The Clutter Museum

This blog has hit the road. . .

2011-03-16T21:46:00.004-06:00

It's now at ClutterMuseum.com. About damn time, n'est-ce pas?

Update your bookmarks and feed readers, ¡por favor!

The rising of our women is the rising of us all

2011-03-10T21:33:00.005-07:00

I'm too angry to blog thoughtfully about what's going on in Wisconsin.

My parents were schoolteachers under a string of Republican governors, and I remember seeing a photo in the newspaper of my dad and his fellow workers protesting at some school board meeting, singing union songs. When I became a graduate student, I joined unions and participated in picket lines, so I'm definitely feeling some solidarity with the people of Wisconsin.

Many times over the past few days, I've seen folks reference Martin Luther King Junior's reminder that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." That sentence has become a sort of mantra for me over the past few days.

Suffragists, Section of Working Women, 1917 (source)

As many people have pointed out, the end of collective bargaining disproportionately affects women employees--as do various other actions being taken this legislative season in state legislatures across the nation.

I feel moved, then, to share one of my favorite songs. Here's Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco performing their version of "Bread and Roses" (scroll to 1:18, where the song begins):

Lyrics (slightly different from the original lyrics):

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are brightened by the beauty a sudden sun discloses,
And the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men –
For they are in this struggle and together we can win.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes –
Hearts can starve as well as bodies; give us Bread, but give us Roses.

As we come marching, marching, a hundred million dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew –
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for Roses, too.

As we come marching, marching, we're standing proud and tall –
The rising of our women is the rising of us all –
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes –
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

Crossfire

2011-03-10T20:17:00.004-07:00

Have I shared with you my red-state nightmare?

A gunman enters a class I'm teaching in a large lecture hall. Students at first look shocked, but then they all stand up, draw their handguns, and start shooting. (Take a moment to imagine the crossfire and the terror.)

Thanks to the lovely politicians in my new state of delusion, that nightmare is one step closer to reality.

My campus has banned smoking anywhere on the university's grounds. But it's likely that very soon students will be able to bring guns to class.

Smart is sexy--in the classroom, on the job market, pretty much anywhere. Guns, not so much.
Photo by Janina Szkut, and used under a Creative Commons license

I know many students at Boise State come from rural areas and grew up hunting. They're comfortable, therefore, with hunting rifles. But let's be honest--we're not talking about letting students and others bring rifles onto campus. We're talking about handguns. (Including at football games. Because football isn't already enough of a blood sport.)

As someone who grew up in an area scarred by handgun violence perpetrated by teenagers and young adults, I am profoundly uneasy with this latest development.

I have no words

2011-03-04T09:49:00.003-07:00

. . .except for these: the folks at this protest are bigots and racists, plain and simple. Even worse, some of them are elected (Republican) reps, one of whom made death threats against the Muslim families attending this charity event.

Please spread the word of these protesters' and representatives' hateful wrongdoing.

Ups and Downs, Ups and Downs

2011-02-22T22:01:00.006-07:00

When I was in elementary school, a teacher read my class a book that followed the pattern "Fortunately. . . Unfortunately." It was like this one--and maybe it was that one, but the copyright date doesn't seem right. Anyhoo, cribbing from Amazon's description of that book, the plot went something like this:

Fortunately, Ned was invited to a surprise party.
Unfortunately, the party was a thousand miles away.

Fortunately, a friend loaned Ned an airplane.
Unfortunately, the motor exploded.

Fortunately, there was a parachute in the airplane.
Unfortunately, there was a hole in the parachute.

Lately my life has seemed to be a big, disjointed narrative of Fortunately. . . Unfortunately. . .

Some episodes:

I get a nasty head/chest cold. I begin to recover. Then I get a second round. Then I begin to recover again, but with a twist--my head and chest are clear but I have all the tiredness of a mononucleosis victim. Plus: insomnia! Today, in fact, is the first day in a while that I've had enough energy to make it through the day intellectually and physically intact.

Today I turned in a grant application I've been working on for months. Yay! I've even come to grips with the university's indirect cost rate scaling down the project to the point where it's a bit embarrassing. I even found the strength to correct the grants guy when he called the $50,000 grant proposal "small." (Those of you in the sciences may not realize that a grant over, oh, $3500 is pretty damn big for a humanist.) And then, just as I think I have all my ducks in a row, I learn there's another form specific to my university--a big, complicated one--that I need to get filled out and double-signed. And no, my first thought was not, "What the fuck am I paying indirect costs of $19,500 for if the grants folk aren't going alert me to the fact that I need to fill out this friggin' form?" Fortunately, the grants folks are actually quite nice, and this was in the big scheme of things a small oversight, and they'll help me get it filled out quickly.

Lucas starts kindergarten in the fall. Unfortunately, our local elementary school is kind of sketchy. I'm not one to look at test scores, but let's just say a 50% drop in boys' reading proficiency between kindergarten and first grade raises a red flag--especially when that decline isn't mirrored throughout the district. Fortunately, Lucas earned lucky #13 (of ~150) in the lottery for one of the area's best-regarded charter schools, the one to which local hippies and commies (read: the professoriate) long to send their kids. Unfortunately, through the whims of fate (read: large Idaho families + priority for siblings of current students), even #13 might not be a good enough number to get him into the school. We'll know within a couple of weeks. Keep your fingers crossed for us, OK? As Fang has detailed on his blog, Lucas has been running into a number of budding sociopaths in his preschool, and we'd really prefer that he fall in with the kind of kids whose parents are serious about sending them to a great school, even if it's in what's widely acknowledged as Boise's armpit.

Then there's Utah. That post was a way for me to come to grips with the fact that a doctor found a giant tumor in my 87-year-old grandmother. In her colon. Because her primary care physician is (literally, alas) in a coma and thus no one had pointed out to her that her symptoms might indicate a cancer-scale problem--which means she hadn't had a colonoscopy in, well, ever. Fortunately, the surgeon thought he could excise the tumor, do a temporary colostomy, and reconnect the remaining parts of the colon. Unfortunately, he found the tumor is cancerous, the cancer has metastasized to her liver and pancreas, and the primary tumor is inoperable because of scar tissue from an apparently botched hysterectomy from 40 years ago. The surgeon gives her two years to live.

I'll write a blog post about my grandmother when I have the emotional strength to do so. For now let's just say that I've always marveled at her strength and good humor, and that my grandmother has not just been a caretaker and adviser to me, but also a very good friend. Even today, just a couple days after her surgery, even though she'd had family and doctors and nurses and physical therapists visiting her all day long, she was chatty and even optimistic. We talked and laughed for 25 minutes--and this is a woman who recently found out she's terminally ill and had just hours before learned how to empty the colostomy bag that she'll use for the rest of her life. I love the woman dearly, and I'm having a very difficult time being so far away from her.

This geographical angst has been made even worse by Idaho politics. I love my job dearly, and what little I've seen of this state is achingly beautiful in that wind-scrubbed arid intermountain way. I do plan to stay here for a long time. Yet recent events have made me regret, just a little, putting so much distance between me and California.

Share your own Fortunately. . . Unfortunately. . . scenarios in the comments. It's good to know I'm not alone on this roller coaster.

Putting things in perspective

2011-02-21T19:27:00.001-07:00

From Robert Reich, on the Republican strategy:

Last year, America’s top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains – at 15 percent – due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.

If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of 300,000 teachers. Who is more valuable to our society – thirteen hedge-fund managers or 300,000 teachers? Let’s make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?

Next stop: Hellscape

2011-02-19T07:08:00.009-07:00

Caution: I may be channeling Fang.

Photo by Shane Gorski, and used under a Creative Commons license.

In recent years, I haven't been prone to pessimism, but I'm beginning to believe that the Republicans won't be satisfied until we're all living in heavily armed survivalist compounds outside of dead (liberal!) cities. Only then will we have achieved the vision of the Founding Fathers--only it will be a twisted, post-apocalyptic version of Jefferson's agrarian middle landscape.

I know I need not provide much evidence on a national scale to readers of this blog, but may I share a few highlights gleaned from a few of the blogs I read, and only from the past few days? (Then, my friends, only then shall we turn to the clusterfuck that is Idaho.)

First, there's Historiann's post about representation without taxation. She sums up the Colorado governor's ~~delusion~~ plan to make the state more "pro-business"--the plan is awfully familiar to those of us a bit to the north and west of Historiann--and then provides this commentary:

What a brilliant “pro-business” plan this is! Absolutely everyone wants to move their businesses to a state that’s cutting education! It’s so easy to get your employees to see the advantages for their children of attending schools with huge class sizes and no “extras” like music, art, sports, or anything that’s not covered on the Colorado Student Annual Progress (CSAP) tests. And if they love that, they’ll love the nonexistent state support for universities here! (And guess what? Republicans here are lauding the governor’s “seriousness,” while Democrats are treating Hick’s budget like a flaming bag of poo left on their doorstep.)

We get the politicians we deserve. The fatuousness of these conversations among our elected representatives reflects our own unseriousness as citizens. We expect to enjoy quality schools, universities, parks, roads, hospitals, medical care, emergency services, low-income assistance, prisons, public transportation, and all other services without paying taxes. We’ve been living off of the crumbling infrastructure Americans invested in fifty years ago and more, expecting that nothing would change and that no further investment was required.

A-fucking-men.

Then there's Bardiac's upper-Midwest state, which has been in the news quite a bit lately for its attempted pounding of public-sector labor unions. She provides a round-up of Republican plans to, for example, eliminate health insurance and pensions for "limited-term employees" (who, she points out, are mostly women), as well as cut funding for Medicaid, so that even the children of these newly health-insurance-free employees won't have access to affordable healthcare. She then nicely details the difference between pro-business factions and those of us on the front lines of public service and in particular education:

There's some bluster on both sides, of course. But the bluster of state workers is so much less effective. I was thinking about how ineffective our bluster is.

And here's what I figured out: our problem is that we actually care.

We value education and care about educating our students.

We care about doing jobs we think are important enough that we take less pay than we'd get in the private sector (it's in the news, not just some opinion I have).

So we aren't going to mess with students or do less work.

Can I hear another amen, people?

(Arbitrista seems to agree:

Why so glum? My nature perhaps, and the fact that these are discouraging times. But more importantly I don't have a great deal of confidence that the Democratic Party will do anything to stop it. As with abortion rights or gun control, Democrats have stopped fighting very hard for unions. They're pretty much absent from the public debate on these issues, which means that one one side you have a barrage of relentless propaganda and on the other....nothing.)

And then, via Shark-Fu, we learn of a particularly asinine proposal to eliminate child labor regulations in Missouri. Here's the summary of the bill from the state website:

SB 222 – This act modifies the child labor laws. It eliminates the prohibition on employment of children under age fourteen. Restrictions on the number of hours and restrictions on when a child may work during the day are also removed. It also repeals the requirement that a child ages fourteen or fifteen obtain a work certificate or work permit in order to be employed. Children under sixteen will also be allowed to work in any capacity in a motel, resort or hotel where sleeping accommodations are furnished. It also removes the authority of the director of the Division of Labor Standards to inspect employers who employ children and to require them to keep certain records for children they employ. It also repeals the presumption that the presence of a child in a workplace is evidence of employment.

(Take a moment to pry your jaw off the ground. I'll wait. I'll use the time to teach Lucas how to earn pennies an hour on Mechanical Turk.)

Quips Shark-Fu, "I’m guessing that [state Representative Jane] Cunningham, ever a faithful minion, consulted Satan prior to filing this shit."

Now that we've finished a rapid tour of flyover America, let's take a look at my far-flung corner of Real America.

Via Sisyphus at 43rd State Blues, I learned about the blog of state rep Nicole LeFavour, a Democrat who represents my favorite parts of Boise. LeFavour penned a post titled "How to Tank a State Economy: Easy Steps for Lawmakers." It's worth reading in its entirety, but it's such a well-organized post that it's possible to outline it here.

1. Destroy Jobs

A. Lay off as many state employees as possible

B. Reduce wages

C. Be sure that businesses doing contract work for the state go bankrupt

D. Repel Businesses Seeking to Move into Your State

2. Increase Costs to Families

A. Force Families into Crisis

B. Make Education More Expensive

C. Remain Dependent on Fossil Fuels

D. Increase User Fees for Everything

3. Keep State Government in Perpetual Fiscal Crisis

A. Turn away federal matching funds or any form of money paid to the federal government by taxpayers in your state.

B. No matter how well the national economy is recovering, predict doom for your own state.

C. Create Political Strife.

D. No Matter How Much Things Fall Apart, Don't Raise Taxes.

4. Reduce The State's Population

A. Nothing says economic disaster like death and out migration.

But really, this outline doesn't do LeFavour's post justice. Click through to read it yourself, but here are some of my favorite recent Gem State hijinks (and their results, many of which have been realized) she suggests the state should pursue if it really wants to fail big:

Be sure your public schools rank last in the nation for per pupil spending, class size and adequacy of school facilities, course offerings, text books, lab supplies and equipment and materials essential to teaching.
Provide no anti-discrimination job protections for gay people. Technology companies are full of gay employees. Even if a company provides its own job protections, a state needs to project a hostile enough atmosphere to guarantee that other family members seeking jobs or educational opportunities will face discrimination in employment, housing and education in any given town across the state.
Ensure state leaders talk as much as possible about large predatory animals decimating wildlife populations and killing domestic animals.
Even if you can not pass such a law, at least claim you will enact Arizona-style immigration policies so that employees and business owners with darker skin or names like Martinez or Perez will fear eminent racial profiling, detainment or arrest.
Fail to fund or develop a network of low cost health clinics. The fewer options families have, the more likely they are to fail to access preventative care and fall into costly medical crisis and personal bankruptcy.
Stop funding water quality monitoring, refuse to extensively regulate day care facilities and provide as few counseling services as possible in local schools to ensure an adequate supply of physical and mental health crises statewide.
Eliminate public Kindergarten. Make sure your state's children start out behind the rest of the nation.
Require public schools students take on-line classes in order to graduate. Decreased teacher interaction and the lack of support for those who struggle can be highly effective at wasting years of college tuition as students fail classes or need extensive remedial coursework. The impact on families of students with disabilities can be impressive as those with certain learning styles have higher failure rates and are more likely to fall into cycles of dependence later in life should support in these early years be inadequate.
Deny local communities the ability to fund public transportation. In urban areas this guarantees tax dollars are sucked rapidly into perpetual freeway widening projects which produce few jobs but expend state revenues on raw materials. A lack of public transportation also directly increases costs to families who struggle with with car maintenance or gas prices or for those commuters who waste time in traffic during their commute.
Ensuring failure of your public school system can help bring on privatization and a stratification of the quality of educational opportunity available to families of differing incomes. User fees in education are not a new concept. They are a bridge to stratification and ensure that some kids will not be able to reach the same levels of academic attainment that the more wealthy do.
Violate federal laws so that your state faces sanctions. Refusing to enact federal health care reform for example may well result in the state losing all federal funds for medicaid --meaning a loss to health providers, businesses and families of nearly a billion in federal dollars.

May I add "Have your State Board of Education suspend faculty governance at your state universities"?

Goddammit--I don't have time to become a political activist.

Yet I heart Nicole LeFavour. It's nice to know there's someone so bright and articulate in the statehouse. When Fang gets back on his economic feet (see: We Moved to Idaho), we'll definitely be donating to her campaign fund.

What's your state doing to transform itself into an environmental, economic, and educational hellscape?

Utah

2011-02-12T06:45:00.005-07:00

I have several blog posts in draft, but I haven't had the energy and focus to finish them because I've been thinking about an Unbloggable Thing (UT, so I'll call it Utah).

Photo by Wolfgang Staudt, and used under a Creative Commons license

Random vague bullets of Utah:

A person I care about deeply has gone to Utah.
This loved one is not ready to share with others in hir family that ze has gone to Utah.
This trip to Utah could have been avoided, had adequate steps been taken.
The people who could have taken these steps are, I imagine, really angry with themselves that, despite their love and attention, this person has ended up in Utah, which, in this metaphor at least, is not a very nice place to visit.
Indeed, I'm upset with myself because I might have urged others to take the steps to prevent the trip to Utah.
I'm exceptionally frustrated that ze has gone to Utah, especially considering the trip was avoidable.
Still, I'm pretty much endlessly forgiving when it comes to people I care about, even when they make mistakes that take them (or others I love) to someplace like Utah. (With myself, I'm considerably less forgiving.)
This recent trip to Utah is making me very sad.

What would help, in the comments:

Stories about how you had to keep quiet for a while (perhaps a long while) about something that made you very frustrated or sad, and how you dealt with that, even though it was always on your mind.
Good vibes for my loved one in Utah.
Sympathy. This is going to be hard.

A bit surreal

2011-01-31T14:02:00.002-07:00

Just received notice that one of my journal articles was rejected--with a note that I should familiarize myself with the work of Leslie Madsen-Brooks.*

headdesk

*There is, of course, the chance that one of my grad school profs or former colleagues was the anonymous reviewer, in which case ha ha ha--thanks for the shout-out.

Fun with Name Profiler

2011-01-25T09:50:00.004-07:00

Ah, I could play with this world names profiler all day. . .

Here are maps of my parents' surnames. When I say my people are from icy climes, I'm not kidding:

The map does explain the origin and utility of my ridiculously straight hair, however: no droplets from this morning's freezing fog are going to cling to it--they'll slip right off.

Methinks my Dad's people find Mormon missionaries to be highly persuasive:

Liking Ike

2011-01-19T21:36:00.004-07:00

I can't believe I missed this anniversary, but one of my favorite American speeches turned 50 a couple days ago. It was overshadowed by the mainstream media's hoopla of the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's inauguration, so I'm dragging it into the light here.

Read Eisenhower's farewell address.

A few gems from Stephen Colbert

2011-01-19T21:31:00.002-07:00

Colbert is on fire this week. If you haven't seen these clips, take a break--you deserve one!

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Run for Your Life

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Disintegration

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Mika Brzezinski Experiences Palin Fatigue

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>

Video Archive

Playgrounds

2011-01-14T11:57:00.004-07:00

What I'm about to describe is going to sound a little kooky to many of you, but I feel moved to share it.

I spent most of the last week in Portland, Oregon at a little place called the Playground. Founded last year by Havi Brooks, the Playground is home to several different interesting events, all led by Havi. I attended a Rally specifically for folks who have been members for at least a year of a group run by her.

We began each day with some really, really difficult Shiva Nata. (Disclosure: For me, all levels of Shiva Nata are difficult; there's a reason, after all, its practitioners frequently refer to it simply as "the flailing.") At one point Havi had us do some level 7, which is unbelievably brain-scrambling and resulted, for me at least, in a day-long series of epiphanies in a week already packed with them. Shiva Nata was followed by savasana, and then by some reflective journaling and setting of intentions for the work we'd like to accomplish that day.

There were ten of us on the retreat, all of us working on separate projects and giving one another mutual support when we became stuck on a particular part of our projects or when we felt stymied in a more general way. My fellow Rallions were all bright, creative women who were so delightful to finally meet in person after a year of communicating online. I suppose the best way to describe Rally is as a silent retreat punctuated by whimsy and play (and profoundly fabulous pie from a nearby café.) I accomplished so much in three days—lots of writing and planning, but after doing the work I felt less intellectually exhausted (my usual state) than exhilarated.

I've been reflecting, then, on how I can bring the spirit—and some of the physical aspects, because they're also central to the experience—of Rally with me to my home and work.

Some ideas:

There was one pattern-recognition exercise in particular—it involved various kinds of walking with intention—that I'll be trying out on my students when I'm teaching the capstone writing seminar this semester.
I'm noting, now that I'm back home, a distinct lack of floor pillows in my house, and they're much needed, particularly when I play with Lucas on the floor of his room.
Candles! Funky lamps! Plush monsters! A hammock (and we already have a hammock chair ready to mount on the back patio when it warms up).
I'm going to recommit to practicing Shiva Nata. I was doing it every day for a while about a year ago, but then I stopped, and I'm not sure why. It provides some light, much-needed physical exercise, and I could benefit from the brain workout, too.

Mostly, I want more play—more playgrounds—in my life at home and at work.

What about you? What are you trying out this semester or this year?

Writing Guide Assistance?

2011-01-05T11:58:00.006-07:00

I'm writing a very practical, step-by-step guide aimed at undergrads in the humanities or social sciences (but also probably useful to advanced high school students and grad students who need a review) about how to write an argumentative essay. After a dozen years of teaching writing-intensive courses, I'm pretty confident about teaching the essay, so I'm approaching the guide as an (organized!) download of my brain onto digital paper. I'm going to give it to students in my classes and also maybe make it available for Kindle or as a PDF through ejunkie or some such outlet.

I've already received some great ideas about what should be included in such a guide, but I'd love to hear your thoughts as well. What would you want to see included?

I've drafted about half of the book, and I'm thinking it will come in at 40-50 pages single-spaced—longer once formatted into a book—plus worksheets and appendices. It's not a guide for last-minute, night-before-it's-due essay writers, but rather for students who really have no idea where to start and need a good deal of hand-holding between receiving the essay prompt and turning in the paper. Most importantly: I'm not looking for it to be the be-all, end-all compendium on student writing; I want to keep it under 100 pages when it's formatted.

On this first pass, I'm using a hiking/camping metaphor, though I may abandon it because it might be too precious—and it might not resonate with students who rarely leave an urban environment. Anyway, here's a rough section outline:

Packing Your Knapsack: gathering your tools
The Trailhead: examining your topic
Mapping Your Route: preliminary brainstorming
Foraging: gathering more information
Mountaintop Vistas: crafting your argument
Setting up Camp: organizing your essay
Campfire: revisiting (and possibly revising) your argument, and getting feedback
Packing Up: final clean-up

Additional topics covered in subsections or sidebars (listed below in no particular order):

making a checklist from the assignment instructions
how to narrow your topic if the essay assignment is wide open or vague
how to figure out if your instructor believes there's a "correct" answer, or if she's less interested in a "right" answer and more interested in seeing how well you make your argument
how to articulate the thesis statement
paragraph structure and transitions
using tables for brainstorming
advanced strategy: using metaphors effectively
using a rubric for assessing the paper
primary vs. secondary sources
scholarly vs. popular sources
clustering
outlining
plagiarism
citation styles
reference librarians are your friends
revision strategies
recommended resources (e.g. Strunk and White's Elements of Style)
20 most common errors of grammar and usage (at least in my classes)

As always, your thoughts are much appreciated.

Common rites

2010-12-31T23:23:00.000-07:00

As I write this, the midnight hour sweeps round the world, ushering in a new year. It's a half hour 'til midnight here, and I'm the only one in the house who remains awake.

I'm remembering tonight the New Year's eves of my childhood. We'd spend the evening at my grandparents' house, a classic bright yellow, brick-porched California bungalow just a few doors down from our own home. Perhaps folks would drink a bit too much, but usually my sister and I didn't notice--we were drifting to sleep as my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles laughed at The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

At midnight, we'd run out onto the porch, banging pots and pans with wooden spoons. Some of the older neighbors joined us in this rite. At some point during these years, my grandfather declared it was an old Scottish tradition to run around a tree three times at midnight for good luck. We're not a superstitious people, but we gave in to Pops's tradition, circling the block's palm trees.

Fang and I don't have any New Year's rites, though I suppose we will concoct some as Lucas grows more cognizant of the significance of a new year, and how in one moment we can be in (for the nation) a truly awful year like 2010 and in the next moment be completely free of it, at least temporally.

2010 has been a dynamic year for my little family. So that I might pursue a tenure-track job, we uprooted the family and moved to Boise. It's a move I don't regret, as I really do love my job and adore my new colleagues, but at least once I day I think of California and feel very much as if I'm in exile from where I ought to be. After all, California is more than just a place I was passing through--my family has deep, deep roots there. I suspect one day I'll return, though not any time soon, as I have lots of exploration and growth waiting for me here.

One of the things I've learned in my first semester here is that faculty here really do have a great deal of autonomy. I'm enjoying that tremendously, and I plan to write more here about how my teaching might change as a result of that independence. The expectations for my position really do seem to be wide open, and folks have seemed interested in whatever I propose. 2011 may, then, be a very interesting year intellectually.

On the home front, I have more work to do. We need more grounding in this place, as individuals and as a family. I need to help Fang find what he needs here—and that means both meeting physical needs and finding him greater intellectual and emotional fulfillment. He is, after all, a newspaperman in an era of newspaper extinction. What do you do when you're almost fifty years old and your entire industry disappears--especially if you don't have a college degree? Fang says he suddenly feels sympathy for hoop skirt makers, but I suspect under his humor there's a good deal of pain and perhaps even some fear about how he fits into our new life here.

So we need to spend more time together, to establish rituals and common rites, and to aid one another's intellectual, personal, and professional development in this next stage of our lives. I need to remind Fang that the advice offered to Seamus Heaney's narrator by the shade of James Joyce applies to both of us, even though our recent move was driven by my career, not Fang's:

‘Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you do you must do on your own.
The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

Here's hoping 2011 brings both roots and wings.

I'm heading outside now to thrice circle a tree. I'll take an extra lap for you and yours. Happy New Year.

This Friend speaks my mind

2010-12-20T18:08:00.000-07:00

Chuck Fager, director of Quaker House, on the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell:

This change has two important effects, I think:

First, it will enable thousands of present and future soldiers to pursue their careers on their merits, which is only as it should be.

Second, beyond these individual cases, repealing DADT strikes an important blow to the identification of war with masculinity, with heterosexuality, with America, and all three with God.

This identification is idolatry, pure and simple. But it is all too widespread in American Christianity, and it is way past time for it to be broken up.

Enough

2010-12-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

Someone who is close to me recently returned from six or seven months of service as a Marine in Afghanistan. He drives trucks for the military.

Earlier this year, family members were informed he had been involved in an "incident," but they weren't given details. Today I learned a bit more about the nature of this event.

I wasn't surprised to learn that a truck he was driving hit an IED. He regained consciousness in a helicopter.

Physically, he's allegedly recovered. But now that he's stateside, he has terrible PTSD. He can't sleep or drive, and even riding in a car is apparently too much for him. He cries a lot.

What's his family's response to this? They're criticizing him for not being sufficiently masculine. They can't make the connections among the Bush-era anti-terror wars they supported, the crappy economy made worse by Bush administration policies, this guy's joining the Marines because he felt enlistment was his one ticket out of Hellmouth, Arizona, and the total shattering of his life because of his service in Afghanistan.

The family's proposed solution is that he accept Jesus and go back to Afghanistan like a real man.

Fuck you, conservative America.

Band names inspired by grading my students' papers

2010-12-15T22:46:00.000-07:00

Sketchy Secondary Sources
The Successionists* (a Civil War-era band)
Captain Obvious and the Weak Theses

Play along in the comments!

* Yes, multiple students managed to write research papers about the South's succession from the Union.

RBOC, Transitions (and Buried Lede) Edition

2010-12-15T21:43:00.000-07:00

More quasi-random bullets, because that's all I have in me. (Now with subheads!)

Teaching

I'm finishing up my grading for the semester. I'm down to the single digits on my lower-division students' research papers, and then I have their final exams as well. I hope to finish tomorrow, and then submit grades on Friday, assuming I can figure out the LMS gradebook.
That means--yay!--I've finished my first semester on the tenure track. Two course preps down for the year, and two to go--though the next two should be significantly less time-consuming than this semester's.
One of the students in my public history class said she thinks she's found her calling as a public historian, instead of the schoolteacher path she had always imagined for herself. She's had a really rough time of it lately for reasons that have nothing to do with her academic ability, and it's nice to see her really come into her own as a critical and creative thinker who's willing to try new things. She also discovered her classmates valued her for her informally learned knowledge of local history; they dubbed her "Boisepedia." She talked to the department's internship coordinator today, and I'll be writing her a letter of rec for what sounds like a good position for her.
One of my lower-division U.S. survey students wrote me a really nice note that went a long way toward soothing my I'm-not-a-papered-historian impostor syndrome. She explained she had hated history since fourth grade because that was when she first received a B in any subject, and that my course marked the first time she had been invited to engage meaningfully with history rather than memorize dates and consider only privileged people's histories. She said she now "loves history as a subject" and wants to study feminist theory. Also, there's this: "Most importantly, you helped my writing. I never thought that a history teacher could better strengthen the papers I write. I learned more from you than my [redacted] class. You showed me to come to my own conclusions about the sources I had, not let the sources guide my paper. I will apply this in any future writing I have to do. . . So thank you, Leslie, for making history important to me once more." Her note makes me sad about the state of history in K-12, but for now I'll just enjoy the warm fuzzies.
I'll be teaching a section of the capstone writing course next semester. Apparently the seminar raises a tangle of issues about students' patchwork preparedness for historical research and writing. This course has, I'm told, been designated one whose products are to be used for assessing the efficacy of the history department in teaching its majors to think critically and write well. In theory, I suppose I should feel some pressure about that. Still, I'm approaching the course more like Icarus than Sisyphus; we'll see how long it takes for me to plummet to the ground, my wings destroyed by my own hubris.
I'm teaching a graduate course next semester called "Introduction to Applied History." I applied for a grant to partially subsidize mobile devices for students in the class, so up to 15 of the students (so far there aren't 15 registered for the course) will each be able to buy an iPod Touch at a 50% discount. We'll be exploring the possibilities engendered by existing apps, sort of a "small pieces loosely joined" approach to local digital public history.
We'll also be contributing to a very, very large project I began to organize this week. It's a wiki for Boise. It will be modeled on the absolutely fabulous Davis Wiki, but we'll be doing some structured experiments on public history themes as well. I'll also be watching to see what happens when we give members of the public a relatively easy-to-use platform and invite them to create pages on topics of interest to them, as well as edit others' pages. I'm still working on some domain-mapping issues and getting the site ready for launch, but I'll share the link with you when it's ready for a soft launch. There's also some grant writing I need to do related to this project, so it will keep me very busy next semester.

I'm really happy here. Like crazy happy. I like the students and adore my colleagues.

Research and Writing

Goal #1 for the new semester: Revise an article that was deemed very interesting, but "not a good fit" for one journal, and submit it to one (which I've already identified) that is both a better fit for the article and, really, for my work more generally.
Goal #2: Gather and process materials for another article. This will likely involve travel to archives in Northern and/or Southern California.
Goal #3: Use materials from Goal #2 to craft a chapter to replace one in my dissertation. I'm aiming to have a draft of a book based on my dissertation by the end of summer 2012.

Faith

I attended Friends meeting again, and I'll likely be going again this Sunday, er, First Day.
I've been adding blogs by Quakers from across much of the Friends spectrum--from liberal, unprogrammed Friends to orthodox plain folk--to my RSS reader. I've also been lurking on the forums at QuakerQuaker.
As I wrote in my initial blog post about recent developments in my faith journey, what I suspected would happen did indeed come to pass: some folks are seeing my attendance at Quaker meetings as a sign I'm going to be "born again"--that Friends meetings are but a first step toward my permanent embrace of their own denomination. This is incredibly frustrating for me--like I-want-to-scream frustrating because of the arrogance and presumption.
In case any such people are reading this blog, allow me to say this: I'm committed to the Friends for now. If that doesn't work out, I'll likely take some path through Unitarian Universalism, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodists, with a seasoning of Daoism. Any church that uses the phrase "Bible-believing" as a primary way of differentiating its members is not even on the list. I don't mean any offense to friends or blog readers who attend such churches; it's just not my path, and I don't want anyone to have any delusions that it ever will be.
Another sign that the Friends General Conference may be a good home for me: the yearly meeting takes place at my alma mater. Out of all the tiny towns in the U.S., they pick one that matters tremendously deeply to me. I haven't checked to see how the meeting jibes with my summer teaching schedule, but the seed has been planted. . .

Miscellany

I've been watching The Wire. Fang has all five seasons on DVD, and I'm one episode from finishing season 4. It took me half a season to appreciate the series, but now I give it my highest recommendation. The writing and character development are impressive.
Because of how busy I've been, this year's Christmas shopping is being (literally) brought to us by Amazon Prime. How I adore that program!
I need to get back with the Weight Watchers program. After initially losing 15 pounds, I've put a few pounds back on because I became lax about counting points. I eased myself back into it today by having meals that I know are reasonable, but I didn't count the points. Tomorrow I'll begin accounting for points again, which will initially be a headache under the new points system, but I'll adapt.
Lucas went in for his annual well-child check-up, where he was treated to five separate vaccinations. I had, finally, the new Tdap vaccine for adults. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know I had some whooping cough fun earlier this year; I was also diagnosed with pertussis a few years back. The injection site on my arm is still sore, so I can only imagine what Lucas's legs must feel like, as he was due for another round of DTaP, chickenpox, and MMR vaccines; a polio booster; and--according to his records, though I vaguely remember him already having one--his first Hep A shot. The clinic staff were terrific, though; the entire sequence of vaccines--administered by two nurses synchronizing the injections--took less than 45 seconds. Still, it's not easy to hear him howling with every new stab of the needle.
I went to a birthday party with Lucas last night and connected with some more local parents. That's a very good thing.

What are you up to these days? Toss me some random bullets in the comments.

Public Service Announcement: For Folks on the Job Market

2010-12-13T20:15:00.000-07:00

A good friend is hiring for a position in her organization. She instructed her assistant to run Google and Facebook searches on each applicant.

I present, then, an object lesson in why folks on the job market need to set their Facebook wall posts to be private. Here's the most recent update from one applicant:

And yes--as the applicant in question might say--THAT SHIT'S REAL.

Because it's time for a meme, dammit

2010-12-10T20:28:00.000-07:00

Created by Oatmeal

(Velociraptor quiz as seen at The Seacoast of Bohemia)

Created by Oatmeal

Clearly I haven't been to enough concerts.

More brilliance from Stephen Colbert

2010-12-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

It gets really interesting around 2:50, and absolutely brilliant at 3:50.

For once, I'm grateful I speak cultural studies. Colbert's writers are awesome.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Tip/Wag - Art Edition - Brent Glass

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

March to Keep Fear Alive

Post-Structuralism Explained

2010-12-06T15:49:00.000-07:00

Finally!

ART THOUGHTZ: Post-Structuralism from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.

I probably should mention it's NSFW--unless you happen to work in the academy.

Wonder

2010-12-04T20:38:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from TerraFirma Creative

Here's the prompt for Day 4 of Reverb10:

Wonder.
How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?
(Author: Jeffrey Davis)

When I consider wonder, I think primarily of two things:

being in awe of, or delighted with, something in the world.

being intensely curious.

These are two of my favorite states of being.

I think these two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins artfully capture my own sense of wonder. Go ahead--read them aloud to get their full effect.

God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The Windhover
To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird -- the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Do you know what makes those poems different, other than their lovely imagery? Their sound, their diction. Hopkins tried not to use words derived from Latin, and the result are poems rich with Anglo-Saxon sounds and rhythms, sounds from a time and place that's foreign to me.

And so: wonder.

Words

Words are how I cultivate a sense of wonder in my life. I notice things, and I try to put them into words: November, the last orange leaves still snagged on twigs, coated by a heavy dusting of snow. Mountains rising suddenly beyond the city, glowing that western-dry-grass gold in the last sun. Iowa, and its threat of sky. Tracks of unfamiliar mammals in the backyard snow.

Sometimes I fail. And that really underscores the wonder of a thing--when I can't adequately capture a moment in words.

Wonder for me comes when reality exceeds my expectations, at the seam of the urban and rural or natural worlds. Boise has been full of these moments: a badger in the yard. The first snowflakes I've seen in a decade. A river behind my office; a giraffe beyond that, peeking over the zoo's fence.

Negative capability

That's what John Keats called that state "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." For me, wonder engenders negative capability—it happens when I've transcended that left-brain moment of "how does that work?" and shifted into the right brain's "rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!" It's the moment beyond questioning, a moment of beholding. A moment of contentment.

Even though I'm reflective by nature, it can be hard for me to just sit silently with things. But sometimes what I'm building—be it a lesson plan, an article, a business, a happy childhood for my son, a personal theology—needs that moment of reflection, needs that space where I can observe in wonder at the thing-in-itself, the untouched thing before I've tried to fix or alter it. It's a space where I don't need to worry about reaching after fact and reason, where I'm fine with uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts.

And you?

Where do you find wonder?

Photo by William Warby, and used under a Creative Commons license.

Pssst. . . Look over there.

2010-12-03T19:30:00.000-07:00

I'll still be blogging here quite a bit, but at the moment I'm also trying to build up a blog on the relaunched website for Fang's consulting biz (in which I am a very occasional partner and collaborator).

It's a very non-businessy business site, if I do say so myself. Très Leslie. (I need to get Fang writing over there, too, but he needs some WordPress tutorials first.)

I'm doing the Reverb10 thing over there, in fact. Go check it out. . .

52,371

2010-11-30T19:45:00.001-07:00

That's how many words I wrote outside of work in November. I ditched the idea of writing a novel in favor of working on some stuff for the relaunch of Fang's freelance operations. That word count includes a couple of ebooks in different drafty stages, the blog posts at that link, and the posts at The Clutter Museum. It's an unconventional way to participate in NaNoWriMo, but I know I'm not alone in attempting to write 50,000 nonfiction words.

When I verified my word count with NaNoWriMo tonight, I was given the opportunity to download this little banner.

Yay me.

On winter fashion

2010-11-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

Brrrrrrrrrr! It's been cold here; a few days ago it was hovering in the single digits. It's back up to 30 degrees now, but there's more snow coming down. With the snow already on the ground, we'll probably wake up to 7 or 8 inches of snow tomorrow morning. It'll make for a white-knuckle, icy drive down the hill to preschool and campus.

Is it any wonder, then, that a pair of these Timberland boots, which arrived in the mail yesterday, are among my new favorite things?

I adore them.

They're a lot more practical than the peep-toe stilettos I saw a woman wearing today on campus when it was snowing and about 25 degrees. And they keep my legs warm, unlike the leggings I keep seeing women students wear without pants or skirts. This look, I might point out, is much appreciated by some of the 50- through 70-something men on campus; I've seen them turn around or cock their heads to leer at undergraduate ass on half a dozen occasions since it became cold and the leggings made their debut.

And so, a couple of public service messages for the local undergrads:

Again: Idaho, you're welcome.

On Faith

2010-11-23T21:32:00.000-07:00

BrightStar blogged recently about wanting to re-embrace her faith. She wrote, "the very idea of trying and trying and not finding what I am seeking scares me."

Her short post resonated with me. I haven't written much here about faith because it's a hugely difficult thing for me to talk about. It's like several skeins of yarn all tangled together, each strand representing some years-long line of thought.

Among the strands:

- My early experiences with religion. When I was a small child, my parents attended with some regularity a Presbyterian church whose Sunday school teachings were largely inscrutable to me. When I was in the middle of elementary school, we began attending a local Congregational (later UCC) church. The Christian ed there made more sense to me, but the theology still didn't jibe with my understanding of the world. So in junior high I stopped attending church, and I considered myself an atheist. Maybe my conception of God was too narrow, but I just couldn't see the workings of a divine being in the world.

- Politics. The loudest Christian voices in this country are absolutely repellent to me. The homophobia in particular is unconscionable. (Note: I know there are plenty of queer Christians and queer allies among Christians. I'm talking here about the usual suspects we see in the mainstream media, OK?)

- My own long-term commitment to pacifism, plus a frustration with the American conflation of god with country and the resulting unthinking patriotism and jingoism.

And yet, despite my distaste for religion and my lack of belief in anything resembling the Christian god, I have retained some confidence in what might be called the soul--by which I mean not something that goes to heaven or hell once we shuffle off this mortal coil, but rather something profoundly human that at the same time transcends our everyday humanity--the essence that drives the best art, makes love possible, and allows us to empathize with people very unlike ourselves.

I am, it appears, an atheist with an abiding belief in the soul.

As you might imagine, there's not a lot of room for someone with my beliefs in the religious practices, and especially the Christian denominations, most common among Americans.

And yet I feel moved at this time to write something about my search for a welcoming spiritual practice.

* * *

In the fall of 2004, I was a graduate fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, and I found housing that was affordable, safe, and within walking distance of the National Mall in the form of the Young Women's Christian Home, a (theoretically) nonsectarian residence. I learned a lot about conservative American Christianity from my dorm mates during my three months there, and I had a lot of interesting conversations about faith and politics.

Sometimes "interesting" also meant troubling. At one new friend's invitation, I attended Baptist Bible study on Wednesday nights, an experience that underscored for me the delusions of fundamentalism based on "close readings" of the Bible. Let's just say that polysemy never occurred to these folks, and questions that suggested the possibility of multiple interpretations were not exactly welcome.

On Sunday mornings, the YWCH emptied as most of the women went to church, and frankly, after all of my nodding during dinner conversations with young conservatives and listening to one particular Baptist minister persuade his flock that the second coming of Christ will look like an atomic bomb blast and seeing the congregants imagine the schadenfreude the newly raptured would feel when that day finally arrived, I needed to cleanse.

My childhood best friend was Quaker, so when I was looking for someplace to be on Sunday morning, perhaps it's not surprising that I found myself walking from the Metro station in Dupont Circle, up Connecticut Avenue toward the neighborhood of ambassadorial residences that surrounded the Washington, D.C. Friends meetinghouse.

* * *

I had been reading a couple of books by Shelby Spong, who writes in Why Christianity Must Change or Die, "Institutional Christianity seems fearful of inquiry, fearful of freedom, fearful of knowledge--indeed, fearful of anything except its own repetitious propaganda, which has its origins in a world that none of us any longer inhabits." This really resonated with me, as did Spong's explanation in A New Christianity for a New World of his own beliefs. Spong is a former Episcopal bishop who, according to the first chapter of this book, is a Christian. Yet, as he writes,

I do not define God as a supernatural being. I do not believe in a deity who can help a nation win a war, intervene to cure a loved one's sickness, allow a particular athletic team to defeat its opponent, or affect the weather for anyone's benefit. I do not think it is appropriate for me to pretend that those things are possible when everything I know about the natural order of the world I inhabit proclaims they are not.

Spong writes that because he does not see God as a supernatural being, he cannot claim the divinity of Jesus, nor his virgin birth, miracles, or resurrection. He continues,

I do not believe that this Jesus founded a church or that he established an ecclesiastical hierarchy beginning with the twelve apostles and enduring to this day. I do not believe that he created sacraments as a special means of grace or that these means of grace are, or can be, somehow controlled by the church, and thus are to be presided over only by the ordained. All of these things represent to me attempts on the part of human beings to accrue power for themselves and their particular religious institution.

As I read on, and learned that Spong espouses feminist, antiracist, and queer-friendly stances on civil and human rights, I uttered an involuntary amen.

One more bit from Spong:

The primary question I seek to raise in this book is this: Can a person claim with integrity to be a Christian and at the same time dismiss, as I have done, so much of what has traditionally defined the content of the Christian faith? Would I be wiser and more honest if I were to do what so many others in my generation have done--namely , resign from my membership in this faith-system of my forebears? . . . . In the eyes of many, both in the Christian church and in the secular society, it would. . .have represented an act of integrity. It would not, however, have been honest, nor would it have been true to my deepest convictions. My problem has never been my faith. It has always been the literal way that human beings have chosen to articulate that faith.

Dude was an Episcopal bishop. He knows whereof he speaks, and I suspect he knows to whom he speaks, that his audience is a very large one.

I'm definitely a member of that audience. I'm open to Christian philosophies of empathy (walking a mile in another person's shoes), forgiveness and nonviolence (turn the other cheek), and deep caring for people who are unlike oneself. I don't see sufficient embrace or application of such philosophies in the many, many church services I have attended across the Christian spectrum.

So I wouldn't call myself a Christian. Maybe Christianish, though even that makes me uneasy because I find nauseating what passes for Christian discourse in the American political sphere.

* * *

Back in the fall of 2004, I found myself spending increasing amounts of time on the Friends General Conference website. The overview I found there of Quaker belief was reassuring. I don't remember if the website had the same content then as it does now, but these questions in particular interested me:

Are you seeking haven in a world which may not be in pace with your needs?
Do you wish to join with us to help in finding ways to implement the historic peace testimony of Friends "to oppose all wars and preparation for wars? "
Do you wish to discover how you, as an individual, can help to create a better world?
Do you seek a religious home, without creeds or required statements of belief?
Do you desire to wait upon God in an expectant silence without the presence of intermediaries?
Are you looking for meaningful spiritual community?

Aside from the primary testimonies of the Friends—simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and care for the earth—perhaps what most attracts me to Friends is their willingness not to always have an answer at hand. I've found other Christians and pseudo-Christians, when asked a question they cannot answer, turn to the Bible, a book that has never really spoken to me. Friends, on the other hand, will sit with something for a while, individually and communally, listening to the wisps of God within themselves and reflecting on what they hear. I also appreciate that, at least in the strand of Quaker practice that most appeals to me, they don't have a theology of heaven or hell; instead, they focus on this life, on this world. Theirs is a faith, it seems to me, rooted in contemporary concerns and with practices that allow for dynamic engagement with the world rather than judgment of it based on static creeds.

* * *

At the moment, I have many things I'd just like to sit with in silence.

* * *

This past Sunday I attended the local unprogrammed Friends meeting. There were only nine of us in the room, which is a bit small for my taste, but we just about filled the room at the local literary center where the meeting gathers. The meeting last Sunday was a completely silent one, and afterward, instead of people shaking hands as I've seen elsewhere, we joined hands in a circle and shared our thoughts on the previous week.

I met some very interesting people, and I intend to go back, but since there weren't any other kids there, I'm not sure how I'll handle the Lucas situation. I do want to raise Lucas with Quaker values, and establish his dedication to the peace testimony--assuming he chooses to embrace it--so that if there's a time when he needs to be a conscientious objector, he'll have a long personal history to draw upon.

I haven't said anything here about Fang, but he's shown some interest in Quaker values, but I know that he and I don't always tune into the same faith wavelength, so we'll see if he joins me in my latest experimentation with faith.

I'm still uneasy writing about faith in this space, because as I said, I'm an atheist, and I don't want to mislead anyone into thinking I'm opening my heart to their particular conception of Jesus, or that I'm open to proselytizing or evangelism. I wouldn't say I feel as if there's something missing in my life so much as I feel there's something there that I haven't adequately addressed.

What about you? What are the things you're uncomfortable writing about? And how did you find yourself where you are in your particular faith journey?

Corrupting Idaho's preschoolers, one classroom at a time

2010-11-17T21:39:00.000-07:00

Lucas has gotten waaaay into spelling lately. Since the letters of the week at his preschool are "O" and "Q," on the way into school this morning, he was asking me how to spell "Q" words. We spelled "queen," and then Lucas spelled "queer."

"Mommy, what does 'queer' mean?"

I explained that queer has a couple meanings he should know and provided the definitions, emphasizing once again that some men love men, and some women love women, and that some kids have two mommies and some have two daddies.

Fast-forward 9 hours. I walk into his preschool classroom to find Lucas sitting at a table with two other little boys and a classroom aide. One of the little boys flashes a peace sign at me.

"Some dudes," he says excitedly, "love dudes, and that's OK."

My work is done here. I can move back to California now, yes?

You're welcome, Idaho.

Project-manic

2010-11-11T20:26:00.000-07:00

My therapists have never liked it when I used the word "manic" to describe my better moods. I don't mean it in the clinical way they understand it, though; I suppose a better term for what I experience is "project-manic." It's a state where, for a week to a couple of months, I am intensely focused on getting things done in a particular aspect of my life--maybe it's a creative project, maybe it's work stuff, and too infrequently it's cleaning and organizing the house.

This time my project-manic phase is centered around work. After years of not submitting an article to a peer-reviewed journal (see: full-time staff job, adjuncting, and motherhood), I've submitted two in the past month, both distillations of stuff from my dissertation. So I'm feeling pretty good about that. And I have most of the material I need, I think, for the next article, but it's probably going to take me a couple of months to write it. Still, submitting three articles in a year is pretty damn miraculous for me. Fingers crossed that they meet with sufficient acceptance.

My application was also just was accepted to participate in a program about teaching and learning with mobile devices. I proposed a project for my applied history grad course next semester, and I'm excited to see how that works out.

In other news:

Lucas is learning to spell. He's been writing and typing his classmates' names, and every day he comes home able to spell more of them from memory. He's also been drawing a ton of fun stuff. Here's one Fang and I have dubbed "Fat Elvis":

Jake the puppy (9 months old) now weighs at least 100 pounds. Here's a photo of him from about a month ago (photo by Lucas!), as well as a picture that puts his paws in scale--I have pretty big hands for a woman.

I'm glad I bought that extra ice scraper last week.
Good god even small oak trees have a lot of leaves, as do whatever kind of trees those two in the front yard are.
Living indoors too much, and wearing scarves when I'm outside, turns my skin back into a teenager's--and not in a good way. As I've pointed out before, developing wrinkles and battling acne simultaneously is not fucking fair.
Lucas is going through a pink stage. He frequently comments on what a pretty color it is, and he's declared he doesn't want to wear his black knit cap with the silver Spider-Man logo on it because he wants to get a multicolored hat that is mostly pink. On the one hand, I'm glad he hasn't yet been swayed by some of the most basic gender norming processes, but I also worry what the other kids will say to him if he wears a hot pink hat to preschool. (I have memories of one particular day in my own kindergarten experience when a boy and I wore the same style of red shorts with white stripes down the side, and I was told repeatedly by the boys that I was wearing "boy shorts." Such comments were really tough for 5-year-old me to handle, and Lucas is that age now.)
I'm helping Fang reestablish his freelancing practice, which means much projectizing at home (after Lucas falls asleep) on top of my work-work. With the pay cut I took to come here, I should probably pick up some freelancing or consulting work, too.
I changed my NaNoWriMo project to writing a couple ebooks for Fang and the biz; the cheesy Jefferson time-travel project will have the wait until at least the summer.
It appears most of my lower-division students can't write a research question to save their lives, even after much coaching about what makes a good question. My faves are all along the lines of "Did the Civil War have a good or bad effect on the United States?" and "How did the California gold rush change life in the entire U.S. from then until today?" Needless to say, tomorrow's class will include more coaching so that I don't have to read 50 really really really really REALLY lousy papers.

Uncomfortable, and aspirational, conferencing

2010-11-05T06:18:00.000-06:00

I'm attending a regional women's history conference right now. It resembles pretty closely many of the conferences I've attended. As a women's historian and feminist, it's pretty common for me to find myself at conferences where 85 to 90 percent of the participants are women, and even a higher percentage are white, with a majority (or nearly so) nearing retirement age or older.

I have a great deal of affection for such women—perhaps because I expect to be one of them in 30 years.

Yet there's something about these conferences that always leaves me a little bit cold. I often feel as if I've stepped back in time 20 or 25 years, as these conferences are very second-wave feminist—and it's not just because the women attending cut their feminist teeth in the 60s and 70s. It's because these conferences remind me that so much second-wave work has yet to be done in K-16 history education (and yet I'm beyond ready to move on). Many of my U.S. history survey students say they never had to consider women's history or black history or Chicano history in their K-12 years, and education-focused panels at this conference have reminded me that it's not just Idaho students who aren't engaging with women's history—students in much more progressive states are still getting mostly privileged-white-male history.

At the same time, if you drop me down into a more third-wave conference packed with feminists of color or with a more queer sensibility, I'd be equally uncomfortable. The cultural studies Ph.D. in me thinks they're fighting the good fight and that American society is waaaaay behind the curve in terms of civil rights, but my inner second-wave, white woman history educator also realizes that, in education at least, we haven't adequately set the foundation for such work.

So, for example, on my midterm for my U.S. history survey a couple weeks ago, I told the students they would have an opportunity to answer a question about the three greatest challenges to women's advancement in colonial and early federal America. We had just read Clarence Walker's book Mongrel Nation, and we had watched bits of documentaries addressing Jefferson and slavery. I even pointed out that slavery was a barrier to advancement for all American women. And yet fewer than half the students who addressed that question placed slavery in their top three challenges. Black women weren't even on their radar when they answered the question—even when the question itself asked them to be sure to consider women of color.

* * *

I don't mean to criticize conferences of the second-wave or third-wave persuasion. Rather, I'm trying to express my discomfort with both of them.

I'm also trying to find a way to articulate—in the sense of bones and joints, as well as of language—my own theoretical and methodological and physical space in the field of American women's history. And I need to do so in the next, oh, six hours, as I'm stepping in for a more senior colleague from another institution when I sit on a roundtable this afternoon. And hoo boy, do I ever have a sense of impostor syndrome.

When I agreed to participate in the roundtable, I didn't look closely enough at the timing and the participants. I didn't realize it was the closing plenary with a couple hundred women's historians in the audience, and I certainly didn't realize that some giants of women's history in the U.S. west would be sitting on the panel. I also didn't realize the focus would be primarily on women's history in Washington state, which is a topic with which I'm only passingly familiar. When I saw the long list of questions the moderator suggested we might address in the panel, I had a tiny panic attack.

But someone has to be the most junior person on the panel, so why not me?

I'm thinking, therefore, that my small contribution to the roundtable is likely to be methodological. I suspect if I can stave off further panic attacks on the dais, I'll be pushing (gently) for a democratization of public history, specifically for more innovative and participatory digital history projects. The subjects of public history projects are becoming more populist—for example, yesterday an architectural historian discussed attempts to get National Historic Landmark status for sites of queer struggle or sites significant in labor history. However, I'm not seeing—and maybe I'm just not looking in the right places—projects in which historians are, borrowing a couple of pedagogical terms, guides on the side rather than sages on the stage. Even many oral history projects make me uneasy on this account. I'll have more to say on this topic, I suspect, in the coming months and years, but for now I'll end with this question: How do you think we ought to go about increasing public interest in, engagement with, and initiation of history projects? Which is more important, broadly speaking, in increasing engagement—a project's subject or its methods?

NaNoWriMo, Day 1

2010-11-01T22:34:00.000-06:00

This NaNoWriMo stuff is fun, folks. Crazy fun. I wrote 1824 words tonight.

Here's an excerpt from chapter 1 of what I'm terming my shitty first draft*:

She never expected to find herself here. Raised in an unfashionable part of Long Beach—and, really, wasn’t that most of the city? she asked herself now—she was the first person in her family to go to college, and she surprised everyone by moving across the country to write a dissertation on federal America. She had interned at Colonial Williamsburg and regularly played the part of a Spanish visitor to Virginia’s first capital. Her first book, on the intersection of race and gender at Jefferson’s Monticello, had been published only a year ago, but Dr. Bryant had called her two days after Amazon began shipping the text. A fellowship, Bryant promised. A year or two in California, near Jane’s aging parents and her darling nieces and nephews—most importantly, a year or two away from Pocatello, where the roulette wheel of the tenure-track job market had landed Jane seven years earlier. Jane thought of the job market as more like the Peace Corps, really—you go where you’re needed, even if that’s Tulsa or Vermillion or Fresno or Pocatello.

Again her poorly metered limerick ran through her head:
There once was a prof from Pocatello
Who had to subsist on orange Jell-O.
She had to slim down
to fit in that gown
to meet the sage of. . .
Ugh, the rhythm was terrible. She had been an English major before veering into the even less employable field of history, so when the anapests didn’t scan, she felt as if she had just raked her teeth across the dry skin of a pear—it set her teeth on edge and sent pins and needles down her spine.

And now she was headed toward that final rhyme. . . or so she hoped. Sort of. How could she know, really? She had make the mistake of recently watching Galaxy Quest, and so had seen the space pig teleported to the ship inside out, a steaming pile of quivering ribs. Eliza had assured her that with Bryant’s funding and her team’s brilliance, their journey would be completely safe. But still. . .

Jane shoved her hands in her pockets. The clonozepam jiggled reassuringly in its smooth plastic bottle.

* Many participants in NaNoWriMo recommend not doing any editing at all. I'm taking their advice to heart, so please excuse the mess.

A writing fiend

2010-10-30T21:47:00.000-06:00

Rarely have I been as dedicated to writing--and to writing well--as I have been in the past month. It helps that I have plenty of material to harvest from my dissertation. I sent out one journal article a week and a half ago, and I'm about halfway through editing another. I hope to pull together one more by the end of the academic year.

I've also been writing lots of web copy to get Fang's freelancing career off the ground, and I've completely relaunched the website of the tiny company we founded in 2002, when we were both moonlighting as freelancers.

Despite this productivity, I've decided to up the ante.

Yes, I'm going to attempt NaNoWriMo, both to reinforce my habit of writing every day and to get a really cheesy novel out of my head--it seeded itself a couple weeks ago and won't stop growing in ways that are completely ridiculous and improbable. Suffice it to say the story involves a political crisis brought on by Constitutional originalists winning the House, Senate, and White House; a wealthy inventor, a physicist, and an historian (all women, of course); time travel; and an aging Thomas Jefferson. Will what these intrepid time travelers learn once again change the course of human events?

Ha! Good thing I won't have too much grading to do in November. . .

Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo? I'd love some accountability partners. Leave a comment here or e-mail me: trillwing -at- gmail -dot- com.

Fun with midterms

2010-10-24T21:14:00.001-06:00

It can be frustrating, yet fun, when a student confuses the source of a quotation. After reading Clarence Walker's Mongrel Nation, a student attributed the following to none other than Thomas Jefferson:

The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice
I want a black woman for my own special use.

I need wine. Lots of wine.

RIP, John Lind

2010-10-24T11:11:00.001-06:00

I've written before about John Lind, my great-uncle. John passed away yesterday morning, about six weeks' shy of his 97th birthday. Two of his children, Ian and Bonnie, shared the news on their blogs yesterday; Bonnie followed up with another post this morning.

John Lind surfing in the First National Surfing Championship, which he helped organize, in Long Beach, California, 1938. Photo stolen from iLind.net.

It's been both fascinating and heart-breaking to read Bonnie's and Ian's blogs over the past few years as John entered his final decline, but I hope Bonnie and Ian know how much those of us who knew John--as well as those who didn't--appreciated their chronicle. The grappling in the open with senility, long-term care, and the decision of when to turn to hospice care, as well as Ian's careful curating and digitizing of John's photographs and other ephemera, have provided us all with a glimpse into the difficulties of end-of-life care, provided support to others going through the same drama with their loved ones, and made us all think about end-of-life issues more deeply and thoughtfully.

I hope Bonnie, the family historian and genealogist, and Ian, a recovering journalist and expert chronicler of the last years of his father's life, find the time and space and strength to publish a volume on the long life, and long leave-taking, of John Lind.

If you have any interest at all in surfing history, you should go read Ian's blog, as in addition to writing about John's experiences in long-term care, he's done a fine job of chronicling John's participation in surf culture in Hawaii. From Ian's blog yesterday:

[John Lind] made quite a mark in the world of Hawaii ocean sports after arriving in the islands in 1939. He was a founder of the Hawaii Surfing Association, a founder and first president of the Waikiki Surf Club, and a founder of the Makaka Surfing Championships. He headed the Waikiki Surf Club through most of its first decade. He believed in amateur sports, and I don’t think he ever warmed to the idea of surfing becoming a professional enterprise.

I wish much peace to the Lind family, this week and always. If you're so inclined, please hold them in the light.

UPDATE: The Star-Advertiser has a nice obit, and the Grunion Gazette (where Fang and I met when we were both working there) has a more Long Beach-centric obit.

Five years

2010-10-21T22:09:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure what drew me (ha!) to sketch this monstrous frog on the fifth anniversary of this blog, but tonight the Wacom tablet was calling my name.

(Click to embiggen.)

By request: on professoring

2010-10-19T19:31:00.001-06:00

A friend just nudged me for an update on "professoring." Consider these, then, random paragraphs of the very very early tenure track:

Teaching is going pretty well, I think. I have the usual mix of students who clearly enjoy the courses and are getting a lot out of them, those who are aiming for a B or C, and those few (especially in my lower-division general ed offering) who might be disaffected by just about any history course they take.

The student profile here, however, is very, very different from anywhere else I've taught. I don't have the institutional data with me--it's on my desk at work--but here's what I recall:

Number of students (grad + undergrad) at the university: 19,993
Average student age: 26
Overwhelmingly white
lots of married students and students with kids
30% Latter Day Saints
Most selective public institution in Idaho, but (prepare yourselves for cognitive dissonance)...
4-year graduation rate of 7 percent, 6-year graduation rate of 28 percent (yes, you read that correctly)

In other words, I'm not in the UC Davis classroom anymore. That fact is in many ways a relief, as these older students often bring deeper analytical skills to class discussions--although the writing skills of students here are on average even more dismal (many of them have let me know they never had to write a thesis statement in high school, whereas I very clearly remember learning that skill in 7th grade). I'm really enjoying working with older undergraduate students; my sense of my upper-division public history course is that most students are in their mid- to late-20s, with a smattering of students in their 30s and 40s and about the same number of traditional undergraduate age.

As I've mentioned before, I'm teaching two new-to-me courses, one of which is new to the university: the first "half" of the American history survey (which covers from the beginning of time to 1877) and an upper-division public history course. Next semester I'm tackling two also-new-to-me courses, a graduate seminar that introduces public history to students in the department's Master's in Applied Historical Research and a capstone senior writing course. This semester's survey course is kind of killing me, but I know I'm working less than do a lot of people teaching the course for the first time. Refusing to perform 50-minute lectures three times a week (or even once a week!) helps, as does my belief that students needn't memorize facts--because it means I myself don't feel obliged to establish a comprehensive understanding of 400+ years of U.S. history in a mere 15 weeks. I've been emphasizing critical and creative thinking skills. Best teaching decision to date: having students read Clarence Walker's 2010 book Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slim volume that allows for all kinds of discussions of race and class in early America as well as the current political fascination with the Founders and Constitutional originalism.

I've agreed to sign on to a couple of grad student thesis committees, probably chairing both of them--one on the Master's of Applied Historical Research track and one in the more traditional M.A. program. I suspect I'll gain several more grad students after I teach the M.A.H.R. course in the spring.

Next academic year I'll take over the department's internship program for undergraduate and graduate students. I'm inheriting it from a professor emeritus who appears to have kept the program in very good shape, so I'm not too worried about it.

I've been spared departmental committee work this year, but I am taking over advising the undergraduate history club and its attendant spring conference-going. I've also taken a 16-hour student advising workshop, joined a very interesting faculty interest group on community outreach, and signed on as P.I. to a really interesting NSF grant application that needs an historian of women in science. I also just committed to serving on an advisory committee for the campus's observance of women's history month. Plus, next month I'll be stepping in at a Northwest women's history conference to cover for a faculty member from another Idaho institution; I'll be chairing a session and participating in a roundtable discussion.

The faculty interest group on community outreach promises to be very, very fruitful. Without giving out too many details on a project that we just hatched: a faculty member from another department has a small army of undergraduates he wants to put to work in community outreach, and he knows he wants the students to work with a particular population and to engage in some kind of writing, but he wasn't sure what should be driving their work. I offered to collaborate by helping the students learn to interview members of this group and construct a public history project that draws on both student research and first-person narratives from the group. Assuming we can get a couple of local agencies to participate (I think they will, as it would highlight their work) and can get IRB approval (it's sort of a sensitive population), I think it'll be a terrific project, the kind that births not only journal articles and conference presentations but also exhibits, podcasts, and lovely books of the coffee-table variety that seem to be popular locally.

I've also been helping several students from a colleague's class, as they're required to talk to another history faculty member about the context surrounding famous court cases. So far I've talked with students about the Mountain Meadows massacre, the Scopes trial, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Stanford White murder, and Margaret Sanger. It's been a nice way for me to very quickly review different eras in U.S. history, some of which I haven't had to think about much in the past few years.

I also sent off a journal article today, and I printed out a chapter of the dissertation from which I hope to harvest two or even three articles, as it's a looooong chapter packed with not-quite-fully-formed ideas that I believe merit further development. I'm also occasionally visiting the university library's archives to work with the papers of an Idaho woman who was an amateur mycologist, and I hope over spring break to visit the Smithsonian again, or maybe the New York Botanical Garden, to see the papers of a couple other women. I have the tiniest embryo--more of a zygote or blastocyst, really--of an article about California women gardeners and nurserywomen in the first half of the 20th century, but I'll need to visit an archive or two in southern California to really flesh it out.

My colleagues are excellent, alternately funny, warm, and quirky, as good professors should be. My new-kid-on-the-block antennae are picking up some vibrations of tension and dissent, or rifts among or between certain faculty in the department, but nothing too troubling. I love my job (except for grading, of course), and I feel extremely fortunate to be here.

Plus, Fang likes it here, too, as does Lucas. I now have an Idaho driver's license that's good for 8 years, and I hate hate hate taking tests and going to the DMV, so I figure we'll be here at least 8 years. :)

How cool is this?

2010-10-04T14:49:00.000-06:00

A family sent a video camera into space using simple materials (and an iPhone):

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

(as seen at Pacing the Panic Room)

Weighty thoughts

2010-09-30T18:40:00.000-06:00

. . .or, rather, thoughts on weight.

When I met Fang, I was just about to turn 24, and I weighed 138 pounds. That is insanely thin for me; in high school, even when I was hyperthyroid, I weighed as much as 165 pounds. Last night, I stepped on the scale and found I weighed 182 pounds, which is quite a bit out of a reasonable BMI range for someone my height. (Yes, I know BMI doesn't work well as a measure for everyone, but in my family, it seems a fairly useful way to begin to measure fitness.)

So I joined Weight Watchers online--last night, just after stepping off the scale.

Today, I carefully tracked what I ate and charted my activity levels for the first time, debiting and crediting points depending on the food and the activity.

I feel like crap, all hypoglycemic and hyperthyroidy. Yay.

I biked into work today--a pleasant enough ride in the cool morning with a couple of downhill stretches. This afternoon I rode my bike home, 4.9 miles with the sun beating down and temperatures in the upper 80s but feeling like the 90s, about 0.5 miles of that uphill. I am desperately out of shape, and walked through the front door all red and blotchy, sweaty, heart pounding, and feeling faint.

I showered, drank a ton of water, and ate dinner. Only after I ate did I step on the scale: 178 pounds. No wonder I feel like crap; my body shed four pounds over the course of 20 hours.

People following Weight Watchers are supposed to lose a lot the first week--allegedly mostly water weight--and then lose a pound or two each week thereafter. I suspect I'll feel pretty happy with myself in a couple of weeks, but this first week is going to suck.

Things I'm noticing:

Riding 4.9 miles in work clothes in the warm sun, on somewhat roughly paved streets, some of it uphill, in a state where auto emissions laws seem significantly more lax than in California, is very different from riding on smooth bike paths, mostly in the shade, for two flat miles. I didn't think it would be that different, but hoo boy, for me it is.
I'm going to need to dedicate myself to more exercise. Fang has agree to take Lucas into preschool one day a week, and he already keeps him home one day, so that means I can bike into work two days a week, for a total of about 20 miles/week. It's not a lot, but it's a start, and it's equivalent to a full week of commuter bicycling in Davis.
I need to get up from my desk in the middle of the day and take a walk. There's a decent path by the river that I could walk, or I could treat myself to an occasional lunch-hour trip to the zoo, which is only about a five minute walk from my building.
I need to plan ahead so I have some kind of exercise I can do when winter sets in, and especially when it's dark before or after work. I'm loath to ride my bike here in the dark, even with lights and reflective tape, as Boiseans are nowhere near as attuned to bicyclists as are people in Davis. In Davis, drivers frequently looked over the right shoulders before turning right. Here, not so much, so I'm being extra cautious.

Want to help me reach my goal of shedding 30 pounds?

If you've been on Weight Watchers before, I'd love to hear about your experiences--what should I try to do, avoid doing, etc.? And if you live in a part of the world where it gets too chilly to exercise outside (I have asthma, and very cold air is my lungs' kryptonite), how do you stay active?

In brief

2010-09-29T13:28:00.000-06:00

Ah, public history in Idaho.

Where else would a student's query--about authenticating a vintage knife she had purchased--lead me to a web page titled "How do I Choose a Hitler Youth Knife?"

Good times.

On self-censorship

2010-09-24T23:08:00.001-06:00

I generally don't write blog posts and leave them in draft form, but for the first time in the five years I've been writing in this space, I just did so, both out of my own inclination and on Fang's advice.*

So instead, I solicit your 100-word essays on the censored post's title: "Giving at the Office." Leave 'em in the comments.

* Maybe I'll publish the post if/when the issue arises again in a year or so, but now is not the time, even though the argument I was making, at least in the opinion of the very talented and exacting Fang, is exceptionally timely and well crafted--so rare for me these days!

Idaho Moments #387 and #388

2010-09-20T20:50:00.000-06:00

In a local TV ad, a car dealer just promised to give a gun to anyone who buys a truck.

Photo by Marj Kibby, and used under a Creative Commons license

The state wants to allow residents to shoot an endangered species on sight. One reason, they say, is that elk herds are declining. Hasn't anyone read Never Cry Wolf? (Probably not--the K-12 schools here apparently are underfunded, and not many people go to college.) Methinks we need Farley Mowat to come talk some sense into folks.

RBOC, Reflective Late Summer Edition

2010-09-20T19:42:00.000-06:00

I'm putting all my intellectual effort these days into course planning and harvesting articles from my dissertation, so all I have in me are random bullets:

Lucas and I were pulling dandelions from the lawn yesterday, and a bee or wasp stung me right in the middle of the palm of my right hand. Thank goodness the critter didn't get Lucas. If I recall correctly, this is only my fourth bee sting, but hoo boy is it by far the worst. My hand has been swelling over the past 24 hours, and I can't make a fist, plus--oversharing alert!--the hand just started breaking out in hives. I almost went to an urgent care clinic, but in light of our new high insurance deductible,* I'm going the Benadryl route instead.** The pharmacist said not to take Benadryl until the evening because it'll knock me out, so I'm waiting until Lucas goes to sleep, but meanwhile I can't use my right hand for anything but typing, and even that is a stretch. It's made me VERY grumpy, but it also means I haven't had to grade papers. :)

Someone who matters tremendously to me just let me know she's pregnant after trying for what seems to me to be a reasonable amount of time, but which I'm sure to her felt like for-ev-er. I'm very excited for her and her husband. As soon as she's told a few more people and is into her second trimester, I'll blog about it more openly.

Lucas's development is proceeding in leaps and bounds. His drawings are becoming more and more complex--check out Fang's blog if you're interested, as he's been posting several pieces of Luke's art--and his language, too. Today he wrote his last name flawlessly, without any prompting. We're also getting a bit more insight into how his mind works. For example, on Friday, Fang told Lucas they would watch an episode of a Batman cartoon at 5 p.m., and he showed Lucas a clock with hands on it. Fang reminded him when the small hand was on the 5, they would watch the show. Lucas pointed out there was a dial on the back of the clock, and they could turn it right away to make it point to 5 so that they could watch Batman immediately. Ha!

We had to administer a series of questions and exercises to Lucas for his preschool teachers. One of them required us to ask Lucas to "Draw a boy or a girl." Fang did this exercise with him while they sat across the desk from one another, and Lucas proceeded to draw a person, only he drew it upside down, so that it was right-side-up for Fang.

These latest developments, coupled with others, worry me--I fear we might have a gifted child on our hands. Oy. I'm not sure I'm ready for that, particularly in a state not known for funding quality public education.

This weekend I took Lucas to the local birds of prey center. The folks there don't rehabilitate birds, as do many raptor centers; rather, they breed, raise, and release endangered birds. They have a very intimate bird show--the hawk's feathers actually brushed repeatedly against my legs, and the crow took a dollar bill from Lucas (the bird can't have quarters because they're shiny and he hoards them)--and some raptors that can't be returned to the wild for various reasons, including a couple of California condors and some really neat eagles. Despite all the bigger birds, Lucas was really taken with the crow.

Jacob has finally noticed the five or six squirrels that frequent our backyard, but still has a pretty sedate reaction to them. He's recovering nicely from his neuter surgery, which he had last Thursday. He's tipping the scales at more than 85 pounds now.

Tomorrow afternoon Fang will take Lucas to observe a martial arts class to see if it's something Lucas might want to try. Meanwhile, I'm plotting to take the boy to Friends meetings and First Day school. Would having ninja-level martial arts skills disqualify 18-year-old Lucas from conscientious objector status with the Selective Service?

This conversation just transpired between Lucas and Fang:

Lucas: Daddy, will you do something with me? We can do something you like.

Fang: Sure. What do you want to do? (thinking he'll get out the guitars and play some music)

Lucas: (very sweetly) Well, you like to watch superheroes on the TV, right?

The boy knows how to work his dad, that's for sure.

Fang is trying hard to be more social, which he admits has always been a challenge for him, even though he's very good with people. He was waitlisted for a guitar class offered through the city's community education program, and he found out today they opened up an additional section of the class. He starts next Wednesday, and he's enthusiastic about meeting some like-minded people. He went to a Smashing Pumpkins concert with one of my colleagues last week, and they seemed to hit it off; they seem to have plenty in common to gripe about, if nothing else. (Waves to colleague, who sometimes reads this blog.)

Overall, I'd say what has most characterized our first two months in Idaho is resilience, and really, we're not a resilient people. (The phrase "highly sensitive" is a more apt descriptor.) I'm really happy about that, as these are the times that try a family's souls--a big move, a new job, pay cuts, new social circle, no support network to speak of, a new preschool, a Cliffordesque lab who thinks he's still the size of a shoebox. My colleagues and new friends here have been a huge help in easing our transition, and for that I am exceptionally grateful.

*Thank you, State of Idaho, for lengthening the new-employee health insurance waiting period from 30 days to 90. Much appreciated!

**I've never taken Benadryl, but I'm going to take my first pill in a few minutes. Fang is a little too excited about this prospect--he knows I can react strongly to new meds, and he's crossing his fingers for a good show. Will it include further crankiness, slurred speech, or giggles unbecoming a bee-sting victim? I'll keep you posted. (As if.)

A bleg for U.S. historians

2010-09-19T19:26:00.001-06:00

Hey, U.S. historians--

When you're teaching the intro survey, what documents or images or material culture do you use to illustrate the transition from Puritanism to Enlightenment thinking and republicanism? We've been spending a lot of time in Puritan New England, and my students are hungry for something new (as am I).

I'm looking for enlightening (ha!) sources from the mid-1700s that illustrate this shift in theology/politics/everyday life. I have a couple of ideas (e.g. comparing/contrasting this and this), but I'd like to hear what other folks use.

I should mention we've already looked at Winthrop, Mather, Whitefield, Edwards, and Puritan children/families (via tombstones, architecture, furniture, family manuals, wills, sermons, and Bradstreet).

Thanks!

Jake helps Fang christen his new video camera

2010-09-08T21:37:00.000-06:00

By the way, we took the dog to the vet last week to see about getting him neutered. At about seven months old, he now weighs more than 80 pounds. Those of you playing along at home know that means he gained 30 pounds in six weeks. And he's not done growing yet.

Give some books to kids

2010-09-01T20:31:00.001-06:00

I have to admit I'm a sucker for DonorChoose.org. Today I heard some history department colleagues talking about how many students in Boise go without books, so when I saw this DonorsChoose project asking for funds to buy books for the school library, I signed on as a supporter.

If you have a few spare bucks--and hey, I know it's payday for many of you!--you might consider tossing them in the direction of this high-poverty elementary school.

Lucas's latest

2010-08-27T20:03:00.000-06:00

Lucas has been drawing a lot of people lately--our dining room table is drowning in sketches--and tonight he drew this one for me:

Pink dude came first, drawn upside down intentionally.

Then blue dude came along. According to Lucas, blue dude thinks he's happy, but he's really sad. Hence the tears coming from his eyes.

I don't know what the story is with green dude. Maybe he's feeling some schadenfreude for blue dude?

(Fang also received a drawing from Lucas; his features an "invisible guy" drawn in yellow. Fang acknowledges my new acquisition is superior. That's why I'm looking so smug in the photo.)

I will now take a moment to remind Fang that Lucas has never drawn a portrait of me, but Fang has merited several, including this recent one, which is a damn good likeness:

Of course, there's also the famous "neckchin" drawing, and this next portrait, done at age 2 years and 4 months, is definitely among his greatest hits, and an amazing likeness of Fang:

I'm worried this means the boy is going to suck at left-brain thinking. (Who am I kidding? I know it means exactly that--he's cursed by genetics.) Time to save up for math tutors!

. . .and things I don't love so much

2010-08-26T21:45:00.000-06:00

Weather today and tonight in Boise:

104 degrees (tying the record high)
Humidity this afternoon

Current weather alerts for the region:

Record temperatures
Air quality alert (yellow--the alert, not the air)
Severe thunderstorms
Fire weather
High winds (50 mph--not so bad as last weekend's 70 mph)

Tomorrow's forecast? 78 degrees and pleasant.

Welcome to Idaho. It's like Iowa, only with more consonants.

You've got to respect any region whose local broadcaster offers this list of potential weather challenges:

(from KTVB.com)

Another thing I love

2010-08-26T21:44:00.001-06:00

Posting has been light, and may continue to be--this first week of class has been fun, but it's kicking my butt, too.

Meanwhile, there's this:

Things I like:

2010-08-13T12:43:00.000-06:00

Protest signs: check
Smart humor: check
Permission to marry after August 18: fingers crossed

(h/t to @Lisa_V)

A morning with the boy

2010-08-11T19:46:00.000-06:00

Wednesday is Fang's craziest workday, so it's considerably easier for him if Lucas and I leave the house for part of the day. As I spent most of yesterday finalizing a big syllabus for a new course, I was happy to go adventuring with the boy today.

We took a little walk around a Boise park that features a hill. After a decade in Davis, being able to see an entire city from the top of a hill seemed downright miraculous. I took a ton of photos, but my iPhone camera skills are not strong when it comes to landscapes. This will teach me to carry a real camera. . .

Lucas, as usual, was happy to serve as a photo subject:

A tenure-track bleg

2010-08-10T21:58:00.001-06:00

Soon I need to submit a document to my mentoring committee explaining (a) what I plan to accomplish this year and (b) what I'll accomplish for tenure. It's not a document that's set in stone, but it needs to be thoughtful and ambitious without being suicidal. Would any of my tenured or tenure-track readers be willing to share similar documents they have submitted early in their careers? I'd find it tremendously helpful. You can e-mail me at trillwing -at- gmail -dot- com.

Alternatively, if you happen to know where I might find such documents online, please leave a link in the comments below. I'm having a heck of a time locating samples.

Many thanks!

Frozen potatoes

2010-08-10T21:37:00.000-06:00

A couple posts ago I marveled at the number of frozen potato items available in a local grocery store. After all, this is Idaho, and you'd think fresh potatoes would be on everyone's plate. Running across these freezers makes me suspect otherwise:

And yes, those are all potatoes.

Stephen Colbert on the recent ruling re: Prop 8

2010-08-10T19:48:00.000-06:00

This is too good not to share:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

How to Ruin Same-Sex Marriages

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

2010 Election

Fox News

Lucas loves Idaho

2010-08-03T22:05:00.000-06:00

One thing that has absolutely astonished me throughout our move from California to Idaho has been Lucas's resilience. He's announced on more than one occasion he wants "to live here forever" and "never move again."

Part of this comes from a new friendship he's struck up with my friend Lisa's son, who is 8. His first playdate with M prompted Lucas to announce that his "best friend in the whole world" lives in Idaho. Both Lucas and M are about the same size, so I think they forget that M has 3.5 years of sophistication on Lucas. This is going to work out well as I try to nurture Lucas's nascent interest in reading: "Lucas, M reads at a third-grade level. Why can't you?" (I kid!) (Sort of!)

Lucas also started two weeks of swim lessons yesterday; his class consists of Lucas and one newly four-year-old boy. In just two half-hour sessions, Lucas has grown considerably braver; he's always liked going to pools, but never been a fan of putting his face in the water. I think it helps that the instructor has a ton of toys that distract Lucas from the fact that he's getting his face wet. Here's a glimpse from today's lesson:

Last week I took Lucas to the local state history museum, and he adored it. Really, truly adored it--and it's not particularly geared toward kids. After seeing so much of Fang emerge in Lucas, it's nice to see a little bit of me awakening in the boy's genes. In the museum's gift shop, we bought a couple geodes for him to smash open, but I have to admit I was also tempted by these:

Seriously. Click to embiggen.

He's not just interested in history, but in natural history as well. At one point on our drive to Idaho, we pulled over in northern Nevada or southern Oregon to stretch our legs, and we encountered thousands of grasshoppers. Lucas was fascinated by them (as was our puppy), so you can imagine his delight when he was able to capture a couple at a playground the other day:

He kept trying to shield the insect from us, as if we'd try to take it from him, though I can assure you I've never snatched a bug from the boy's hands, even though I may be quite fond of certain species.

Lucas really likes this particular playground, though he hasn't explored most of the equipment, which is of the increasingly trendy EVO type I'm seeing on more playgrounds. Here's one of the most conventional pieces on the playground; I'll try to get more photos on our next visit.

I was worried about raising Lucas in an overwhelmingly majority-white city, but I'm learning that there are places to go to expose the boy to more than just WASPs. We went to get him a library book today, and the children's section is packed with multicultural literature. And if we go to a particular WinCo supermarket at noon on Sunday, after the churches have let out, there's an amazingly diverse cross-section of Boise society there, in terms of both race/ethnicity and class. (Alas, the food there is not as ethnically interesting. You should see the number of fried potato side-dishes available in the freezer section!)

So far, Idaho is for Lucas a nature park, a science center, a history museum, a zoo, some nice parks and playgrounds, a new friend, a couple of pools, some grasshoppers, some backyard dirt to dig in, a bigger bedroom, a badger, twin fawns, and an armload of books checked out on his new library card. Fang and I may be hitting some bumps in the life-shifting road, but Lucas is cruising happily along.

Urban wildlife sighting #2

2010-08-01T07:46:00.001-06:00

While I was out in the yard with the dog this morning, I heard the neighbor's dog barking and thought it was trying to push its nose under the fence.

"Hey," I thought, "That little dog looks a lot like a badger."

So I climbed up onto the fence to get a better look.

Tip: Hanging over your neighbor's fence with a camera might be an awkward way to meet your new neighbor, unless you have an icebreaker like, "Say, did you know you have a badger in your yard?"

I'm a little worried that the badger didn't seem afraid of the dog. Or, really, me.

More scenes from our new life

2010-07-31T10:41:00.000-06:00

The past two weeks represent the first time in years that Fang and I have spent so much unbroken time with the boy, as his next preschool term doesn't start for another couple of weeks. We've both noted how much we've learned about Lucas, and we're seeing huge leaps forward in his development, and particularly in his imaginative play, creativity, and helpfulness.

One example: Lucas has always wanted me to help him make little sculptures out of pipe cleaners. Last week, however, he took matters entirely into his own hands, shaping and reshaping an elaborate sculpture so that it was first a hat for him, then for Fang, and then something to go over his shoe and trail behind it:

I've begun to worry that the boy is gifted in a right-brained way. I worry that he'll test just shy of gifted and won't get the challenge he needs in a mainstream class. I'd like him to be bright, but solidly mainstream, or clearly gifted, so that it's clear what kind of educational path we should set him on. His favorite things right now are stickers, tools, drawing, writing the letters of his name, and being read to--especially poems by Shel Silverstein. He's just starting to get the jokes in them, to pick up on their various ironies, which is a lot of fun.

The dog is also growing--and growing on us. Jake is alternately zen and puppy-crazy-dumb, and he's learning to negotiate the house's many hardwood floors. He often sounds like he's tap dancing. Here's a photo I took of him yesterday; he's about six months old now, and really turning into a lovely dog.

If you need some scale, that's a large Kong dog toy at the left of the picture, and a men's size 13 shoe in the foreground. He's a big pup!

Fun with that Old Spice ad

2010-07-28T04:36:00.000-06:00

How the heck did I miss this?

And for posterity, and for those of you living in a cave, here's the original:

Writing group?

2010-07-27T18:31:00.000-06:00

My copy of Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks just arrived, and it looks fabulous. But now I need a writing group.

I know some readers of this blog are doing really interesting research and writing. Any humanists or social scientists want to join me in writing or revising an article this fall?

E-mail me: trillwing -at- gmail -dot- com.

Boise blogging

2010-07-26T19:44:00.000-06:00

Some scenes from our first several days in Boise, as seen through my iPhone. . . (A bit prosaic, but I know family will appreciate the Lucas photos.)

Our first full day in Boise, we saw this sign downtown. (I thought the tiny red shoes on the doorstep were a nice touch.) Welcome to Idaho!

Mmmmmm. . . Lunch at P.F. Chang's.

Boise has irrigation canals running all over town. This one--being explored by my dad and Lucas--ran behind the motel where we stayed until the movers showed up with our stuff.

This statue of Lincoln--sculpted by Idaho native Gutzon Borglum--was recently installed in a Boise park. The local media bragged that it is "the third largest seated Lincoln statue in the world." Go Boise! ;) Fang has recently developed a fascination for all things Lincoln--he just finished reading a book on Lincoln's use of the telegraph--and I suspect he's brewing another novel, this time with Lincoln as a central character.

In the Boise Zoo parking lot. . .

Boise is very, very, very white. Like more than 90 percent white. I very much feel my whiteness here in a way I haven't since I lived in Iowa. It feels like an itch that won't go away.

The Boise Zoo is kind of old school, but it did have one of those tiger windows that I've seen at many larger zoos.

Lucas has discovered boxes in a big way. He keeps packing himself up. Here he is in the box for our new push mower:

I haven't explored much of the city yet, but Boise apparently has a ton of nature parks, including this one not far from downtown:

Next to the parking lot Lucas and I spotted twin fawns!

Their mama was on the other side of the parking lot:

I haven't seen urban deer since I lived in Iowa City, so I enjoyed the sighting.

Regular text blogging will resume shortly. . .

Busy busy--and distracted

2010-07-22T18:45:00.001-06:00

My moving-into-a-new-rental to-do list has been insane, and much of it has put me in the car, running errands on the unfashionable side of town, which conveniently begins one block from where I live. :)

I did manage to make it downtown yesterday for Urban Lunch, "a monthly informal gathering for urban-minded individuals who want to further the discussion surrounding Boise's urban issues." I ran into a departmental colleague there, and met two terrific folks with whom I hope to work in the future--one of the founders of Urban Lunch, who also works in my dean's office, and a visiting assistant prof who works on urban rhetoric. This town is packed with interesting people.

I was about 25 minutes late to Urban Lunch, however. I actually arrived 25 minutes early, but as I was parallel parking my compact car in a tiny space downtown, someone in a large SUV was trying to fit into the same-sized space in front of the car parked ahead of mine. The idiot kept bumping--ramming, really--the compact car in front of me in an attempt, I suppose, to make a larger space for his giant vehicle (even though there was an appropriately sized space across the street), and he set off the smaller car's alarm. I was also worried that he was going to push the small car into mine.

I left my car and pulled out my iPhone to find someplace to grab a lunch to go. Grabbing lunch took longer than I expected, so I rushed back toward the location for Urban Lunch, propelled by my smugness about my punctuality despite being a newcomer to town. Yay me.

But as I was passing by my car, I heard an engine running. And of course, it was mine. I was so distracted by the a-hole ramming the car in front of me that I had exited my car with the keys still in the ignition and the engine running. (In my defense, I've been driving for 18 years, and never had this happen.)

So I called Fang, who was out and about running errands with the boy. He got lost on his way to downtown--he has even less a sense of direction than I do--so by the time he arrived with a key I was late to lunch.

Eventually I'll learn that payback for being self-congratulatory is a real bitch.

An accounting

2010-07-16T17:02:00.000-06:00

Pounds loaded (thank God not by us) onto the moving truck: Approximately 14,000 (damn books, comic books, and CDs)

Cars driven from Davis to Boise: 2

Hours spent on the road between Davis and Boise: 11

Wrong turns taken on that trip: 1

Nights in motel rooms: 3 so far, likely to be 4

Toys and gifts my dad brought with him for Lucas: at least 4

Number of said toys the dog destroyed while we were out: 1

Toys purchased by my dad for Lucas on the trip: 2

Number of hours I spent today listening to Lucas prattle on about "germ scrapers" he made out of Legos: 6, going on 7

Number of times Lucas asked me if his redesigned germ scrapers are "cool": too many to count

Motel coffee tables consumed by dog: 0.1

Motel coffee tables for which we'll have to pay: 1

Muzzles purchased for dog: 2

Dog hair in this motel room because I was too embarrassed to allow it to be cleaned with the coffee table chewed up: 3 cubic feet?

Times in my life UC Davis has issued me a physical paycheck instead of direct deposit: 1

Miles I am from said paycheck: 565.3

High temperature the day we left the crazy hot Sacramento Valley: 95 degrees

Current temperature in Boise: 101

Times divorce narrowly avoided: 4?

Blog posts I've written during the move: 1

Blog posts Fang has written during the move: 5

Debt we owe to my dad for helping me drive a car 575 miles, walking the dog, buying all our meals here, handing us an anniversary card brimming with cash, and entertaining Lucas at a time of great physical, emotional, and financial stress for our family: God only knows

Window the moving company gave us for delivery: 3 days

Day on which our stuff will be delivered: day 3

Movers due to arrive: in 15 hours

Melancholy, and missing a friend

2010-07-09T21:44:00.000-06:00

Fang has been feeling melancholy, and in my waning days in this charming college town, I can't help but join him in his nostalgia for a part of our life that has passed.

But as I set off on the next stage of my academic life, I find myself reflecting even further back, to college--the last place I was very sad to leave--and even to high school, to friends I haven't seen in a long time and to one in particular I will never see again.

I've been thinking about my friend killed seven weeks ago while bicycling. I hadn't seen Erik for many years, though I had been meaning to do so, since we ended up living a short stretch of freeway from one another. Erik and I ran in the same circles in high school--those awkwardly earnest folks, geeks, and nerds who constituted the gifted magnet at our high school.

We had many classes together--the most memorable being the tenth-grade P.E. class comprising those few of us who weren't on a sports team and who, thanks to the gifted program's odd block schedule, ended up taking P.E. only every other day. It resembled not so much a gifted P.E. class as an adaptive one, and to this day I have great sympathy for the soccer coach who tried to lead our class of intellectually curious, hormone-addled misfits through track, basketball, weight training, and especially swimming and badminton.

I remember a girl classmate and friend of ours, upon seeing the wild-haired, gangly, and Scots-Irish-pale Erik in gym shorts, asked him, "Do those legs go all the way up?" It wasn't meant as an insult--we had all experienced too many of those and we knew we looked dorky in our not-quite-regulation P.E. uniforms--and I still smile at the memory of Erik, with his big, bouncy, ground-covering gait, blinking through his round glasses in shock at someone commenting on a body that (again, like all of ours) was not usually an object of sexual attention.

Our last couple years of high school, we also often ate lunch together with the same circle of friends, on the lawn near the entrance to the band room--where we gravitated because so many of us spent a couple hours a day in symphonic winds, band, or orchestra. It was pretty obvious that Erik had a crush on me, but I wasn't ready--wouldn't be for years, really--for a boyfriend. Still, my feigned ignorance of Erik's interest never kept Erik from being ridiculously nice, and I regret that in my shyness around boys I never really let him into my life the way I might have.

On one of my birthdays--I can't remember if it was my fifteenth or sixteenth, but it was on a weekend afternoon--he looked up my home address and rode his bike quite a distance from his neighborhood to mine to deliver a birthday card. I was in a foul mood--in tears at the moment he showed up--and thanked him without letting him into the house, in part because of my mood but also because I was too embarrassed and confused about boys to let my parents know that I even talked to any. I've often regretted not letting Erik in that day because he was such a nice, if earnest and awkward, guy--exactly my kind of friend, really. He deserved more kindness, as well as a glass of lemonade, on that warm June day. I wish I had found a moment in the intervening years to tell him how much his gesture meant to me. It was a revelation and a confirmation I needed as a teenage girl whose out-of-control thyroid was busy wreaking havoc with her body, mind, and self-esteem.

From third grade on, I was one of those kids--and I suspect Erik was, too--who was a bit too earnest, a bit too bright for my age and too uncomfortable in my own skin. I got picked on a lot from fourth grade through junior high and a bit into high school, and my defense was not to retaliate--I was never good with the quick retort--but to be not only nice to everyone, but to show a genuine interest in whatever they were enthusiastic about. (In fact, Erik often--to my exasperation at the time--started sentences with "You'll find this interesting.") In junior high, high school, and college, I think nerdy or geeky boys like Erik found my kindness and interest, my willingness to really listen, to be a respite from the myriad unkindnesses of adolescence and young adulthood.

One of the last images Erik uploaded to his Flickr account, and a favorite of mine.

I've tried to carry that kindness into adulthood, but one thing I learned from boys and young men like Erik--all those fiercely dorky yet (I now see) lovely guys who took an interest in me when my interest was very much elsewhere--is how to speak and live plainly, in the open, bravely. It hasn't been an easy lesson, and I certainly haven't learned to live as authentically and passionately and creatively as Erik did.

So this past week, as I've been thinking about all the terrific people I've had the great good fortune to have known here and before here, I've been returning often to Erik and to the nice boys--and realizing, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, that my glory was I had, and continue to have, such friends.

How do you use history?

2010-07-06T22:42:00.000-06:00

I'm kind of thinking aloud here, and as an academic I'm hesitant to put baby ideas into print, even virtually, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

In a month I set off on the tenure track in history, with a trifold focus on U.S., gender, and (especially) public history.

Whereas public historians traditionally have done history for the public--e.g. in museum exhibits or in documentary films--there's a small but growing group of public historians who want to foster and study history done by the public, by passionate amateurs and average folks instead of created for them. I'm one of those historians, and as I transition to life on the tenure track (I'll have 4-5 years to prove I deserve to be employed for the next 30-35 years), I'm searching for a project or two in which I can make significant progress in 3-4 years.

I'm hoping you can help me by telling me a bit about how you use history in your life, either everyday or on special occasions. I want to find a project that not only interests me, but that really gets people excited about engaging with the history of their family, neighborhood, house, community, hobby, or whatever else they're passionate about.

Just FYI, clusters of things that have piqued my interest thus far, in no particular order:

The use of mobile devices to experience additional "layers" of a place

- augmented reality
- GPS-enabled smartphones that provide text or video about a place
- smartphone apps that let people contribute their own stories about a place while they're in it

Crowdsourcing histories

- Davis Wiki does this in cataloging the present and past of an entire city, with no aspirations to objectivity
- The public's use of virtual spaces like the Smithsonian Commons or the Powerhouse Museum's collections database--creating new taxonomies and folksonomies, repurposing historic material in creative ways

Conservatives' uses and abuses of history and historiography

- The Texas school board's revision of the history and social studies curriculum to deemphasize the contributions of people of color and to lionize some very bigoted people.
- The Arizona law that implicitly forbids the teaching of many kinds of ethnic studies.
- Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers' reinscription of white male privilege in the American historical narrative

The thousands of ways people use history in everyday life, sometimes without realizing they're doing history

- Connecting to their past through personally or communally resonant objects
- Historical reenactment
- Video games, simulations, or alternate reality games inspired by historical places or events
- Communities of genealogists
- Memorials, formal and informal
- Oral histories gathered by amateurs
- Scrapbooking and photo albums

I'm really curious about what happens if a historian (me!) approaches conservatives' uses of history almost at face value, with a good deal of curiosity rather than immediate criticism (academics' typical first response). I'll be living in one of the country's most conservative states, and I'm wondering if there are ways I might engage with some of the more conservative groups in constructing historical projects and programs that

a) are meaningful to them
b) depend on their participation

but also

c) are packed with opportunities for people to learn to do history in more rigorous ways, rather than stick to simplistic K-12 textbook views (or Fox News' views) of history
d) get participants to think critically and creatively about people, places, and events, in light of existing evidence or evidence they've gathered (e.g. through oral histories)
e) prod people on the ends of the political spectrum to engage with one another's stories and in important conversations about community, through historical research and production

Regardless of your political persuasion, if you had access to an eager, energetic, and open-minded historian who wanted to work with you and your friends/neighbors/affinity community on a meaningful project, what might that project or program look like, and why?

Thanks so much. I can't wait to see what my brilliant and creative readers share.

Moving Medley: Last brain cell edition

2010-07-06T19:35:00.001-06:00

I think it's telling that, upon hearing I'm moving to Idaho and setting off on the tenure track, a junior professor in the writing program here handed me a miniature version of one of these:

"Now you'll always be sure to have at least one brain cell," she explained cheerfully but also a bit too seriously.

I've been clutching onto that last brain cell for the last couple weeks, rubbing it like a talisman.

We have five full days until the movers arrive. The house feels mostly packed, but it isn't--we're down to the stuff we use everyday and the awkward stuff, like lamps and the mixer, that's so hard to box up.

The boy's excitement is reaching fever pitch. He's demanded that we pack up all his toys and has contented himself with playing with the tons of shredded documents I've been using as packing material. We've given up trying to get him to understand that his friends aren't coming with him to "the faraway home," as he seems to think that his friends will move with us and be able to drop in at any time. It's kind of heartbreaking to watch him playing with a couple of his little best friends for what may be the last time, as the past year he's become very social thanks largely to them.

Fang, too, is having a hard time taking leave of The Last Boy Scout, his best friend here. As I type this, they're both sitting on our shredded couch, playing their electric guitars at a volume that is a bit too respectable, even for the suburbs. TLBS is a local celebrity because he's the drummer for a band popular in the region, so Fang is especially touched that TLBS would come over to the house to jam with Fang, who is still learning to play the guitar. I've got two guys over 6 feet tall giggling a lot as they try to teach each other different licks, and I'm really enjoying the show.

Lucas is stuck with us for a month, as his preschool's academic year doesn't start until mid-August. I figure he'll find ways to amuse himself, but it's going to make it hard for me to finish planning my courses with him asking me to play hide and seek or Play-Doh or take him to the pool.

I'm veering between nostalgia for this place where I've spent a decade—where Lucas was born, where I've made some terrific friends, where we watched a beloved dog grow old and pass into oblivion, where we've lived a thousand little moments that suddenly I feel I must grab at, selfishly filling my arms, and my heart, with them—and a hard-nosed push to finish up my work at the teaching center, pack up everything at home, and arrange for the countless details (utilities off, utilities on, new insurance of various kinds, landlords to pacify, movers to schedule, junk haulers to engage, house cleaners and carpet cleaners and and and) that accompany such a big move.

My dad arrives in a week to help me drive one of our cars up to Idaho—I'm a cruddy long-distance driver unless I have another adult to talk to, and Fang will be driving our other car—and to help us settle into our new place in Boise. My dad has always been a calming influence on me, so I'm looking forward to seeing him.

I'm waking up several times every night thinking of something that needs to get done. This morning, for example, I was up at 2 a.m. changing our address with the postal service, and berating myself for not yet having a carpet cleaner lined up. Stieg Larsson's trilogy is keeping me company in the middle of the night; there's nothing like a Swedish thriller about the underage sex trade to distract me from my midnight panic attacks.

What's new with you?

Moving (toward insanity)

2010-06-30T03:39:00.000-06:00

We keep having to move up our household moving date to better coordinate moving companies, internet hook up, and Fang's work and scheduled vacation. It's driving both of us insane, especially since we're needing to schedule things to the minute.

One example: It looks like we're going to be making a stop near noon in Winnemucca, Nevada so that Fang can find an internet café and meet a deadline for one of the newspapers he creates. I've already scoped out the local wireless internet options; I imagine Fang will be editing and uploading files and feeding the boy lunch while the dog and I grab some takeout and head to the nearest shady park--at noon, in mid-July. Should be a blast!

Meanwhile, I'm still working for the university in the spaces between the insanity. I'll let you know how that pans out over the next couple of weeks. . .

To Boise and Back

2010-06-25T19:34:00.001-06:00

Last week we took a fairly whirlwind trip to Boise to get the lay of the land. I was worried that Fang wouldn't like the city, but he does--perhaps even more than I do. Yay! You can read his posts about our travels--which included a job interview for Fang--here: day 1, day 2, and day 3. I'm a bit embarrassed to say it's the first trip Fang and I have taken alone since Lucas was born, which made it pleasant in and of itself.

Our travel was made possible by my lovely sister-in-law, who left her beautiful Venice (California) home to stay in our squalid 1978 tract home for a few days and take care of Lucas. She's awesome!

We'll be living about five miles from the university, a bit farther out than I'd like, but still a bikeable distance when the weather is half-decent. Unlike Davis, Boise doesn't have a park or two within walking distance of every house, and when I look at a map of the city, it seems our neighborhood has a greater park paucity than most. It's a great house, but because it's a block from a major street and a freeway onramp, it's not a place we'd buy--but it will be OK to rent for a couple years.

We also landed Lucas a spot in a decent preschool, albeit one that doesn't admit students until August, at about the same time I begin work, so we'll need to entertain Lucas for a month while we're settling in and I'm putting together the final details for my courses.

There will be difficult adjustments. Lucas calls Boise "the faraway home," and he's very excited to be moving there. But his best friend here told Lucas he'll be moving with him to the faraway home, and we're having a hard time convincing Lucas otherwise.

Lucas pointed out yesterday that when we're in Boise, Davis will be "the faraway home." Indeed.

On the home front, we've begun packing in earnest, as our move is less than three weeks away. I've removed most of the art from the walls and have been busy patching up nail holes, packing up framed prints and paintings, and boxing up just about anything I figure we can live without for the next month. Because we finally have an address in Boise, we're now able to secure a mover, and we're getting estimates from three next week.

It's been a few years since we've moved, and about a decade since we changed towns, and I'm just now remembering what a PITA moving is. Moving across state lines makes things more difficult, as our health, auto, and renters insurance policies are California-specific.

My own work in the teaching center is winding down a bit. Between it being summer and my frequent faculty contacts knowing that I'm leaving, I'm finding myself putting out fewer little fires, which means I can move the reports I need to write to the front burner. I'm working up until just a day or two before we drive to Boise, which is a bit insane, I know, but it's all a carefully choreographed dance of enough time to finish up projects, paycheck timing, health insurance expiration, Fang's work responsibilities, and cleaning up the house for a walk-through with the landlord.

As you can see, things are relatively boring here. It's mostly a matter of taking care of bureaucratic stuff--phone, internet, cable, insurance, forwarding mail, etc.

To make things more, um, interesting, on Tuesday I have to respond to a jury summons--I'm hoping I don't have to go to the courthouse, as my doing so would be a waste of everyone's time. I'm not able to serve on a long trial, since I'm moving, and the fact that I've attended many a rally and community meeting against the county D.A. and to protest Ajay Dev's unfair trial might tip off the lawyers and judge that I'm doubtful about the quality of justice being meted out in the county's courts. Back in May, when I was first summoned, I tried to explain my moving situation to the nice person who answers the jury hotline, but the best she could do for me was postpone my service until after the school year rather than excuse me completely. Honestly, I'd be happy to serve on a jury, but I suspect I'm highly unlikely to make it onto a case.

What's happening in your neck of the woods?

On (my) place(s) in the American West

2010-06-14T19:09:00.000-06:00

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

— Wordsworth, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"

I.

Two clicks away from a Google search for "poems about Idaho," you'll find "Requiem for Idaho," a poem by Ron McFarland that begins

Out here, we don't talk about culture,
we think we are. We nurtured Ezra Pound
who ran from us like hell
and never came back. You
never came at all. You
will never know how clever
we never are out here.

and ends

Our mythology comes down to a logger
stirring his coffee with his thumb.

Coffee cup by Alex Pearson

II.

I have never really identified this way, but I suppose I am what people back East might call a Westerner. Aside from four months in Fredericksburg, Virginia and three months in Washington, D.C., I've lived all my life west of the Mississippi—four years in Iowa and the rest in California.

Welcome to Idaho by Scorpions and Centaurs

In reading guidebooks on Idaho, I'm beginning to realize I'm moving into what many consider the Real West, where it's not a good idea to be an interloper from California.

I am very much from California. Like five or six generations Californian. Even Fang, despite early inclinations to the contrary, has come to consider himself a Californian.

III.

Artichoke by -sel

I have several favorite poems about California. Robinson Jeffers's "Carmel Point," Amy Clampitt's "John Donne in California," and Garrett Hongo's "Mendocino Rose" come immediately to mind. Clampitt so captures the essence of a California meal in her lines

There will be wine,
artichokes, and California
politics for dinner

that I'm already missing artichokes, even as I have several growing in my backyard garden at the moment. I'm wistful for the sommelier who haunts the wine aisle at my favorite supermarket.

IV.

Long Beach lifeguard stand by Joshua Targownik

I've never been a big fan of Long Beach, where I was born and grew up. In All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren calls Long Beach "the essence of California." Jack Burden, the narrator of the novel, spends a night in a hotel in Long Beach:

That was why I came to lie on a bed in a hotel in Long Beach, California, on the last coast amid the grandeurs of nature. For that is where you come, after you have crossed oceans and eaten stale biscuits while prisoned forty days and nights in a stormy-tossed rat-trap, after you have sweated in the greenery and heard the savage whoop, after you have built cabins and cities and bridged rivers, after you have laid with women and scattered children like millet seed in a high wind, after you have composed resonant documents, made noble speeches, and bathed your arms in blood to the elbows, after you have shaken with malaria in the marshes and in the icy wind across the high plains. That is where you come, to lie alone on a bed in a hotel room in Long Beach, California. Where I lay, while outside my window a neon sign flickered on and off to the time of my heart, systole and diastole, flushing and flushing again in the gray sea mist with a tint like blood.

I lay there, having drowned in West, my body having drifted down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze on the sea floor of History.

The California I have known is polarized: first there is my parents' house--my family's block, really--in a 1920s suburb; avocado and orange trees in the backyards; the long, nearly waveless beach a few blocks from there; my old high school festooned with razor wire and, in my memory, the tension of the L.A. riots. And then there is the Sacramento Valley and Davis, where it's common to see chickens in the yards of 1970s tract homes, where when I walk Lucas to preschool I pass through a small vineyard, a tiny cherry orchard, and walk past redwood, fig, almond, and olive trees. Where black walnuts shade and litter the largest boulevard near us. Where there's more dust and yeast in the air than salt and brine. Where oleander seems a reasonable tree.

When I left Iowa, I wrote dozens of poems about how much I missed its fields, its oppressive unbroken sky.

I suspect when I leave here, I will finally write poems about California, which, despite my best attempts to the contrary, I have come to love.

V.

Rain over Boise by Nicholas D.

Even as I grow wistful about my life in California, I am optimistic about Idaho. I hear the whole state is lovely--I've only seen one city in it--and everyone I've met who lives in Boise is enthusiastic about it and is exceptionally nice. I'm going to learn the language of fast rivers rather than ocean and delta. I'll learn an entirely new history, one with familiar themes because my new place is, after all, in the West.

When state politics get in the way--as I know they will, as Idaho is one of the most conservative states socially and perhaps the most fiscally conservative--I need to put myself in mind of Wordsworth's meadow, grove, and stream apparelled in celestial light. I suspect I'll put my faith in the land, and I'm trying to get myself back into shape so that I can enjoy it on bike, foot, and horseback.

VI.

Archipelago by Neil Banas

As I've muddled around over the past few months with what it means to teach history--or, more specifically, what it means for me, with my motley interdisciplinary background in literature and nature and culture, to teach history and practice history, and especially public and local history--I've been returning again and again to microhistories, to the usefulness of partiality and discontinuity and standpoint epistemologies. It's been so long since I've read a great, whiggish narrative of U.S. history that even if I wanted to, I'm not sure I could teach American history as such. And so I'm approaching my classes and my research as an archipelago, to borrow a term from Florike Egmond and Peter Mason.

And I suppose approaching history as archipelago--as a chain of distinct, heterogeneous islands created by similar disruptive and yet creative forces--makes sense to me because Idaho is but the latest island in my personal far-flung archipelago of the West--Long Beach, Grinnell, Davis, Iowa City, Boise. Because of my academic training, but also because I've lived the perambulatory academic life--I'm suspicious of unifying explanations. And maybe that's why this blog post has gone on for so long--there's nothing that makes it hang together except for my experience of the West, of that place Amy Clampitt described as

strenuous
huge, wind-curried hills, their green
gobleted just now with native poppies'
opulent red-gold, where New World lizards run
among strange bells, thistles wear the guise
of lizards, and one shining oak is poison.

Poison oak by Philip Bouchard

All photos used under Creative Commons licenses

Evolution

2010-06-08T18:14:00.000-06:00

The bones nicely illustrate Jacob's rapid growth. He had a medium-sized bone, but he devoured it. Lesson learned: he needs the hardest Nylabones.

The revolution will be televised

2010-06-08T12:03:00.000-06:00

I found this video to be particularly well done, and a nice review of a key, and tragic, moment in the Iranian protests. Please share it widely.

You can also upload a photo of yourself with the phrase "I am Neda" to NedaSpeaks.org, a project of Amnesty International. Here's mine:

By request: Puppy photos

2010-06-05T23:02:00.003-06:00

Jacob is now just shy of five months old. I'm not really sure how this

became this

in just two months. And by the vet's estimate, at his current ~50 pounds, he's just over halfway to his adult weight.

I know I've been remiss by not posting a ton of cute puppy photos, but Jacob is difficult to photograph because he's so damn wiggly and is a whore for the camera. Most of my photos of him look something like this:

He does tend to hold a little more still for Fang, particularly when Fang is doing his back exercises:

Really, he's adorable, alternately exuberant and kind of zen. I'll try to get some decent video of the cuteness to share with you all soon.

Bats are fuzzy

2010-06-05T22:45:00.000-06:00

Lucas and I went on a bat walk (really more of a drive) in the Yolo causeway last night. Here's the freeway bridge that connects Davis to West Sacramento:

The bridge has expansion joints that are perfect urban bat habitat. Our guide told me there can be 50 bats squeeze into a linear foot of expansion joint. The bats are tiny, as we learned in our orientation session:

Three photos above: Mexican free-tailed bat. Click to embiggen!

Chomp! Nom nom nom.

Above: Brown (very fuzzy) bat. The bats in these photos are captive because they have injured wings and aren't able to return to the wild. This particular brown bat has learned to love mealworms.

Just after sunset, the bats fly west from underneath the eastern end of the bridge, emerging to the south side of the bridge near this tree:

We saw three long ribbons of bats emerge, in waves about five minutes apart from one another. It was pretty spectacular. We're talking thousands and thousands of bats.

Definitely click to enlarge these sunset photos if you're into bats.

If you live in this area, definitely sign up to take the bat walk and talk with the Yolo Basin Foundation. But hurry--all the spots are almost filled.

35

2010-06-02T09:55:00.000-06:00

The director of the teaching center just pointed out that I share my birthday with the Marquis de Sade.*

Why does he know such things?

I'm 35 today. I'm enjoying making my coworkers feel old, even as I feel more 45 than 35.

Accessible Course Hacks: A Brief Primer

2010-05-28T21:47:00.000-06:00

This is a last-minute submission for Hacking the Academy.

Because "disability" is an extremely slippery category, it's not easy to state what percentage of students on any given campus have a disability, but various studies have estimated that between 3 and 11 percent of undergraduate students enter college with some kind of disability. If we're including physical, learning, and emotional disabilities—both those students are aware of and those they are in the process of developing or identifying—I suspect the number is much higher.

So I'm puzzled when faculty members—and there have been many—say to me, "In all my years of teaching, I've never had a disabled student in my classes."

After all, if you're teaching a class of 300 students—and my university has classes that enroll upward of 900, so I'm being conservative here—and 10 percent of them have some kind of disability, you're looking at 30 students who right off the bat might need some kind of accommodation but might not ask for help.

Accommodating students is usually really easy once they ask for help. After all, in order to comply with state or federal laws, most universities have administrative or student-services units that work with students with disabilities to determine for which accommodations they're eligible and ensure they get the needed assistance. Often, the only time faculty hear about students' disabilities is when they receive a note from the student disabilities center informing them that certain students qualify for additional time on an exam. Such accommodations are ridiculously simple to provide.

I've found that it's very easy to accommodate students in other ways as well; it's usually not any additional work, and is in fact a matter of being cognizant and thoughtful. Let me use blind or low-vision students as an example. I arrive at my first class already having posted an accessible version of the syllabus online, and I have both standard and large-print versions of my syllabus available. When I've taught low-vision students, I simply need to remember to e-mail any handouts to them in advance of the class so that they can pull them up on their laptops with screen readers or transfer it to their Braille PDAs. I also am careful to describe any images or video I'm sharing with the class.

When I accommodate students with disabilities, many other students benefit. Drawing again on my examples above, any student might appreciate having a digital version of the syllabus handy. And if I e-mail class handouts to the entire class instead of just those students who have been cleared for accommodations, more students arrive ready to discuss the topic at hand because the handouts I send help to frame their understanding of the material they've read or viewed or listened to. In the case of images I'm projecting onto a screen during class, I frequently have students describe images to one another because they all—sighted or not—find new layers to an image when they discuss it with their peers. In fact, sometimes I'll pass out an image to a group, and only one person in each group gets to look at it at first—they have to describe it to the other students in the group, and the other students ask questions about it, which tends to deepen their understanding of what's going on.

There are dozens, and probably hundreds, of ways we can accommodate students with a variety of physical and learning disabilities, but the most important thing, I think, is that we adhere to principles of the universal design for learning as we develop our courses. To borrow a phrase from the disability movement, we need to "build in" such accommodations instead of "bolting them on" after the fact. Yes, there are certain things—like the amount of extra time a student should receive on an exam—that are best determined, out of fairness to all students, by experts who have documented the student's disability, but there are plenty of things we can do to accommodate students without having to worry about establishing an accidental legal precedent.

It can seem overwhelming at first, I know, but really it's about being mindful—double-checking, for example, that the blog platform or course management system you're using is accessible to all users—rather than about opening yourself up to a ton of additional work. One small step I typically take is not only to include a statement on my syllabus saying that I'd like to hear from students with disabilities, but also emphasize my interest in teaching all students by highlighting this section of the syllabus on the first day of class. Since I began making a bigger deal out of my desire to accommodate students with disabilities in simple ways, I've had greater numbers of students approach me for assistance, and they've never asked for anything unreasonable. Many of them end up going to student disability services for the first time ever to document a learning disability they have suspected for some time. I've taken a good deal of satisfaction in helping students better understand how they themselves learn, as well as in presenting them with resources they might use to explore the complexity of their various identities, including their status as people with disabilities.

More RBOC--and a PSA

2010-05-27T23:12:00.001-06:00

. . .because that's all I have in me these days.

I am feeling remarkably well this evening because I cleaned out a good deal of the garage, AKA my secret shame. We had barely touched it since we moved into this house more than three years ago, and there were some hurriedly packed boxes left untouched at that time, so you might imagine the dreck I was pawing through. Most of it was paper and went into the recycling bin.
We're going to have an enormous yard sale. I hate holding yard sales, but the extra cash will be nice.
Lucas decided that, since we only have about 50 days left before we move, he should grab the empty boxes from the garage and start packing up his toys. Now if only Fang could catch some of that enthusiasm. . .
Fun fact: I have whooping cough. Ends up I've been contagious for at least a month. Sorry, coworkers--I thought it was merely bronchitis.
If you haven't had a booster vaccine for whooping cough, you might want to get one, as pertussis is resurging. And for the love of all that is holy (breathing, for example), be sure your kids' vaccinations are up to date.
I don't know how much longer it will be available to nonsubscribers, but my interview with the Sacramento Bee about the literature of Lost is available here on the Sac Bee site, and here as a PDF. My TV interview isn't online, but it was fun--and I managed to rope Fang into the fun as well, as he's much more articulate about Lost than I am. We got about equal screen time; Fang was a "local blogger" and I earned a promotion from the reporter--professor of cultural studies.
I'm giving a teaching talk tomorrow for the Faculty Mentoring Faculty Program at UC Davis. It's called "The Undisciplined Instructor: Lessons on Teaching from Perpetual Amateur." If I don't embarrass myself too terribly, I'll post a link to the video for anyone who is looking for a soporific.

Finally, on a more somber note, a PSA:

When you open your driver's side car door, please take a second to look over your shoulder to see if there's a bike coming up behind you. A good friend of mine from high school was killed last week when a driver opened her door right in front of him, which knocked him in front of, and under, a bus.

Additionally, if you drive on the right side of the road, look over your right shoulder before turning right. This is a little trick I've learned here in Davis, and it's averted many an accident, I assure you.

Ghost bike photo by Ludovic Bertron, and used under a Creative Commons license

RBOC: My Brain is Full edition

2010-05-20T21:46:00.000-06:00

Long time, no blog.

I've been fighting off some kind of lung plague for three weeks now, and I haven't been feeling very bloggy. More nod-off-on-the-couch-and-watch-reruns-of-Bones-y. (Which, I might add: Why did no one ever tell me that the show is about a woman scientist working in a Smithsonian-like museum? Hello--that was my dissertation topic.) So instead of any semblance of sustained thought, I present a long-overdue random bullets of huh-huh-huh.

But first, a question: I'm supposed to give a talk about teaching next Friday, kind of a "last lecture" thing for a small audience of (usually senior) faculty. Typically speakers talk for 30 minutes and then take questions for 20. Number of times I've talked for 30 minutes straight in the past several years: 1. (Job talk. I'm chatty but not lecture-y.) This Faculty Mentoring Faculty Program presentation will be videotaped and made available online. What teaching topics would you want to hear about? Bonus points if you can describe the topic without using the words assessment, literacies, instructional technology, or student learning outcomes. Extra bonus points if you use the phrase rats off a sinking ship.

Now, the bullets:

I was interviewed last week by a reporter for the Sacramento Bee. He grilled me about the literature of the TV show Lost. I blame my friend Dr. Andy, who handed over my cell phone number to the university news service when the folks there were looking for someone to comment on the show. The reporter's sole follow-up question was on the symbolism of rabbits on the show. I think I last used the word "symbolism" in 1998. Where are the English and cultural studies faculty when you need them? (I'll post a link to the interview when it's available. They asked for a photo of me, which is unsettling, as I thought I'd be one source among many, not the entire horse and pony show.)
Tomorrow I'm talking to a TV reporter about Lost, but I'm not sure what about the show most interests him, other than that ZOMG the show is ending, how will fanfolk ever live without it? The reporter's first and last names are both those of nice East Coast colleges. If I were writing a short story about an English professor, I'd probably give him the same name.
Dr. Andy tells me I should write an article or book about Lost. My first thought: Ooh, shiny! I then reminded him I'm about to launch onto the tenure track in history. Put down the contemporary pop culture references, Leslie. . .
I remind myself that (ack!) I'm moving to Boise in less than two months and I have yet to sign a lease, line up movers, find a preschool, get health insurance, or do just about anything else. It's just a tad too early to do anything of these things because apparently everything in Idaho (except for sign-ups for the best preschools, whose deadlines have long since passed) happens at the last minute. "Show up with your stuff and then find a place," was how one property manager put it. "You can sign up on July 31st for health insurance on August 1st," enthused the insurance agent. Um, no. But if this is the case everywhere in the Gem State, I'm looking forward to my first trip to the DMV. (Though on a side note, I don't think any DMV could beat my trip to the Iowa City DMV. No lines, and they handed me new license plates within minutes.)
What have I done thus far? Ordered my textbooks for fall. I made a lovely matrix to evaluate potential textbooks for my U.S. history survey to 1877, filled in several cells with details after browsing a dozen or more textbooks online, came up with my own "gut check" scoring system. . .and then threw a mental dart that landed, conveniently, on the one desk copy I've received from a publisher. What can I say? I like paper. (Plus, the textbook's writing didn't make me cringe. I learned the writing in many (most?) of today's history textbooks kind of sucks.)
The department chair contacted me this week to let me know I don't need to teach one grad seminar and two lower-division courses in the spring. Instead I can teach one grad seminar and any upper-division course of my choosing, preferably one with a focus on gender. I'm thinking of tackling the capstone writing course for history majors. The class size is apparently pretty small, so I could give students' papers a good deal of individual attention. Your thoughts?
We've had nothing but bad luck with trees lately. Our landlord sent out some apparently tree-hating in-law of his to trim our trees. We now have no cherry saplings, a fig tree trunk that protrudes about seven feet from the ground where there used to be a glorious sweeping fig tree, and the shoulder-height remains of a few 15-foot-tall oleander bushes in the backyard.
Well, we thought, at least the neighbor's big, lovely, leafy cottonwood tree (my favorite species!) provides us with shade. I came home this afternoon to find the neighbors have completely removed the giant tree.
I'm glad we're moving in July. Summer in Davis with no shade = unbearable.
After months of working on it, I finished my first copyedit of Fang's 750-page novel. Yes, our next talk about it will be how to cut it by at least one-third. Can you say "trilogy"?
Sometimes it bothers me that Fang is a much more prolific writer than I am. He made the good choice as a writer not to sweat through an M.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in mumblety mumble like some people you might know.
Our puppy, Jacob, is getting big. He's about 45 pounds now--halfway to full grown. As puppies go, he's very manageable, despite his oafish size. Pictures soon, I promise.

What's on your mind?

For Mother's Day

2010-05-09T10:15:00.000-06:00

A letter to my mother

Dear Mom,

This week my therapist grew a bit exasperated with me. "I've never met anyone who is so protective of her mother!" she said.

Which made me giggle a bit. Because one of the words I've never really applied to my relationship with you is "protective." After all, parents are supposed to protect their children, right? Not the other way around, unless the parent is ill or otherwise needs assistance. And while I have certainly defended you on the rare occasions when someone misunderstands your actions or intentions, I can't say I've ever felt the urge or need to protect you.

For that, I owe you a debt of gratitude. Having such a strong, smart woman for a mother—one who chose such a kind, smart man to be my father—has allowed me to focus (selfishly, perhaps) on my own growth, my own goals.

At the same time, I wouldn't call you protective. You pushed me—usually implicitly, sometimes explicitly—to work very hard toward my dreams. You have always been the realist who anchors—without derailing—my idealism. For this, too, I'm grateful.

Although we haven't talked about it much, I imagine you're ambivalent about my impending move to Boise. On the one hand, I'm realizing a dream of mine—to teach public history—but on the other, I'm moving your only grandchild out of driving distance. I'm sorry about that. But I think you've known from the time I was a little girl that, despite my deep love for our family, I would be moving far from Long Beach. I'm deeply appreciative that a family that has lived on the same block for four generations has been so accepting of my perambulations, of my crafting a life outside the neighborhood. I know such acceptance has come at a cost—financial and emotional—which makes me all the more grateful.

Despite the fact that I've taken a different geographical path from others in our family, your influence on me has been immeasurable and invaluable. Your love of literature and of good books—you quoted Robert Burns and Geoffrey Chaucer at the dinner table—set me on a path deep into the humanities. Your passion for the natural world—we spent part of every summer in Yosemite and ventured into other landscapes around the American west—has led me to live in smaller, more sustainable cities surrounded by, or at least in proximity to, natural beauty, even when that beauty can be difficult to discern.

Maybe your greatest gift to me—beyond your fierce love—is discernment. You've taught me to see what matters and what doesn't. From you, directly and indirectly, I've come to value environmental causes, all manner of civil rights, and a broad spectrum of arts and culture. Even while you encouraged me to set high standards for myself in education and life, you taught me to be—as one mentor once labeled me—democratic to the bone.

Thanks for that.

I could go on, but my own little family here insists that they celebrate this Mother's Day with me, so I'm off to join them. I wanted to spend this time with you—even though we're more than 400 miles apart—to let you know how much you've influenced me, how much I appreciate your love, and how much I return it.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom.

Love,

Leslie

Arizona tries to say adiós to ethnic studies

2010-04-29T23:49:00.000-06:00

On Thursday, the Arizona State Legislature passed House Bill 2281, a measure that prohibits public school districts from offering classes that "are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group," "promote the overthrow of the United States government," "promote resentment toward a race of class of people," or "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

I'm worried less about the specific language and provisions of the bill than about the motivations of the people who authored it and voted to pass it.

At the heart of the bill seems to be an uneasiness with Chicana/o studies. The bill was inspired in part by the Tucson school district's inclusion of Mexican American studies in its curriculum (which was previously called Raza Studies and included the works of educational reformers like Paolo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed), and has been supported vigorously by State Superintendent of Schools Tom Horne.

Mural photo by Urban Sea Star, and used under a Creative Commons license

According Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, the Raza Studies program students—approximately 1200 Latino students—outperformed their peers. Citing research by Dr. Augustine Romero, Rodriguez writes,

Horne is seemingly unaware that students from Raza Studies, who are taught about their indigenous cultures, consistently outperform students from all backgrounds at TUSD. They also have a very high college-going rate.

Paul Teitelbaum reported in February about students' appreciation for Tucson's raza studies program. Students and alumni, he writes,

countered the racist lies being made about the ethnic studies program, explaining the importance of oppressed youth learning their own peoples’ history. At least a dozen ethnic studies students and alumni recounted how important the program is/was to their academic success.
Students explained that the ethnic studies program combats the mythology incorporated in euro-centric history books that does little or nothing to portray the lives and history of the Indigenous people of Arizona. Ethnic studies programs teach oppressed youth the true history of how their land was stolen, their lives uprooted and their culture all but destroyed. Studying the rich history of the Indigenous peoples reveals the actual historical events that led to the ceding of one-third of Mexico to the expanding U.S. empire, and the forced removal of peoples from their ancestral homelands. “What we learn is the unique experience of Mexicanos who lived through the circumstances surrounding the defeat of Mexico and theft of Mexican land in 1848,” one student explained.

Dustin from Savage Minds wrote particularly eloquently about this issue when HB 2281's predecessor bill, Senate Bill 1069, was approved by a state senate committee in June 2009, so I'm going to quote him at length.

At risk for conservatives like [former National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Lynne] Cheney is not history, per se. After all, the Massacre at Sand Creek happened, the Constitution really did set black people’s worth at 3/5 that of white people’s, and police and militia really did attack the children of striking workers in Lawrence, MA, as they approached the train station en route to lodging away from the hunger and violence of the strike. In a place like Tucson, which was after all part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, the history of “la Raza” is particularly relevant.
What is at risk is the notion that American history should not be just (or even in many cases) the facts of our past but should be a story that edifies national citizenship. [...] [To conservatives,] there is a narrative of history that Americans should share, and this narrative is one that celebrates the triumphs and high values of our nation while downplaying the embarrassments and shortcomings.
In Arizona, and in the Southwest in general, this narrative takes on special importance as an assimilative tool, because for the most part, it is not the history of the people who live there. Latino children in traditional US history classes get the dubious pleasure of sitting through months of a history that, unless by some miracle the teacher manages to get up to the 1960s and the agricultural worker strikes led by Cesar Chavez, is unlikely to contain a Latino name except as enemies. This narrative that largely excludes the Latino experience form American history defines our history largely as the history of white folks, predominantly male.

With such narrow-minded thinking behind the bill, why do I say I'm not worried about its actual provisions? Well, the bill specifically protects instruction about Native Americans from being impacted by the bill. It also retains the rights of schools to group students by English language ability, which sometimes results in ethnically homogeneous classes. Most importantly, it also teachers to continue discussions of "controversial aspects of history," "the holocaust," "any other instance of genocide," and "the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on ethnicity, race, or class." As far as I'm concerned, that's a loophole big enough to drive a César Chávez Day parade float through.

The bill makes a couple of asinine assumptions: First, that classes about a particular ethnic group are designed exclusively for instruction of that ethnic group, and second, that it's possible to recognize the full humanity and instructional needs of students without considering how their life experiences have been shaped by their ethnic background—by the privileges they have enjoyed or the prejudices they have endured.

As for that bit about current courses in Tucson or elsewhere promoting "the overthrow of the United States government"? That's slippery slope thinking. After all, instruction about Dolores Huerta, César Chávez, and the Mexican resistance to U.S. colonialism following the American annexation of Texas qualifies as a treasonous curriculum only if one equates any challenge to the status quo (including white hegemony in, say, agribusiness) with a direct assault on American governmental institutions.

And oh—one sign that your legislature might have passed a bill that is racist in intent? When folks at the Stormfront white supremacist forums (and no, I'm not going to link to the forums themselves) cheer and think about relocating to Arizona. At this moment I can't imagine a bigger red flag.

On a personal note, issues of race in the teaching of history are very much on my mind these days. Yesterday I submitted my textbook orders for the history courses—an introduction to American history through 1877 and a seminar on public history—I'll be teaching this fall. I'll be teaching at a mostly white regional public university in the Pacific Northwest, and it's unlikely many of the students in my courses will have had to grapple meaningfully with issues of race in American history; nor will they likely have been victims of everyday or exceptional racism. The bizarre rewriting of the state history curriculum by Texas conservatives and the fearful and racially-motivated HB 2281, along with countless other recent examples, will, I think, serve as excellent case studies for my students as we consider how history gets written—who writes it, who gets represented in mainstream narratives, and how. In fact, these two incidents of state intervention serve as excellent arguments for a broader embrace of public history—of history of, by, and for everyday people—over solely triumphalist national narratives.

So I want to know: No matter where in the world you live, where and how have you encountered what were, until 30 or 40 years ago, considered "alternative" histories of "minority" voices? And how are you representing your region's or nation's history to the next generation?

Are U.S. D.A.s seeking justice or reelection?

2010-04-15T22:04:00.000-06:00

So, say you're a teacher. And state law requires you to teach about contraception if you teach sex ed. But then your county's district attorney proclaims that if you teach about contraception, he'll press criminal charges.

Excuse the expression, but you're screwed--stuck between the law and a lawyer.

This is the situation facing teachers in Juneau County, Wisconsin, where D.A. Scott Southworth is claiming such instruction encourages sex among minors.

Come Mr. D.A., tally me (condoms on) bananas

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported on the impasse:

The new law "promotes the sexualization - and sexual assault - of our children," Southworth wrote in a March 24 letter to officials in five school districts. He urged the districts to suspend their sex education programs and transfer their curriculum on anatomy to a science course.

Southworth believes classroom discussion of how to properly use contraceptives will lead not only to sexual activity between minors, but sexual assault on minors. In a letter (PDF) to school districts in Juneau County, Southworth warned,

The teacher need not be deliberately encourage [sic] the illegal behavior: he or she only need be aware that his or her instruction is "practically certain" to cause the child to engage in the illegal act. Moreover, the teacher could be charged with this crime even if the child does not actually engage in the criminal behavior. Depending on the nature of the child's behavior, the teacher could face either misdemeanor or felony charges with maximum punishments ranging from 9 months of jail up to six years of prison.

It's preposterous that teachers would reasonably believe that instruction on contraception could lead to sexual assault. According to data from the University of Wisconsin Health Institute, Juneau County's teen birth rate is approximately 25% higher than the state average, and the county ranks 62 out of 72 Wisconsin counties in the Institute's health behaviors index (which includes such data as chlamydia infection rates, smoking rates, smoking during pregnancy, binge drinking, and the teen birth rate). Clearly, this is a county where young people need some instruction on health.

Apparently some Juneau County parents have their heads buried firmly in the sand. The Juneau County Star Times reports,

Jim Schmidt, a member of the Juneau County chapter of Pro-Life Wisconsin and father of seven, believes that parental involvement, not school curriculum, is what will have the greatest effect on sexual health outcomes.

"They haven't had [sex education] in Necedah schools for 15 years and everything is fine," he said. "That is a parent's responsibility. If they don't know how to handle it, they need to talk to their doctor."

Ranking in the bottom 14% in a state's health index is not an indicator that "everything is fine." Indeed, those states (typically the most religious) that discourage teaching about contraception have the highest rates of teen birth.

District attorneys overstepping their powers

Southworth's behavior is part of a trend of D.A.s in the U.S. bringing the power of their offices to bear on families and individuals in ways that might not be entirely appropriate. Southworth holds an elected office, as do all D.A.s in my home state of California.

D.A.s overstepping their power has raised considerable concern in my part of the country. A Facebook group called "What a Difference a DA makes" claims that "The DA is the most powerful elected official most voters have never heard of." The Facebook group was created by the American Civil Liberties Union's District Attorney Campaign, whose webpage explains,

Voters from every county in California elect one attorney whose job it is to speak "for the people" in the criminal courts. The primary duty of the District Attorney (DA) is to promote the safety of our communities by prosecuting those who break the law. As the "peoples' lawyer," the DA is supposed to serve the interests of all members of the community and to enforce the laws without prejudice, bias, or political purposes.

A great deal of power and responsibility lies in the hands of District Attorneys. Yet most voters don't pay close attention to the positions of DA candidates. Many voters simply skip this box on the ballot. Even editorial boards of newspapers often do not bother to endorse DA candidates. Without involvement from voters, community organizations, opinion leaders and the media, the immense powers that we put in the hands of DAs will go unchecked.

Definitely check out the Facebook group's news feed, which contains an alarming number of reports of D.A.s overstepping their bounds.

In my own county of Yolo, California, for example, D.A. Jeff Reisig's office has come under increasing scrutiny for potential discrimination against defendants of color, as well as what some are calling the "Cash for Convictions" program, and others call Balance Sheet Justice. Under this program, counties receive grants for convictions of people for certain categories of crimes, which means Reisig's office has an incentive to seek conviction over justice, and indeed, Yolo County has one of the highest rape prosecution and conviction rates in the country--and according to Rev. Ashiya Odeye of the local Justice Reform Coalition, arrests of white men for rape have dropped dramatically during Reisig's tenure, while prosecution of men of color for rape has increased sharply.

August 2009 rally in Woodland, California, against Yolo County D.A. Jeff Reisig

Of particular concern in my county are the shooting by undercover sheriff's deputies of Luis Gutierrez and the 378-year prison sentence given to dark-skinned Nepali-American Ajay Dev, who was convicted of rape, while white child molester Brett Pedroia served only 8 months of a one-year prison sentence.

In the Dev case, the D.A.'s office charged the defendant with 92 crimes, which all but ensured the (almost entirely white) jury would perceive Dev as guilty as soon as the trial began. Dev's supporters maintain he is innocent of the 750 rapes of which he was accused by a woman whose U.S. citizenship apparently hinged on Dev's conviction.

Quick--who's your D.A.?

If you live in the U.S., there's a good chance your jurisdiction has a district attorney, and a good chance as well that you have the opportunity to elect candidates to this office. Unless you want someone like Southworth or Reisig currying political favor through interference in curriculum and health or through heavy-handed prosecutions that may favor convictions over justice, start your research now. To help you get started, the ACLU offers some really good questions to ask candidates for district attorney.

Coda

I'm fed up with transparent abuses of the legal system; the increasing misrepresentation of U.S. history for political ends; and the general state of science, health, and history education in U.S. primary and secondary schools. I believe these three challenges are connected. Expect to see more from me on these issues, but particularly the public use, misuse, and abuse of history, very soon.

Detoxing

2010-04-12T21:21:00.000-06:00

I wrote a month and a half ago about how I've been turning the ship of my life to a new heading, about how weighted down I feel and how it's going to take a long time to make the next turn.

As excited as I am about starting the new job and all the life changes that will accompany it, and as deliberate as I'm trying to be in the changes I'm making, the universe keeps throwing spanners into the works. First we gave up the dog. Then last week I dealt with some workplace drama that I shouldn't write about here, but that only made the move from my office to the cube farm all the worse and made several aspects of my job less attractive than they've ever been and heightened the feelings of--and this is the first time I've put a word on them--betrayal (by the institution, by individuals) I've been feeling all along about the move and other recent changes to the teaching center.

Add to this the necessity of finishing up some projects at work, of saying goodbye to people and places that mean a lot to me, and the thousand little things that need to be done before one moves and changes employers--health insurance worries, doctors' visits, finding and renting a new place, setting up utilities, arranging the move, finding a new preschool, courses to plan (books to order by Thursday!), and so much more--and I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed.

I've been looking at this time of transition as an opportunity to declutter--physically, emotionally, and mentally--but I'm thinking a better metaphor is detoxing. Decluttering is about shedding stuff--which I'm ready to do, but which is hard--while detoxing is about taking in good stuff (fruits and veggies, literal and metaphorical) and exercising (physically and mentally) to clear out all the built-up toxins.

Photo by Terri Swallow, and used under a Creative Commons license

It's easier, in other words, for me to think about moving on to good stuff than it is to think about ridding myself of stuff that isn't right for me. Most visible case in point: Jacob (the new puppy) vs. Obi (the unpredictable dog). I still cry when I think of how much I miss Obi, but when I focus on acclimating Jacob into our lives, I'm much more positive.

I suppose this should have been obvious to me all along, but no. I need to keep myself future-focused as a way of detoxing from all the stuff and stucknesses and monsters I'm ready to leave behind me.

Here we go again. . .

2010-03-26T19:46:00.000-06:00

I'm visiting my family in Long Beach, and Fang knew there was a giant hole in my heart because of Obi's absence. So he got me an insanely adorable band-aid:

And yes, I know it's mildly insane. But. . . is he not delectable? You're looking at 10 cute weeks of Golden Retriever/Lab mix. He came with the name "Jacob," and since we're LOST fans, we may just keep it.

It's driving me crazy that I won't be able to meet him until Sunday evening.

Very Personal Ad: The Next Dog

2010-03-23T23:23:00.000-06:00

I. Background

If you have been following Fang's and my posts about returning our dog of almost two years to the SPCA, you can imagine that Fang and I are pretty damn torn up right now.

We both miss Obi terribly, as we did love the dog; as Fang says, Obi is 7/8 a good dog. It's the 1/8 we couldn't abide. Intellectually, we know we made the right decision, as we couldn't keep a dog with a bite history in the house with our four-year-old. And Obi will benefit from being in a situation with someone who has experience dealing with troubled dogs. But emotionally, well, let's just say we've cried a river, separately and together.

I explained to Fang that I'm having an especially hard time with losing Obi not only because I feel we failed him in some fundamental way, but also because my grief clock for dogs is set at 10- to 15-year intervals. And Woody left us less than two years ago. To lose two dogs in less than two years is more than I can bear right now, when so much else in my life is in flux.

That said, Fang and I are dog people. We've both always had dogs around, from the time we were born--though I took a hiatus during college and early grad school, I was always thrilled to return home to my parents' dog. Until Obi, we had both had nothing but good experiences with raising and caring for dogs.

Between the time we decided to return Obi to the SPCA and the day Fang actually signed the frightened dog over to the volunteers there, I asked Fang to be open to the idea of us getting another dog before we move to Boise during the summer. I said I would be more open to letting Obi go if we were open to having another rescue dog come into our lives. I feel we have built up some karma that we need to work off by making a lifelong commitment to another dog as soon as possible.

Fang was hesitant. But yesterday he admitted that he's having a hard time living with the latest dog-shaped hole shadowing us around the house.

We're not rushing out to get another dog. We're still grieving. But we're open to the possibility of another rescue dog.

That said, we realized we went about adopting Obi in just the wrong way. Adopting a dog when you have a small child is entirely different from adopting a dog if your kids are older or if you're living alone or as a couple. We fell in love with Obi's sweetness and cuteness and then focused on persuading the SPCA folks that we would be a terrific home for the dog. And we totally thought we would be great doggy parents to him--we answered everything truthfully on the application.

What we now know is that we need to approach adoption differently. We need to explain to rescue organizations that we are an ideal home for a particular kind of dog and be very clear about exactly what kind of dog we're looking for. In other words, we need the rescue organization to sell us on the dog rather than sell ourselves to the organization.

Undoubtedly many of you are saying duuuuuuhhhhhhh.

Lesson learned. Paradigm shifted.

II. A Very Personal Ad

Havi Brooks has a ritual of posting "very personal ads" (VPAs) as a way of letting the universe know she's open to good things happening--and helping herself think through how the things she wants might come to pass. She explains it like this:

...it’s time to make a regular practice of trying to feel okay asking for stuff.

Even when the asking thing feels weird and conflicted.

To get everything clear in my mind about our next dog--to be sure we aren't making the same kind of mistakes that hurt us and a sensitive animal--I'm writing my own VPA here.

Here’s what I want:

A medium-large, friendly dog without a bite history. I'm open to many breeds, but because we plan to rent in Boise and because many rental companies and landlords are biased against certain breeds, we can't at this time take in any dog that looks as if it's of pit bull, Rottweiler, Chow Chow, or Shar Pei stock, nor a purebred German Shepherd (though I love me some German Shepherd). I know these aren't necessarily the most violent or bite-prone breeds of dog, but I do know they show up regularly on lists of banned pets in rentals.

My ideal dog--while I'm asking--would inhabit an intersection among Labrador Retriever, German Shepherd, Australian Shepherd, Border Collie, Golden Retriever, Standard Poodle, and maybe even Gordon Setter. These are crazy active and in some cases crazy smart dogs, but that's what we wanted in Obi--and what we got, except with a predisposition to bite, gained, we're guessing, from some incident(s) in his life in the year before we adopted him.

Because we went through the geriatric dog business relatively recently, we're looking for a younger dog. Fang would like a very young puppy so that we can be sure it hasn't been environmentally programmed in some unpleasant way, while I'm more open to juvenile and young adult dogs.

I want a dog who will grow up with Lucas. Fang wants a dog with whom he can go gray. I want a companion for long walks and--gasp!--maybe even jogging.

Ways this could work:

I could check Petfinder occasionally, scanning for dogs that fit the profile we're looking for, then contacting the rescue organizations to talk about what kind of dog we're looking for and about what kind of home we could provide.

Someone in the Sacramento region or Bay Area or, heck, even central or Southern California could read this post and contact me (trillwing -at- gmail -dot- com or @lesliemb on Twitter) about a dog they suspect would be good match for us.

My commitment:

To provide the next dog with the best possible care. Top-quality food (as we did with Woody and Obi). An excellent holistic vet, here and in Boise. A terrific kid to play with. Long walks, sometimes in open fields. Socialization with other dogs at local dog parks. Lots of toys, even if he or she is prone to tearing them apart. Training that focuses on reward instead of punishment. A bag of treats always on top of the fridge or in my pocket.

Sweet doggie, wherever you are, we'll be ready when you are.

Photo credits, all licensed under Creative Commons:
Himalayan Sheepdog by sir_watkyn
Australian Shepherd by Xan Lotta
Four dogs by Sarah Novak

Doggy heartbreak, continued

2010-03-18T23:29:00.000-06:00

I'm really struggling with giving up the dog.

My motives for wanting to keep the dog are almost entirely selfish and self-centered:

Obi is my dog. He's the first dog that someone (in this case Fang, who was fed up with Obi at the moment) declared to be entirely mine. I've always wanted a dog of my own--I've always come into situations where someone else is responsible for the dog--yet Fang has already said that the next dog will be Lucas's as the boy and the dog will grow up together.

I'm the one who failed Obi. I took him to obedience classes--where, as I said, even the trainer had difficulty controlling him--but I didn't follow through sufficiently. Had I been better about providing Obi with structured outlets for his energy and with more vigorous exercise, his psychological quirks might not have manifested themselves so readily.

I'm having a hard time, too, forgiving the people who brought Obi's aggression to our attention. He bit a friend when we first brought him home because he smelled her dog on her, and while I found that disturbing, I dismissed it when he didn't try to bite again for a year and a half. It's the more recent incidents--the woman whose glove he clamped down when she reached out to pet him when he was under a dog sitter's care; the stranger at whom Obi lunged and air snapped when he reached out to pet him while Fang was walking him; the neighbor whose dog bit Fang, leaving her scent on his hand and prompting Obi, too, to bite Fang. If these incidents hadn't occurred, we wouldn't be parting with the dog now. Intellectually, I know these are signs we must heed, and that the people aren't at fault, that Obi is and ultimately we are responsible for his behavior. But I still resent the intrusions of these well-meaning folks into Obi's narrative.

I love this dog, liabilities and all. Just as Woody was Fang's emotional barometer, Obi has come to be mine, coming to comfort and cuddle with me when I'm down or approaching me playfully when I'm in a good mood or if I seem bored.

I don't want to put Fang in the position of having to pry the dog from my arms at 2 p.m. Saturday, when we're scheduled to return Obi to the SPCA for another round of fostering and then, I hope, adoption to another home. But it's going to be incredibly difficult to let his fur slip from my fingers even though I know intellectually it's the right thing to do.

I've been in and out of tears all week, many of them shed directly into Obi's fur. So many what-ifs. So many missed opportunities. Such an uncertain future. A dog's hard-earned trust betrayed. So much love lost.

I'm going to miss you, dog.

We are not curators

2010-03-18T21:54:00.000-06:00

There's been a ton of talk over the past year about how participating in social media—whether through blogging, social bookmarking, Twitter, Flickr, or whatever—can be a form of curatorial practice.

And I totally get the appeal of that particular metaphor. In fact, I understand that some people mean to use it in a very literal way, in the sense that they see themselves as imposing a welcome order or useful narrative on a very unwieldy collection of internet artifacts. I've seen some people I think are absolutely brilliant using the term this way.

Those who know me well know I don't roll out my Ph.D. lightly. But as an (OK, adjunct) professor of museum studies and soon-to-be assistant professor of public history, I have to call bullshit on this one. As a lover of metaphor and as a poet who embraces all the possibilities of metaphor, I completely expect commenters to tell me to loosen up in this case. In fact, I suspect I'll come across as a snob. But really, this distinction—what is curating, what very much isn't—matters tremendously.

Educators with some facility in social media have become particularly fond of the term. But education isn't curating. Curating isn't education. In fact, in many museums, curators and educators are, alas, at odds with one another. Traditionally, curators have developed a depth of expertise in a content area over years of study, while educators tend—and yes, I know I'm generalizing here—to be younger folks with less education and experience. Education positions have a ton of turnover, a ton of burnout; curatorial positions come with more prestige and a sense of ownership of a position, sort of like tenure. Curators have at least a master's degree and frequently a Ph.D. Educators have undergraduate degrees and increasingly, in this era of incredible competition for jobs, master's degrees.

I don't mean to imply that curators are above the fray, that they hold themselves at arm's length from education. But their function is different. Curation is not a process of choosing the best resources to help other people learn. It's much, much more, and to suggest that social bookmarking, sharing links via Twitter, or using an internet platform's algorithm to help you determine which songs belong on your internet radio station is curation is ridiculous. Differentiating among things you like and dislike, or resources that you think are good or bad, and then sharing those opinions with people as a collection of internet or educational resources, is not curation.

When people talk about "curating" via social media, they're really talking about filtering, and curators do so much more than filter. You can't, I'm afraid to inform Robert Scoble, just "click to curate." In fact, the absence of talented curators makes a given educational context degenerate, in newcurator's most excellent formulation, to reality television.

Educators also do more than filter. They translate the curator's research and expertise into small bites digestible by the general public or schoolchildren. This is a talent unto itself, and—speaking as a former museum educator and exhibition developer—it's not easy to develop because informal learning diverges so spectacularly from what we're all taught is supposed to happen in formal educational settings.

The conflation of a combination of sharing, digital resource connoisseurship, and online teaching and learning with a form of curation not only devalues the actual practice of curation—and by extension the time, effort, and passion it takes to develop sufficient expertise to become a curator—but also obscures the skills we hone as we navigate sharing on the social web.

We need a new term for folks who are developing (or who have already developed) the depth of expertise that marks curatorial work, but who also practice the distinctive forms of teaching and learning engendered by the social web. It's not exactly edupunk, and it's not museopunk.

In my mind, the people—and particularly academics—who occupy this space practice Keats's "negative capability": they are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." By this I mean they get the tension—apparent to anyone who has planned a college course or an exhibition—between helping students or visitors develop content expertise and giving them opportunities to think critically and creatively. Doing both of these things simultaneously—cultivating expertise and promoting real intellectual development and discernment—is incredibly difficult to do from a lectern or via exhibition label. The social web, like a provocatively interactive museum exhibition, offers new possibilities for this kind of participation in, and service to, the world.

California Academy of Sciences botanical curator Alice Eastwood standing on the scarp of the San Andreas Fault, 1906. Eastwood was both a curator and an educator.

What we call that exciting—and dare I say disruptive?— role is open to discussion and debate. Kindly leave your witty neologisms in the comments.

Update: Just saw this article on the new curators in the New York Times, which in some ways undermines my argument and in other ways reinforces that curating is its own special skill set. An excerpt:

It is also a group plugged in to all areas of museum life. They don’t simply organize exhibitions, they also have a hand in fund-raising and public relations, catalog production and installation. “The old-fashioned notion of a curator was that of a connoisseur who made discoveries and attributions,” said Scott Rothkopf, 33, who is the latest full-time curator to join the Whitney Museum of American Art’s team. “A lot of that work has already been done. The younger generation is trained to think differently, to think more about ideas.”

More doggy heartbreak

2010-03-14T21:34:00.000-06:00

Of the countless topics I don't address in this space, there's one that should count more than others: the matter of the dog. After all, in July we will have had this dog for two years, and yet he hardly appears in these bloggy pages at all.

There's a big reason for that: he's a biter, or to be fair, more regularly an attempted biter. We've kept him in check, thank god, and we've tried our damndest to break him of this habit he brought with him from his former life. But I didn't want to write about it here because (a) it's embarrassing and (b) I didn't want to put anything in writing, lest he actually bite someone--I didn't want evidence that I had prior knowledge of his aggressive tendencies.

We've had some close calls. Because he looks so damn friendly, people try to pet him when we're out walking, and he inevitably lunges at them. On walks, I carry a muzzle in my back pocket for that exact reason. We worked for a while with a trainer whose advice helped quite a bit, but during obedience class even she had difficulty controlling him, once mentioning that he seemed to be "on crack" and telling us to drug him with Benadryl before training sessions. (We never did drug him, preferring to try to wear him out first.) When we have friends over, we have to crate Obi and put him in a room away from the action because he's both anxious and territorial.

Obi has come a long way, but not far enough. This past week Obi crossed a big, fat line: he bit my husband. You can read a first-person account at Fang's blog.

Accordingly, we're seeking a new home for Obi, one with someone who has more time and energy to devote to this crazy high-energy and clearly troubled dog--and more importantly, one without kids around. Preferably on a farm. Upstate. With rabbits. And no--I don't mean for that to be a euphemism for euthanasia. I looked up information about dog bites, and it appears dogs that produce the kind of bite Obi gave Fang can usually be rehabilitated. I really think this dog, who is bright but with a couple screws loose from being passed around (we are his third owners that we know of), would with some rigorous training make an excellent working dog. He's really well-behaved when I walk him off-leash in the fields and even is a gentleman when I've been brave enough to take him to the dog park.

But in the house? In the yard? On the leash? A totally different dog. Almost feral.

The good news is when we adopted him from the SPCA, the organization said we could return the dog at any time. I've e-mailed the folks there and asked them to contact me to discuss Obi's future. I want to be absolutely sure he doesn't go to a home with kids, and I may even mail a registered, notarized letter to that effect when we hand him back to the SPCA folks.

I feel terribly guilty and depressed, because in my experience with pets, adoption is a lifelong commitment, and I feel as if we've failed this dog. And despite his quirks and his destructiveness and how much he frustrates me, I do love the beast.

If we didn't have a four-year-0ld kid, we'd redouble our efforts, as after all we are dog people: We could do more obedience classes. Get him on calming drugs, maybe some Eastern medicine from our fabulous holistic veterinarian. Have more one-on-one sessions with a trainer. Exercise him for hours each day so that he's completely worn out when he's around the house and other people. But at this point in our lives, we can't have an unpredictable dog in the house.

It's absolutely breaking my heart.

Getting the job

2010-03-07T22:59:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to write something about process of landing the history job, to reflect a bit on my experiences over the past several years, both to make the narrative clear to myself and because maybe--though I know the job market is prone to brutal whimsy--doing so will help someone else seeking a tenure-track job.

I wince a bit as I write this, as I know some folks from my new university will read this post, and my accounting of events may seem really skewed and possibly inaccurate and narcissistic. But such concerns have never before stopped me, eh?

So, a quick accounting of my intellectual and professional life, in case you haven't bothered to piece together my life story by browsing the 4.5 years of posts in The Clutter Museum archives:

I earned a B.A. in English in 1997.
I earned an M.A. in English/creative writing (poetry!) in 1998.
I worked for a year outside academia.
I started dating Fang, and a week later moved to Iowa to pursue a Ph.D. in American Studies.
The following spring, Fang wooed me back to California, where I worked outside academia for another year, and I applied to one grad program, sort of on a lark.
I started a Ph.D. in cultural studies at UC Davis in 2001.
I finished my dissertation in 2006.
I went on the academic job market in four of the five years between being ABD and now. During that time, I applied for about 100 jobs, mostly in academia. The only interviews I had were on the edges of the academy: to manage the public history and public science programs for a city, to direct a new teaching center (a position that came with a tenure-track job), and to direct professional development opportunities for staff and volunteers at a consortium of 23 museums and cultural institutions. It was clear from the day I spent touring the city with the other candidates that I wasn't as qualified as they were for first job, the second job was closed due to lack of funding, and the third went to an internal candidate.
Meanwhile, I worked as a pedagogy consultant in academic technology and then transferred into my current job, where I am--I kid you not--"Assistant to the _______ I" in a teaching center. I've spent much of the past 3+ years consulting with faculty on teaching with and without technology.

So that's the standard narrative, the one you'd get if you looked at my CV or handed me a glass of wine and asked me about the academic job market for a Ph.D. in cultural studies.

But there's another narrative, one that is less obvious but, I think, more relevant. In this version of events, my graduate program did nothing to prepare me for the realities of the job market. Instead, a little intellectual and technological curiosity propelled me to the point I'm at today.

In fall 2005, I started this blog, and in January 2006, I became a contributing editor for research, academia, and education at BlogHer.

In 2006, I also attended the BlogHer conference in San José. There I met three women whose blogs I was already reading: Barbara Sawhill (of Oberlin), Barbara Ganley (then of Middlebury), and Laura Blankenship (then of Bryn Mawr). Individually, these women are amazing. Together, they are awesome. We hooked up with Martha Burtis from the University of Mary Washington (one of my erstwhile almost-almae matres) and began talking about teaching in technology, about the strictures of course management systems and the possibilities of social media. We took our show on the road, ~~presenting~~ moderating conversations and doodle fests at education and technology conferences. Inspired by the Barbaras, Martha, and Laura, I experimented with technology in my teaching and became, well, maybe a little too comfortable with it. But I definitely became more conversant in educational technology than most folks who teach undergrads, and it helped me tremendously in my professional development on both the academic and staff sides of my higher ed career.

Also in 2006, I started a blog about museums. It drew the attention of the director of a museum studies graduate program about an hour down the road. She remembered my name from a question I asked on a museum history listserv a few years earlier, and apparently she had been cyberstalking me until I finished my Ph.D. When I had the degree in hand, she contacted me and asked if I would teach the history and theory course. What I didn't tell her is that I was actually thinking about enrolling in the program. When she went on sabbatical in winter and spring quarters of 2009, I oversaw the students' Master's theses.

At the teaching center, I taught a nine-week seminar in college teaching once a year to grad students and postdocs. I consulted with faculty across the disciplines. I chaired committees for the teaching center and was invited to be on ones outside the center. I then began to receive invitations to chair those committees. I am not a natural networker, and all of these experiences have been invaluable in making me comfortable speaking with faculty and administrators (OK, being a print journalist for several months in 1999 also helped, because I had to learn to pick up the phone and call just about anyone).

I also continued to benefit from mentoring by my dissertation adviser and, later, from coaching by a history professor who was on my dissertation committee. Their generosity with their time and advice has been invaluable in more ways than I can enumerate here. The director of the museum studies program also passed a couple opportunities my way when she was too busy to handle them herself, which resulted in (and I know this sounds weird, but it's oddly true) a very well-placed encyclopedia article.

I also submitted an article to a journal that ended up being a pretty respectable venue, and it was published there this past summer. I must admit that once I had narrowed my choices to three journals, I went with the one whose citation system matched that of my dissertation. I had a toddler, a full-time job, and an adjunct gig, and I was looking for any possible way to save time. I was fortunate that in this case such a decision worked in my favor.

I've been thinking about my professional experience as falling on two tracks: the traditional path to the job market and the unconventional one.

Traditional path:

Ph.D. (but with a liability: mine is interdisciplinary, not within a discipline)
tons of teaching experience (required for humanities jobs, it seems)
fancy shmancy graduate research fellowship at the Smithsonian archives
publication
conference presentations
some minimal kind of service as a graduate student.

Unconventional path:

start a blog on academia and motherhood
contribute to another blog
start yet another blog
make fabulous connections via blogging
blog connections lead to conference presentations, an adjunct gig in museum studies, and the opportunity to mentor graduate students
parlay blogging experience into a job in academic technology
transfer academic technology experience to job at teaching center
get a ton of administrative and committee experience and be able to talk somewhat intelligently about how the bureaucratic university works.

All of the experiences on the unconventional path are not ones that the average humanities student acquires between starting a graduate program and going on the job market. But they have completely shaped who I am as a writer, a scholar, and a professional more broadly. Blogging has opened up so many opportunities for me, which in turn have led to increased confidence.

Yes, I still have impostor syndrome. I am, after all, embarking on a tenure-track job in a discipline in which I have no academic degrees, no discipline-specific teaching experience, and very little experience as a student myself. (I'm putting together a survey course on the U.S. to 1877, for example, and the last time I took a course that covered such a broad span of U.S. history was in 10th grade.)

But to bring us to the present, here's what I understand about how I snagged my new job:

There were 260 applicants; each member of the five-person search committee looked at 20% of the applications, each of which encompassed only a cover letter, a CV, and letters of rec. My application caught the eye of the person in whose pile my packet landed. So that was totally committee member roulette, as far as I'm concerned; it was more luck than strategy that landed me a videoconference interview.

I did my final prep for this interview--how else?--by writing a blog post. Which I then--stupidly, I thought at the time--mentioned during the interview. I later discovered that at least one search committee member read the blog post and was impressed by my sleuthing into the university's struggles with teaching the liberal arts.

I also let myself be funny during the interview--mostly to keep myself sane and because I was a bit sleep-deprived, but I think it worked to my advantage.

By the point of the campus interview, I had decided that I would squelch any impostor syndrome I was feeling and just let myself be, well, me. And so I talked with faculty and students about the things that interested me--my research, women in academic and museum science, students with disabilities, and local social justice issues--and pointed a couple faculty members to some resources that might be useful to them in teaching and writing grants. I also refused to lecture exclusively to the fifty or so students in the course I guest-taught, even though I knew that attempting an interactive and wide-ranging lesson on material culture, the 1893 world's fair, and technology with someone else's students in the third week of a survey course might be risky. My one capitulation to tradition was that I allowed myself to have the full text of my research talk on my computer screen when I presented it. I don't usually read my talks, but I was a bit nervous about the whole, you know, history thing.

And when one faculty member asked me who my people were, in terms of public history--was I an AASLH or NCPH person, or something else entirely?--I answered that my historians were those I followed on Twitter and via their blogs and podcasts, or whom I met via listservs on topics other than history, and that the conferences I attended were more focused on teaching and learning than on historical research. That was a risky conversation, but I'm glad I had it.

When the same professor asked after my research talk if it was autobiographical, I figured my cover had been blown, in that I was arguing that it was women from outside mainstream academic science who most contributed to the public understanding of natural science. And there I was, an interloper (in my mind), making the argument that I should be hired by a history department to do public history.

My point is this: the process of landing this job, from the time I finished my Ph.D. until I accepted their offer, was marked, it seemed to me at the time, by risk-taking. But the risks, I now see from the other side of the job market fence, were all about remaining authentic to my interests instead of pandering to what I believed theirs to be. In the case of this university, my interests and those of the faculty happened to match up pretty well. So I'm absolutely delighted because I'm starting a job from a position of authenticity; I didn't build up a façade that I'll need to maintain or very carefully disassemble.

I hope the recipe I've shared here--one part luck, two parts authenticity, and two parts unconventional professional development--proves useful to someone else frustrated with a more traditional approach to the job market.

Reader, I married him--here's why

2010-02-26T20:05:00.001-07:00

If you're not reading Fang's Forum, you're really missing out on some great writing.

Some favorite quips from recent blog posts:

On music videos by Croatia's Johnny Cash: "They could have been shot by Matthew Brady 150 years ago if Brady made music videos instead of battlefield corpsescapes."

On Johnny Cash's American VI: "Only Cash could sing the words, 'Oh Death, where is thy sting?' not as self-pity or a brash challenge, but rather as a teasing lover to a would-be paramour. Cheeky and cool."

From Dear Tiger Woods": "Great speech. I wonder if Chris Matthews forgot you were black for a while."

Experiencing Mountain Dew: "like drinking a sweetened industrial solvent."

On our impending move to another university town: "I keep trying for a passable brave face for her, but all I’ve come up with so far is a perfectly-realized petulant sulk."

Living with Fang keeps me humble about all those expensive degrees I spent a dozen years pursuing. Dude can write circles around me, and his only diploma is from Amphitheater High School in Tucson, Arizona.

Go check him out. And then offer him a job, 'cause we need to get the man some bifocals:

Turning the ship

2010-02-25T16:33:00.000-07:00

As regular readers know, I grew up in Long Beach, California, home to one of the largest ports in the U.S. and to a number of offshore oil platforms and oil islands.

Long Beach horizon, looking southwest, Christmas Day, 2009,
with ships, oil islands, breakwater, the cranes of the Port of Long Beach,
and smog obscuring Catalina Island. Isn't it lovely?

Accordingly, oil freighters were a common sight on the horizon, and I learned early on that the less oil on board, the higher the tanker rode in the water and the more I could see of the broad red stripe on its hull.

Tanker photo by Tom Wahlin, and used under a Creative Commons license

Friends, my ship is full. I'm weighted down—with good things and bad things, terrific opportunities and terrible challenges—so much that the red stripe is completely submerged.

Shall we review?

First, the job.

I don't think I can sufficiently express how awesome this particular new job promises to be, and how grateful I am for the opportunity and for the support my excellent new colleagues continue to show me.

Because—and this bears repeating—it is a tenure-track job. In history. In one of the crappiest years for history jobs in quite some time.

And I don't have a degree--any degree--in history. I mean, I'm an historian, but I didn't arrive here via the usual route. So while this new position is very much what I've wanted for longer than I care to admit, I'm still a bit surprised because, you know, after so many years on the academic job market, one gets more than a little beaten down.

Second, moving.

We'll move in late July or early August. I don't know yet when we'll fly up to look for a house to rent; in my current burb, the leasing market for the fall begins in January (yes, you read that correctly), but Craigslist has plenty of affordable, decent-looking housing available immediately in the new city, so I'm guessing we'd only be wasting time and money if we flew up there this week to try to secure housing for late summer. We also need to find a preschool. My new colleagues have been awesome, offering me temporary housing and cars and assistance finding schools, which is a huge relief.

Yet there's all the stuff that's attendant with moving: turning utilities on and off, figuring out internet and TV service, convincing potential landlords that a big dog isn't necessarily a liability, finding enough boxes and packing supplies, weeding out old crap we should have tossed years ago, holding a yard sale. It's all in the service of an exciting new chapter in my life, but the road there is still a bit too long and rough for my liking.

Plus, as my peripatetic blog readers know, moving is difficult emotionally. I've lived in this town for a decade, nine of those years in my latest stint here with Fang. Lucas was born here. I have made some very close friends here, and although I've become used to the comings and goings of friends and colleagues in a university town, I had begun to assume that we'd be here for quite a while longer. So I'm in the process of detaching myself from the town, while promising that I'll keep in touch with friends.

Third, Fang's job.

This morning Fang learned that a newspaper that provides more than half his income has been sold. Everyone was let go today, and the publisher didn't even bother to call Fang to let him know--Fang heard through the previous publisher, who was busy extricating herself from the last little legal connections she had to the business. His coworkers who live and work in the town where the newspaper is located were fired by voicemail or learned the paper had been sold when they showed up for work and saw the furniture being removed from the office.

Need I point out that we have some moving expenses coming up? Sure, the new university covers much of the household moving expenses, but there's a lot of other stuff for which we'll be footing the bill.

Fourth. . .so much more.

I could write so much more, but I'm going to stop here before I feel too defeated by the stress of a couple class preps in a discipline in which I've never taught, diving back into research, keeping up my energy in my current job, planning a 600-mile move, scraping together some additional freelance income for Fang and me because I'm furloughed and he's half-jobless, and and and.

Because really, on the whole, I'm crazy excited and optimistic when I think on the scale of months and years. But days and weeks? Those are hard right now.

As I said, my ship is very full. It's going to take some time to slow it down enough to make a significant change in heading.

Compass rose photo by Thom Watson, and used under a Creative Commons license

Offered the job!

2010-02-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

In case you don't follow me on Twitter or Facebook, here's the news: I was offered the history professor job yesterday afternoon. I'm planning to accept it, but I'm still in negotiations, so I'm not going to blog any more about it right now.

I am so thrilled!

----

UPDATE:

Accepted the offer! (I was instructed by my new department chair to update this blog posthaste. Ha!)

At 4 years old, he's already a fanboy

2010-02-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

I blame Fang.

Waiting

2010-02-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

Well, the search committee for the gender/public history position has made its decision and forwarded one candidate's name to the dean, provost, president, HR, etc. Which means waiting. . . for not too long, I hope.

I'm not one to obsess, really, but sometimes the not-obsessing becomes obsessive in that the compartmentalizing of thought takes too much effort. So while I've spent this long weekend building robots from Tinkertoys, cleaning house, making Play-Doh pancakes, cooking (raspberry crepes this morning!), walking, sketching on the computer, playing that damned Echo Bazaar, editing Fang's manuscript, prepping tax materials for our agent, enjoying a luxuriously long lunch with a good friend, and taking Lucas to the park, a fog of what-if has been seeping through the cracks in the walls of my willpower to not. obsess. about. it.

Meanwhile, I've let myself reread a few of the kind (and even enthusiastic) e-mails I received in response to the thank-you notes I sent to the department faculty who participated in the on-campus interview. I'm confident I impressed a couple folks mightily, but in the end it's a matter of "fit" and department consensus, which is something out of my control.

If nothing else, the campus visit refocused and reinvigorated me intellectually. I wrote in a previous blog post that I felt more authentically myself there, talking about research and teaching and public history, than I do in my actual job. It was a pleasant passage, though to where, I don't yet know.

It brings to mind some of my favorite lines by Seamus Heaney, from section XII of his poem "Station Island." In this section, James Joyce is advising the poet, who has just completed a pilgrimmage to Station Island:

...'Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite,
What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don't be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.'

It was as if I had stepped free into space
alone with nothing that I had not known
already. . .

In other news, I'm anticipating spring. Today was warm enough for me to bike downtown for lunch in short sleeves. Yay! I'm also keeping close watch on tree branches. Here's a couple shots from my iPhone. The first is on my current campus, out on the student farm at dusk. The second is from my neighborhood, and I love how there's a bit of fall, winter, and spring bundled together in the twigs and sprigs.

What are you waiting for?

A virtual visit with my grandfather's brother

2010-02-06T16:53:00.000-07:00

I'm mostly posting this for family, who seem to have an easier time finding my blog than they do anything on YouTube, but I'll provide some context anyway:

My mom's cousin, Ian Lind, just posted this video of his father, John Lind, whom I mentioned on this blog three years ago. My great-uncle John is suffering from Alzheimer's, and apparently this visit to John's nursing home was one of the better ones in a while.

It's fun seeing John talk, even in his illness, because he reminds me so much of my late grandfather, his younger brother, who passed away in 1991 when I wasn't yet 16.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I've inherited the gene that keeps hair from going gray. John is 96 and still hasn't gone gray. I remember how fantastic he looked when he visited Long Beach for his 60th high school reunion, and how he complained that all his old girlfriends had somehow become old.

As I understand it, John was kind of central to the multicultural Hawaiian surfing scene in the mid-twentieth century. If you're interested in surfing history, definitely check out the John Lind collection at Ian's blog.

Campus interview update

2010-02-05T22:13:00.000-07:00

You know how everyone says that when you return from an on-campus interview, you'll feel as if you've been hit by a truck?

They're absolutely right. I am beyond worn out.

That said, I had a delightful trip. I felt more authentically myself there, talking about research and teaching and public history, than I do in my actual job. I'm sure those of you who work as staff members in higher ed know the feeling; it's similar to what I've experienced at really terrific conferences on learning, and it comes not just from intellectual engagement and the excitement of new possibilities, but from receiving a greater than usual amount of respect.

I really liked the history faculty I met, and I was impressed by their collegiality and by both their academic and public scholarship. They were generous with their time and candid about the university and the city.

I also really liked the students I met, both in the classroom and in a private chat I had with a handful of them on my last day there.

The teaching talk went OK--it wasn't my best day, but not my worst by any means, either--and the faculty seemed to appreciate my research talk. They asked really thoughtful questions, ones that were challenging rather than intimidating.

One downside: It would be a major pay cut, and the cost of living isn't really low enough to offset the difference.

I had a ton of great conversations with a lot of really interesting people, and the city, while significantly more isolated than any city I've lived in, is self-contained. The word everyone kept using to describe it? Convenient. I don't know if that sums up everything I'm looking for in a city, but I was interested to learn about the interfaith and human rights campaigns in the city. There's a little white supremacy presence in another part of the state, and the occasional intrusion of Aryans into the city has fortified the citizens' commitments to civil and human rights. Now if only the rest of the (very red) state would join them, and pass legislation in support of GLBT folks. . .

But I digress.

The campus's teaching center is not to be believed. It's a young center, but oh. my. god. It's physically lovely and spacious, and its programs seem to be first-rate. While we're cutting programs due to budget cuts and layoffs, they're growing their outreach efforts. While we're moving our teaching center into a windowless cube farm, they're in their campus's newest building, in a space filled with natural light and comfy, welcoming furniture. It was inspiring and depressing all at once.

Anyway, the history department is interviewing two more candidates. Overall, I think I made a good impression, but I understand departments' decisions are driven by a number of factors. Still, I'd be delighted to be offered the job, and I should hear back within another week or so. I'll keep you posted. Kindly keep your fingers crossed for me.

Ah, Humor, Thy Name is "Anonymous"

2010-01-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

A bit of backstory:

In 2006, I wrote a post that included photos of Lucas, who had fallen and hit his head, both before and after my husband took him to the ER.

Fang Bastardson left this comment on that post:

Your husband is obviously a bad, bad man and an unfit father. If I ever run into him, I'll kick his ass clear on back to last Thursday on principle.

I swear to God, you have to have a license to have a dog...

Have you alerted CPS, or shall I?

Here's the funny thing: Fang took those photos. He's my husband.

If Fang has mastered one quality, it's self-loathing. And he's terribly witty about it.

Fast-forward to the present day. My beloved Fang just received this comment on his blog:

[A]s for the nasty comment you left about a post on The Clutter Museum wherein you castigated a dad for taking a picture of his son's bleeding head before taking him to the ER, not only are you illiterate you're mean spirited and hateful. I happen to know the gentleman in question and he is an attentive, devoted father.
You, on the other hand, are a poser and a jerk.

This kind commenter (who I hope was writing with tongue as firmly planted in cheek as Fang originally was) also pointed out that Fang misspelled "dewclaw" in his bloggy bio. Let me assure you all--including Anonymous, if s/he is reading--that Fang is an immaculate speller, and that "doo-claw" is an homage to his favorite dog, whose nickname was Doo.

Ah, blogosphere, how I love you.

A snippet of scorn

2010-01-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

As I'm writing and endlessly revising my job talk for this coming week, I've come across some gems from the archives that I know some of my women scientist readers in particular will enjoy. I may share others, but this anecdote is particularly galling to me right now.

In part of my talk I'll examine ranch owner and businesswoman Susanna Bixby Bryant, who founded the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden on part of her ranch property between Los Angeles and Riverside. Bryant wanted to create an arboretum of native Californian flora, and she wanted it to be both comprehensible to the public and useful to scientists. California's botanists were thrilled to have a wealthy landowner demonstrate such support for a botanical project, but some were not so enthusiastic about letting the public tramp around the garden.

How bad was their scorn? Pretty bad. Willis Linn Jepson--you may know him from the Jepson Manual if you've ever botanized in the American west--had this to say in a 1929 letter when he learned that Bryant planned to be director of the garden she founded, provided land for, and hired and paid the staff of:

We have then, in that case, a problem presented which has many difficult aspects. You have not only had no training in the scientific field of botany, but the professional ethics and canons governing intercourse among botanists, a code several thousand years old, is a closed book to you. When you stepped from the field of business and society, where you are quite at home, into the field of Botany you were delighted to find certain privileges awaiting you (privileges quite foreign to the ranch or office) but you do not realize that with those privileges go heavy obligations. Frequently you do things in the name of Botany from which you would naturally refrain in the world of business.*

Bastard.

I couldn't find an image of an older, wiser Bryant glaring at Jepson, so the following will have to suffice as my interpretation of her likely response.

* Jepson to Bryant, 16 Feb. 1929, Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden archives, folder “Willis Linn Jepson,” no letter #.

Prepping for the job interview: hilarity ensues

2010-01-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

To-do list for campus interview prep:

Flight plans in place? Check!

No-fuss haircut? Check!

Wrestling the job talk into submission? (sort of) Check!

Catastrophic laptop failure? Check.

I'm typing this on a new laptop. I spent about 10 hours today shuttling in the rain between the Apple store (a city over), home, Best Buy (another city over), the Apple store (again), and home, then moving data around so everything works. Before those trips there was hemming and hawing over where to buy the laptop--the Apple store, where I can get the education discount, or Fry's Electronics, where I know from (sigh) experience they'll give me an identical loaner computer, complete with data transfer, if something goes wrong with the machine. And because there's a chance I'll be living someplace different in the next year, I was cautious and did some research: ends up the university city where I'm interviewing has neither an Apple store nor a Fry's. Damn. (Of course, neither does my current burb, but having both within driving distance is nice.)

But in the end, it really wasn't so catastrophic--except for the unexpected expense--as I rescued all the data, but I lost an (reserved! emptied! weekend!) day of interview prep. Somehow I doubt the other candidates spent today twiddling their thumbs. . .

In other news, I'm wondering, the Chronicle's advice aside, how one balances potential snow showers with interview shoes. . . Fingers crossed that the 10-day forecast for sunnier weather holds, lest I develop hypothermia and require toe amputation. Wouldn't that be a great campus interview cautionary tale, forever immortalized in the Chronicle's online career column archives? I'd be right up there with the guy who showed up for an interview in a Tweety Bird t-shirt, or the candidate who ran from the room to throw up from anxiety. Or that woman who blogs about goldfish constipation even though she's on the job market.*

*As evidence I have been thinking about museums, I offer "What's your museum's 'cello side'?" from Museum Blogging.

Thanks for all the fish

2010-01-23T22:39:00.000-07:00

As if to exact revenge for my using its brethren as a metaphor and allegory in a recurring dream, one of my fancy goldfish today insisted on swimming upside down.

Which, even if you've never owned a goldfish, you know isn't a good thing.

But it enriches the metaphor. Piggy's upside-down antics first sent me into a suck of despair--I can't stand to see animals suffering, or appearing to suffer--and then to the web, where I learned (and here's where the metaphor gets enriched exponentially) that upside-down swimming is not necessarily a sign of imminent death.

It's usually constipation.

So I spent the morning learning about how to make a goldfish poop, and then anxiously waiting for said poop and for Piggy to just start swimming upright dammit.

Piggy, in her hospital bowl--upright

And if you're ever in the market for goldfish laxatives? The secret is shelled peas.

Storm basin

2010-01-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago when I walked by the local storm basin a few blocks from my house, I noticed that the water levels were way down, with many large islands showing. Today I happened by there and wow! what a difference a storm makes. These photos aren't taken from the same location, but they give some idea of the change in water level. (They're taken with my iPhone, so the quality's not too great.)

Before:

Before:

After (click to embiggen--it's pretty!):

Too many fish

2010-01-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

We have four fish, two bettas in separate bowls on our kitchen counter and two fancy goldfish in a 10-gallon tank on a table between the counter and the dining room. I can hear the gurgle and hum of the tank's air pump from my desk, which occupies a corner of the dining room. And while I ostensibly bought the fish for Lucas, really they're my fish, as I'm the one who cares for them, changes the water and cleans the tank, and spends the most time watching them. Between caring for the fish and hearing the air pump's hum, these four fish take up a bigger amount of my mind-space than maybe they should.

I have this recurring dream--I hesitate to call it a nightmare, though it certainly verges on that--where the bowls and tank develop cracks, and I have to very quickly find new homes for the fish, containers where they can live for at least a day or two until I can get to the store. And of course at the moment I need to rehouse them, all the appropriately sized bowls are being used for something else essential, and in the dream suddenly all my flower vases are tiny or narrow bud vases that tilt at odd angles, and the fish are too big for water glasses.

Clearly the dream is rich in metaphor and allegory. I have too many responsibilities. I'm trying to do too much. Everything is cracking and leaking. I don't have sufficient resources. I'm a lousy parent. I'm a fish out of water.