Praying for a technological regression.

I don’t recommend teaching with e-books, especially if you’re counting on an entire class having access to a single copy. Having had similar experiences myself, it was heartening to hear that others felt my pain:

I’m always on the look out for e-books news, though, most of which I pick up from my Twitter feed. It was there that I came across these two recent-ish posts on TeleRead, “The strange case of academic libraries and e-books nobody reads” and a response. I read these eagerly because it is precisely the problem of academic reading that concerns me most in the recent E-book Revolution. Unfortunately, besides a murky prognosis–there are problems, but they will get better!–the posts did not offer me much. (I admit to wanting instant gratification.)

I’m especially impatient because I tried to use an e-book for the first time last semester, in this class–and it was an unalloyed disaster. I had assigned a couple chapters from Ronald Deibert’s Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia. Since it was only two chapters, I did not want my students to have to purchase the entire book, so I tried to place it on library reserve. The only copy the library “owned,” however, was an e-book on NetLibrary. I was initially optimistic, since I thought the format quite fitting for a course on the history and future of the book. Unfortunately, the platform allows only minimal printing (a few pages a day) and its annotating function is almost worthless–500 characters per note, only one note per page. The students could not do precisely what we try to train them to do: underline, write in the margins, etc. And unless they owned a laptop (and many do not), they could not even bring a copy to class.

Through last-minute photocopying (what I had tried to avoid), I solved the immediate problem, and I did get the library to order a paper copy for next time, but I was very disappointed in this wasted potential. And I’m also concerned, because I notice that (presumably as a cost saving measure), our library is beginning to order more and more new books this way.

I’ve never had much success with having multiple students access an e-book, either. In fact, I’ve been so frustrated with it that I’ve asked our library to order a physical copy anytime I’ve tried to rely on an e-book.

And then there’s the frustration with the technology itself: there are always promises that “the technology is in its infancy–just wait, it’s getting better.” The problem with printing and annotation, however, is not a technological one. That’s just greed and fear.

Really, you start wondering how it is that publishing companies have gotten themselves so riled up over the possibility that someone might use an e-book. Once a library buys a physical copy of a book, we can copy as many pages of it as we’d like, as many times per day as we’d like, and annotate it till the pages are black.

To be scrupulously exact, I should qualify my earlier statement: I do not yet recommend teaching with e-books. I’m not waiting for the technology to improve, though. I’m waiting on e-books that have regressed to the functionality of the storage technology we’ve already got on the shelves.

Reasons To Study Literature #1

First in a series of posts titled Reasons To Study Literature. Reason #1: It’s essential to the practice of medicine.

From an article by Harriet Squire, professor of medicine at Michigan State University:

The longer I practice medicine, and the longer I teach medical students, the centrality of literature to my work becomes ever clearer. Every day in the office, I listen to patient’s stories; I hear about their pain, suffering, hopes, dreams, loves, and losses. Through my patient’s stories, just as through literature, I learn how and why people suffer, and how they heal. I learn how people’s philosophies and experiences affect how they see the world and how they go about living in it. These topics were blatantly left out of my formal medical education. My own background in literature has helped me to analyze, as well as to elicit, my patient’s stories.

Without a sound and extensive knowledge of people and of human nature, a doctor operates in a vacuum. “Noncompliance” becomes an enigma, rather than the logical outgrowth of a person’s life choices. Recommending tests and treatment becomes an adversarial activity rather than a discussion and negotiation with the patient’s value system and life situation.

Literature provides us with more extensive exposure to a variety of people than we can assure through medical practice alone, especially for beginning doctors and students. Moreover, through literature, we see what parts of human interaction can give others strength, and which parts cause them harm. We see how people change, and why they don’t. We see what threatens them and what nourishes them. By knowing literary characters, we enlarge our ability to know people in general and our patients in particular.

Squire’s use of literature to teach medicine is of course the kind of thing a literature professor likes to hear. (“Look, ma, what I has done is important!”)

The way she describes literature, however, is not the way our discipline has described it for some time. At least officially. The basic move towards methodical, theoretical, historicized study of literature has been going on (at least) since the Renaissance. But that move–let’s call it the scholarly impulse–has always been balanced against what we might call the storytelling impulse. It’s deep-rooted in human nature to turn to literature in search of human experience, moral instruction, and practical wisdom (Aristotelian phronesis).

As much as scholars have liked to insist (over the last thirty years maybe) that they were less interested in morality than theory, that claim rings hollow when you think about just how explicitly some of the most popular fields of study took up questions of ethics and morality: gender and race studies, postcolonialism, etc. But even these disciplines were not immune to the scholarly impulse. When important questions are framed in such a way as to make them inaccessible to the common reader, something is going to be lost.

It should be possible, if not easy, to bridge the distance between these two questions in a way that has always been part of the practice of literature. (And of course there are a lot of examples of public intellectuals who have taken steps in this direction.) Still, I think that more can and should be done until we can figure out a way to make a serious, substantial, and most importantly persuasive case for the humanities and the value of what it is we do.

I don’t propose to do that in a single blog post, of course. But the larger question is how to balance the gains from methodical sophistication with the need to make literature relevant to more commonplace concerns–and Squire offers one quite nice example of the practical usefulness of literature, I think.

Scialabba on “authoritarian democracy.”

George Scialabba performs his usual voodoo, deftly summing up a book and a large social problem at the same time:

Many, perhaps most, advanced societies today, Kampfner argues, operate on the basis of a “pact,” an implicit bargain between government and society. In exchange for consumer goods and private freedoms – to travel; to marry whomever, live wherever, and read whatever they wish; to do business without interference from government regulations or labor unions; and to pay few or no taxes – the rich and the middle class have agreed to abdicate politics. The government keeps opposition parties, the mass media, and academic or journalistic muckrakers on a very short leash. Surveillance waxes; civil liberties wane. Transparency, accountability, and citizen initiative are sacrificed to order, security, and prosperity.

The prototype and showcase of authoritarian democracy is Singapore. The tiny city-state has an extraordinarily high per capita income, without the pockets of destitution that disfigure the US and UK and without those countries’ inequitable and underfunded education, pension, and health care systems. Government agencies are efficient and honest; violent crime and business fraud are rare. Travel is unhindered; technical and managerial innovations are welcomed; shopping is world-class. Streets and public buildings are clean as a whistle and neat as a pin. Just a month ago, the popular website New Geography placed Singapore at the top of its list of “The World’s Smartest Cities.”

There is, naturally, a large “on the other hand.” Nothing is allowed that the government fears might threaten public order or social stability; and the government’s sensitivities on this score are very delicate indeed. Spitting, chewing gum, yelling, or failing to flush a toilet in a public place; overstaying your visa; depicting (never mind engaging in) oral or anal sex; rashly employing irony or sarcasm; and, most important, criticizing the government in ways the government deems not constructive – all these are swiftly and severely punished. Petty offenders are fined or caned; overzealous opposition politicians or trade unionists tend to be imprisoned for long stretches. Indiscreet newspapers or blogs are served with defamation suits, tried in government-friendly courts that generally oblige by assessing substantial damages. Indeed, so frequent are these suits and so substantial the awards that all the newspapers in Singapore are now government-controlled. International media like the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review have taken this lesson to heart and now watch their step very carefully. As Kampfner observes, Singapore “requires an almost complete abrogation of freedom of expression in return for a very good material life.”

…

The West too is undergoing what Kampfner calls a “democratic recession.” In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi’s popularity is due partly to his ownership of much of the country’s mass media and his influence over the rest. But it’s also partly an expression of public disillusionment with politics and a desire to be left alone by the state – above all by the tax collector. England under Thatcher and Blair has seen an exponential increase in technological surveillance and a steady decline in Parliamentary and judicial control of the executive branch, especially the police and intelligence agencies. Here the pretext was not growth but security: terrorist threats, first from the IRA and then from al-Qaeda. But London’s centrality to international finance and its hospitality to rich foreigners with shady pasts have also helped to erode England’s already weak traditions of free speech, journalistic muckraking, and official whistle-blowing. (Perhaps because of Kampfner’s long residence in the UK, this chapter is particularly scathing.)

As for the United States, the Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties and the signal failure of Congress, the media, or the judiciary to resist it are already well-known. Kamfpner misses an opportunity here, discussing only the national security rationale and failing to bring out the deep-rooted hostility of the contemporary Republican Party, wholly devoted as it is to the interests of corporations and Wall Street, to openness in government. For Republicans, 9/11 was an opportunity to shield the tax and regulatory apparatuses, no less than the national security one, from media scrutiny and citizen challenge. They pursued that opportunity relentlessly, and with near-total success.

Freedom for Sale convincingly describes the unwritten “pact” between the middle and upper classes of most countries and their governments: freedom to make, keep, and spend money in exchange for the freedom to question authority. Is this a good or bad bargain? Conscientious journalist that he is, Kampfner airs both sides. The proponents of the “Singapore model” (they are not all Singaporeans) admonish us that “understanding the limits on freedom is what makes freedom possible. The greater good is impossible without some constraint on individualism.” The Founding Father himself, Lee Kuan Yew, is given space to expound his philosophy: “At the end of the day, we offer what every citizen wants – a good life, security, a good education, and a future for their children. That is good governance.”

But what is “a good life”? Lee clearly thinks that a life free of want and danger is good enough, and he is confident that most Asians will agree with him. Westerners may high-mindedly cite Aristotle: “Man is by nature a political animal”; or Pericles: “We Greeks do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is minding his own business. We say that he has no business.” Stirring words, but as Kampfner shows, even Westerners pay them no more than lip service these days. Example is the best argument, so perhaps Westerners who wish to help those brave Asians struggling for a more participatory democracy should begin at home.

The implications of this trend are frightening at home. But let’s just home here in the good ol’ U. S. of A. we don’t start penalizing those “rashly employing irony or sarcasm”? That’s just crazytalk. I’d have to move–and not to Singapore.

In the immortal words of Led Zeppelin, “Thank you.”

Sometimes you read a blog post that you wish you’d written. Emerson puts it more poetically: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” Except that I didn’t reject these thoughts, I just never bothered to put them into so many words. (Only the occasional rant. Let this be a warning to anyone who gets invited over for dinner.)

Anyway, check this out: the editor of a poetry journal speaks out against one trend in contemporary poetry:

Here’s what I’d like to see more of in submissions: IDEAS. Why don’t poems have more ideas? So many poems I read are essentially just descriptions. So you went outside. It was beautiful. Or not. I don’t care how creatively you describe it, if it didn’t trigger any thoughts beyond “Hells yeah I am going to describe this,” it’s not a poem. It’s just showing off to yourself, or as Matt Rass used to say, “masturbating to language.” Ha. I love that phrase. Anyway: ideas.

Hells yeah I am going to agree with this.

My academic schedule.

Classes start today for Spring 2010. Exciting in some ways, intimidating in others. I wonder if walking up front on the first day of class ever gets any easier? According to most of the anecdotes I’ve heard, not really.

This semester I’m teaching Satire, Literature of the British Renaissance, and British Novel I. An exciting mix, and one that, as I’ve been filling in the page numbers on the syllabuses for each week’s reading, even has me a little stressed about managing my time in order to keep up with the readings.

And it’s not that I’m concerned about finishing the readings themselves–as an undergrad I had semesters with heavier reading loads in addition to Latin. What I’m more concerned about is keeping up with the outside readings, grading, and research, in addition to the class readings. I had to plan pretty carefully in terms of when assignments come in so that it wouldn’t get overwhelming and tempt me to cut corners somewhere. Twelve-hour work week my rear-end.

But I have a plan: every time I find myself complaining about how much work I have to do, I’m just going to mutter, “Latin.” That should put things in perspective and shut me up real quick.

The academic schedule.

Mary Beard writes a wonderful blog called A Don’s Life, and in a recent post (“What to Cut in Universities”) she gives a peek into the academic schedule, notorious for its many holidays and reputed 12-hour work weeks:

I wish he (or she) could have seen my, pretty ordinary, term-time day — which went something like this.

I was at work at home at 7.30 — emailing students, about things that had come in over night. I went to the Faculty at 8.15, to get some essay and lecture bibliographies together. At 10.00 I had a meeting about promotions in another Faculty (I’m the internal ‘external’ rep)….I was back in Classics again at about 11.45 in time to see five graduate students in a row, and get to my College, my other place of work, by 2.30…(I chose its gate for the picture at the top of this post by the way, in case you are wondering about the metal work).

After 5 minutes with my assistant (yes I know I am very lucky on that score….), who had done some industrial quantities of xeroxing, I saw each of the Newnham Classics third years for 15 minutes, to discuss their work schedule for the term (cutting it fine, and I got behind, but they are all coming to my home on Sunday evening, when the loose ends can be picked up). After that I saw groups of first and second years, a second year historian from another college who will be taking ancient history with me this term, and a third year whose dissertation I’m supervising….then a graduate I hadn’t met before, who is going to be doing some work on Jane Harrison.

I got home by about 7.00 …. husband had done supper, so that I could start going through draft exam papers. I’m an exam board chair and I needed to read over all the papers submitted for an examiners meeting tomorrow, looking for errors, duplications, typos etc. That took until 12.30… which I reckon is a 17 hour day, minus a half hour for supper.

The knowledge economy on overtime.

Clearly the most sensible cuts to make in tight economic times, therefore, are professors: refusing to open up new faculty jobs while making every effort to increase the student body, and furloughing the ones that are already there. Beard suggests deep administrative cuts in British higher ed, to the REF, which is according to many of the stories I’ve heard bloated and ineffective. She writes:

It isnt going to tell us anything we didn’t know any way… and it must cost millions. At least enough to save a few hard-working academics and departments from the axe. In other walks of life, this would be called pruning the bureaucrats and channelling resources to the front line (ie the teachers…).

I think that gets an amen. Administrative bloat is a problem everywhere, as schools become systems. If we’re going to run universities like businesses, let’s at least run them like smart ones.

“Get a life, people!”

Academics run on a strange schedule. Where other Americans took today off in honor of MLK, I was finishing up my yearly self-evaluation and tinkering with syllabuses. But don’t cry for me–I didn’t go back to work on January 4th, either. Instead on that day I continued working on the Article That Just Doesn’t Quit (Being A Pain In My Rear), same as I have been doing since classes ended back in December. Now that it’s out the door along with a shorter piece, the essay review is starting to feel in hand, and the semester’s research is more or less plotted out, it’s time to get spring’s teaching polished up and finished.

I did take advantage of the holiday to wake up a little later than usual and to dawdle over my coffee a little longer than usual. And let’s not forget how much syllabus-writing is an incremental act prone to much procrastination. All of these preliminaries are meant as context for my admission, that when Bill’s post about narrative conventions referred me to this link about narrative problems in LOTR, I followed it.

Now I’m a fan of Tolkien’s, and I’m not suggesting that I’ve never had this kind of argument in my life. I went on to get a Ph.D. in literature, after all. Arguing about things only geeks care about is what I do.

Still. Woo-ee. Someone needs to tell those people, in the immortal words of William Shatner, to get a life.

To be a bit more serious, if only for a moment, it strikes me that the main problem with making this kind of argument is the difficulty of not merging the two paradigms at stake. That is, there are two (probably mutually-exclusive?*) sets of assumptions going on in the argument:

1. Middle Earth is not like Earth (i.e., it’s got magic rings and Nazgul and flying eagles and shit)

2. Middle Earth is like Earth (i.e., a volcano under the control of a sorcerer-demigod is still assumed to work like an ordinary volcano, needing to build up pressure before it pops instead of responding to a magical pinprick)

I think it’s fairly clear, just from a brief reading of the webpage involved,* that it’s going to be hard to maintain any logical consistency when you’re slipping between two (mutually-exclusive, it seems?*) paradigms. If you’re thinking magically, so to speak, it’s going to be hard to maintain the kind of empirical rigor demanded by scientific proof–and ditto the reverse, where a scientific mind isn’t going to be very good at accounting for magic.

It’s always seemed to me that magic in Tolkien works a lot like magic in Arthurian legend. That is, a sword will get stuck in a stone, for example, and you know that something pretty spiffy must have happened for it to get there. But Merlin isn’t waiting around like some kind of spellcasting toolbox that Arthur can call on every time he needs to fix a well. (In fact, this is basically the approach taken towards magic in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and it really doesn’t do much justice to Malory. Though that’s probably Twain’s point, at least as I teach the book. OK, yes, I have been writing this post while working on my Satire syllabus.)

Magic isn’t a substitute for technology, it just exists as a kind of metaphysical fact. If, on occasion, a magician does do something impressive and awe-inspiring, the reader rarely gets a front-row seat watching him make passes in the air and mutter curses under his breath. At least, not in traditional stories about magic of the kind that inspired Tolkien the medievalist.

It would seem that it’s hard to make these distinctions about fantasy fiction, because these kinds of over-literal discussions about fantasy have been going on for a long time now.

If it’s hard to convince someone of your point under ordinary circumstances, it’s going to be much harder when the line between magic and reality is blurred. In which case, as it seems to me, you have two choices: you can either put on your arguing hat, or you can get a life.

_____
*I should be careful to point out that I’m making no grand claims about having looked all that carefully at the argument involved. Not because I have a life, but because there are only five working days of winter break left to me. If I’m going to be parsing arguments carefully, it’s going to be for a more prestigious venue than this lowly blog. Also, they’re going to be arguments I’m professionally invested in.

“Sufficiently paid? Alas! Alas! The world was mistaken.”

There’s a new study about the diminishing returns available to those of us brainiacs who went out and earned ourselves a Ph.D.–

Here’s a new angle on the jobs crisis facing people with Ph.D.’s.

The economics blogger Mike Mandel was curious about the role that various credentials play in the U.S. economy….perhaps people should flee the Ph.D. path, given another figure Mandel uncovered. While the inflation-adusted earnings of workers with bachelor’s or masters degrees have increased very slightly since 1999–a rise of one percent or less–the story was quite different for the doctorate. Employees with Ph.D.’s can expect to earn 10 percent less, in real dollars, than they would have a decade ago. “Yowza,” Mandel writes.

There’s a nifty graph over at the original post, for the visual learners among you.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Trollope for the first time. I can’t believe no one ever suggested I should read Trollope before. Barchester Towers (1857) is hilariously funny. But the following passage, introducing Mr. Arabin, strikes me as most apposite to the statistics above. Mr. Arabin is a clergyman, who had while a student been a Tractarian, and had since cloistered himself at Oxford to fight doctrinal and institutional battles with the Evangelicals, represented in the novel by the slimy Mr. Slope. Here’s is Arabin’s arrival in Barchester, where as a forty year old bachelor he takes up a church living there worth ₤300 per annum.

It did not occur to Mr. Arabin that he was spoken of at all. It seemed to him, when he compared himself with his host, that he was a person of so little consequence to any, that he was worth no one’s words or thoughts. He was utterly alone in the world as regarded domestic ties and those inner familiar relations which are hardly possible between others than husbands and wives, parents and children, or brothers and sisters. He had often discussed with himself the necessity of such bonds for a man’s happiness in this world, and had generally satisfied himself with the answer that happiness in this world is not a necessity. Herein he deceived himself, or rather tried to do so. He, like others, yearned for the enjoyment of whatever he saw enjoyable, and though he attempted, with the modern stoicism of so many Christians, to make himself believe that joy and sorrow were matters which here should be held as perfectly indifferent, these things were not indifferent to him. He was tired of his Oxford rooms and his college life. He regarded the wife and children of his friend with something like envy; he all but coveted the pleasant drawing-room, with its pretty windows opening on to lawns and flower-beds, the apparel of the comfortable house, and—above all—the air of home which encompassed it all.

It will be said that no time can have been so fitted for such desires on his part as this, when he had just possessed himself of a country parish, of a living among fields and gardens, of a house which a wife would grace. It is true there was a difference between the opulence of Plumstead and the modest economy of St. Ewold, but surely Mr. Arabin was not a man to sigh after wealth! Of all men, his friends would have unanimously declared he was the last to do so. But how little our friends know us! In his period of stoical rejection of this world’s happiness, he had cast from him as utter dross all anxiety as to fortune. He had, as it were, proclaimed himself to be indifferent to promotion, and those who chiefly admired his talents, and would mainly have exerted themselves to secure to them their deserved reward, had taken him at his word. And now, if the truth must out, he felt himself disappointed—disappointed not by them but by himself. The daydream of his youth was over, and at the age of forty he felt that he was not fit to work in the spirit of an apostle. He had mistaken himself, and learned his mistake when it was past remedy. He had professed himself indifferent to mitres and diaconal residences, to rich livings and pleasant glebes, and now he had to own to himself that he was sighing for the good things of other men on whom, in his pride, he had ventured to look down.

Not for wealth, in its vulgar sense, had he ever sighed; not for the enjoyment of rich things had he ever longed; but for the allotted share of worldly bliss which a wife, and children, and happy home could give him, for that usual amount of comfort which he had ventured to reject as unnecessary for him, he did now feel that he would have been wiser to have searched.

He knew that his talents, his position, and his friends would have won for him promotion, had he put himself in the way of winning it. Instead of doing so, he had allowed himself to be persuaded to accept a living which would give him an income of some £300 a year should he, by marrying, throw up his fellowship. Such, at the age of forty, was the worldly result of labour which the world had chosen to regard as successful. The world also thought that Mr. Arabin was, in his own estimation, sufficiently paid. Alas! Alas! The world was mistaken, and Mr. Arabin was beginning to ascertain that such was the case.

And here may I beg the reader not to be hard in his judgement upon this man. Is not the state at which he has arrived the natural result of efforts to reach that which is not the condition of humanity? Is not modern stoicism, built though it be on Christianity, as great an outrage on human nature as was the stoicism of the ancients? The philosophy of Zeno was built on true laws, but on true laws misunderstood and therefore misapplied. It is the same with our Stoics here, who would teach us that wealth and worldly comfort and happiness on earth are not worth the search. Alas, for a doctrine which can find no believing pupils and no true teachers!

Poor Arabin! If we recall that Oxford fellows at the time were clergy, the comparison between Arabin and the professoriate gets pretty uncomfortable. Even Trollope can’t satirize this guy without feeling a little chagrin, as evidenced above all by that last paragraph, and by his various interjections of pity throughout.

I immediately reread this passage with growing melancholy. I don’t think I’m alone among professors in sighing just like Arabin, and sometimes feeling that “that usual amount of comfort which he had ventured to reject as unnecessary for him, he did now feel that he would have been wiser to have searched.”

Sympathy for the devil.

For Haiti and Pat Robertson.

(You have to imagine that I’m also making the appropriate comment and finger gesture: forward to 3:05 in the following video of Matthew Lillard from SLC Punk!.)

Feel free to repost.

Always–wait–never…forget to check your metadata.

Hilarity ensued as I was looking at the Google Books metadata on Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A Curious History (1997). The site maps this phrase of scholarly footnote about a manuscript found in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris:

“BN, Paris, MS Dupuy 632, fols. 78 verso, 82 verso-83 recto.”

onto the map as Paris, Mississippi. (I’m too lazy to reprint the page here, but there’s only one stickpin in Mississippi on the map–it ain’t hard to find.)

Okay, fine, it was a kind of dorky hilarity. Mostly it was a mental smirk that probably didn’t even make its way to becoming a full-fledged facial expression.