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...?

In sickness and celebration

Brief blog hiatus due to illness and daughter's graduation - congratulations!

Grandparents came to town for the ceremony and banquet. I had to teach during the ceremony, which sucked, but I was there for the banquet. Reverse of what happened for oldest daughter's grad, so I guess at least I'm being consistent in being 1 for 2 for both.

I feel reaffirmed in my belief that my students should get a lecture on social speaking situations in my Public speaking class, even though it isn't required in the curriculum. There were some people at the banquet - full grown adults, older than me by the looks of it - who have NO idea how to give a good toast! The teacher who toasted the grads strained my patience, and I've got a pretty good tolerance for long-windedness....

I anticipated the work disruption of guests and grad, but I didn't anticipate the illness (nothing serious, just made me totally unproductive for a while), so tomorrow's my only dissertation day this week. Bummer. I'll just have to make it a good one! Wish me luck...

Not sure what this one means...

You know how when you're anxious about an exam, or a new semester of teaching, you sometimes have those dreams where you're in the exam or the classroom and you're unprepared?*

I had a similar kind of anxiety dream last night, but it was all mixed up. I dreamt that I had signed up for a class on Monday afternoons, right after I teach. I was running around trying to get to the class. I had lost my schedule, but I'd been to it once, so I was trying to find the classroom. Oh, and for some reason, I had a lap dog with me and one of my own students kept following me trying to ask questions and he just wouldn't get it that I needed to find my own class!

Weird! I've never had one of these kinds of dreams where I mix up my roles as teacher and as student before... and what's with the lap dog?

*I had a unusual version of this kind of dream before my first husband and I renewed vows. I was sewing my own dress, and in the dream, I still had to finish sewing it an hour before the ceremony was supposed to take place!

Two great things that go good together

When in New Orleans, we spent the later part of an evening walking down the street, looking into store windows as we made our way to Walgreen's for some sunburn relief in a tube.

Along the way, we saw a place called The Melting Pot, that advertised itself as a fondue. It was closed, so all we could see were a couple of tables and a bar, and we thought what a nice little neighborhood restaurant it seemed. The next morning, one of those lovely booklets of "places to go, things to see" rated it quite highly, which surprised us, because based on the short store frontage, we hadn't thought it was that big a place to warrant a mention.

But it sounded like fun, so we made a reservation.

It was magnificent! (and much larger than it appeared!)

The meal is more than just food - it's a production in and of itself. We spent three hours there! If you go for their full experience package, you get a cheese appetizer fondue, a main course fondue, and a chocolate fondue for dessert! Sooo yummy!

Unfortunately they're only in the U.S., but since Ruth's Chris has now come to Canada, perhaps The Melting Pot will too. (If you're in the Boston area, there's one set to open this fall in Back Bay) I would definitely recommend trying the place out because the one in New Orleans was fabulous!

The title of the post does say there were two good things that go together. The other was the Conundrum white table wine. Yes, something labelled "white table wine" usually isn't worth mentioning, but the Conundrum table wine is named so because it's a blend of varietals that's very skillfully mixed to produce a white wine with an absolutely yummy smell and a complex of flavours that make you wish you could just gobble it all up!

The wine complemented the fondue very well, which is hard to do because a fondue has so many different flavours going on, but because the wine's a varietal mix, it's got so many fruits and scents, it actually worked really well. It would be an excellent patio wine, all on its own too.

I took a trip to my favourite wine store when we got home and grabbed their last two bottles of the 2006. It cost a bit more than I usually pay for wine, but I think this one will be worth it. If you can afford one wine splurge and you're looking for something unique in a white, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try. You probably haven't tasted a wine like it before!

One dollar short and one day late... a.k.a A room of one's own

This week, as I yet again squeeze in a bit of work here, a bit of work there, a bit of parenting here (and there), some household maintenance, putting out fires (not literally), trying to realize vacation plans, I realize that I either:

Want a wife

Want a room of one's own

After all, who wouldn't?

But then I thought about it, really thought about what it would be like. Which led me to the conclusion that I can't imagine what it would be like.

I don't literally mean having a room of my own or having a wife. I mean the idea that lies behind those phrases: to have the freedom from responsibility that would allow me to ignore everything else and just concentrate on the work I need to do. That's essentially what Woolf is saying in wanting a room of one's own - it's the desire for a space, behind a door, where no one knocks unless the house is on fire. When you, the person behind the door, are the one who decides when the door gets opened again.

I think I cannot imagine what it would be like because I've been working in a piecemeal fashion for so long that it's become a habit that I don't know I could break. Though since I haven't had the luxury of trying, I'm not going to say I couldn't. If I had the opportunity, I'd give it my best shot.

A few weeks back, when I was interviewed about being a single parent and student, the interviewer asked if I'd been accommodated when asking for extensions etc. and I'd replied I'd never asked for one then (and only once ever asked for one, but that was years later after I'd taken a battering during the qualifiers). I explained that since I'd never not been a parent while in school, I'd just developed the discipline to start projects early so they'd get done on time.

After all, when you've got kids that have got to be fed, washed, sent to school, supervised, whatever else, you can't just pull an all-nighter and expect the next day to be normal (or even survivable!) The discipline to start early became a necessity, and the habit stayed with me, even after the kids were old enough to fend for themselves if I had pulled an all-nighter. In fact, I was teased in graduate school for being the one who had the all the reading done all the time (not that I actually did, but I got teased that I did).

But I've always had this image in the back of my mind about how my child-less peers approached their work - writing and reading when the mood hit them, sometimes for days at a time, eating leftovers, or surviving on noodles and coffee, able to throw themselves into a project wholeheartedly and achieve a kind of intensity of scholarly activity that I could never hope for in the piecemeal I-can-read-this-one-article-while-I-cook-supper way that I studied.

But now I'm wondering. Would such intensity make me a better scholar? Would being able to ignore my family members and their bodily needs for food, clean clothes etc. have made me smarter than I am? Would I struggle as much as I do if I'd had that time to throw myself intensely into my work?

I always feel like that country song "one dollar short and one day late" and I gaze jealously at this image of freedom, where I can work on the dissertation for days on end, only emerging for the breaks *I* need, to eat the food *I'm* hungry for, to stop when *I* want to stop. Not when I have to make dinner, or pick someone up from somewhere. Not to have those thoughts intrude into my reading that I have to remember to pay that bill, or put the garbage out tonight, or pick up that item from the store before Friday.

Pathetic, ain't it? My fantasy is a life where I can work whenever I want to!

You don't own your body

Did you know that you don't own your own body? Legally speaking, that is. You have control over it, but you don't own it.

To me that's odd. Commonly speaking, we think that our bodies are ours to do with as we please. The idea that a woman's body is her own to decide what she does with it has been a cornerstone of feminist thought for decades now. And it's true, a woman does have the right to control her own body.

But she doesn't own it.

That's thanks to patent law. If tissues from your body are used to create a vaccine, or a treatment, or a cell line for research purposes, you no longer 'own' any part of that subsequent process. You might own the raw material i.e. your body, and you can control that raw material. But as soon as a bioscientist takes that raw material and applies a process to it, which the scientist patents, you no longer have any interest (legally speaking) in that technology and cannot control how it is used, or ask for compensation for it.

The way our legislation has been written, tissue that is removed from the body is considered waste, which means the person whose body it was removed from no longer has a claim over it.

I'm simplifying things significantly, but this is the general interpretation of the law as seen in John Moore vs. the Regents of the University of California. Having read segments of the judgment, I suspect this is the court case that Michael Crichton is referring to in Next, his novel about the patenting of human life. If you're looking for an airplane novel, this one's a good one. Though, then again, most Crichton novels are airplane novels.

But as you're reading the novel, just keep in mind that although you control the body that's reading it, you don't own it.

Is there a protocol for this?

Okay, so my dissertation supervisor has had my introductory chapter for about two months now. She indicated when I passed it off to her it would be a few weeks.

Ordinarily, I would not consider this a problem. But I've just finished drafting chapter 1 and I'm not sure what I should do. Should I wait to get the introduction back before sending the first chapter? Should I send it off anyway? Am I being annoying if she has two chapters at one time? Should I email (again)? (I emailed a week ago to say chapter 1 was in the final stages and to ask this very question - no response yet)

I can continue to work, but frankly, chapter 2 is also on the doorstep - that is, it needs one additional small section added and some serious trimming of the rest, but most of the content is there. If I don't send off chapter 1 soon, there's a very real possibility that chapter 2 will be sitting around as well, waiting to be sent off!

So, any ideas out there what the protocol for this kind of thing is?

Very excited!

Although teaching post-secondary is an activity that ostensibly is part of the "life of the mind", I find myself starving for real intellectual engagement. It's at times like this that I really regret having left the city of my doctoral program because that was at least one place to get that.

So you can imagine my delight at the prospect of a summer free from teaching in which I can live the "life of the mind" without also trying to explain to a student how 2 pages about how video gaming is so cool falls short of a 5 page argumentative essay!

I of course will still be doing my online work - and we've just been approved for a major project that's set to begin in about a month - but I also anticipate having much more time available for doing what I love.

Now I just have to get through the next 5 weeks...

A new distraction

I've found myself reading a couple of early twentieth century precursors of science fiction over the last couple of weeks. It's really quite fascinating stuff. It has me wondering if they two samples I read: The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle and Man's World by Charlotte Haldane (wife of J.B.S.) are representative of Edwardian and early twentieth century sf.

In the nineteenth century, the "scientific romance", what is commonly understood to be the precursor to the gee-whiz-bang rockets-and-mad-scientists science fiction of the mid twentieth century (when the genre really took off) was preoccupied with biology. If you think of the work of H.G. Wells - War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, or even Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde - they all employed ideas of evolution, devolution, and social Darwinianism in their subtexts.

The stuff we think of most often when we think science fiction - and the stuff Margaret Atwood thinks of when she defines herself as NOT a science fiction writer - really came into being in the 1940s and 1950s - the BEMs (bug eyed monsters) and rocket ships, Flash Gordon, and all that jazz. The sf of this period is really more about physics than it is about biology.

[which makes me wonder, will science fiction ever go through a phase where it's all about chemistry?... I can't imagine, but it seems a bit unfair for chemistry to not have its moment in the sun]

This stuff from the 1920s that I'm reading still retains a lot of that social Darwinism, but the new emphasis on physics is also creeping in as well. The narratives are a real sharp contrast with the modernist texts we usually think of from the period - Woolf, Joyce etc. and I would love to read more of it to figure out exactly how those differences play out.

Since I've not studied modernism extensively, it's a project that I'm not equipped to undertake right now, but I do think it might be an interesting avenue to pursue after the dissertation gets finished. See? I am working hard at keeping myself from getting distracted. It's just there are so many really interesting things to read!

This is why driving downtown is nasty

According to this news report, this weekend marked the longest continuous concrete pour in Canadian history. The pour is only second to one in Dubai and another in Vegas. Now that's an unusual event!

It also explains why it was IMPOSSIBLE to drive downtown this weekend. The Bow-Encana project has been wreaking havoc with Calgarians' driving patterns for many months already, but combined with the blocking off of additional streets for the Mother's Day run, it was impossible to get a car through the downtown core yesterday morning.

I know. I tried. I guess we should've taken the train down to the Tower for the Mother's Day run! On the bright side, it was finally *not* raining, and the sun was not overpowering, so it was a perfect day for running. I even finished the course about 2 minutes faster than I thought I would, so I'm happy with the results. (Daughter is less than happy with her performance, though I think it was stellar.)

But we should've taken the train!

2 down 5 to go

I've just finished the rough and dirty draft of chapter 1. Woohoo!

My word count actually went down - which is probably a good thing given how overly wordy I was getting, and it should drop even more as I edit chapter 2, which is also rough and dirty, but needs a section added as well as a bunch of stuff trimmed down or moved to footnotes.

So here's where I stand right now:

Introduction - is with advisor, who's had it for several months now, but since the BIG conference is this weekend, I'll start bugging her for comments in a couple of weeks.

Chapter 1 - rough and dirty draft - by that I mean all the arguments are there and all the sources I wish to use, but I've paid little attention to what it sounds like. I figure a couple of weeks of editing, adding missing pieces, reading a bit more, and it will be draft ready for advisor's eyes.

Chapter 2 - also rough and dirty draft - this was actually the first thing I wrote, last year, and so now that I'm getting a better sense of the layout of the whole thing, it needs some serious modification. But like chapter 1 most of the argument is there and the majority of the sources, so it should only require a few weeks to a month of editing to get it advisor-draft ready.

Chapter 3-6 - bits and pieces strewn across these - each chapter has about 3000 words that sketches some of the argument, but there will need to be a lot more reading before I can begin to write any of them.

So I should be on track to have 4 of the 7 chapters completely drafted by the end of the summer, which is my goal right now. I figure I can then complete edits and the remaining three chapters in the following year and be a doctor by this time next year! That would be a very gratifying feeling!

Right now my challenge is trying to balance the amount of paid work I can do during the next year against the need to get this stuff written. I'm really undecided about what to do. I enjoy both of my jobs, but one has been really slow lately, and other other is changing significantly in form, and I don't know if I can feel comfortable within that change. Right now I don't need to really make any decisions immediately, but I will need to make them in the next few months.

But in the meantime I'm going to go celebrate the completion of a draft with... oh, wait, I suppose catching up on the laundry, recycling, and exercising aren't really celebrations, are they?

Language-dependent reading

In my wanderings through the linkages of the interwebs I came across this article in the Wall Street Journal. "How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language" describes the research of Maryanne Wolf at Tufts.

The argument in this article is that the brain's activities during reading are different based on the language being read - the implication is that reading disabilities like dyslexia are more common in languages like English than Chinese, because the relationship between word and sign in English is more abstract. Interesting. Wolf's book, Proust and the Squid, is on my amazon list, and this article is making me think I have to move it up in priority, because it sounds absolutely fascinating.

People are idiotic in real life

Subtitle: Why I find Cloverfield annoying and will probably find Diary of the Dead annoying.

In real life, people say idiotic things when surprised, like "oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Did you see that? ohmygodohmygodohmygod"*

Realistic? Yes. Entertaining? No.

Fiction film is still fiction. I like my fiction to be have a bit more intelligent dialogue than what we often spout in real life. Perhaps it's a bit of elitism. If writers are just going to write what people say, then they're just recorders. I expect writers to come up with more interesting lines than the kind of stuff that I say when I've not had time to think about it. I want to see the effort of a creative mind in my movie dialogue. Because lets face it, in real life, we say some really stupid stuff.

*I'm pretty sure this is a fairly accurate rendition of the dialogue in Cloverfield when everything starts to go bad.

Festival-ing

Jazzfest was an intense yet relaxing weekend of good food, good music and good company.

New Orleans still is recovering from Katrina, but it's made some really significant strides from what we could see. People told us stories of returning after the hurricane, and the French Quarter seems to have really recovered well - dozens of restaurants later, we could not get a table at 11:00 on a Saturday night and ended up retreating to the Garden District just to eat!

The festival itself was fabulous! We did get rained on Friday night during Stevie Wonder, but the rain ended by Saturday morning and we only had to contend with the mud at that point! The highlight for me was probably Santana on Sunday - he put on a fabulous show, the sun was out, and everyone around us was just chillin' and enjoying.

Maybe it was the weather - maybe just the Santana fans. When Stevie Wonder endorsed Obama on Friday in the rain, there were mostly cheers but some boos, but when Santana did on Sunday in the sunshine, there was nothing but cheers. I found that interesting.

It's a good thing Stevie got there. And it's a good thing we got there. On Thursday night when we left, we were delayed and so we were late coming into Dallas for our connection. We ended up sprinting the last 10 gates just to get there in time before they wanted to give away our seats to standbys. We were in such a rush to get in the plane, we didn't pay much attention to who or what we were passing as we made our way to our seats. Had we been looking, we would've realized that Stevie was waiting for us to make that flight too! And here I thought all these performers chartered their own planes!

I'd post some pictures, but I left my camera with my husband who's still there, so pictures will have to wait. I gotta say pictures would sure help me keep that warm sunny glow. Going from 25 + degrees over the weekend to single digits and overcast today has been a bit of a letdown...

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.