The Salt-Box

Around Christmas, 30boxes announced a new feature for their slick online calendar: a daily digest of your schedule, arriving in your e-mail inbox around midnight.  Especially after the demise of Sandy, this is a useful feature to add.

Right now, though, it doesn’t work the way I expect.  It’s easy to control:

What I expect to happen is that I will only get e-mail when I have put events into my calendar myself.

What actually happens, though, is that I get e-mail when there’s an event on a webcalendar that I’ve subscribed to–typically, the calendar of events at CCSU.

That’s frustrating, because the two kinds of events aren’t the same.  The difference between them is clear enough in the regular 30boxes interface, which only shows events I’ve added–until I mouse over a given day, and then it reveals everything else.  My calendar should only e-mail me about events I really can’t miss, not to tell me that a bunch of different clubs have their meetings.

(Apparently I’ve been using 30boxes for almost 3 years–since 2/6/2006.  That’s a long time online.)

This morning at an on-campus retreat for FYE faculty, a presenter mentioned that, soon, universities will have to print textbooks, ISBNs, and prices in online catalogs for registration and such.  I thought, “nah, couldn’t possibly be true”–that’s ridiculous.  And yet, here’s the Higher Education Opportunity Act, signed into law last summer:

(d) Provision of ISBN College Textbook Information in Course Schedules- To the maximum extent practicable, each institution of higher education receiving Federal financial assistance shall–

1. disclose, on the institution’s Internet course schedule and in a manner of the institution’s choosing, the International Standard Book Number and retail price information of required and recommended college textbooks and supplemental materials for each course listed in the institution’s course schedule used for preregistration and registration purposes, except that–
   • if the International Standard Book Number is not available for such college textbook or supplemental material, then the institution shall include in the Internet course schedule the author, title, publisher, and copyright date for such college textbook or supplemental material; and
   • if the institution determines that the disclosure of the information described in this subsection is not practicable for a college textbook or supplemental material, then the institution shall so indicate by placing the designation `To Be Determined’ in lieu of the information required under this subsection; and
2. if applicable, include on the institution’s written course schedule a notice that textbook information is available on the institution’s Internet course schedule, and the Internet address for such schedule.

Damn.

It’s already the case that textbook orders are required to be submitted preposterously early.  (As I understand it, this is to facilitate the buyback market, which has complex effects on textbook prices.)  If we have to provide all of that online, that deadline will get a lot firmer and a lot earlier.

Which is to say that, in effect, this is a regulation that will hamper creative teaching–or, rather, it will encourage professors to teach the same courses, from the same textbooks, over and over again.  It also will create public pressure for conformity in textbook ordering: “Why are *you* using the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, when everyone else is using the Norton?”  “Why do you require the Penguin edition of Dickens, when the Dover edition is so much cheaper?”

Textbook pricing is a complicated problem, and this is a fairly blunt instrument.  I’m in favor of information and transparency–I usually make my book orders as public as possible, and provide information to the local alternative bookstore and so forth–but this doesn’t sound like it was thought through carefully.

We might also pause a moment and mourn the idea that a student might take a course for a reason other than the professor offered the least expensive version of it.

. . . are up at Blog of a Bookslut.  Highlights include a bunch of contemporary Italian poetry, Kenyan poet-bloggers, and Robert Frost Christmas cards.

Over at Bookninja, George Murray points to this depressing, though slightly inflammatory article about parents who won’t read their children traditional fairy tales because they’re insufficiently PC and positive:

Favourites such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella and Rapunzel are being dropped by some families who fear children are being emotionally damaged.

A third of parents refused to read Little Red Riding Hood because she walks through woods alone and finds her grandmother eaten by a wolf.

One in 10 said Snow White should be re-named because “the dwarf reference is not PC”.

The mind reels.

As is so frequently the case with modern absurdities, Charles Dickens was on the case 150-odd years ago (I’ve posted this before, but will re-post as events demand):

In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected. Our English red tape is too magnificently red ever to be employed in the tying up of such trifles, but every one who has considered the subject knows full well that a nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun. The theatre, having done its worst to destroy these admirable fictions–having in a most exemplary manner destroyed itself, its artists, and its audiences, in that perversion of its duty–it becomes doubly important that the little books themselves, nurseries of fancy as they are, should be preserved. To preserve them in their usefulness, they must be as much preserved in their simplicity, and purity, and innocent extravagance, as if they were actual fact. Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty, to our thinking, of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.

. . .

Now, it makes not the least difference to our objection whether we agree or disagree with our worthy friend, Mr. Cruikshank, in the opinions he interpolates upon an old fairy story. Whether good or bad in themselves, they are, in that relation, like the famous definition of a weed; a thing growing up in a wrong place. He has no greater moral justification in altering the harmless little books than we should have in altering his best etchings. 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 [97/98] 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.

Nobody likes it when a kid has nightmares–but it happens.  Just two nights ago, our 5-yr-old dreamed of a talking female statue who kept telling him, “BELIEVE IN GOD OR YOU WILL DIE.”  Believe me, he’d not read anything with that sort of imagery anytime recently . . . it was just a nightmare.  Dickens is right: The imaginative space of fairy tales, and of art in general, is worth defending against the suffocating desire of parents to protect their children from untoward thoughts.

Music

As I look through iTunes, these are the top five albums that I bought this year, irrespective of release date:

• The Hold Steady, Stay Positive  (tracks: “Ask Her for Some Adderall,” “Slapped Actress,” “Stay Positive“)
• The Drive-By Truckers, Southern Rock Opera (tracks: “Zip City,” “Dead, Drunk and Naked,” and, of course, “Let There Be Rock“)
• The Gaslight Anthem, The ‘59 Sound (track: “Great Expectations” )
• Against Me!, Reinventing Axl Rose (tracks: “Pints of Guinness Make You Strong,” “Baby I’m an Anarchist,” “Those Anarcho Punks Are Mysterious“)
• TV on the Radio, Dear Science (tracks: “Crying,” “Dancing Choose,” “Love Dog,” bonus sentimental video)

I also bought most of The National’s back catalog, and picked up a huge amount of uncollected KRS-ONE tracks.  Oh, and the soundtrack to Juno was fun, and led me to Jeffrey Lewis’s It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through.  The Counting Crows album was, I thought, better than its reception, but I am pretty old.  The DBT’s newest album, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, is also terrific. (And they’re playing in CT in 3 weeks!)

My favorites from this year include Dear Science, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, and The ‘59 Sound, but, really, the album of the year in our house was Stay Positive, a CD we wore out playing in the car.  “Ask Her For Some Adderall” will always be the song of 2008 for us.  (And, as I’ve written elsewhere, there’s nothing quite like hearing your 5-yr-old belt it out at maximum volume, nor developing a tradition of pulling up to kindergarten in the morning just as the final section of “Constructive Summer” kicks in: “I went to your schools / and did my detention / but the walls were so gray / I couldn’t pay attention.”  A. liked the line about “Saint Joe Strummer” so much she bought me the 4-hour documentary about him, The Future Is Unwritten, for Christmas.)

 Kid’s Music

Beyond The Hold Steady, the 5-yr-old also enjoyed the Barenaked Ladies’ kid-friendly release,  Snacktime, as well as Justin Roberts’s Pop Fly, and Kimya Dawson’s Alphabutt.  Favorite tracks: “Ask Her for Some Adderall”; DBT’s “Bob“; Beefy’s “I’m No Superman“; Ozzy Ozbourne, “Iron Man“; and Dawson, “Alphabutt.”

Movies

Movies are expensive when you factor in baby sitting.  I suspect the best movie we saw at a theater was Tell No One, and we probably had the best time at Iron Man.  (I’ll give you that The Dark Knight is a better movie, but it seems inarguable that Iron Man is more fun.)

It looks like the best movies we rented were United 93 and No Country for Old Men.

 Kid’s Movies

Like everyone else, we thought Wall-E and Kung-Fu Panda were the best children’s movies, with Bolt right below that.  I suspect that if the 5-yr-old were typing this, he’d rate Star Wars: The Clone Wars pretty highly.  I fell asleep during the Horton movie, and refused to see the Madagascar one, since I’d fallen asleep during the original.

Non-Professional Reading

The best book I read this year that I was neither teaching nor writing about was Ciaran Carson’s translation of The Tain, followed by Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.

The best book I read to the 5-yr-old this year was Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain & The Green Knight, followed by H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. 20K Leagues under the Sea wasn’t as successful, because we had a bad translation.

The worst things I read him: The novelizations of the Star Wars & Indiana Jones universes are just astonishingly bad–and they’re badly copyedited, to boot. Here’s hoping that the H. G. Wells helps the boy improve his taste, or I might have to start reading him Neuromancer or something, and he might be a little young.

Tomorrow I’ll round up the things I read more or less professionally.