Wa-acko!

Last week, I was in a major tizzy trying to find a book that I've quoted from extensively in my dissertation: How we Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles.

I had come across a reference to it in another article, and wanted to check up on the context since my database of notes didn't have anything down for that particular page. So I started searching my shelves.

I have a lot of shelves.

LibraryThing lists 1199 books in our collection. So, yeah, lots of shelves.

But I couldn't find it.

I looked again.

I asked everyone in the family if they'd seen it. They hadn't.

I looked some more.

I started wondering if I'd lost it. As I thought about it, I realized I had been relying on my notes for the last few years. Perhaps I'd lost it before we'd even moved.

That got me thinking.

So I checked LibraryThing. It wasn't actually listed there. Not a big surprise. I only activated by LibraryThing account in 2006, and I'm pretty sure I read it in 2005.

So then I checked my amazon buying history, since I would've purchased it from them, given it wouldn't exactly be a given that I could find it at my local bookstore.

There was no history of purchasing.

Gradually it dawned on me. This book? The one that plays a pretty major role in my dissertation?

I don't own it. Never have.

But I was convinced for a week that I had. Wa-acko!

Question is: Do I buy it now, or say to hell with looking up this reference? (The local academic library has it out till September, and I want to finish this draft before then)

Decision time.

Up and down and up and down... again

One of the most frustrating things I'm finding in this dissertation editing is the precariousness of my productivity. The littlest thing knocks me off my game into a struggle with frustration.

One day, I have a great writing day, work out part of an argument in what I can honestly say is a beautiful piece of writing, and feel confident that I will finish these revisions and they will be (mostly) acceptable and I will be able to look forward to the defence.

The next day, I flounder around, trying to get a handle on the ideas that seem too large for my head, and so they squeeze out of it, bouncing across the office floor and I have to scramble around trying to pick them back up. But they're slippery, and I can't seem to hold more than one at a time. Which I do. But even then, sometimes I pick one up, turning it this way and that, puzzled at what it means and why I thought it was a good idea in the first place. Sometimes I set it aside, hoping that it will become clearer as time goes on. Sometimes I toss it out the window.

This back and forth between confidence that I'm making satisfactory progress and despair at ever crafting an argument that makes sense is taking its toll.

Today, I'm distracted again. Thoughts of non-work-related troubles keep crowding in my brain, and no matter how hard I try, they break my concentration and I feel frustrated.

Here's hoping tomorrow's a more balanced day.

Best horror movies

A while ago, a daughter asked hubby what were the top 10 horror movies of all time. So we brainstormed. This is what we came up with (in no particular order).

Top Ten

The Thing
Alien
The Exorcist
Nightmare on Elm Street
Halloween
The Shining
Ravenous
American Werewolf in London
28 Days Later
The Fly

The rationale for some of these might not be readily apparent since we used a wide range of criteria, including innovation, scare factor, uniqueness, cinematography, and plot among others (as you can probably tell, we leaned heavily toward innovation).

Honorable Mentions go to

Poltergeist
The Others
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The Sixth Sense
Amytyville Horror (remake)
Dreamcatcher
The Mist
Se7en
1408
Hellraiser
High Tension

Again, an eclectic mix of criteria went into deciding the honorable mentions as well. We didn't include any spoofs, since that's a whole other category requiring different criteria, but if we had, I'm sure some Evil Dead and Shaun of the Dead would've made it in.

Happy Father's Day - both to those who love and hate these kinds of movies!

It's a beautiful thing

There's a moment that's absolutely beautiful in writing. It usually comes after you've been struggling for days, knowing exactly what you want to say, but not being able to make it work. Usually, you've been working at it, but it's not happening - type, erase, type, erase, type, erase...

Then on one of those go-throughs, you stop to read the paragraph you just wrote, and it slowly dawns on you that you've got it. It might still be a little rough around the edges, but you've found the structure you needed to make that argument stand out in the way that it deserves.

It's an awe-inspiring moment, and for me, it's always accompanied by a bit of wonder: "I did that?" Wow.

Stuck

I am stuck. Stuck. Stuck. Stuck.

I know what I want to say in this chapter, but I just can't seem to get it arranged right. Too many things struggle for supremacy and all of them seem to be the first idea I should introduce.

But of course they can't all be first.

Short of eenie-meenie-minie-mo, how does one choose?!

Anything to procrastinate?

How much of a lit-geek does it mark me that I've suspended work on the part of the second chapter of the dissertation on The Island of Doctor Moreau because I've just found out that Broadview Press is issuing an edition of it at the end of the month and I want to use it for the edits to the chapter?

One of my only regrets in not becoming a Victorianist is the fewer opportunities I will have to teach Broadview editions of texts (Broadview specializes in literature already in the public domain). I'm absolutely tickled that they are coming out with an edition of The Island of Doctor Moreau just in time for me to use it!

Books, books, books

We attended the giant annual book sale in town here this last weekend, and despite our vows to bring home fewer books than last year (we'd had to buy another bookshelf to accommodate them all), we still came home with a lot. In all fairness, there were three of us searching this time, so we did meet our goal in per capita terms!

But in the traffic jam on the way there, we began talking about the physicality of books, in part because we'd both heard of California's proposition to require electronic texts in all its public schools. News: Here and here. Although we both agreed that digital text is becoming more prevalent and can be useful, we both wondered at the timing of the move.

The Husband (TH) tried the electronic textbook route for one year of dental school and switched back to paper the next because of the headaches using digital texts created. This was about five years ago, so no doubt there have been technological developments. But I have to wonder whether they are enough. If a highly intelligent health professional finds electronic text difficult to work with, what chance does an elementary school child have?

I don't mean from the perspective of familiarity with online venues. Even though I think the idea of 'digital natives' is a fallacy, setting that aside and accepting that perhaps there is indeed something different about the experience of growing up reading paper texts and growing up primarily online, the devices on which online textbooks rely are fickle indeed!

There's no information on how the content will be delivered, but technology inevitably breaks down, often at inopportune times. If the students will access their texts online, they will need to have access ($$$) and that access will need to be reliable, unlike the previous city where we lived. We had to call out the repairmen 3 times in one year to repair our internet connection, and each time it took an average of 5 days to get someone there. If my kids had needed that access for school, we would've been scrambling to get it.

But there's another phenomena that both TH and I, as well as other friends that I've asked experience which has to do with the physical nature of the book itself. Both TH and I have had the experience of recalling something we've read by its physical location on the page. We've remembered for example that it was the second paragraph from the top on the right hand side of the page about 2/3 of the way through the book. A quick flip in the right general section leads you to the source you wanted.

This is because memory is highly influenced by space. It certainly is true that in navigation or danger avoidance, being able to remember *where* those dangers are is an excellent skill, and we all develop this kind of spatial memory, whether or not we apply it to reading. If you can't find your keys, you replay the memory of your actions when you last knew you had them until to you come to the part where you 'see' where you put them down.

What happens to this memory aid on an electronic screen? I understand about the search function of a website - that could act as a replacement for the spatial memory cue. But unless a whole site has its own search function (not impossible), you'll need to rely upon a search engine, so that your search terms will need to be quite specific. Either option requires wading through a lot of other instances of the keyword coming up. Now a persistent person might keep going till they find just the right reference they were thinking of, but if my students are any any indication, they don't bother with much more than the first three hits on any search.

I will admit that it's possible I'm an old fuddy-duddy and the way that I learned to learn does not apply to 'digital natives'. But even so, subjecting all the public school students of California to this grand experiment - and it is an experiment - seems like a premature move on the part of the governor.

Meanwhile, I lugged about 50 lbs of books home. Perhaps I can at least get "pumped" as a result of my love of the physical!

Human Body Parts R Us

*spoiler alert*

I finally went to see Terminator Salvation over the weekend, and found that everything critics were saying about the movie was true. Most critics pointed to its weak plot, which I'll grant was weak, mostly because it was axed in favour of loud explosions.

(Speaking of which, just what were all those Resistance soldiers shooting at in the background during the escape from the compound? If you've got a spotlight on the people you're trying to kill, why is stuff in the background blowing up? Is your aim seriously just that bad? If so, how did you survive against the machines for so long?)

What I am interested in is the final scene, which the filmmakers seem to present in an entirely un-ironic way, but which actually raises some interesting questions that could've re-injected the plot with some life.

The scene I'm talking about of course is the final one where John Connor has been beat about by the Arnold-Terminator (T-800) and is dying because "his heart can't take it". (How cliched!) But aside from cliche, the scene is meant to be a sad one. John's pregnant wife stands next to him, reporting this sad news as his physician to his friends.

Upon hearing this news, the Marcus-Terminator (infiltration model) which has been equipped with the cloned heart and mind of the original, organic Marcus, offers up his heart to John, saying that everyone needs a second chance.

This is where the film loses me.

First, I'm not sure what "second chance" Marcus is referring to. Is he referring to his own second chance, that he has successfully navigated in redeeming his humanity by saving Kyle and John? Or is it John who needs the second chance? And if so, why does he need a second chance? The notion of the second chance is not the same as the notion of another life - the second chance is necessary to correct a wrong done the first time. But in that case, what did John do wrong?

From where I'm sitting, it looks like John did exactly what he needed to do: a) find a way to attack Skynet, b) save Kyle Reese in order to send him back so that he can be conceived. What more does he need to do? He has already fulfilled his destiny.

I leave aside the fact that he is about to become a father himself. While the nuclear family (ha!) narrative is sentimental, frankly, if he were to die, his child would still survive, so he has still been successful there. So since he's provided the military with the tools to beat Skynet and has impregnated his wife, he is in some ways redundant at this point - others *could* take over just fine for him.

Second, and this is probably more important, the transplant itself is problematic. Leaving aside the fact that they are in a battlefield surgery, that there is a need for extensive testing to ensure donor and recipient are compatible, and that heart transplant surgery requires extensive specialized training, the idea of the transplant itself counters the entire message of the film.

The film carefully constructs an antinomy between the organic humans and the mechanical machines and cyborgs. It reifies the natural born human as the ultimate expression of humanity (it's in our face with John's wife's pregnancy), so that this final act of the film seems to fly in the face of what the film has been celebrating the whole time.

In the slap-dash manner that the heart transplant is plotted, the film suggests that humans are just like machines. You get a defective part, you just pop it out, pop in a new one, and you're off to the races again. In some ways, the John (who presumably will survive the transplant, otherwise what's the point of it anyway) at the end of the film will be part cyborg himself. He will have had an artificial organ implanted in his body, making him not much different than the Marcus who has mechanical parts integrated into his.

Unfortunately this movie is not sophisticated enough to make this into some kind of interesting philosophical observation. It really does present the scene in an un-ironic mode. Too bad. There was a lot that could've been done with this idea if they'd just stopped blowing things up (and sentimentalizing family and romantic love) long enough to actually contemplate it.

The RYS post I'll never send

This is a draft of a post that's been sitting in my queue for a long time, and since I know I will never teach public speaking at this place again, I suppose now is the time to post it. Enjoy.

Dear Arrogant Coat-tail rider -

Yes, you. The charming one. Or the other charming one. Either of you. I'm sure when you walked into class that first day and flashed your charming smile at me, you thought you had me in your pocket. But you haven't been around long enough to realize that someone like me has seen your kind before, and I know what you're all about.

I know that the smiles, and the jokes, even the compliments, have all worked on the past, especially as you work your way through the bar, practicing on all the young hotties the lines you're going to use for your debut on Keys to the VIP, but I'm no longer a young hottie. And I saw you coming a mile away.

Your descriptions of the palatial home your parents live in and the expensive cars they've bought you are awe inspiring and I'm sure they work well on the cocktail circuit. But in the classroom, they don't go over so well.

Have you ever taken the time to get to know some of the other students in the class? Do you know about the guy who sits in the row behind you, runs off to work a full-time shift right after class and whose student loan payment hasn't arrived yet? Or the single mother who runs into class just as it starts because she's had to wait for her ex to come pick up their child so she can attend? Do you think about them when you complain about how you're driving a loaner because the beamer's in the shop? Or when you breeze in ten minutes late because you didn't want to rush through your expensive lunch downtown?

Your speech in which you gave detailed descriptions about all the properties and cars your family owned went over like a lead balloon. But I don't think you noticed. How could you? You only had eyes for you.

While I'm asking questions, can I ask one about your writing? Why is it that no matter what the topic, you manage to find yourself inserting a paragraph about how rich your folks are and how hard it is for you living in the apartment they paid for without mom to cook for you like she used to? Is there nothing else in that pretty little head of yours, or is that the only thing you ever think about? It's getting a bit monotonous I must say. I keep telling you it isn't interesting, or even relevant to the assignment, but you don't seem to be paying attention.

I am curious about your parents though. I wonder how much they know about your life, and why they continue to pay your bills? Does the charm work on them? Do you just lie to them most of the time so they don't know that you're pissing away their money by failing all your classes? Or do they just not care? Now, THAT I'm curious about. But whether your beamer's in the shop? I could care less.


Dear Odious Orator -

I know you're much to smart to be taking this class, which is why you've applied to take the proficiency exam in order to bypass taking it. I know you're too good to sit through the 14 weeks of class like everyone else, and I'd never dream of imagining I could teach you anything new if you did come to class.

Several months ago when I gave you several dates when you could come in and deliver the speech component of your proficiency exam, I expected you would choose one in good time and we would make the necessary arrangements. I never realized that your fabulously fun-filled life would make it impossible for you to call until this week. Calling me three times in the last two days demanding to know which days are available next week for your performance might seem like a great idea on your part, but the reason your bright idea looks so dim from here is because that privileged little head of yours is very far up your ass.

The rest of the students in the class have planned ahead, delivered their speeches on time and we've kept to the very tight schedule we've been given this year. But of course we'll chuck it all to the wind to make sure you can present next week before the break. I'll also be sure to mark your performance within an hour of your delivery so that there's no delay in getting you the mark you so richly deserve.

Far be it from me to stand in the way of someone so obviously good at communicating that you have no need to learn anything about the difference between a friendly and a hostile audience.

Ships passing in the night... or something like that

I just completed my writing task for the day as the last person in the family headed out to start her day.

I've tried over the last month to write for at least an hour every day first thing in the morning. Sometimes it ends up being two or three hours like it was today. When I get up, I turn on the computer, make coffee, haul a cup up to the machine and start typing. So far it has worked remarkably well (except for the occasional travel or meeting hiccup to get in the way). I find I write well in the morning (provided it's not too early!) and having accomplished my writing task for the day first thing means it's not hanging over my head all day.

But it's an odd feeling, knowing that I've accomplished what I wanted to today before at least one other family member's day had even begun.

Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again

Dissertation re-writing continues apace. I am finding it very slow going on the first chapter revision since it is essentially a new chapter I'm writing, though all the research is there and ready to be inserted as necessary.

The first chapter is the one that I envision laying out the kinds of issues specifically raised by the technologies that are represented in the later chapters, so I had originally written it as a kind of taxonomy of technologies. There were two problems with this:

1) Since I wrote it quite early, I included technologies that I probably don't need to include, and purely as a taxonomy, it became simultaneously dry and rambling. Double whammy for the reader, right?
2) It also was divorced from the literature. In its original incarnation, there was no mention of literary texts or how this would apply. This was because a) I wanted the introduction to deal with the connection between literature and social/technological issues, and b) as a taxonomy, I thought it would be too confusing to try to relate everything to a relevant literary text.

So I was really quite unhappy with the product (and the comments I got from early readings bore that out), but I didn't know what to do about it and it was hanging over my head as I continued to write subsequent chapters.

Luckily, another problem that I encountered when writing the last chapter provided a (potential) solution to the problem of chapter 1. When I was writing the science fiction chapter, I initially wanted it to address three novels (yes, I know that's a lot). Of course as I began writing, I realized I would be at the 70 page mark before I even dealt with the third one of those novels, so I knew I would have to cut one.

I had good reasons for having all of them in the chapter, so it was difficult to decide. But since I had written conference papers on two of the novels (The Calcutta Chromosome and The Stone Canal), I started writing up those ones for the chapter. Then I got to the 60+ page mark like I mentioned and realized the third wouldn't fit.

Then I had an epiphany while sitting on the beach in Barbados. What if I made the third novel, Natural History, the literary model for all that taxonomy stuff I want to do in the first chapter?

Since it had pretty much every kind of posthuman character in it, created by pretty much every emergent technology that I wanted to talk about, it seemed absolutely ideal as a way of modeling all the technologies while connecting them to a literary text.

I got terribly excited at the idea. Yes, I went geek-crazy over a potential solution to a writing problem. But I also immediately started worrying about it. After all, I don't think I've really seen this kind of move in a book before.

Now I know the dissertation isn't a book, but all the same, I'd never really seen someone start off a project talking about just one book to introduce the argument of the project, and then go off to talk in more detail about other books.

So I ran the idea past my advisor in that very hesitant I-have-this-crazy-idea-that-maybe-I'll-do-and-what-do-you-think kind of way. Surprisingly, she gave (equally hesitant) confirmation that that *might* be the way to deal with the problem in chapter one.

So here I sit, trying to match up all the technologies to all the characters and situations in the novel. It's matching up surprisingly well, but there is that little voice in the back of my head saying that maybe once I spend a month doing this, it won't actually work out the way I planned and this version of the chapter will be just as useless as the previous one.

But even if that little voice is right, I now have two versions of the first chapter to work with if a third needs to be created using a different strategy. So it's all good. I'll recycle what I can and rethink what I can't.

Thing is, the more I work with it, the more it seems to do what I want it to do, so I'm hopeful.

But, boy, is it a lot of work to entirely rewrite the thing from the ground up!

Bioethics and PMS

I have been ripping apart the first chapter of the dissertation. I'm essentially rewriting it from the ground up, which means I'm also revisiting many of my old sources. Perhaps because I'm finding a congruence between personal experience and academic reading, I've found the following two passages about pharmacological enhancement from Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness by the President's Council on Bioethics particularly interesting today:

"This enhanced ability [in drugs like Ritalin] to make children conform to conventional standards could also diminish our openness to the diversity of human temperaments. As we will find with other biotechnologies with a potential use beyond therapy, behavior-modifying drugs offer us an unprecedented power to enforce our standards of normality" (103).

and

"...behavior-modifying drugs might not only deprive that child of an essential part of this [socialization] education. They might also encourage him to change his self-understanding, by coming to look upon himself as governed by chemical impulses and not by moral decisions grounded in some sense of what is right and appropriate... technologies aside, merely regarding ourselves and our activities in largely genetic or neurochemical terms may diminish our sense of ourselves as moral actors faced with genuine choices and options in life" (106).

While this isn't the first time* I've read an argument that Ritalin is tamping down our children's abilities to experience a full range of emotions, I'm interested in the connection to morality in the second half. And my first thought is that the writer must be a man if he can't see that it is possible to understand the influence of brain chemistry on emotion while AT THE SAME TIME understanding that it is not the only force controlling behavior.

Any woman with PMS knows what brain chemistry is capable of doing to her emotional stability. But most women learn to control those impulses. There are times of the month where I want to hurl the salt shaker across the table at someone just for talking to me. But I don't. Because I know *I* don't really want to do that, it's just the whacked out neurochemicals that make me feel that way.

In fact, I think that experiencing such forces makes it easier to see how one can choose to entertain emotions or choose not to let them dictate your behavior.

That's not to say it's easy! Don't ask my parents about hurling things - they have some embarassing stories to tell from when I was younger! But without having to overcome those urges and not allow them to dictate behavior, you do become more aware that you do not have to be blown about by the turbulence of neurochemistry.

This is also why I get so angered at men who have assumed that as an angry woman, I'm just experiencing PMS. For me at least, it takes immense amounts of self control at times to not express the emotions I'm feeling, so assuming that I give in to them is insulting. It of course also assumes that they haven't done something to warrant being angry at, which is a whole other story!

This post isn't really about men and women or PMS, but I did find it interesting that the kinds of arguments against using pharmacology as a technology of enhancement for children actually seems to be about more than just children and individual parents' choices about whether to use those enhancements or not. It seems the more we imagine how to get to the "better" posthuman, the more difficult it is to ascertain what we mean by "better."

*The first time I came across the argument, it was actually that Ritalin makes little boys sit still and calm down, while Prozac makes grown women perk up, which pushes both groups towards a homogenous middle. Interesting thought.

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Just a quick note since it's been over a week since posting to update that
1) conference went well
2) visiting doctoral institution and friends in the area was great!
3) I'm glad to be home again!