Snippets

The poster presentation went fairly well. Good questions, some interesting conversations. Lots to think about.

One of my neighbors is putting in a submerged pool. Didn't really think of this neighborhood as being upscale enough for a pool, but there it is.

Going to New Orleans to the jazz festival tomorrow. I suspect this jazz fest will spoil me for all others... Mostly, I'm looking forward to warm temps and sunshine!

Two friends in as many weeks have asked me about my Smart because they/family are thinking of buying one. A sign of spring? Or just of rising gas prices?

I'm experiencing a lull in academic feedback and in work projects. Which is fine right now, but I'm starting to fear they'll all come at me at the same time...

We started going to the gym a few weeks ago - before then we didn't have memberships anywhere. It's actually a bit depressing to see the scale go up as you gain muscle before it comes back down!

Memory lane (and its back alley)

Memory is a funny thing. There are those events, images, and sensations that are burned into our memory, even when they're trivial, and then there are those events that seem impossible to recall in any detail.

I've spent a lot of time being drawn back into a period in my life that wasn't really so long ago, but feels like a lifetime.

This week I went to my Alma Mater three times: drop off poster, proof poster, pick up poster and spend a day in special collections. I also stopped in at the department to see if they had an openings for sessionals.

I took the stairs.

I didn't take the stairs for my health, though I could feel the work of 10 flights, but rather to see how Leon is doing.

Leon first appeared in the 1970s (the exact date eludes me, but there is a footnote on one of the stairs referencing it). Obviously, Leon has fallen on hard times when his caregivers can only manage to pay attention to him in a spelling-challenged drunken state. Luckily for Leon, his last restorer was either too out of shape or too drunk to "restore" him past the sixth floor, so that upper floors are still pretty much the same as I remember them.

Leon's story begins in the basement, where he sees a light above that he's determined to reach. As he hops up each flight of stairs, his adventures reflect the departments he's passing. Some of the events don't match the floors anymore, since the university has grown significantly since his first inception. For example, his English department adventure only covers two flights/one floor, but the department had grown to one and a half floors by the time I started there, and I noticed now fully occupies two floors.

The restorations certainly reflect the times as well (aside from the orthographic challenges of new curses). "Indians" is scratched out and "Aboriginal" put in its place (though on the stair, it isn't capitalized, which it should be) and the last drunken caregiver got a bit too liberal with the annotations.

Curiously, he/she mis-spells bitch more than once, adding a 't' at the end, which I can only assume is an attempt to combine the older form and its newer one. Perhaps Leon should contemplate that one as he goes past the linguistics department...

I wonder how many current students know or care about Leon? When I ponder that question, that's when I realize how large that gap is between where I was when I first encountered him and where I am now. Leon is one of those common knowledge kinds of things that float around in undergrad circles, casually, as if they'd always been there. Knowing about Leon is one of those things that mark whether you're a newbie or not and being able to nod knowingly when someone tells you about this cool story on the stairs that they discovered meant you belonged. I am glad to see that Leon is being cared for, but the purist in me was a bit disturbed by the editorial revision and annotation that he's gone through.

I also participated in a sociology research project about single parents in post-secondary institutions earlier this week. It too reminded me of those days, but the memories there were a mixed bag. The interview asked a lot of questions about support and what the university could do to make the experience better for single mothers. The thing is, I'd never really thought to include the university itself in my attempts to meet the challenges of being a mother and a student at the same time. In fact, I remember feeling reluctant to speak of my parental status, especially to profs and other administrators because I didn't want pity and I didn't want special treatment. I wanted my academic accomplishments to stand for themselves and to be evaluated exactly the same as any of the 18 year olds in the class.

Not that that was easy! I really struggled through first year chemistry. Even though I'd taken it in high school and actually gotten a decent mark, the first year chemistry course looked like Greek to me. I struggled mightily with stoichiometry, which I swear wasn't invented when I was in high school!

But that's the kind of memories all this week has been dredging up. It also reminds me that I have no way of knowing what the future will bring either. If you had told me what my life looks like now back then I would've found it hard to believe. Which makes me realize how futile it is to try to imagine what kind of life I'll have in another 5, 10 years. I just have to take it as it comes, which is all that any of us can do really when it comes down to it.

7 days

I know I live in Canada.

But 7 days of snow in spring is a bit much, even for Calgary. Where's the sunshine and flowers???

Squeezing into a shoe that isn't supposed to fit

This poster has been a real challenge to complete. Not that there's anything particularly insightful on it, but just trying to arrange the kind of argument that I would spend 20 pages of text writing into a more visual format.

And you can tell that I'm not used to making graphs or even charts, because it took me the better part of yesterday just to produce those two little graphics you see on the poster!

English literature definitely is a qualitative kind of discipline, where our arguments are built on comparisons of what is contained within the texts we use as our sources, not how many of them there are. Quantitative analysis really doesn't show up in English (except for a few structuralists and come cultural critics), so trying to come up with a graphic representation of my argument was difficult indeed.

But it is finished. Now I just need to get it to a printer that can produce it poster-sized, finish off the actual paper that will go with it (if anyone is interested in the rest of the argument), print off information cards and write up my 5 minute blurb for the judges who will be coming around to all the posters to analyze them. So there's lots yet to do! But it's been interesting so far.

[Clicking on the poster should give you a bigger version of it]

My new boyfriend

At least that's what he tells me every night.

"I'm George Stroumboulopoulos. And I'm your boyfriend"

I am enchanted. I will admit that.

Imagine my surprise at leaving the country for four years only to return and find a CBC program I like! George has some of the most interesting guests on the show, and although his attempts at comedy sometimes fall flat (no flatter than Letterman or Leno though), there's competition with The Daily Show in my house for the late night slot.

Chuck Norris?

So apparently, Chuck Norris jokes are all the thing now. Why? I don't know.

My students were comparing their favourites during our lab period today, and at first, I thought I was mis-hearing them. But no. These students, who weren't even alive when Chuck Norris movies were cool, are suddenly all over him.

I don't get it. I've probably seen every Chuck Norris movie ever made - I dated a guy who was a huge Norris fan - but the cinephile in me has erased most of those memories. Despite that, I have to say, I find the Norris websites confusing...

Intellectual stimulation (or lack thereof)

I've been feeling the isolation of being in a place NOT the same as the university that will grant me my degree when all is said and done.

I knew it would be a tradeoff coming here - that work, life, kids education etc. would be easier, but writing the dissertation would be harder. But it's felt particularly poignant over the last few days because:
a) I received email notice about a workshop that I'd badly love to attend but can't since it's 3000 miles away
b) A friend and colleague is defending and I won't be there for it.
c) I'm realizing that with the end of the semester (for most people) that everyone is busy and I should not expect responses to the various queries I have sent over the last few weeks.

I've tried to alleviate some of the isolation by attending events at the local university, but with the term winding down, those will also dry up over the summer. We did go to the local sciencecafe last month, and I hope to go again this month, but that's only one evening every four weeks or so, and doesn't really satisfy in the way that attending a lecture or defense would.

I'm taking summer off from one of my jobs, so I'll have more time for writing, but with the summer also come even fewer opportunities for intellectual stimulation. At least the internet is a (poor) substitute, that will hopefully keep me going till I get through the writing!

Patience

Everytime I start a new academic or work project, I label a new file folder. I'm going to either have to go buy more folders, or stop beginning new projects because I've only got one left now. I'll give you three guesses which option I'll choose, and the first two don't count!

I'm a rather impatient person. I've been trying to get better at it, but I do tend to want things to happen faster than they tend to. I'm thinking that might be why I keep taking on so many projects. While I'm waiting for other people to do their part of a project, I get impatient and go start a new one. Then all of a sudden I've got a huge number of projects on the go!

Patience is a virtue.
Virtue is a grace.
Grace is a little girl,
Who doesn't wash her face.

I recently worked on a project for a government client. Talk about slow! Everything has to be approved by many people at many different levels, and just getting an answer to a question can take a week! That was hard to get used to.

But academia really isn't any better. I find myself getting a bit annoyed at the seasons of academia. Last spring/summer, I sent off three proposals for book chapters or articles to various places, all of which were conditionally accepted (to my surprise!) Each indicated they would respond and send revision requests by the fall. It's now April and I've yet to see those revision notes. I also know I won't see them till May since it's the end of the term, but I find myself a bit annoyed that none of these projects seem to have happened on schedule. I'm suspecting that's the norm in academia, but it doesn't make it any easier while I wait.

I'd just really love to finish these projects off, file them away, and concentrate on the current ones. *sigh* But I'll just have to wait till I hear back from the people who have the power to publish them.

Have patience. Have patience.
Don't be in such a hurry.
When you get impatient,
You only start to worry.
Remember, remember,
that God is patient too.
And think of all the times
when others have to wait for you*.

I am hopeful that someday I'll learn patience. I have been learning to be a more patient driver over the last few years. Perhaps I'll be able to do the same for the rest of my life as well. It's just that there's so much I want to do that I don't want to wait in order to be able to do it! That includes academic projects, which is my challenge: to focus on what's happening right now, and leave everyone else's schedules to them.

*These are the lyrics to a children's song the girls would listen to on one of their favorite tapes. For the full effect, you'd have to be able to imagine a turtle singing them in a slow, low voice that sounds like a record being played too slow.

New genre

I'm venturing into a new scholarly genre in three weeks time - the poster paper.

The genre is primarily used by scientists (including social scientists) so those of us in the humanities usually don't have the experience of publishing this way. But I submitted an abstract to a conference on genomics (the science of genetic information), specifically to their section on "liberal democracy and genomics" and it was picked up as a poster paper.

So now I have to figure this genre out!

Looks very different from the kind of writing/publishing I'm used to doing, that's for sure!

It does offer me the opportunity to think beyond just words to describe the work that I'm doing, which is not only a novelty, but something I've been wanting to do for a while now. (I've been thinking about creating a dissertation-based website where I can include dissertation-related material that wouldn't necessarily make it into the dissertation itself)

I think producing this poster presentation will actually be very productive as I work to adapt my research to this kind of format. I'm expecting that in the act of translating my work into this new genre, it will reveal things about my research that I haven't really thought about before.

Certainly, thinking about my research into the novel I'll be discussing - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - as a scientific project, with a background discussion, methodology, results and discussion, will require me to approach the novel and my work on it from a different angle than I have to this point.

I realize what I'm doing might be construed by some as a kind of "disloyalty" to the discipline. After all, the 2006 presidential address by Marjorie Perloff to the MLA called for a return to a more conventional definition of the English department, with less cultural studies and perhaps even less interdisciplinary work and more literary work. The debate of whether this is a good idea or a bad one is too large for me to engage with right now, but the point is that presenting a poster paper certainly isn't staying faithful to the (original) "literary" nature of the discipline.

But I'm looking forward to it. Wish me luck as I try to remember what a science poster presentation is supposed to look like!

Happy Blogversary

Five years.

I don't think I necessarily had any notions of how long this blog would last when I first began, but I probably wouldn't have guessed it would be going five years later.

During the time, many things have changed. Pictures and video are much easier to embed now and the whole Blogger interface has changed. But mostly I think things have stayed the same. I still seem to blog about the same kinds of stuff, maybe I blog a bit more about my dissertation work, but considering its LARGE role in my life, that seems natural.

When I first began, I thought the blog would be a way for friends who were far away to keep up with what was going on in my life, instead of having to write the same email over and over. But it very quickly changed, partly because I realized that the people who I email are not necessarily the same people who read the blog. So as a kind of mass email, it has failed.

But the blog is just the medium, and its purpose (at least for me has changed). One of the things I really have found useful about blogging, particularly as I blog about the dissertation, is that it has taught me how to talk about my academic work in a way that is less formal, and a bit more approachable. Now, before you protest, know that I do recognize that I've still got a long way to go before my writing about the dissertation really becomes approachable, but I'm starting to see differences, and if for nothing else, the blog has been instrumental in making that happen.

So here's to five years - who knows what's yet to come?

The horror, the horror...

Okay, "horror" is probably too strong a word for it. But the inability of so many people to use language to effectively express themselves is really starting to get to me.

Maybe it's because I'm getting old.

Maybe it's because I'm marking first year composition papers.

Maybe it's because while taking a break from marking first year composition papers I tried reading the letters to the editor section of the newspaper.

Maybe it's because I started reading favorite blogs during another break from marking first year composition papers and came across my buddy Jim's comment that BostonNow is limiting its reader-generated section because

Thankfully, the paper seems to have realized that most people who would blog for free in this situation are either terrible, desperate, or a little crazy, so they've cut down on the amount of space given to re-printing them.

Together, these events have conspired to convince me that the number of people capable of using language to accurately convey a coherent, well thought out argument (about anything!) is drastically falling. And it's not just people who have an excuse. About a third of my class are ESL students, which means they often say things I can't understand, but I do understand why they're having difficulty expressing themselves. Another 10% of my students write like I would expect high school graduates to write.

But it's the other half of the class whose inability to manipulate the language with any dexterity that (collectively) convince me we're in serious trouble. They grew up here, speaking the language since they learned to talk, writing it all through their formal education so far, and yet they could not write an argument to save their lives because they can't grasp simple concepts like "every sentence needs a subject and a verb". They prattle on in their writing like they do when they speak. And although I've yet to see someone type out "you know what I'm sayin'?"*, they're coming real damn close.

It gets really frustrating, because there's just so much that they have not learnt to this point, that even covering the basics would take far more time than I'm allotted to teach them. I'm supposed to be teaching them the higher writing functions, but I feel like I only teach those functions to that 10%. The rest I'm just trying to get caught up. It's exhausting and depressing at the same time.

*the answer to this query is usually "no" since the phrase is used to avoid actually saying what it is that the speaker is convinced he/she is saying.

Big Dog

I've seen a much shorter clip of Big Dog before, but this one shows some really interesting scenarios that the robot works through - hills, ice, being knocked off balance. You might want to play it with the sound off (or down) because Big Dog does make a rather annoying sound while operating.

Big Dog was produced by Boston Dynamics.