The Salt-Box

Everyone likes to know what their former students are up to, right? One of my former MA students went off to a top-twenty doctoral program this year, apparently to spend her time staging action-figure battles with her officemates.

The evidence:

• Oscar Wilde ties up Freud and Dickens
• Wilde gets Freud to slip, leaves taunting notes for Dickens
• Dickens ties up Wilde, while Freud reveals a secret!
• Dickens forces Wilde to watch Freud destroy The Picture.

Naturally, I’m envious. My Freud action figure is still in his box.

I wonder why PopMatters decided to run my review of the BBC Count Dracula DVD *today* . . . ?  (Just kidding: The boy’s been hopped-up on anticipated candy for a week.) A preview:

By playing Dracula, not as a frenzied monster consumed by bloodlust, but only as a man doing –as do we all—what he must, Jordan ensures the constant relevance of his performance.  Even under the padding of a BBC production, Jordan brings out the erotic dimension of Dracula without giving in wholly to indulgence.  The main female characters, Susan Penhaligon as Lucy and Judi Bowker as Mina, are fine as far as they go, but, as I discuss below, they are not allowed to go as far in this adaptation as they are in Stoker’s novel.

Read the whole thing!

In last week’s New Yorker, Steven Martin has an essay that purports to describe his early years in comedy.  (The fulltext isn’t online, though there’s an abstract.)  When he recalls his early years in standup, he discusses how he’d deal with hecklers:

I developed a few defensive lines to use against the unruly: “Oh, I remember when I had my first beer.”  And if that didn’t cool them off I would use a psychological trick.  I would lower my voice and continue with my act, talking almost inaudibly.  The audience couldn’t hear the show, and they would shut the heckler up on their own.

This was interesting to me because two weeks ago, after watching me present, a colleague mentioned admiring my presentation style, which is based on being soft-spoken.  I speak quietly, especially at the start, asking listeners to supply some of their own interest and energy to following along.  If they have to focus on hearing, then there’s a good chance they’ll transfer some of that focus to the material.

Two weeks ago, I was also re-compiling my tenure file*, and had the occasion to notice that many students apparently do not recognize this as a legitimate rhetorical choice.  I have several evaluations asking me to speak up; a significant number of these attribute my soft speaking voice to nervousness, which isn’t right.  Almost all of these students were in general education courses, which seems related–many people in a gen ed literature course are taking it because it fulfills one or more requirements which they see as unrelated to their life.  They’re just not going to be willing to invest attention as quickly as someone who’s a major, or who likes a particular topic, or whatever.  I probably need to think about this a bit more.

–

*”Re-compiling” because last year I was promoted to associate professor, but not tenured due to “inadequate achievement in years in rank.”

CNN has a story about a company that will, for a fee, give you official-looking notes explaining why you missed work:

Feeling like playing hooky, but nervous about getting caught? The Excused Absence Network has got your back.

For about $25, students and employees can buy excuse notes that appear to come from doctors or hospitals. Other options include a fake jury summons or an authentic-looking funeral service program complete with comforting poems and a list of pallbearers.

 This sort of thing is why I don’t distinguish between excused/unexcused absences: Such a distinction asks me to judge who’s telling me the truth (or at least bothering to lie credibly).  That’s not a role I want to play.

Can anyone in higher ed imagine deploying one of these nifty tokens at a meeting of any standing committee ?  Or, for example, at the faculty senate?

–

It’s off-topic, but I’m a little concerned about my classes tomorrow, since I gather the Red Sox are about to win the Series.  Will Arnold and Clough be as enticing as Manny and Ortiz? Can Alton Locke hold people’s attention as well as Jon Papelbon?

Today was the last day of the local U-6 soccer league’s fall season.  We’ve had a great time–the Little Man played, A was a “Soccer Mom” (which is an official title in this league, and not just a quasi-mythical demographic), and I coached.

To commemorate the last day, the league commissioner organized a series of “parents against the kids” games, which were *exactly* as chaotic as you would imagine: 2 or 3 teams of kids (each with 4-10 players) on the field at once, against whatever parents were willing to play.

In our game, a divide quickly emerged between those of us who wanted to compete (albeit in an age-appropriate way, of course), and those of us who wanted the kids to triumph at all costs.  The latter group would get out of the way of better players, set them up in front of the goal, not try to advance the ball etc.  The former group would try half-heartedly to go forward, would take actual shots on goal, and would block the ball where possible (though no one would actually tackle the ball or steal it away from kids, or even kick the ball hard).

It made for a pretty interesting set of exchanges.  We both were firmly in the “compete” camp, on the strength of our knowledge of the Little Man: In games he thinks he’s good at, he despises unearned “victories.”  A goal in a game against people who are trying to help him would be an insult. Plus, the Little Man lost A as a potential ally when she heard him saying to some other kids, “don’t worry if my mom’s playing defense–she’s not mighty.  We can score on her.”  A word to kids: It turns out smack-talking against your mom isn’t a good idea.

Other parents worried that if their kids’ kicks were blocked by adults, they’d cry.   Some, more reasonably, wanted as many kids as possible to have the chance to score, so as to end the season on a high note.  Still others, even more reasonably, were just out there so there would be enough bodies, and just wanted to keep the ball in play.

Everyone got on fine, of course–in part because none of us who wanted to compete actually cared about *winning*.  (Which, let’s be honest, would be a little disgusting in an U-6 league.*)  But it was interesting to see the variety of different responses, and to imagine what it would be like to raise a kid who didn’t want you to “play for real” when you play.

–

*And, to be clear: As a coach, my practices emphasize having fun, mutual encouragement, and skills-building.  The kids supply enough competitive instinct, and it would be counterproductive to encourage it in a league where all the “games” are intrasquad scrimmages.   U-6 is about hooking players for the older leagues.

How could you not love this reading list?

• Arthur Conan Doyle. The Adventures & Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
• Rider Haggard. King Solomon’s Mines; Allan Quatermain; She (Published as a single volume)
• Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume I
• Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II
• Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier
• Sax Rohmer. The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu
• Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Bram Stoker. Dracula
• Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Years Leagues Under the Sea (NB: “20,000 years” is how long it took to compile the book order.)
• H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
• H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
• H. G. Wells, The War Between the Worlds

My plan is to pretend as though the movie never happened. At all.

(And the rest of my schedule is: one course bought out through accumulated overload, a 300-level Victorian lit survey, a 400-level course on humanities computing, and a section of thesis-writing for the honors program. I heart the spring . . . though that could just be the lack of fall break talking.)

Flying back from this month’s conference, I spotted this fun illusion during our initial descent into Bradley airport. It looks like we’re flying into a bullseye:

What Jason Fried of 37signals (Ruby on Rails, Backpack, Ta Da, Highrise, Basecamp, etc., etc.) says about enterprise software is also true of the bigger course management software packages, such as Blackboard/Vista:

The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. That’s where the disconnect begins. And it pulls and pulls and pulls until the user experience is split from the buying experience so severely that the software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users. The experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words.

I know that the Educause folks think that students want course management software, and so they believe they’re advocating on behalf of students when they promote it.  And I know, too, that there needs to be some sort of command-and-control ability to interface with registration software, etc.

But the bloat & frustration level with something like Vista are just intolerable, especially compared with how easy it is to use tools like blogger, pbwiki, del.icio.us, etc., etc.  I’m interested in helping my students engage the material in new ways, not in teaching the byzantine architecture of a program they’ll not see again after they graduate.

Three gems from my most recent stack of exams.  All of these are somewhat clearly produced by the desire to write quickly–that is, I’ve not chosen answers from bad exams, just ones that appear to have gone slightly awry.

• Blake’s “London” suggests that there is a sexual double standard in Romantic-era England, and “this, therefore, created protestitution.”
• According to Coleridge, “primary [imagination] is the creative power of bad god and man.”
• “Beauty is a man-made thing.  The shape of a woman’s body is beautiful.”

I rather like the idea of protestitution.