-bots don’t think the average internet user is smart enough to . . . read spam:

A new approach for spam: Boost your vocabulary *and* your penis size!

The blog went quiet for a week because I took three of our Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day senior prize winners to the 22nd National Conference for Undergraduate Research, at Salisbury U in Maryland.  There were some technical difficulties–spotty shuttle service, some moldy food in the boxed lunches, and devastatingly, a hotel wireless network wholly unprepared for the # of laptops that were hitting it throughout the weekend.

In the main, however, Salisbury U was a gracious host, and this conference always elevates my spirits.  The worst thing about working with students is that the material they produce is almost always deformed in some way by the practical demands of the semester.   Maybe a good student had to rush your paper because she had 3 other assignments due that week.  Maybe another got sick at an inopportune time and was too proud to negotiate an extension.  Even very good work usually hasn’t been sharpened to the student’s best capacity, because students are fully capable of figuring out how much polishing will produce the desired grade.

At NCUR, however, the students have generally polished their work to a fairly high degree.  Even when I disagreed profoundly with their arguments, it’s still clear that they’ve brought their best lights to that project.  As a result, it’s almost uniformly a very impressive, even–to risk a little mawkishness–inspiring sight.  It’s a weekend when all your encounters with student work take place in an ideal realm: The one where students care a lot about the work they’ve done, and are excited to talk about it.

Plus, I got to hang out for a bit with an old friend from graduate school, and compare notes about teaching at a 4/4 school, living close to campus, and having a young kid.

Our boy started playing in the local U-6 soccer league last fall, which has been fun for all of us.  He plays, and we have both held coaching and administrative roles with the league.  In the fall, I coached, and A. helped out with a variety of organizational tasks.  Her title?  “Soccer Mom.”

Going into this season, A decided that she didn’t want to be pulled in a hundred different directions while the kid was playing, and so she gave up the soccer mom role and signed on to be my assistant coach.  Meanwhile, I’ve become more involved with the organizational side, in part because I always go to the league meetings.

Last season, A’s title for that organizational work was “Soccer Mom.”

This season, my title for comparable organizational work: “Assistant Commissioner.”

If you turn to the last page of the April issue of Wired, you’ll see that New Britain will not always be a relatively poor, school-challenged city. No! This month’s “Artifacts from the Future,” by Paul Davidson, shows a future Risk game (CNN World News Edition), in which the Hardware City has realized its manifest destiny to rule over all New England, and indeed some mid-Atlantic states:

One day, dominion shall be ours!  Take *that*, Newington and Plainville!

Apparently my (Connecticut-based) MacBook’s dictionary doesn’t recognize Rhode Island as a state:

My students have always explained that RI stands in approximately the same relation to CT as West Virginia does to Virginia, or Alabama to Georgia — I guess my MacBook agrees.

My PsychoSlut column this month is about HBO’s recent show, In Treatment:

About a decade ago, when starting as a graduate student in Emory’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program, I had a fierce, public argument with a good friend, Eddie Gamarra, about what the point of dream interpretation might be in psychoanalysis. We were arguing, in effect, over what mattered most: some original wish or dream-thought that could painstakingly be recovered (Eddie’s view), or the fact of dream-censorship itself, which retroactively creates the wish out of the raw materials of the dream (my own view). This debate raises a complex question about whether analysis points you toward a truth about yourself, one that the analyst knows or infers and tries to help you find, or whether the analyst simply (!) helps us realize the complex ways that we enmesh ourselves in self-deception, in the hopes that such a recognition may help us take up a more sustainable attitude — to exchange, as Freud said, hysterical misery for ordinary human unhappiness. Does analysis claim that there is a truth in your head, which might be excavated in order to disclose the real meaning about your life? Or does it claim that our minds are, more or less, set up to facilitate misrecognition, mistranslation, and other forms of petit and grand errors, and that it can simply be useful to track that process in action?

I have been thinking about this argument with Eddie a lot recently, usually while watching HBO’s recently-concluded series, In Treatment, which received a lot of press — largely on the strength of the brilliant Gabriel Byrne and the fact that the New York Times probably overrates the contemporary importance of psychoanalysts — but not so many viewers. The show, an American import of a runaway Israeli hit, aired five nights a week, recording a therapist (Paul) as he meets with a single patient, and then on Fridays showing his meeting with his own therapist.

As always, read the whole thing!

This morning I’m giving a presentation at the local Academic Computing Conference entitled “From Twitter to Wikis: Why Your Students Should Care about the New Web Tools.”

There are basically 3 parts to the presentation:

• First, I argue that too many people–not really tech people, but the sort of person who believes labels like “millenials” are meaningful–conflate things like Facebook/MySpace with genuinely new tools for managing information.  Claiming that today’s students take naturally to social software, and pointing to MySpace and FaceBook as your examples, is  equivalent to claiming that their crystal meth addiction prepares their palate to enjoy fine Bordeaux.
• Then, demos: del.icio.us, the Victorian timeline (which you can see in action here), wikified class notes, twitter
• Finally, two students have volunteered to be a part of this.  (One of ’em is Alex, who did this presentation on a Twitter+Facebook poetry mashup yesterday as part of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day.  The other is a student who wasn’t familiar with any of these things before my various classes, but who has become a big convert to del.icio.us and to TAPoR.)

David Glenn poses the above question over at the Chronicle‘s Footnoted blog. The closest I can come to answering is the story below, which I can justify because SUNY Press brought out a translation of Being and Time shortly after the events in question.

When I was an undergrad, I was casually involved for a while with a woman who was, more or less the presiding spirit of the English department, or at least those of us who worked on Honors theses, worked in the writing center, etc.  This was about the time of my first burst of enthusiasm for literary theory.

One evening, we were sitting around talking about what we might like to do in graduate school.  I said that, since I’d been reading a lot of Luce Irigaray, including untranslated bits of The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, that it might be fun to be really systematic about reading Heidegger.  Grad school seemed like a good opportunity to read Being and Time seriously.

She jumped off the couch, shrieking in protest, and, it must be said, derisive laughter.  Apparently it was almost a tradition in the department for theoretically-orientated male undergrads to, in effect, ditch girls for the siren song of Dasein.   (Yes, I just linked to the Wikipedia entry for a Heideggerian concept.  It’s been one of those weeks.)

And so I remained within the orbit of psychoanalytic theory, now and forever.

So, that’s my story: Being and Time would have, in this case, led to my being unequivocally dumped.

I can’t really promise that. (I mean, Miriam can probably do it, but not mere mortals.)

But this is the exercise we did in my Digital Literary Studies class tonight:

• Find e-texts of two Victorian novels (we used Hard Times & Silas Marner)
• Go to TagCrowd.com, and create 15-20 word clouds of the word frequencies in each chapter of both novels.
• Write a one/two sentence “summary” of each chapter in such a way that the summaries reflect the drifts in word count.
• Obviously the summary’s not going to accurately reflect the plot, but it will deliver some information about the language of the text.  This isn’t supposed to be an actual substitute for reading, but rather a very rough cut at patterns in a text. (Example: A student just observed that, viewed from the perspective of TagCrowd, Shirley slightly resembles a Harlequin romance.  The intersection of romance plot & industrial novel is, of course, an actual interpretative issue . . . .)
•  After writing these little summaries, I asked the students to find an e-text of yet another Victorian novel, and then to open up TAPoR‘s Text Analysis Recipes.  They then applied Recipe 1: Identify Themes within a Text to their chosen text.  The result is, in just a few minutes, a reasonably competent assemblage of some themes in a novel, which close reading can then supplement.

As I say–none of these can replace actually doing the reading. But they are useful, even with quite inexperienced practitioners, in helping orient readers to the kinds of patterns through which novelists make meaning.