The Salt-Box

I notice on Amazon.com that Gregory Tague’s collection, The Origins of English Literary Modernism (Academica) is now out. The collection has several interesting essays on turn-of-the-20thC English literature; it also has my essay, “The Middlebrow Prophet: Reading the Future of the Modernist Novel in Bennett’s Early Criticism.”  This is a bit of a return for me–my first peer-reviewed publication was on The Old Wives’ Tale and Riceyman Steps.  This time, as the title suggests, I re-read Bennett’s criticism, discovering there a critic more sympathetic to modernist aims than we might expect.

Here’s an early paragraph:

Why did Bennett fall out of fashion?  Once again, Bennett’s foresight provides a clue.  Writing in dismay about what he saw as an overly provincial reaction on the part of London’s cultural elite to Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionism exhibit, Bennett imagined his own imminent obsolescence:

Supposing a young writer turned up and forced me, and some of my contemporaries–us who fancy ourselves a bit–to admit that we had been concerning ourselves unduly with inessentials, that we had been worrying ourselves to achieve infantile realisms?  Well, that day would be a great and disturbing day–for us. (”Neo-Impressionism” 285)

As everyone familiar with the modernist novel knows, this is precisely Virginia Woolf’s charge against Arnold Bennett in her widely-anthologized essays, “Modern Fiction” (1919) and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924)  And while Woolf has largely convinced posterity of the justice of her claim, she never was able to force Bennett to admit anything. I’ll take up some details of their argument momentarily; for now it’s worth just underscoring Bennett’s model of artistic progress.  At least in 1910, he is not the bogeyman of tradition, the strawman of Woolf’s manifestos.  Instead, he is an advocate of cultural change, bringing to provincial London the good news of modernism–announcing an art of permanent revolution, one which will ultimately undo his own achievements.

(Footnotes snipped.)  Bennett’s a great read, both as a novelist and a reviewer, and so this essay was enormous fun to write.  Have a look at the whole collection, or, better yet, have your library order it!

Last week, the Tomorrow’s Professor listserv circulated a chapter by Jeffrey Buller explaining how to handle, as a dean, one-on-one meetings with faculty.  I am not a dean (though the son of a provost), but this advice seems useful for anyone:

There is a tendency to treat one-on-one appointments as somehow less critical than the formal presentations we make before committees, boards, and similar groups. After all, individual meetings occur all the time-how much preparation do we require to talk to someone? The fact of the matter is, however, that some of your most important-and anxiety-producing-meetings will take place in one-on-one conversations. Without others present, people tend to say things they would never admit in a public setting. They also feel free to bring up matters that they would be reluctant to broach before groups of people. For this reason, dismissing a one-on-one appointment as a mere conversation is rarely a good idea. At best, you may miss an opportunity to discuss ideas that could truly advance your college. At worst, you may be unprepared for a situation that could become disastrous or at least unpleasant because you didn’t take the time to do your homework.

This is true for meeting with students and colleagues, as well as meetings with administrators.  A significant number of my time-management problems arise when, an individual meeting, I make exceptions or informally agree to look into something.  Handling one-on-one meetings, especially with students, is something I need to get better at–especially meetings with students who need to improve some aspect of their performance.  (I tend to be deliberately upbeat and enthusiastic, which can seem at odds with the seriousness of a given situation.)

This morning at breakfast we were talking about college & saving.  A pointed out that if the 5-yr-old went to a CSU school, we could set him up pretty well for afterwards.  He said that he’d probably like to use that money for toys.  Then the following exchange:

A: When you’re a college boy I’d probably rather you spend your money on your girlfriend than on Lego toys or comic books.

A very horrified Boy: I will not have to pay a girl to be my girlfriend!

A falls over laughing, then: No, I mean you would take her out, or buy her things.

Boy: We’ll see . . . but I don’t think I’ll have to give her my money.

Not sure where, at 5, he would have picked up on the idea that some people pay for it, and that it’s culturally deprecated, but there you are. (Relatedly, see the Comics Curmudgeon.)

It is, I think, a rule of the internets that if you do something well and openly, that someone will sue you.  In this case, it’s the makers of Endnote suing Zotero for having the temerity to help users access their information.

The Courthouse News Service writeup (via Bethany Nowviskie) is slyly funny:

 The complaint states, “Dr. Daniel J. Cohen, Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History, and the director of GMU’s Center for History and New media, developed Zotero, which is a freely distributable, open-source software based research tool that allows users to gather, organize and analyze sources, including citations, and freely share the results with others.” (my emphasis)

That’s certainly grounds for complaint!  Curse you, Dan Cohen, for your commitment to open software, free intellectual exchange, and fruitful research!

It’s a rainy day in CT, and so this morning at breakfast the topic of “going to school in the rain” came up.  Here’s the conversation with the 5-yr-old:

we were talking about how kindergartners are a lot like
college boys — except college boys can choose not to go to class.
[The boy] said, “I can tell you one thing: If they’re not there, they are
home playin’ video games!”  And then he said, “You know that’s true!”

Alex, I believe he’s talking about you.  The fact that he started playing Lego Batman on the Wii yesterday has nothing to do with it, I’m sure . . .

Other college-themed geekery from this morning: A kind of plumbing I can understand!

Hey, look who’s at Geek Dad today!

This semester I’m teaching for the first time our department’s intro-to-the-major course, which is fairly new to us.  (Previously we tended to assume that our majors got all the intro work they needed from the surveys.  We no longer think that’s true.)  It’s a dog’s breakfast of a course, mixing “how to write” with “how to read closely” with “oh, right . . . you should have heard of some theory, in at least a practical sort of way, if you want to be able to read contemporary academic criticism successfully.”  (A big if, to be sure, but I guess it’s often required.

The texts we read in the course don’t matter too much–the point instead is to work on the idea of reading–as long as there are multiple genres.  There’s a mini-tradition of using Great Expectations as the novel, hitting as it does a sweet spot of length + critical industry around it.  (Thus making it possible for people to write on it from any one of the theoretical views we cover, and being sure to find scholarship about it.)

So, we’re a week or so into Great Expectations, and we’ve covered New Criticism and reader-response theory in our theory book.  (Monday is theory day.)  I can say I’ve learned two things already:

1.  Boy, New Criticism teaches a treat.  You can see why it was so influential in classrooms for so long.

2.  It’s hard to teach a novel in a class like this.  When teaching Great Expectations in my Victorian Age course, or my Victorian Novel course, or my Dickens course, certain kinds of readings come to the forefront.  But here, none of that really matters in an obvious way.  Do I bring in Newman’s discussion of the gentleman?  Does the novel’s re-mixing of David Copperfield matter?

We can close-read passages all day long, but articulating those readings together in a coherent way is . . . well.  We can also simply disband the idea of gaining any understanding of the novel, and simply churn through a set of disconnected formal analyses, but that’s not much more appealing.

(Mercifully, no matter what we can also watch the South Park adaptation of Great Expectations, which is both awesome and surprisingly accurate.  Don’t miss Herbert Pocket’s tutoring Pip about London manners.)

This is a first for me: A blog post reconstructed from text messages, but here goes:

A friend of mine at another university–for strict anonymity’s sake we’ll call him “Brian”–wrote this afternoon to ask whether I had any practical advice on developing rubrics for evaluating student writing. You can see an example of a rubric I use here; here’s the assignment it’s for).

Anyway, here are the things I told “Brian”:

• Make the math, if there’s math (for example, if points are assigned, which convert to a grade), easy to do in a hurry!
• Make sure that the rubric is aligned to the learning outcomes for the assignment.  Your rubric doesn’t have to capture everything–just what you’re working on in this paper.
• Make sure the rubric produces results you can live with.  Try it out on some papers before you commit to using it with students.  (Maybe it produces scores that seem too low/high, or doesn’t differentiate well between average and strong papers.)
• Build credibility for the rubric by norming with students.  Give them a real (anonymized!) paper, a copy of the rubric, and grade it collectively in class.  Have them discuss their grading process, and explain your own.
• Whenever possible, give the students the rubric in advance.  It gives organized students the opportunity to prioritize their revisions in the most productive way.

That’s my list!  But I’m really not a rubric expert, just some guy who’s been using them increasingly for a year or so.  What are your suggestions for designing a good rubric?

Last week I was in Porto for WikiSym 2008. It was both fun and informative, in ways some followup posts will explore. Perhaps the most interesting and invigorating part was the opportunity to be at a conference that was both related to my daily work and yet distant from my research expertise. WikiSym’s a conference for wiki developers, researchers (several sociologist/communication types studying Wikipedia), and practitioners. Aside from George Landow, who gave a keynote, I think I was the only literature professor.

On the one hand, this was a bit awkward, especially at moments of idle chit-chat.

But on the other hand, there were some real advantages:

• It was fun to see different possibilities for conferences. Any conference with a twitter printer and a flickr feed is worth attending. OpenSpace was fascinating. And, of course, the conference about wikis had a wiki that people could edit with reports and notes and such throughout the conference. Those technologies and social practices made the conference productive in real-time, as it were, rather than simply providing inspiration or food for thought (though it offered those, too).
• An advantage of a conference like WikiSym, especially if you’re a relative outsider, is that there’s surprisingly little bullshit posturing. People were friendly and open, without much worrying about what kind of school you’re from, or whether you’re going to be able to help their career. (Some of that may be a characteristic of “people who are interested in wikis,” but it seems related to the idea that, in a mixed group, reputation matters less.)
• It was also fun to be able listen without having to sound smart. It’s always surprising to discover the extent to which anxiety over status or expertise clogs one’s thinking.

Of course, just going to a random conference outside your area would probably be meaningless or frustrating.  For the exercise to be useful, it needs to be something you’re genuinely interested in, and preferably have at least some experience with. Beyond that, however, I’d say that such a conference can be powerful.

Matt Sedensky has an interesting article out today on the problem of institutionalizing elderly Holocaust survivors. Here’s the lead:

Nearly every night, Martin Hornung’s nightmare unfolds to the same haunting strains. Of Auschwitz. Of screaming voices. Of scenes he would rather not relive in the light of day.

“I’m almost afraid to go to sleep,” the 86-year-old retired computer engineer said.

The horrors that revisit Hornung in the dark are common among Holocaust survivors and are a reason why he refuses to enter a nursing home despite his myriad health problems.

Jewish organizations worldwide are working to keep survivors out of such facilities, where the surroundings and routines — strangers in uniforms, desolate shower rooms, medical procedures — can worsen flashbacks.

Sedensky doesn’t cite it, but there’s an interesting documentary by Shosh Shlam, called Last Journey into Silence (see the trailer here), which is about a group of survivors who, after the war, were locked away in mental institutions as psychotic. About ten years ago, they were moved to a hospice called Shaar Menashe, and were re-diagnosed with Holocaust-related PTSD, sometimes with interesting effects. (Though, of course, these patients now also suffer from 30-odd years of institutionalization–the idea of a “cure” is pretty remote.) The film recovers their story, and also reflects on the complex relationships between survivors and their children.

A. and another grad school colleague interviewed Shlam about the movie some years ago–it’s available here as a .pdf.

It’s odd that these three came out within a week of each other, as they were conducted several months apart, but I do have three new interviews up over the past 10 days or so:

• In Clarkesworld Magazine, an interview with Richard K. Morgan (author of Altered Carbon, the recipient this year of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Black Man [Thirteen])
•  In Bookslut, an interview with Kate Summerscale (author of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, recipient this year of the BBC4 Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction)
• In PopMatters, an interview with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (editors of Steampunk, and too many other things to mention)

Next month has some other exciting things coming, which I can’t mention yet, but it’s probably safe to say that this particular cluster may be the coolest I get for quite some time . . . !!