Leonard Nimoy's Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

This is just so bizarre that I'm left speechless!

It's a good feeling

Getting the draft of the chapter that needs to be sent off in two days finished is a good feeling. I still need to do an overall edit of the chapter - writing each section separately over several months means there are probably gaps between the sections that'll need to be addressed - but finishing it is definitely a good feeling!

And just in time for the weather to really get gorgeous... patios, hiking trails, and bbqs... nice!

Opposable thumbs... ain't they grand?

Nice that our opposable thumbs distinguish us from most other creatures... of course human beings are known for their cognitive abilities, and their use of language, but those things aren't readily apparent in a first impression (and for some humans, they aren't even apparent after extended interaction!)

I've been thinking about my opposable thumbs lately, mostly because I've been hyper-aware of my thumbs. You know how they say you don't really know what you've got till it's gone? You could say the same that you don't really know how useful a body part is until it starts aching.

We've been refinishing our deck, which means all the old paint has to be sanded off before we can stain it. Why the builders of the deck decided paint on the walking surface was a good idea is beyond me. Stain, baby, that's where it's at for high traffic areas!

Funny too how the deck looked fabulous last year when we bought the place (actually only 10 months ago) and looked like crap as soon as the snow melted off it. If you'd asked me last year, I wouldn't have thought we'd have to paint for at least a few years.

So yes, my thumbs ache from holding the sander in place as it does its job. But if I didn't have opposable thumbs, I wouldn't be able to sand my deck... then again, if I didn't have opposable thumbs, I probably wouldn't have a house with a deck that needs sanding... or even care for that matter if the paint is peeling...

okay, the post is officially degenerating. Time to go...

Ending it

I suck at writing conclusions. I've known this for a long time. My modus operandi for a long time (i.e. seminar papers) had been to just leave the last piece of my argument hanging there without even trying to tie everything together.

That was (marginally) acceptable for writing seminar papers, particularly if the last part of my argument was in any way summative of what I was writing about, but it's really coming home to me now in the dissertation that that strategy's just not going to work anymore. After all, the transitions between the chapters should at least give a nod of recognition to the overall project and how each chapter fits into that project.

I tell myself it will all work out fine in the end, as I struggle with the conclusion to this last chapter (no, it's not complete, but I just finished writing the last section, so it seemed appropriate to attempt a conclusion). After all, once all the chapters are written, I'll have to deal with the thing as a whole, and all the introductions and conclusions will (and probably should) change when they're placed up against the chapters that precede or follow them. So I'll get a chance to sort it all out at the end.

But I still really suck at conclusions. I suppose one really positive outcome of this whole dissertating process would be getting better at writing conclusions.

If I get better at it, that is.

Sooo slow!

It's been three weeks of writing since I last updated my dissertation writing meter. So I figured it'd go up quite a bit, after all, I've been writing what seems like an awful lot.

1%

That's all it's up. Guess I did almost as much cutting of useless stuff as I did typing new stuff. Phooey! At this rate, I'll take me three more years to finish the thing!

Interconnective scholarship

Where indeed would we be without the internet?

This isn't going to a cheerleading post for the internet - after all, I remember doing research in the days before the internet, and I certainly didn't feel like I was missing out on anything. I also could probably finish this dissertation if the internet disappeared overnight, though it would involve a lot more travelling to physical locations like libraries.

But I have found twice in as many days that connectivity to the internet has brought me two ideas that I intend to use or at least explore in the dissertation. If it hadn't been for the internet, I would have had to spend more time and energy exploring these things, or remain ignorant of them.

The first item was a mention on a listserv about a connection between two books I hadn't thought of pairing together - Rushdie's magic realist text Midnight's Children, and Ian MacDonald's science fiction text River of Gods. I've of course read Rushdie's book, and intended to discuss it in my fourth chapter (the one that focuses on magic realism as technique), but I had only started reading MacDonald's book before I got sidetracked and set it aside. I had been thinking of mentioning it in the sixth chapter, the one on science fiction, but now I'll have to read it earlier to see what kinds of fruitful connections might be there. I may ultimately decide not to use MacDonald's book in the fourth chapter, but it might prove an interesting angle to take.

The second was a blog post. The writer was talking about collectivity in the context of Web 2.0 technologies (something very big on my work-related radar right now), but it talked about the hive mind and the Borg in particular. And right now I'm stuck in a place in the dissertation chapter where I'm trying to bridge hybridity with collectivity (specifically a reference to ants and bees in a novel) and this article looks like it could provide that link. [Now I just need to find something to make that prosthetics/war/progress link!]

Without those electronic connections, I'd still be stuck working out the argument connecting hybridity and collectivity, and I might have written all of chapter four without even opening MacDonald's book, not knowing I was missing out on a connection that could prove interesting. No doubt I would've managed without these connections, but they sure helped.

RBOC: Hump day edition

Yes, I know it's not Friday. But there's no rule that says RBOC can only be on Fridays. 'Cause I said so. So there.

• My nose and throat are scratchy, which makes me cranky. And less productive. Which makes me even more cranky. Funny how the last time I had a cold was last July. Why don't I get colds when other people do, you know, in winter?
• I'm thinking lots about student cheating, and why it happens, and how it's so easy to understand when you know a student is struggling, and how utterly reprehensible it looks when you watch the student who struggled to produce hu's own, from scratch paper that really wasn't good while someone else tries to take the easy way out.
• I'm stuck in the diss chapter trying to work out a connection between the prosthetic impulse, war, and the notion of Progress. Don't know where to find the answer, so I'm avoiding that section. But I'll have to come back to it sooner or later.
• I've booked a flight back to meet with my advisor(s), arrange paperwork, and have this latest chapter of the diss workshopped with some smart people. Problem is, that means I HAVE to have the chapter done by then!
• I saw The Happening on the weekend, which means I understand when critics say its not like his previous work (that's a good thing for this movie), but I'm surprised that I haven't heard more buzz about the explanation for why the events in the movie take place. It's an interesting idea, and I'm surprised I haven't seen much talk about it. Perhaps that'll be a blog post for later this week

I like these bullet things. Much easier than a coherent blog post. I'll have to do them more often...

Dr. Jones's failed tenure bid

Poor Indiana - failed to get tenure while out on his last adventure.

Monkey business (yes, I know chimps aren't really monkeys, it's just "chimp business" or "ape business" doesn't have the same ring)

(Lilli Strauss AP photo)

This will certainly be interesting:

The European Court of Human Rights is to hear an appeal to declare an abandoned chimp a human in order to appoint a legal guardian for it. Since humans are the only ones under Austrian law (where the chimp lives) who can have guardians, a woman is asking to court to declare the chimp human. As the news report wryly notes:

Beyond the legal challenges, anthropologists say chimpanzees are not humans, though without a clear definition of what it means to be human, backing that claim up is a challenge perhaps fit for some great courtroom drama.

Really? You think there might be courtroom drama? Forget the courtroom, what does this do to our definition of human beyond this single case? The article points to the same problem that my dissertation often points to - the difficulty in defining what a human is, particularly when compared with intelligent machines (or animals in this case).

The article quotes only people who talk about how difficult it is to make a determination of human characteristics that are unique to humans, but buries the one argument - language - in a link that doesn't really match the argument. But the innate capacity to manipulate language that comes so easily to humans might be one. Yes, there are humans who don't have language, so I don't know that it's foolproof, but it might be a place to start.

What the article never brings up are alternate solutions to this problem. A chimp can still be property, can it not? Can the woman who wants to be a guardian to the chimp not simply purchase it? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems a much easier solution for caring for the chimp than having it declared a human with all the rights that entails...

Lo, what light through yonder window breaks?

Welcome back, sun!

The old people keep taking over...

After all, look at the latest Indiana Jones movie - a grey-haired hero joins up with other older characters, including one in the grips of senility - to drive the action of this action movie.

Similarly, according toWho Blogs Now?, blogging is aging as well. Aside from company blogs and splogs (spam weblogs), the average age of adult bloggers in 37.6. So it's not just young people who are blogging, though the percentages of bloggers in a population does decrease with age. As the article says,

As a result, figuring out exactly who blogs has become more difficult.... However, word-of-mouth is still a powerful marketing tactic, and since influential bloggers are so effective at spreading the word about their likes and dislikes, blogger demographics continue to matter.

Not surprising to find that about 2/3 of bloggers are white, but then again, this mirrors the percentage of whites in the U.S., the country where the information comes from.

There was only one confusing thing for me and that was the article's identification of who belonged to Baby Boomers and Gen Xers - I'm terribly close to Baby Boomers according to them, and I'd always considered myself firmly ensconced in Gen Xers... But that's another post.

Telecommuting delights

I cannot wait until I get to go back to telecommuting only! The drive to work this morning was longer than I expected (even though I left earlier than usual). I suspect part of it was because of the rain, something drivers here rarely have to contend with, so it freaks them out. I swear, as a group, they drive faster in a blizzard than in a little rain...

Three more teaching days and then I have at least 2 months off. Woohoo! I do enjoy teaching - I really do. But I could do without the commute and the marking. So a break will be fabulous.

Maybe I'll have time to read all those books I bought!

(Extra) value reading

You had to know I couldn't resist the contrast with the last post...

This weekend, the annual city-wide charity book sale was going on. I didn't realize it actually started on Friday, so we didn't go down till Sunday, and I was wondering if there would be anything good left.

I don't know what we might have missed, but I found me some great finds! Some of them have been on my amazon list for a while, and some of them were just really interesting in that I-hadn't-thought-about-buying-this-book, but-here-it-is kind of way. After all, at $1-$2 a book, and the proceeds going to charity, it was very tempting to buy more than I could realistically read (at least until next year's sale!)

But I found Will in the World, which I know I won't get to read for a while, but it just sounded so interesting I wanted to have it.

I also found Primate Visions, which I could realistically spend a week reading sometime soon because it fits in with the dissertation reading. I'm also reading a fiction novel by Will Self called Great Apes, in which a man wakes up to find the world populated by intelligent chimps who tell him he only thinks he's human. And no, it's not like Planet of the Apes, it's far better done.

I also got a copy of R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the play that first coined the term "robot" in it's contemporary use in 1921. I know less about this play, and since it's by a Russian, it isn't useful as an example of a British writer grappling with the issues raised by cyborgs or robots, but I also have suggested it as a volume in a GenEd class that I might get to teach on the Social effects of Technology, so I'd like to take a look at it more closely.

I also picked up Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer - I've heard both authors speak before, and they're both science fiction writers, but I haven't read any of their work (and, again, their themes are related to the dissertation), so I'm hoping to find a couple new authors I like. Karl is a Canadian Mennonite science fiction writer - how cool is that? - so I'm just intensely curious about his writing. Interestingly, I cannot find an image for Sawyer's book of the volume I actually have - the one I have is a U.S. published version, 1st printing by the looks of it, so it's weird that the cover on mine is different (much more interesting in my opinion). I also just picked up Sawyer's newest novel, Humans that I'm reviewing for Wordfest this fall, so here's hoping I like his stuff enough to read 2 novels of his!

I did not buy any Stephen King, or any Danielle Steel, even though there were a LOT of copies of probably everything both have ever written...

(De)valuing reading

Ever notice how sometimes topics or issues seem to all of a sudden come at you from different venues? Happens to me all the time. I'm convinced it's because I'm clueless to most of the stuff around me and just happen to attend to the things that repeat, but that's beside the point...

What I have been noticing is a recent upsurge in references to reading in the things that cross my desk(top). I've been struggling with the reading/writing dilemma lately. Those of you who've written a dissertation definitely know what I'm talking about, but even if you haven't, you've probably encountered it anytime you've written a research paper. It's that urge to read just one more thing, find one more source, before you feel capable of starting to write.

I've been suspecting that my writing is as fitful as it has been because I have to read more. But retreating to reading as an activity is also a very easy way to avoid dealing with the writing. And since I have a definite, quasi-scheduled deadline (no, that isn't an oxymoron - it's both definite, and only roughly scheduled) for a chapter, there should be some urgency to get the writing done. But I keep finding myself reading other things in an attempt to solve some of the writing speed bumps I'm encountering.

[A related, but non-reading problem that I'm struggling with now is that I read a book review in a journal that arrived this week. The book sounds like it would help me solve one of those problem areas in this chapter. The problem? Neither my school, nor the local university library have the book or are connected to universities with the book (according to Worldcat, only 13 libraries in all of North America have the book). So I'd have to order it. But no North American online bookstores have it (even amazon.co.uk doesn't have it). So I'd have to order it from the Czech republic. With the shipping, the price tag gets a bit high... So I need to decide if that's the price I pay for not being connected to one of the universities that have it]

But back to reading. Through academic blog surfing, I came across this excellent post over at To Delight and to Instruct on the devaluing of reading time as non-productive work. As academics, we value writing (and publication) over reading. The yearly kudos list of grad student accomplishments that our department produces lists only conference papers delivered, articles published, or positions gained. The list coordinator would probably laugh if I wrote in and said my accomplishment for the year was to read 2000 pages of literary criticism, even if 500 of it was French philosophers!

This privileging of writing over reading as academic activity isn't limited to grad students (who are actually the one group whose reading is expected to dominate academic activity). Horace writes that it's hard to think of a reading day as productive. This is because of

the idea of our work being inserted more and more persistently into a capitalist logic wherein everything is measured in terms of its exchange value, where its quantifiability is most tangible and its value is clearest when it can be reproduced, or exchanged for capital

and that grading, the most quantifiable part of teaching, is the least effective pedagogically. Certainly my students don't learn from my grading (any composition teacher can attest to that - more often than not, you get the final draft with the same problem you provided a solution to in the draft... *sigh*). My students learn in the classroom, not through the powerpoints or lecture notes themselves, but through the dynamic interaction of two human beings engaged in exploring a problem together. But that's a different blog post.

The point is that our training into the academy reinforces this idea that writing is productive (because quantifiable) and reading, or worse yet, thinking about things, is non-productive time. We count our productivity by words written, or pages produced (and I've fallen into the most extreme case of this as evidenced by my participation in NaNoWriMo). But the creativity that writing requires can't be reduced to a timetable or a formula. In an article that my students are reading this term "What Business Can Learn from Open Source", Paul Graham notes the same need for "soak" time regarding ideas (in this case, open source software programming):

The...problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.

I nodded vigorously when I read this. The couple of years I spent in an office of the 9 to 5 variety were like that. I know there were many times that I felt the guilty start of being caught staring at the wall while I thought through something, when I should've been trying to look busy. It's very stressful trying to look like you're working when what you really need to do is just think... I'm lucky that in my current work as an elearning content manager, adjunct instructor, and dissertation writer, I can spend time staring at the walls, walking (or running) around, while I mull over problems without anyone looking at me like I'm wasting time...!

It doesn't mean that I'm not susceptible to that urge to seem productive though. Even when I'm reading academic sources, I feel like I need to be making notes on what I'm reading. You know, so that I can justify spending the time reading by the fact that I'll at least have these notes if I need them later. It's a tad pathetic. But then again, I feel a certain level of perverse satisfaction as I see the number of entries in Endnote climb (topping 600 at this point, so let's hope they come in handy! actually, they already have, which of course just reinforces that perverse delight in the growing number...) At least with an new Endnote entry, I can point to something quantifiable - see, I was reading, and now I have one more entry...!

Reading is one of those things that you can get in trouble for at work, especially if you're not making notes. Which is why I found this Read at Work website absolutely fabulous! When you go to the site and click to enter, you see a desktop like this one, you know, the generic wallpaper that computers seem to always come with. Then if you select one of the files on the "desktop" it will open to a powerpoint file. I especially like The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde (you'll find it in the short story file). The site takes you from the imitation desktop to one of the literature links that looks like a powerpoint presentation. So you can be reading great literature and anyone looking over your shoulder at work will think you're hard at work on the next powerpoint presentation. As you can see, you don't even need to register to use it. I love it!

Scrolling through some of the selections on the site, I can't help but wonder if students would read these stories in this format because they're chunked into smaller, easily digestible chunks (well, that, and they come with graphics... though some of the images don't necessarily match the content). After all, one of the challenges of online reading is that what works well on paper - paragraphs neatly arranged in a uniform pattern on a page - doesn't work well on the screen. After all, we all remember those early amateur websites that were basically text on a screen (with colored font thrown in - what was it about colored font that those webpage makers were fascinated with? one of those mysteries I never did figure out). It took a while to figure it out, but all the literature now recognizes that reading online is a very different activity than reading on paper, and to be effective, it has to be arranged, organized, and translated to the online format.

Of course all this talk of online reading (okay, all my talk about online reading) gets me wondering what the content of the dissertation would like look converted to web format... Maybe I'll actually have the time this summer to give it a try. At least a website would be more "productive" than just reading...!

Unread books meme

Since I'm stalling out on the dissertation writing, I thought I might cheer myself up with the following meme. Whether I'm cheered up will depend on the numbers I suppose. So, the meme is to identify which of the top 106 books most often marked "unread" by members on Library Thing that you've read.

The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1 The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams*
2 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
3 The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
4 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5 Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
6 Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
7 Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8 One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9 Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
10 The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
11 Ulysses by James Joyce
12 War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
13 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
14 The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15 Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
16 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
17 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
18 Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
19 A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
20 The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
21 Middlemarch by George Eliot
22 Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
23 The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
24 The Kor'an by Anonymous
25 Moby Dick by Herman Melville
26 The Odyssey by Homer
27 The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
28 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29 The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
30 The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
31 Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
32 Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
33 The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
34 The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
35 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
36 The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
37 The Iliad by Homer
38 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
39 Emma by Jane Austen
40 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
41 Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
42 Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift
43 The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
44 Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
45 Dracula by Bram Stoker*
46 Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence
47 A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
48 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
49 The once and future king by T. H. White
50 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
51 To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
52 Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
53 Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
54 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
55 Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
56 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
57 Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
58 The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
59 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
60 Underworld by Don DeLillo
61 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
62 The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
63 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
64 The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
65 The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells*
66 Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
67 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
68 Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
69 A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
70 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
71 The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri
72 The inferno by Dante Alighieri
73 Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
74 The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
75 Swann's way by Marcel Proust
76 The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
77 The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
78 Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen
79 The portrait of a lady by Henry James
80 Silas Marner by George Eliot
81 The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde*
82 The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas
83 The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
84 The book thief by Markus Zusak
85 The confusion by Neal Stephenson
86 One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
87 Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley*
88 Bleak House by Charles Dickens
89 The system of the world by Neal Stephenson
90 The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
91 Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
92 The known world by Edward P. Jones
93 The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
94 The mill on the Floss by George Eliot
95 The English patient by Michael Ondaatje
96 Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
97 Dubliners by James Joyce
98 Les misérables by Victor Hugo
99 The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan
100 Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace
101 Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
102 Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
103 Persuasion by Jane Austen
104 A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
105 The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
106 Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller

39 read; 2 bought but not read; 2 started but never finished.
I do find it interesting that of the ones with * that I've read more once, the multiple readings have happened because I was studying them, not because I necessarily wanted to reread except in one instance. The other interesting thing is that aside from the Neal Stephenson, there's not much on the list that I haven't read that I really have a desire to read. That must be why these books are on an 'unread' list.

I'm going to be all annoying netizen and tag rebeckler, thirdworstpoet, and unacademic advisor for this meme.

Lists

Since my good friend was on a list-making binge lately, and I have nothing really intelligent to say, sharing lists ought to easy... Although none of my lists are complete, here's some samples:

This week's list:
Buy groceries and birthday cake
Pick up oldest daughter & cook birthday dinner for her
Teach 3x
Mark English papers
Write up Speech evaluations
Meet with boss for lunch
Attend client meeting regarding potential project
Prepare different project summary before lunch meeting
Mail chapter to advisor
Go to university library
Go for 6km run
Finish Wordfest book review

Things I want to learn how to do/take up as activities (money and time are of course objects to consider for many of these):
Get motorcycle license and buy a bike
Learn to dance the Salsa
Scuba diving
Build a decent wine cellar
Visit Australia
Learn how to fly an airplane

There's a lot of distance between those two lists, isn't there...?