Merely (an) Academic

Dear Prime Minister Harper, re: Attawapiskat

2011-12-11T09:17:00.001-08:00

Dear Prime Minister Harper,

I hope you have the opportunity to read this article on the disgraceful response of your government to the crisis at Attawapiskat.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/11/canada-third-world-first-nation-attawapiskat?newsfeed=true

Two points in it strike me as particularly pertinent:

a) federal audits of expenditures at Attawapiskat are available on the web for every year since 2005; so your insistence that the only reason for the misery there is misappropriation of funds by the band leaders has already been investigated and shown to be incorrect.

b) your government's demand that a 3rd-party manager take over the band's funds (which, as the Guardian points out, have not been misspent), as if the band was a group of misbehaving children who couldn't be trusted with money, incredibly also demands that the band itself pay for this third-party administrator - $180,000 out of the money that they don't have, and desperately need to spend on something else. Like housing. Or sanitation. Or public health.

Your government's ruling ideology - that the poor must have done something to make themselves poor, that it is their fault, and that they deserve to be punished for it - once again does not stand up to investigation. The band at Attawapiskat needs much more than your punitive measures. It does not need a third-party administrator. It does not deserve to lose its home. What it needs is the help it has been denied for over a decade, which has brought it to this state.

Your government's response to the crisis at Attawapiskat is disgracing us on the international stage.

I hope you will reconsider, and give Attawapiskat the help it needs.

Yours sincerely,

Merely Academic

cc. John Duncan, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development

Denise Savoie, MP

End of Term: Buffy, meet Tragedy (redux)

2011-11-29T23:27:00.001-08:00

I'm grading the last batch of Greek quizzes and trying, while doing so, to think through why ancient literature matters. Or more specifically, why parallels/influences/ whatever from ancient literature to pop culture matter.

Several years ago I gave a paper on prophecy in Buffy and how it was related to the use of prophecy in Sophocles. One audience member asked afterwards why it mattered. I couldn't answer the question. It was so obvious to me that the parallels and differences between the use of prophecy in Greek tragedy, and in modern television, mattered that I had never thought through an answer to the question. "Because it's interesting"? To whom.

But more: when two completely different cultures and largely different art forms happen to have thrown up the same artifact, is there any real point comparing them? When the question is put that way, of course the answer is yes: how is that artifact - prophecy, or whatever it is - useful? In fact it's more interesting in that they ARE two different art forms & two different cultures. Why did two such different contexts produce the same object/technique/whatever?

From these ruminations one may reasonably gather that I'm contemplating tackling pop culture again. This time in collaboration. I wonder if each of us is hoping the other one will come up with the justification. The practical reason is that if you use the phrase e.g. "Plato and ..." in a pop culture context people are apt to sit up and take notice. But I can't help but think there is another reason to do it, only I can't articulate it yet. But it is interesting, damn it, to find 2 literatures 3000 years apart using similar narrative techniques, and it isn't entirely because the modern version has read the ancient one and has been influenced by it; or even, I think, just because some narrative tropes have endured 3000 years.

It occurs to me that perhaps I should have studied Comp. Lit. Or at least found out what Comp. Lit. people do. Because they are surely asking the same questions, and have presumably come up with some answers I could use.

The Greek quizzes, in the meantime, are - well, I won't say tragic. Worth distracting myself from.

River Song the Hero

2011-10-05T09:40:00.001-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Analysing River Song's life according to the Hero's Pattern (as identified by Lord Raglan):

The hero's mother is a royal virgin - hm. Well, no. But she is a one-woman man who lives next to a crack in reality, so is singled out for the attention of the god for that reason.
~~Her father is a king~~
~~And often a near relative of the mother~~
The circumstances of her conception are unusual - no fooling! On the tardis, which makes her a Time Lord.
She is also reputed to be the child of a god. How many people weren't sure who the father was? All of us, and it keeps coming up, over and over; the series really yanks our chain on this one.
Atbirth an attempt is made, usually by the father or maternal grandfather, to kill her.Not kill, in this case, but abduct, destroy what she was and make her into something else entirely; not the father, who does his best to save her.
She is spirited away - by the Silence
And reared by foster-parents in a far country - indeed; in the demonic orphanage, by Madame Kovarian, and the Silence.
We are told nothing (or little) of her childhood - pretty much; we have seen the orphanage, we see her when she's 9 and she's dying and regenerating, we see her briefly throughout her teens.
On reaching adulthood she returns or goes to her future kingdom - is sent to meet and kill the Doctor, which is, or with whom is, her future home.
After a victory over a king, wild beast, giant, or dragon - in this case the Doctor, and twice (kills him once, persuades him not to die once)
She marries the princess - the point of this is that the hero marries the person by and through whom she becomes a ruler herself, which works fine
And becomes ruler. Time Lord, Ruler of Time and Space, Master of the Universe, who can fly the Tardis better than her husband can.
For a time she reigns uneventfully - read "carries on adventuring with the Doctor", which is implied throughout her story -
And prescribes laws - not sure what this would correspond to -
But eventually she loses favour with the gods and/or her subjects - which happens immediately,with her incarceration in the Storm Cage -
~~and is driven from her throne and city~~ - actually by the time of her death she seems to have been restored to full honours, as Professor Song.
After which she meets with a mysterious death - true enough!
~~often on top of a hill~~ - in the bowels of a library in this case
Her children, if any, do not succeed her - we don't know yet
Her body is not buried - nor, indeed, ever found
But she has one or more holy sepulchres - the computer, which contains and maintains her heroic spirit for visitors, just as the sepulchres did for hero cults.

That's 15, plus a few maybes, so could be as high as 19. Herakles himself only scores 14.

Evolutionary biology meets domestic violence

2011-09-28T08:40:00.001-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

This recent article in New Scientist discusses a study by David Buss, and evolutionary psychologist at Austin, Texas, who argues that wife-beating had an evolutionary value: it discouraged females from having affairs and thus bearing children by other males. As Heather Douglas (Queensland) comments, however, there are a fair number of assumptions inherent in this argument: for example, that the primary focus of a couple is child-rearing, and that couples will be heterosexual, when any casual glance at the wealth of literature on domestic violence will inform the reader that domestic violence occurs in same-sex and childless couples.

Those assumptions are natural to an evolutionary psychologists, however, who will argue that only those adaptations that affect reproduction are interesting from the point of view of evolutionary psychology. Further, if an adaptation has proven to be useful in child-rearing couples it will spread to non-child-rearing couples, for various reasons, among them because they become part of the cultural norms - everyone's doing it so you get used to it yourself - and because even if you are not part of a child-rearing couple yourself, you were raised by one, and will have learned what's "normal" from your parents. Both of which are fair enough.
So those assumptions are not my problem with the article. My problem is the outrageous circular logic which seems to be very common in the field of evolutionary psychology. The procedure seems to be

identify a problematic aspect of modern society

now invent a version of cave-man behaviour that will 'explain' that phenomenon

congratulations! you have just retrojected the problematic aspect of modern society onto your invention of cave-man culture, thereby justifying it

bonus - since there is no evidence of cave-man culture, your hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Make up anything you want.

Image via Wikipedia
And it's no accident that the 'problematic' aspects of modern society are usually those that involve gender relations. Broadly speaking, evolutionary psychology tends to persistently come up with reasons the cultural subordination of women makes sound evolutionary sense. Honest!
So back to this article. This study is not as bad as some. At least the argument does have something to do with reproduction, which gives it a toe-hold in the world of evolutionary biology. But its observations mistake associations for causes.
The argument is that men who beat their wives do so to discourage them from bearing other men's children. It's based on two studies:

a small study of 65 pregnant women. Those whose partners beat them were revealed to be more likely, not less, to be bearing another man's child. Buss & his co-author interpret this, I guess, to mean that those women who are more likely to give their partners cause for jealousy are more likely to get beat up, and the beatings, um, probably dissuaded them from being as unfaithful as they might have been? I guess.

a larger study of 8000 Canadian women. 14% of the women who were getting beaten up by their partners said their partners were very upset when they talked to other men. Only 1% of the women who were not getting beaten up described their partners that way.

So, the writers conclude, wife-beating is associated with jealousy. This is not exactly news. Domestic violence is widely known to be only one of several mechanisms used by the beater to control the behaviour of the victim, not only towards other men, but towards any other thing that the victim might want to pay attention to. Her family. Her job. Her children. Her hobbies. Of course Buss would argue that this is all an extension of the core anxiety, that the woman should not be bearing other men's children. If you can keep her locked in a dark room all day doing absolutely nothing that you haven't previously approved, she will also not be bearing other men's children. One hopes.
Buss also argues that it would make sense for beaters to beat up particularly "valuable" mates - that is, women the man thinks have a good shot at finding a better mate than they are themselves. Women who "marry down", or who are perceived as having married "down", chosen a mate perceived as less attractive, intelligent, high-status, rich, or successful career-wise than they are themselves, would thus be more at risk of becoming victims of domestic violence, as their partners try to frighten them out of looking elsewhere, or try to damage their self-esteem so that they won't think they could attract a better partner.
Now it is true that a primary tactic of wife-beaters, and any abusive partner, is to damage the self-esteem of their victim by any means that come to hand. But Buss, here as everywhere in the article, is identifying as causal behaviour that is simply part of the same package.
Wife-beaters and other abusers desperately want to maintain control of their victim. Emotional abuse, physical abuse, destruction of the self-esteem of the partner, isolation of the partner by any means necessary, are all tactics the abuser employs towards that end. But to attribute all of this to sexual jealousy is to accept the excuse the wife-beater uses - the concrete external object they will point to as the reason for their behaviour. Beaters will claim that their partners were likely to stray in order to have an excuse for beating them. What they really fear is that their partners have an independent identity of any kind.
So the Canadian study that shows that beaters are more likely than non-beaters to be jealous tells us nothing except that jealousy and wife-beating tend to occur in the same package. But to accept that jealousy is the cause of wife-beating is to believe what the beaters have to say. They are not the most reliable witnesses. Jealousy and wife-beating are simply two of the tactics that abusers use to control every aspect of their partner's existence.
In any event, as Buss' own study shows, from an evolutionary perspective it is a highly UNsuccessful tactic. In the pregnant women study, women whose partners beat them were MORE likely to be bearing another man's child - possibly (I tend to thnk) because they were seeking solace with another man from the nightmare abusive relationship they're trapped in. So beating your wife should actually have a negative correlation with reproductive success.
If it had anything to do with evolution, then, wife-beating would have died out long ago. But domestic violence doesn't bolster reproductive success; it is a tool for maintaining the power of the patriarchy, which does not bolster reproductive success as much as it privileges some kinds of reproduction over others.

Night thoughts

2011-09-27T22:04:00.001-07:00

I'm trying not to read news because it is so depressing. Reading the comments on news is even more depressing. It's terrifying to discover how many people out there don't think the current crop of Republican Presidential wannabes are right-wing enough.

I watch the ongoing shenanigans over the economy and the vote in the once-giant economy to the south of us with mounting sick horror. It's like watching a train wreck just far enough away that I can barely hear the screams. Meanwhile closer to home my own country has been taken over by ideologues no less dangerous than the ones currently running the US up on the rocks.

But I can't stop. I read tech news because it's soothing (look! gadgets! pretty! Apple's going to bring out a new phone!) but inevitably my gaze drifts, I'll just take a quick look at the headlines, I tell myself.

Meanwhile it is unclear to me what relevance anything I do has to anything now happening anywhere in the world. It's hard not to succumb to the viewpoint that nothing matters except insofar as it makes money, when that is increasingly the subtext of public discourse. When it isn't the actual text of course. I was raised to think a humanist education was a good in itself. I don't know how to justify that; I never had to before. It seemed self-evident, and not only to me. How do I start?

mobile phone scams

2011-09-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

This is a public service announcement - with guitar!

My daughter's phone bill, when I got it this month, was mysteriously $10 more than I expected. So was the previous month's, when I took a look - we'd been out of town so I missed that bill.

Since I've blocked internet access so that the phone can't accidentally hit the WWW button and get charged for 4 hours of roaming while it's in her backpack, this shouldn't happen. I phoned and Virgin Mobile said "oh, she signed up for a $10/month service from Jammedia" (or Smashmedia, I don't remember now) - "and she didn't do this from the phone, she must have visited a website, she did it deliberately it's all her fault, but here's the number of Smashmedia".

So I phoned Smashmedia. They inquired about her age and as soon as it was established that she was a minor they promised to remove the subscription from the bill and send me a full refund for the $20 they'd scammed out of her so far. (Which they did, I should add; a check for $20 from "Fox Mobile Distribution GMBH, Karl-Liebknecht - Strasse 5, 10178 Berlin Germany" arrived 3 weeks later.) And they told me that she must have seen an advertisement that told her to text #2455 or something to download unlimited ring tones every month for $10/month. Simply texting that number was enough to sign her up to get hosed of $10/month in perpetuity.

Now my daughter is not an idiot and I doubt that she would knowingly have signed up for anything that would cost her $10/month for something she'll barely use. So I asked her what had happened. And no, she had certainly not answered an ad that said that. She did vaguely recall that she'd replied to a text she'd received on her, which said "answer this text to download a free ringtone!"

She never got the ringtone, either; the download didn't work.

Do I think that somewhere, in very tiny letters, it said "and texting this also constitutes agreement that yada yada and also your soul?" I'm sure it did. Maybe nowhere accessible to the naked eye of course.

My suspicion that this is more or less what happened was confirmed this morning. I was searching for Home Depot on my iPad, and had entered "homedepotcanada.com" hopefully in the URL window. This sent me, mysteriously, instead to a site "m.yamoja.mobi", that asked me to answer 3 short questions for a "chance to win" an iPad 2, MacBook Air or a soon-to-be-obsolete iPhone 4: my gender, how often did I watch videos online, and how did I feel about ads in videos.

This all seemed harmless enough, though probably nothing to do with Home Depot, but I wouldn't mind winning an iPad 2, even though I doubted the chances were particularly high, so I answered.

The next page asked again whether I'd like "a chance to win" an iPad 2 or an iPhone 4 - they were already out of MacBook Airs, the site claimed, an encouraging sign since it gave one to understand that perhaps they did actually occasionally give stuff away. I chose the iPad 2.

The next page asked me a question about iPad 2 configuration (how does it differ from the iPad?) and then asked me to enter my mobile number, with a helpful field for entry.

In smaller, grey letters underneath this request I was informed that giving them my mobile number would sign me up for "4 questions a week at $2 per question", or about $35/month for absolutely nothing. If I had not been on my iPad, but my cell phone, there's a good chance I wouldn't have been able to read this 'agreement' at all on the cell phone screen.

The "survey" is a sham; it's intended to keep you on the site long enough to feel invested, long enough to actually start feeling as if you really WOULD like that iPad 2. Long enough to be willing to give them your mobile number. Now, if you're older than 12, you won't do that. But if you're older than 12, you're not their target audience.

As far as I can tell, this constitutes normal business practice and nobody cares much, because a search for m.yamoja.mobi scam turns up no complaints. I hope the next person to do that search finds this post.

turtles

2011-09-13T08:43:00.001-07:00

On my way home from running this morning (note how I casually insert that; I went for a run this morning! not sure I'll make a habit of it though) I passed the local private school (junior branch). There was a flood of little moppets in their little kilts and cardigans washing towards the school, and my attention was caught by a little girl standing beside her Dad's big black SUV, looking nervous but determined. I couldn't figure out why until her father came round the car carrying her little brother, sighed, pulled out of her hands the little stuffed turtle she was trying to smuggle into school with her and tossed it back in the car window. Somehow this was the more touching given her little uniform. I hope she learns to hide it under her jacket soon. Anyone needs a little friend in a new school.

I can't be this tired, I've got 12 weeks to go ...

2011-09-12T23:39:00.000-07:00

Taught 2 classes, tried unsuccessfully to find a hotel we can afford to hold a conference in, bicycled to school and back, bought groceries, cut up vegetables for children's lunches, rewatched "Red", which holds up well under re-watching, . Only Sarah should have been in the final scene. ~~Must figure out 2 birthday parties -~~ - no, am not making to-do lists. am distressed to discover that even with the bicycling I didn't quite make 10,000 steps.

Dr. Who 6.10 was incredible. More when I'm not so exhausted. Doctor, that WAS a real Amy; just not the one you care about.

Another Day Run

2011-09-11T00:18:00.001-07:00

Spent the day running errands. I went for a run in the morning but forgot to wear my FitBit so feel as if it didn't count. In the afternoon went to buy school supplies.

I don't recall school supplies costing my parents an arm and a leg. In fact I recall in my day the school supplying students with paper, notebooks, pencils, pens, erasers, crayons, markers, glue, tape, scissors, and dictionaries, all of which I bought today as every year. I suppose persistent underfunding of the public school system has perfectly predictable side effects.

I was determined it wouldn't cost as much this year as last, so we recycled as much as we could from last year, and bought the cheap brands instead of the ones the school recommended. Total: $220. Last year it was $260; but one of the kids needs a new knapsack which will bring us up nearly even.

Now this is not pleasant, but okay; I have a decent job, my husband has a decent job, we can afford this. But what the hell would I do if I were a single mother, or one with no job, or a poor job? In what sense is it "public education" if half the kids can't afford the supplies they need?

Also went to get some jewelry repaired. My daughter has an earring she was very proud of, an ornament dangling from a large, graceful curve of wire, that she'd bought with her own money from its maker on one of the Greek islands last summer. She took it off to play games in school on Friday and left it on top of her things.

When she got back to her things afterwards, the Popular Girls (read: prematurely sexualized Mean Girls, as was the case when I was going through grade 8 too come to think of it) were standing there in a little group. One of them said "here, were you looking for this?" with a smug little plastic smirk, and handed her earring. They all ran off giggling as she looked at it.

Some little thug had tied the wire in multiple knots. The jeweller did his best to straighten it out, but it's not the same.

another day down, and Harper's still in power

2011-09-08T23:58:00.000-07:00

Taught two classes today, set up 2 class websites, went for a swim, read the totally inappropriate Bridget Jones' Diary to my 13 year old. My fitbit thinks I have only walked 10,000 steps today because it doesn't count the swim, for obvious reasons (I couldn't wear it in the water). Still, I'm pleased with it. I think it estimates a bit high - other people say that 12,000 on your Fitbit = about 10,000 on a pedometer. If it motivates me to get more into motion that's all I want from it.

Image by SoulCookie via Flickr

I have no reason whatever to add this picture here. Go, Baltar!

Meanwhile, Harper is planning to restore sweeping powers to the police because he fears terrorism, or so he says. These would be the police who handled their extraordinary powers SO WELL during the G20 meetings. These would be the powers that they were stripped of 4 years ago because of utterly legitimate and justifiable fears that those powers would be misused. But Harper does not care about sense, or what the country wants, or what is good for it. He wants total control. His own friends say so (see the last link.) I can't help but think that's what's really behind the prisons spending he's forcing through despite all the evidence that prisons don't work, and that the crime rate is falling in any case. To Harper, prisons are an obvious good because they are all about control, and that's his paradigm of choice.

His ongoing attempts to make Canada both a scarier and a meaner place of course include talking us into agreeing with that, to which end Fox News North is poisoning public discourse with Harper's active assistance. And in 2012 the current CRTC head's term will be up, and Harper has a majority. No one can stop extra powers being given to the police, or prisons being built and people being forced into them instead of being rehabilitated and made capable of rejoining society, or public discourse becoming as divisive and hate-filled as it has been for years in the U.S. I truly do fear for my country.

Related articles

first day down, 62 (approx) to go

2011-09-07T23:00:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaTeaching is a physically exhausting profession. I'm just saying. Though going for a run this morning AND bicycling to school probably didn't help. My new Fitbit however informs me that I have had the equivalent of 13,000 steps worth of exercise, which is probably more than I usually get in a week. This is all good but may explain the exhaustion.

Aside from teaching, meeting students, and trying to figure out why my computer would no longer speak to my printer (still not entirely solved), I did domestic things, laundry etc, and played Monopoly, and read Terry Pratchett to my 11 year old. Did not have time to surf the web, find evil things the right wing is doing and get angry about it. I'm going to do a bit of sewing now, then turn in. As always, it's a real struggle not to write down what I MUST DO TOMORROW OR THE SKIES WILL FALL. Presumably I'll remember those things if they're that important. Still, auggh. Old habits die hard.

no guilt is all very well, but I also have no memory

2011-09-06T22:00:00.000-07:00

Not writing down what I need to do is a bit worrying, because I'm liable to forget stuff. I'm wondering if it's okay to write down things like "phone the therapist, and also the ziplining place about the birthday party" and leave it on the kitchen table, since I've already forgotten both those things several times ... does that violate the principle of the "no to-do list"? How about writing it down here, since I'll probably reread it at some point - or how about "remember to buy some playing cards so as not to have to stand in line for 4 hours in the bookstore", is that a "to do" or a "reminder"? Are "reminders" okay? I suspect I'm blurring the line here ... "buy milk" is an entirely different category from "spend two hours working on that article you lazy sod! Also those other four articles! And organize that conference! And go supervise that computer project! And get that book proposal in!"

Yes, in EXACTLY that tone of voice.
Image via Wikipedia
I am formulating a rule here: trivia only.

Had an active and moderately productive day. Talked to people at work about various projects, installed OS X Lion on my 4 year old laptop (so far no problems, knock wood ...) and backed it up; set up my FitBit, which had arrived; updated a syllabus and prepared tomorrow's class; got some exercise; checked my calendar; found my textbook for tomorrow's class; did a little website administration; ran a couple of errands; met a friend for coffee; updated the website for tomorrow's class; got some exercise; organized stuff with both my TAs. Not bad for a day's work. It is very hard to stop myself from immediately thinking of all the things I didn't do and didn't even try to do. But the whole point here is to stop that. Tomorrow is another day. And tonight I will be in bed at a reasonable hour.

Am formulating this term's oath to that effect. "If I'm not in bed by 11 every night but one, every week, I will ..." - send money to the Conservative Party Campaign to Take Away Women's Votes. I'm sure there is one.

Um, True Blood? We have to talk

2011-09-05T23:36:00.000-07:00

Just saw yesterday's True Blood (4.11), "Soul on Fire". As has been true all season, everything was great except for any scene with Sookie in it. Now Anna Paquin is a magnificent actress and hasn't lost her chops, so that's not the problem.

I have a theory, and here is my theory: the screenwriters, who are also great, and doing the best job they can of getting something worth seeing out of the truly awful novels, are less handicapped the less attention the original author paid a character, because then they can make stuff up, and it will be much BETTER stuff than they'll find in the books. So who's the best character in True Blood? Jessica, who doesn't even appear in the novels. Who's the next best? Lafayette, who was killed off at the end of the first book, in the novels.
Image by Vanessa Stehling via Flickr
But Eric and Sookie and Bill are all very important in the novels, and try as they may, the screenwriters can't get away from that, or change the characterizations too much. Worse, structurally, Sookie's in the center of the story; it's All About Her. Her character fascinates novelist Harris, is Harris' focalizer, and Harris can't imagine that we wouldn't be fascinated too; so she has done nothing to make Sookie particularly interesting, because to Harris, she's already interesting.

So we have, this season, a character at the very center of the story, on whom it all depends, who is very dull, who has no motivation beyond sheer stupidity and unthinking self-centredness for any of the things she does, but whom we are supposed to find as fascinating as the two vampire sex-gods who are so consumed with her that they're willing to INSTANTLY agree to die to save her life. INSTANTLY.

And when we don't go along with it, the story falls completely flat.

In fact Sookie is a Mary Sue. And in the first three seasons the series worked with that, because we were as much in love with her as the author , so we went along the show's assessment that every little thing about her was completely absorbing. (Though the io9 recappers didn't agree, and this season I'm beginning to see their point..)

This season, we aren't willing to go along. At least, I'm not. I don't really care whether she takes Billie or Eric to the prom; I just want her to grow up already. (And how old are Eric and Bill? They're acting like they're about 14, which is unbelievable as well as dull.) In the meantime, I'm more interested in the characters that are actually showing some kind of growth arc - Jessica; Jason; Tara; Hoyt; Alcide; Sam (sorta); Andy; Terry, especially Terry - the ones that are already adults and the ones that are trying hard to grow up. Sookie's just in a holding pattern, and I don't care anymore. Too much of her behaviour is irrational and uninterestingly so. Meanwhile, she needs to get a job. She doesn't even own her house anymore; who's supporting her?

Marni/Antonia was great as always, and Debbie Pelt too, and the Werewolf Divorce was oddly moving. "Debbie Pelt, I abjure you. I see you no longer. I hunt with you no longer. I share flesh with you no longer." Perhaps it has to be delivered while growling.

I haven't done a Bechdel-Wallace analysis of this season. Sookie is generally at odds with women this season, when she interacts with them, which she doesn't much.

Aside from that, I went to the fall fair, did some laundry, made dinner, visited a friend, read to my son, and did a tiny bit of sewing and administration. Tomorrow the kids are back to school. The next day, I am too. It's been a good summer.

Related Articles

Sookie is a Mary Sue (Merely Academic)
True Blood 4.11 (Soul on Fire) recap (io9.com)

guilt-free TV

2011-09-05T00:41:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaWatched the latest Dr. Who tonight; it was very good, but I don't think Amy and Rory can be put off forever. The Doctor said he would find their child, but meant, surely, their BABY. Discovering that Dr. Song is their daughter, as was their best friend the childhood JD Mels, that she was raised by evil aliens in that terrifying orphanage, and ultimately leaving her in a hospital to be cured of her psychopathic tendencies, is not good enough. Saving another child, who is a little boy who loves his Dad, but is not the son of his parents - unlike Mels/Dr. Song, who is their daughter but not a child, and for that matter doesn't love them - is not good enough either. You can save all the children in the universe, and that's a very good thing to do; but that does not absolve the Doctor of his promise to restore their baby to them; to restore to them a child they can raise and love and become family with. George is his father's son in that he's part of the family, has been adopted. Mels/River is not part of Rory and Amy's family. That's what the Doctor promised to restore to them, and he hasn't done it.

And - just as an aside - interesting feature, that it's the Doctor and the father that save little George, while the mother's at work. Why? On reading "Let's Kill Hitler (and break my heart)" (below) and its comments on feminism in Dr. Who, now I'm wondering; why is the mother - and why is Amy - being left out of the loop here? Why is the only significant parent the father? (On the other hand, Dad's home because he's unemployed; is Mom the responsible parent, or the absent parent, here?)

Anyway. Also ran across, again, the truly excellent essay explaining how to read bad fiction, the marvellous "Well Tempered Plot Device", by Nick Lowe. I recommend it to anyone slogging through genre fiction generally; and point out that it works for bad TV too. And it makes me really want to try "clench racing".

Also
Image via Wikipediawatched another episode of Battlestar Galactica, and have got to "Pegasus", where we have essentially the AU Galactica. The commander is female, and there is no civilian authority; it's an entirely military operation, and it's insane. Everyone on Pegasus is either a collaborator or terrified into submission. They are rapists, abusers and torturers, and Admiral Reid, Marianne from True Blood, really gets off on shooting people to get her own way. Of course she only does it when military law, as interpreted by herself, gives her some shred of an excuse.

Wondering, again, what to make of the fact that the female leader is evil and has produced an evil ship - it takes its tone from the top, and even if she is killed off, as I suspect will happen eventually, all those under her are so damaged that it won't be possible to integrate them; the entire culture of the Pegasus is toxic. And sure, we have Laura the President, who is wonderful. But now I want to watch carefully for other signs that even in the BSG world, apparently a woman in power = a bad thing.

Haven't been posting about True Blood (and haven't seen this evening's show yet) because everyone on it is more interesting than Sookie this season. Unfortunately Sookie is the linchpin of the whole show. If she's not interesting, it all falls apart. But everyone's got a story except her - I'm afraid I can't buy the "Sookie's in love with a vampire" storyline as worth her (or our) primary attention yet again. I could cut her
Image via Wikipediasome slack for considering the world well lost for love the first time, but it's time she got a life that involved, you know, holding down a job, figuring out something else to do besides shagging pretty vampires.

Interestingly everyone else on the show has also noticed this, thinks, correctly, that Sookie is behaving like a crazy person and is walking away from her. Tara: "are you crazy?" Alcide: "Sookie, what are you doing?" Sookie responds by ignoring them - not even bothering to answer the question - because Twu Wuv Conquers All. Well, no, it doesn't. Her vampire habit doesn't seem to endanger her - at least, she tends to live through it - but it endangers everyone around her; and she doesn't seem to notice or care. I have lost patience.

Nor do I know how True Blood managed to make Eric so dull and sexless, but it did. The idea, I suppose, was to make him childlike so that Sookie could feel maternal towards him and re-parent him, re-"make" him post-Godric; but the mother-child bond is really not easy to sexualize, and they didn't succeed. The idea was, I suppose, also to contrast this relationship with Sookie/Bill, where Bill was definitely being overly paternal, "protecting" Sookie - and himself - by not telling her things she needed to know. So while I appreciate why they were making the attempt, it did not in my view succeed. (Do I find it suspect that the father-child bond is remarkably easy to sexualize? yes, and I don't want to think about it right now.)

Meanwhile, Jessica, Lafayette, Jesus (who I suspect is not long for this world), Marni/Antonia, Debbie, Alcide (especially shirtless), Nan, Pam, Ginger, Tommy, Hoyt, even Sam, even Marcus - they're all excellent, and make the show worth seeing. But the central Bill/Sookie/Eric storyline, and all three characters, could frankly be left out entirely and the season would be better for it.

What else did I do today: went for a run, took my daughter shopping, did a little sewing and some grad student stuff, and started sanding down a second-hand desk.

Related articles

But if I don't write it down, how will I make myself feel guilty about it?

2011-09-03T22:48:00.001-07:00

So, today I went swimming, ran some errands, picked up some groceries, did some sewing, tried out some comic book software (the test page is below) and held a dinner party for eight.

The weather was beautiful; wish I'd got the kids out in it. Tomorrow I shall boot them out of doors. Of course tomorrow it will likely sleet, or hail, or something.

Merely Academic's Day Off

2011-09-02T23:19:00.000-07:00

Today I tried only writing down what I had already done. Note to self: if using Wunderlist, as I was, don't check the items off once they're written, because then they vanish ... a moderately productive day, in any event. Got some groceries, did some sewing, got some exercise, handled some email, did a little conference-organizing stuff, watched a film my son collaborated in making, made pizza, watched "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" with the kids, cleaned the kitchen. It is really, really hard not to write down a list for tomorrow. But I shall persevere. Because this is exactly the day I would have had if I had had a to-do list, only I would have felt guilty about it because there would have been 97 more things on the list that I would not have got to.

Just read about a professor in San Bernardino who was running a Hell's Angels chapter and selling meth out of his comfortable middle-class home, in which the police also found an armoury and a lot of leather jackets with gang patches on. It's not every day you find an academic with a hobby like that. I must keep a closer eye on my colleagues. Apparently he was a good Catholic boy, which lets my colleagues, atheist to a man, out I suppose.

Life with no to-do list

2011-09-01T23:14:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I deleted my to-do list.

I'd been nurturing it for years, in Omnifocus, adding not only everything I thought I must do but projects I might like to start someday and things I've thought about perhaps doing; and of course all the repetitive tasks I have to do from time to time. The net effect was in retrospect obvious; I couldn't bear to open my great, lumbering beast of a to-do file, which had at least 87 things on it, almost all overdue. Periodically I'd read through it and prune, and reset some due-by dates so they wouldn't be so outrageously overdue, but then they would just go and get overdue again.

Meanwhile all the things I did do never actually got into the list at all, because I couldn't open it to write them in without becoming immediately paralyzed by the weight of all the things I should have done years ago that were sitting on the list already, mutely accusing me. So, and this is not a small thing, I never got to check anything off. Or, on those rare occasions when I did, the 93 or so other things still on the list served to mute any sense of accomplishment I might otherwise have had.

This was not working. I was not doing more. It was entirely possibly I was doing less, and spending my life feeling guilty, too.

So, I deleted the list.

From now on I am recording only the things I've actually done, not the ones I think I should do. Especially since I seem to have developed an allergy to to-do lists. Today I wrote a short list of things I thought I should do today, and then I did almost nothing on the list, but several things that weren't on it. Apparently I don't like to be dictated to even by myself.

So, what did I do today? Went for a run; took my daughter to lunch and to buy art supplies; mailed a letter; filled in the form and dropped off the check for my daughter's art class; picked up my son from camp; set up websites for both of the classes I'm teaching this term (not the graduate class, which is extra-to-load, so comes last); set up a Circus Pony Notebook for the third year Greek class; paid the parking tickets the university had set a collection agency on me for, the bastards (I always pay them eventually, what's their problem?); gave the collection agency the receipt number; paid for my daughter's March Break trip to Quebec; figured out dinner; did some laundry; watched Zoolander, which was much funnier than I thought it would be.

It is hard not to conclude with a list of all the things I feel I must do tomorrow, but the hell with it. I'm sure I'll do some of them, at least. I hope I go for a swim. I'd like that.

The next five years of Harper

2011-05-03T16:59:00.001-07:00

Majority rules - just about everything (Greg Weston, CBC)

Greg Weston's assessment (linked above) of the next four years, bleak as it is, is I think over-optimistic. He's under the impression that Harper cares about destroying the Liberals; that Harper is a political operator and that was his primary goal. Because Harper will want to make sure the Liberals don't make a comeback, Weston argues, he'll be cautious about introducing socially conservative measures; he'll stay in the centre.

I think this is gravely wrong. Harper's goals are not primarily political, but ideological. He and his backers are profoundly socially conservative and his goal, all along, has been to enforce a socially conservative agenda on Canada. The Liberals mattered because they were in his way; they were not important for any other reason. Now that they're out of the way, he can introduce his real agenda with no further loss of time. Indeed, he has already done so, by defunding rehabilitation programs (that actually work) and funding further prisons (that don't); by defunding Status of Women offices; by a thousand other things, some of them frustrated because he had a minority government. He doesn't have that problem now. I expect him to hit the ground running.

Some people have pointed out that he can't change the constitution because he doesn't have the votes in Parliament. This is not entirely true. He may not be able to change it but he can certainly ignore it, because he will not scruple to use the "notwithstanding" clause to overwrite the Charter of Rights any time he feels like it. Since he will have the opportunity to pack the Supreme Court with his own appointees, any court challenge will fail. Since he will be appointing Sheila Fraser's successor, any attempt to keep track of where the money goes will be muzzled.

Since he has gotten rid of the long-form census it will no longer be possible to keep track of what he is doing to Canada and to Canadians, as more money slides into the hands of the very rich, and as more and more people, especially women and children, slide into poverty which, thanks to the defunding of social programs, they will be unable to escape.

I don't know that the country will ever recover from the next five years. It is, indeed, Harper's agenda to make sure that the country does not recover. He wants to indelibly rewrite what Canada is. He wants to change what we stand for and who we are.

We can't let him. We will have to resist loudly and obstinately every step of the way. This is not really in our nature to do; Canadians tend to be quite, passive, and trust that their government has their best interests at heart. The Harper government does not. We cannot just stand by.

The Canadian election

2011-05-02T23:34:00.001-07:00

I am stunned.

I keep thinking of the Auden poem that seems to me to serve as the template for Harper's vision of Canada, and which nothing, now can keep him from implementing:

The Shield of Achilles (W. H. Auden)

The Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

Circus Ponies Notebook is Da Bomb

2011-04-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Herodotus approves of Circus Ponies Notebook

Have just spent $49.99 US (but the CDN$ is above par!) on Circus Ponies Notebook, because:

syncing with my iPad actually does work as described (and they promise Dropbox syncing soon)
okay, I only found this out after I'd bought it, but it makes the purchase worth it all by itself: support for multi-alphabet indexing. Wow.

One cool function Notebook has is the automatic indexing of all of the words in your document alphabetically and numerically on two pages; 1) all the capitalized words, and 2) all the words. This is very nice, if you're looking for where exactly you wrote about "distressed apricot omelette flambé", say.

But it turns out it has support for other alphabets as well, as I discovered while fooling about with it (instead of marking, yes) to see if I could use it for taking convenient notes for my language classes - Greek text on one side of the page, glosses on the other side of the page, notes on what I want to remember to mention at the bottom. And why yes I can; it has a Cornell Notes page format which is ideal for this.

But - and this is truly awesome - once I'd cut and pasted a chunk of Herodotus into my notebook to see how it would work, I discovered that Notebook had also produced an alphabetized index of all of the Greek text too. This makes it phenomenally useful for finding citations, building an index locorum, checking for other uses of the same word in the text you're actually using (as opposed to all of Herodotus, say) - and no doubt many other uses I haven't thought of but will discover shortly.

So I think the $49.99 (= only $48.30 CDN, not that Visa's going to give me that rate...) was well-spent already.

Now if only it would also grade my papers...

playing with software

2011-04-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

I've been taking a break from marking, er, all day, and have found some Cool New Software! Which should enable me to waste WEEKS re-organizing my notes into absolutely perfect, multiply-cross-indexed little notelets, which I imagine as being something like chiclets, all perfectly lined up, alphabetized, cross-linked, and absolutely everything but, you know, actually being an article. Brushing, combing and massaging your notes, that's the ticket to endless weeks of happy non-productivity that somehow feels as if you're getting something done. Without actually, you know, getting anything out the door ...The new software I refer to is Circus Ponies "Notebook" (only for Mac, I think). I found a blog, "Organizing Creativity", that gave a two-step process for automatically turning all your research into articles without human intervention of any kind, or that was my hopeful reconstruction of what he describes. Essentially, he takes all his notes in "Notebook", whose strengths he describes here, and also uses "Notebook" to produce a detailed outline which includes all of the secondary literature he will be referring to, with links to those notes. (The strength of "Notebook" is that it automagically produces multiple links and cross-indexings). Then he uses "Scrivener", of which I'm already a huge fan, to actually write the article., with the "Notebook" file open beside the "Scrivener" window. He has another post here that discusses how to use Scrivener to write dissertations, or any lengthy project.

Image via Wikipedia

One touch I particularly liked is that he suggests that you use checkboxes in your outline. Why? So that once you've actually written something, you can check it off, and the text will grey out, and you will feel happy because you are accomplishing stuff.

Until now I had thought of "Notebook" and "Scrivener" as essentially duplicating each others' functions - or, at least, largely overlapping. But "Notebook" does seem to keep everything much better organized than "Scrivener" does. Though, I have to say, all this really produces is that illusion of control to which classicists are so prone to succumb. It says something awful about our discipline that the highest praise we frequently bestow on other scholars is that they are "in control of" the secondary literature, or "in control of" the texts. Surely "control" is not the highest virtue to which we should aspire?

However, the hell. For now, I can play with my new software, and pretend that I will soon have control! really! Control of eVERYTHING I'm supposed to have read! And then it will magically all turn itself into articles! While I sleep! Circus Ponies will mate with Scriveners and produce studious little centaurs of articles, which will gallop off to journals in happy frolicking herds. A girl can dream.

Term-time life cycle, take 2

2011-03-13T12:17:00.001-07:00

(Data massaged for clarity)

one law for the rich

2011-03-05T16:53:00.000-08:00

I spent some time this morning talking to my children's former daycare provider. She was a wonderful woman who ran an excellent daycare. When my children were still young, she moved away to another town where she and her husband could afford to buy a house, but we have kept in occasional touch.

Things didn't go well for her in the new town. She had a temporary daycare license in the new town, subject to their making a few changes to the house they bought (a secure play area, that sort of thing), but somehow in the course of fulfilling the regulations she and her husband fell foul of the local child care licensing authorities, I think largely because the inspectors didn't like her husband (who worked from home), and they manufactured a set of excuses to refuse her a permanent license. (They came by one day to inspect and look at her records when she was about to take the children for a walk. She said fine, they should come in and she would delay the walk. They said they would come back later. Then they wrote her up as having refused to let them inspect. There were two of them and she had no witness. That sort of thing.) And I appreciate that granting child care licenses is a conservative exercise, and should be; better to refuse a license and be wrong than to grant one and be wrong. But she ran an excellent daycare, and they were wrong.

One contributing factor, I believe, is that she and her husband were from a non-English-speaking country and had strong accents. Another, she said, and I have no reason to doubt it, was that they were accustomed to dealing with people who simply did whatever the licensing authorities said, and didn't try to argue or object or point out what the regulations actually were. Her husband, in particular, was an argumentative sort, and the authorities didn't like people who didn't kowtow. So they got rid of her, and many children have been denied the benefits of her child care, and that in itself is a bad thing; especially when it's so hard to find child care at all, let alone good child care.

But for her it was bad too, because she lost her livelihood; and she lost something she really loved, and was gifted at; taking care of small children. She fought it all the way to the top of the ministry, through as many layers of bureaucracy as she could find. The local authorities had committed all kinds of procedural errors, to say nothing of the flat lies they'd introduced into the files. She got nowhere. She was, she said, simply astonished that people could do so many illegal things and no one stopped them, or even believed her. Again, the accent won't have helped; she sounded like an outsider, and why should they trust her?

So she and her husband both went through retraining, she as an administrative assistant and her husband as a draftsman (he has a civil engineering degree from their home country), but nowhere in their new town would hire them without three to five years' experience. So he went to work in telemarketing, the poor bastard, and she went to work at a donut chain, and when she was laid off from there, she went to work at a franchise of another food chain.

She likes the work there, which is 9-5 weekdays, she likes the management and her co-workers. Minimum wage, and an outrageous waste of her talents, but there is no point thinking about that now, I suppose. But there is one thing; they get no breaks. According to the labour code even of the benighted right-wing province we live in, on an 8 hour shift employers are required to give workers 2 15-minute or 1 30-minute break. She gets 3 minutes to scarf down her lunch and that's all. This is illegal.

She knows it's illegal. I assume her employers know it's illegal. She knows she should be given breaks. But, she says, if she ever said "you're supposed to give us 2 15-minute breaks", the next day she would be out of a job. And after her experience with the Ministry of Denying Licenses to Good Child Cares, the fight has gone out of her. She just can't face another fight. She's scared, and broken.

What she said to me was, she couldn't believe that people could get away with all the illegal things the child care authorities did to her. But now she understands her position. She was naive. She thought that there was a justice system, and it worked for everyone. Now she understands that it works for those who have power, not for those, like her, who have none.

She can't afford to lose her miserable minimum-wage sweatshop job; her employers don't have to bother to follow the labour code because there are a dozen people who would be happy to have her job if she lost it, in this economy. Nobody cares about people like her. The "grey ones", she said; the masses. They could treat her worse than they do and she couldn't quit or complain. She's grateful it's no worse.

The very worst thing for me is to hear her sound so beaten. Her employers are acting in clear contravention of the law, but she believes she has no recourse. She believes she has to let them. Because in Canada, there's law for the rich, but not for the poor, and for immigrants, like her.

I was so appalled I couldn't speak at first to answer her. I am so ashamed that my country has treated her this way.

I was thinking about our legal problems as she spoke. Our contractor may or may not still be suing us; but we can hire a lawyer, and my father can give me advice. The CRA believes we owe a lot more taxes than we thought we did; but (again) we can hire a lawyer, we can talk it over, we can reach some kind of settlement. These things will be all right.

We can afford to hire a lawyer. She can't. But she shouldn't need to hire a lawyer to get working conditions that are supposed to be hers by law. She shouldn't need to be afraid to point that out because she'll lose her job if she does and it's so hard to find another one.

Because we can afford to hire a lawyer if we need to, people don't mess with our legal rights. Because she can't, the ministry knew it could get away with denying her a child care license, and her present employer knows he can get away with treating his workers however he wants.

She's not enfranchised. I thought everyone in Canada was.

I'm still speechless.

prescriptive stereotypes, or, why I don't publish

2011-02-28T09:07:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a fascinating article (Krefting, L.A. “Intertwined Discourses of Merit and Gender: Evidence From Academic Employment in the USA.” Gender, Work & Organization 10.2 (2003): 260-78.) The author is discussing the position of women in academe from the point of view of the work done by Glick and Fiske (P. Glick, S.T. Fiske (1999), "Sexism and other “isms”: Interdependence, status, and the ambivalent content of stereotypes", in W.B. Swan, J.H. Langlois, L.A. Gilbert (Eds),American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, pp.193 - 221).

I see that this article has been cited a bazillion times by just about everybody, so I'm coming late to the party, and anyone with even a casual interest in this subject already knows all about it, so my moment of enlightenment and self-awareness is going to be pretty self-evident to those people. Bear with me. This is not my field of study. My field of study is Greek tragedy. Which this pretty neatly fits into as well, but that's for another day.

Glick and Fiske note that stereotypes fall into two spheres, 'competence' and 'likeability'. Competence is assessed by membership in a group which is stereotypically assessed as 'competent'. 'Likeability' is assessed by group membership as well, but this time by whether the group is perceived as a source of co-operation or competition. So, Asians are believed to be competent because the group 'Asian' is stereotypically assessed as 'competent', without reference to the individual members. (I saw a t-shirt I loved on an Asian student a few weeks ago, I remark in passing; it said simply "I suck at math".) Women are assessed as "likeable" because their private-sphere job, as wives and mothers, is to be co-operative, compassionate, helpful, kind, loving, deferential and supportive. And these two spheres are conflicting, because being "competent" means that you are ((if you're not from the same group as the speaker) potentially a competitor, and therefore you are "unlikeable".

When stereotypes are merely descriptive, they will evaporate in the face of sufficient conflicting evidence. But when there is dependence on that stereotype - when someone needs it to be true - then it becomes a "prescriptive" stereotype, something that is believed to be true because it SHOULD be true, damn it, and then no amount of conflicting evidence will put a dent in it.    And in the case of the women, we have precisely such a prescriptive stereotype. Because there is all kinds of evidence, increasing and in every field, that shows that women are every bit as competent as men are; but the stereotype that women are nurturing, deferential, and 'likeable' - and therefore incompetent - is necessary as a basis for the dominant ideology. It is a social stabilizer. It keeps us in our place, nurturing and deferring. Even if women ARE competent, says the stereotype, they SHOULDN'T be; because that would make them not nurturing or deferential.

So, in a nutshell, we have Hilary Clinton's problem. Brilliant, competent as hell, but not real warm - actually, "and therefore" not real warm, says the stereotype. When I think about how much work she put into the razor-wire 'acting her gender' performance she had to put on I am in awe. Has to be demonstrably brilliantly competent, but has to show SOME emotion sometimes - but if she shows too much then she's probably going to break down in a crisis ("too warm"); but if she shows too little she's a bitch because women aren't supposed to be competent ... but Presidents are supposed to be competent ... so she can't win, either way.

Also, Krefting goes on to point out, prescriptive stereotypes work whether women obey or rebel, because rebellious women are punished, and the dominant ideology is served whether women support it (by complying) or are punished for not complying.

Now academic women, professional women, are in the same position as Hilary Clinton. Our career success depends on being assessed as both competent and likeable (not so openly true in Canada, or at least at some universities in Canada, where 'collegiality' is not one of the categories allowed to be explicitly assessed in tenure decisions; but there is still a subtext). But women can't be assessed as both competent and likeable, because the categories conflict. We are one or we are the other. So how competent can we be and still be considered likeable? Is there any way of being 'likeable' that does not involve being incompetent (and warm, nurturing, and the department Mom?)   Professional women have to negotiate a tricky path through this, all without ever acknowledging that it exists (since that would provoke indignant denials and label you unco-operative, hence unlikeable). We all choose different routes.

Mine is pretty obvious, looked at in that light. I published enough to get tenure - barely - and then I stopped.    It's taken me years to start again and it gives me nightmares when I do. Really.

In fact I still remember my grad school nightmare, just after I got this job, and I was elated and working hard at finishing the diss. and feeling competent and proud. And in my dream, two men showed up in my room. They were dressed in black; black turtlenecks. Commandos, or terrorists. I proudly showed them the work I was doing, all the notes I was taking; I was happy. And they looked at me, and didn't say anything, or smile. They took my notes and set fire to them, and set fire to my books, as I begged them not to. The books and the room were on fire. The men and the fire were between me and the door. I begged them not to leave me there. They left. I couldn't get out. I was going to burn to death. Even in the dream I knew that was a particularly painful way to die. And then I woke up.

Obviously, though, I did not wake up all the way.    Because after that my brief enthusiasm for my work vanished. I dragged my feet absolutely as long as I dared. It took me another 2 years to finish my diss., while teaching, and only the total terror of losing my job enabled me to finish it at all.

Even now, though I'm making a point of writing every morning, what I'm working on - at length - is a report that I will get no credit for, instead of working on an article that I WOULD get credit for, would even get promoted for, after many, many years as an assistant professor. And I know I'm doing this to avoid work on that article, because working on a real article, even now - well, how do I put this: it doesn't wake the monsters up but it makes them twitch in their sleep. It's unpleasant. I find myself avoiding it, without noticing. There's always one more non-article-writing (= non-threatening) thing that needs to be done first, and THEN the article.

On the other hand, you know, people like me a lot. I am a nice person. I am a good teacher. I am helpful, social, collegial, gregarious. I am NICE. I would never compete with you. I freely admit your professional superiority, you big strong handsome male academics, you. Nobody has ever set fire to my notes and my books and left me to die without even bothering to speak to me or acknowledge my desperate pleas. Nobody has ever felt any need to do that. Nobody sees me as competition. Believe me.

All of the usual reasons anyone has for not publishing are also working in me, of course. Fear that I have nothing to say worth hearing, uncertainty that the world really needs another literary article, many competing demands on my time; and sloth, which I naturally think is at the top of the list. But Krefting's article has caused me to consider whether there's more going on.

There is a factor the article didn't address, that I think complicates matters further. Women's strategies - how to appear competent enough but also nice enough to get the things we want without too much conflict, or too many negative consequences - vary from one woman to the next, but they are, generally, formed long, long before we ever reach our mature professional context (er, assuming the tight-rope act we were forced to perform allowed us to find one at all of course). My own strategies were formed in the sixties and seventies, at home, in grade school, high school, and undergraduate, all to some degree and in different ways misogynistic contexts.   By the time I found work my strategies were fully-formed, deep-rooted, and utterly non-self-reflective (if they hadn't been I would have noticed them sooner).

I am now, arguably, in a professional context where none of this was ever necessary at all. The men I work with are decent people, happy to acknowledge professional competence where they see it and happy to see female faculty as 'part of the team', not as competitors. I'd say. I have not tested this theory.

Unfortunately I learned how to be just competent enough, and not look threatening, a long time ago in other contexts entirely, and I got very good at the survival tactics I developed then. And I doubt I'm the only woman in this position. Those of us who grew up in the last half of the last century have seen things change a great deal in a short time for women; and it's been as hard for us to change with the times as it has been for men. The strategies we developed in childhood and adolescence may not be necessary now, but they have become habitual.

The world has changed, I think. I hope. I hope younger women are finding it easier, and that they don't have to develop these strategies, or not to the degree I found it necessary.

Okay, I admit it: it's been a scam all along

2011-02-12T14:08:00.000-08:00

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Our university is at the end of a 5 year "strategic plan" and is looking for another one. This time the buzzword is "knowledge mobilization", which means, boiled down, "how can what you do be instantly turned into somebody outside the university making money?"

Our new VPAC is not from humanities, seems to think that her job is to represent the government to the university rather than the university to the government, and is happy to ignore the recent evidence from (for example) Academically Adrift showing that the only students actually learning anything in university are in Humanities. They are the only ones coming out with enhanced writing, complex problem solving, and critical thinking skills. However, she has flatly told Humanities that we "have to come up with something better than 'we teach critical thinking'", because, after all, who the fuck cares if we have an educated electorate trained in sustained critical thought? (In fact, now I think about it, that's likely the last thing the current government wants.) What we want is proles who'll keep their heads down, stay on the assembly line, pay their taxes and not cause trouble. And since Humanities educations are, by and large, not DIRECTLY and IMMEDIATELY related to getting jobs that make lots of money, obviously, we humanities types are useless.

The key problem, it seems to me, aside from ideology, is the phrase "knowledge mobilization". How does a knowledge of, say, the uses of the Greek optative transfer DIRECTLY AND EMPLOYABLY into a useful skill? The answer is, of course, it doesn't. So we are useless and have been scamming students all these years, hoovering money out of their pockets, to say nothing of wasting the precious time and energy they could have spent learning computing or secretarial skills or slaughterhouse certification or something worthwhile, and giving them nothing in return.

But if the phrase were "SKILLS mobilization", or even 'skills and knowledge mobilization", the picture is quite different. Because the training a Humanities education gives a student is in sustained critical thought and complex problem solving, whatever the individual subject of study might be. And those skills are infinitely transferable. But apparently the government, and our new VPAC, doesn't grasp this (or doesn't want to).

And I find this sudden assessment of our work on an entirely different basis paralyzing. I looked at the article I meant to be working on this morning and thought, what is the point? Why read Aristotle? Nobody's going to make any money on it, and apparently I have no value to my culture if I'm not out there making money for someone. Why not just fire me and pay a sessional $5000 per course to shove as many students through as possible? Since apparently money is all that matters. Indeed, why $5000? Why not $1500 per course, which is normal sessional wages in the U.S.? After all, since we aren't teaching students anything useful, why pay anyone a living wage to teach it? Since it's a scam anyway, we're stealing money from student pockets in order to teach them something worthless, according to this new style of evaluation, and ought to be ashamed of ourselves for deluding students this way ...

I feel really sick. But the thing that makes me feel sickest is that I fear that my colleagues in Humanities are going to cave to this obscenity, and try to come up with ways we really DO make money for people. Making money is NOT our job. The whole point of academe is to have a group of people for whom money is not the ultimate goal. And if we forget that for one second we are cutting our own throats.

My rich and fulfilling fantasy life

2010-12-04T00:09:00.000-08:00

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It is my habit, in times of stress and overwork, to imagine a life in which I have free time and sufficient energy and concentration to do something with it.

In that imaginary life, I'm the kind of person who faithfully goes to bed at 10 or at latest 11, and gets up early to go for a run, because my classes have all been prepared the evening (or possibly even the week) before, so there's never a mad a.m. scramble of dear God I thought I had that lecture somewhere OMG I haven't even read the text yet where are the images! I was supposed to make up the exam when? and life proceeds on an even and cheerful keel and I even have time to get dinner going first thing in the morning, make the children's lunches, make sure they've got their homework (which, in this fantasy life, I helped them with the night before) and wave them off to school with a cheery smile before heading out myself. In this fantasy I am already dressed and have had breakfast before the children get up. In this fantasy, I suspect I got up at 4 a.m. But whatever.

In the fantasy, I have ample free time and the concentration and energy to do something with it. I'm not spending all this extra time that has mysteriously appeared in my life writing (or even reading) for publication, because the very thought of doing that causes me enough anxiety that I hastily shy away from it. I mean I can't even imagine, as a fantasy, enjoying doing that. And I truly do not enjoy reading most of the things that are published in my field anyway. These activities have no place in a fantasy life; they are very much Real World. They may be why I fantasize in the first place.

In this fantasy life, I sew a lot. Marvellous things. Mostly for me, though occasionally for my family. And during term time I find myself wistfully buying patterns, more and more patterns, as a promise to myself that the time WILL come that I will be able to muster the energy, and time, and concentration to make them all, every one of them.

This term my fantasy life has been particularly rich and compelling, thanks to a great pattern sale at Vogue (also Butterick and McCall's, but Vogue really caught my eye). Now I have never made a Vogue pattern - I have aspired to do so many times, judging from my pattern stash - but never actually tried. But my fantasy life has apparently decided that's what I want to do.

So, by way of sharing my fantasies, here are all the patterns I have bought this term; I mean since September. In my dreams, I have the time and even the skill to make every one of these things, and furthermore, they will all look fantastic.

These fantasy projects come in many different styles. There are the ones I might conceivably be able to make, and the ones so far beyond my skill set only complete ignorance would make me consider them. There are the ones I might even wear somewhere, and the ones that even if I could make them, I'd have to remake my entire image - not to mention my body - to take them out of the house. But still I'll tell myself, happily, "I could wear this to teach!" Or, "Ooh, just the thing for lounging about the house!" - as if I ever wear anything when lounging about the house besides old Course Union t-shirts* and yoga pants.

So here are this term's fantasies. I've bought every one of these patterns since September. If I quit my job and did nothing but sew, it would still take me a year - or so - to make them all:

*****
*My favourite is the one with the steatopygous Venus captioned "magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri."** I forget which year's union produced it.
** Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back", translated into Latin. For an interlineated translation, translated back into English for added hilarity, and with lengthy scholarly discussion in the notes (I'm not making any of this up), click the link.

(Patterns below the fold)

Butterick 5534. Looks easier than it is. As if I would ever wear a knee-length skirt with boots ... if I could fit the vest properly it might look good, but that's a big "if". And trousers are always harder than you'd think; if you don't want them to fit like pajamas, at least.

Butterick 5559. This one is actually pretty easy, except (as always) for the fitting issues, but those are easier with knits. What's not easy? Looking like that in it. But if I got it to FIT right it would be PERFECT, my inner optimist tells me ...

Butterick 5495. These baggy-around-the-waist things are all the rage right now, but I can't help but wonder. If I could wear it while pregnant, how likely is it to be flattering when I'm not? One has to ask.

McCalls 6084. Everyone seems to be wearing these. I actually made this one last month in some leftover fabric (my fabric stash dwarfs my pattern stash, and takes up a whole closet downstairs, neatly arranged by colour and fabric type - woven or knit?) I chose it because fitting is really not an issue with this thing, so I could just make it without fiddling with the pattern first. Easy, looked great, and my one main error in construction has not been spotted by anyone but me ...

McCalls 6163. In theory the style should look great on pretty well anyone. If you can get it to fit (waist & shoulders where they should be). In practice I am not sure it's going to be as flattering as all that. One way to find out would be, you know, to make it. Radical, I know ...

McCallas 6165. Not sure what I was thinking when I bought this, but I eventually realised it was not for me, and bought it again in a smaller size for my daughter, who is tall, willowy, and it will suit her perfectly. I also promised to make it for her. And have I? Right ...

Vogue 1019. Vintage pattern from 1945 I think. And here we step straight into fantasy land. There is simply no way I could make that jacket with less than a year's lead time. But it's so PRETTY!

Vogue 1072. A pattern from the 1940's, reissued. And still on Fantasy Island. Could I make that blouse/jacket? Can pigs fly?

Vogue 1136. Vintage 1947 I think. That dress wouldn't suit me even if I did make it (does it come with the wine glass?) The jacket is so far beyond my abilities that I might as well fantasize moving to Paris and starting my own couture house while I'm at it.

Vogue 2885, vintage 1944 (you can tell that it doesn't use as much fabric as the 1947 pattern). I just love this. It's described as "loose-fitting" - for what, a broomstick? It would look great on anyone. On the 4th try, because fitting that jacket would be a precision affair.

Vogue 2980. Now this I could probably make. And wear to work! I think excitedly. I'm sure I could figure out how to raise the neckline so it didn't fall off me every time I bent over! Absolutely I could!

Vogue 7837. I could make nightgowns for all the women in the family for Christmas! I thought. And use up some of the 14 miles of lace I bought at the closing sale of the local Stretch & Sew. Of course I already have five or 6 nightgown patterns, but no matter. Note the cute little bags on her feet (slippers, I think they're supposed to be.) Matching slippers, ooh! I could make those for everyone too! says my inner optimist ...

Vogue 7862. Actually useful, a travel bag with zippered pockets for stuff like your passport, cut to fit around your hip. Might try this one, particularly if I buy myself a MacBook Air and want a bag to carry it in.

Vogue 8643. Another vintage pattern; this one is 1952. Hostess aprons, just like your Mom probably never wore either! I can make one for everyone for Christmas! In gold lamé! It will be so cool!

Vogue 8685. There's no way I could carry off this dress in the version they've made up, but the red one (top left) would be nice, if it weren't that the two-piece waist would be a right bugger to fit. Possibly worth a try anyway though ...

Vogue 8686. Vintage 1932. Deep Depression, so low hemlines (why?) but a straight skirt, and that's not a jacket, it's a dress with a belt with some added fabric to look like one, so minimum fabric use all round. I LOVE this one. I would LOVE to make this one. It is, like all the other vintage patterns, fantastically (ahem) beyond my skill set, but I think I'm going to give it a try anyway. And since we're heading into another Great Depression it may well be fashion-forward by this time next year.

Vogue 8687. Vintage 1956. Cannot be worn without the haughty expression and raised eyebrow. Dress AND loose coat, so lots of fabric used, but we're in the prosperous 50's now and fabric is available. I love the dress; not sure about the coat; but wouldn't mind trying it.

Vogue 8689. Multiple sizings. I fall for these shirts every time, I think I have around 6 shirt patterns that I want to try out because it would be so nice to have even one shirt that actually fit me. But I haven't made any of them because learning how to fit the shirt would be such a pain ...

Vogue 9668. The sleeveless one would look ridiculous on me, but length with cap sleeves would be nice. If I could figure out how to fit the waist and bust.

Meanwhile, my actual sewing project, at this very moment in time, is a dressing gown for my daughter, made in 2 colours of fabric because I ran out of one and couldn't get any more, and she's grown 5 inches (really) since I cut it out a year ago so it will be too short anyway, and she will politely tell me she loves it, and I will know better ... so I've been avoiding making it for a year now, but I have to make that before I can make anything else. Also I owe my son a dressing gown too.

I mean that was part of their Christmas present LAST year, a promise that I would make them each a dressing gown. So ideally they should get them before THIS Christmas. And I may have to make my daughter two because she won't like the first one ...

But I really want to make Vogue 1019! Because it is so cool!

But first, I must set some exams and make up some syllabi ...

Lysias redux

2010-11-27T02:21:00.001-08:00

Murderer can't claim "provocation"

The similarities between this man's murder of his estranged wife's boyfriend after "catching them in the act", and then trying to claim provocation, and the protagonist of Lysias' "Against Eratosthenes", where the husband likewise murders the man in bed with his wife and then claims 'crime of passion', are stunning. Both knew perfectly well they would find their (ex)-wife in bed with another man, both were prepared to do so, both brought weapons to the house in preparation, and both tried to get away with it on the grounds that they were overcome by passion. Glad to see the court threw it out and are treating the murderer as precisely what he is.

the road to becoming a literary scholar in Classics

2010-11-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

This post comes of trying to explain my career path to a friend. You have to understand that I stopped taking English after grade 11 because I could not figure out WTF they wanted of me. I read all the time, I was happy to talk about books, but somehow whatever I wrote or said in English class was The Wrong Thing, but they would never explain to me how it was wrong. Or I didn't understand the explanation.

So my present job, teaching ancient Greek literature, is a bit of mystery to me. I continue to feel as if there is an English teacher at the front of the class frowning as I talk (or write) and then passing on to the next student without commenting. Eventually, then as now, I retreat into doodling in my notebook and daydreaming until class is over ... (click to embiggen:)

The career path diagram skips the "what about linguistics?" option because I never thought of that one, but if I had, I would have rejected it anyway because I liked the stories, not the syntactical structure.

Sunday post: the mission of the United Church

2010-11-13T15:08:00.000-08:00

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This is my Sunday blog post, a day early, and about 3 months late.

Last week’s service at my church brought in my university chaplain as a guest preacher. He is as it happens also the minister who married us, and I was delighted to see him again. Unfortunately the Mission and Service branch of the United Church has recently decided to cut all its funding to university chaplaincies, in favour of other priorities. The provincial council and the city presbytery still contribute, but 30% of the funding came from M&S, and the chaplaincy may be forced to close. So the Presbytery has authorized the chaplain to go to individual congregations talking about what he does, and why the chaplaincy is important, and begging for individual donations. His sermon reminded me once again of why, although I have flirted with Anglicanism (fantastic music!) and Catholicism (great mystics!), I keep coming back to the United Church.

His sermon was inspiring. He said that about 2/3 of the kids that come to university today (at least in these parts) have no faith background at all, not even one they have rejected. But university, and young adulthood generally, is a time when we come into contact with a lot of things that are bigger than we are - ideas, disciplines, whole schools of thought - and one of the things that you can come into contact with for the first time as a young adult, if you haven’t before, is God. Of course even those with a faith background from their childhoods will come into contact with God in a very different way as young adults. So young adulthood is a very important time in people’s lives, in which we all have many questions, and the opportunity exists for each of us to renew or reacquaint or acquaint ourselves for the first time with God.

While young people are searching for meaning practically by definition - that’s what one does in young adulthood - they are generally not going to come into a church to find their answers. It doesn’t cross their minds; they would need some kind of faith background to even have an idea that a church might be a useful place to look. Going to church isn’t even something their parents did; it’s something their grandparents did. So he can’t sit in the chapel expecting them to show up; he has to meet them where they are.

Nor do they respond to the traditional (fear-based, though he didn’t say it) approach of “you must read this Bible, convert, come to the altar and be saved”. What you need to do instead is assist them in their own search. Teaching spirituality as an intellectual pursuit doesn’t really work either. He’s found that the best way to assist students is to teach them the principles of a spiritual discipline or practice of some kind, which they can then follow on their own. So he teaches meditation and contemplative practices, runs workshops on ecological sustainability, spiritual diversity, nature mysticism, and encourages social activism. All these initiatives are very popular; there are on average forty people attending his meditation classes for example (which is more than I had in my tragedy class last time I taught it).

He’s encouraged by the number of students, with no previous spiritual background whatever, who have stayed in touch after they graduated to tell him what they’re doing with their lives. These students have clearly, over the course of their time at U.Vic, got not only an intellectual education, through their regular classes, but also with his assistance developed spiritual foundations for their lives. That, in a nutshell, he feels, is the function of the university chaplaincy.

I think he’s absolutely right. But more, I’m impressed that although he’s a United Church chaplain, he doesn’t seem to think that his basic function, or even part of his function, is to persuade people to come to the United Church. His mission is to teach them spiritual disciplines which they can use as foundations of their own later spiritual practice, to deepen their own experience of God, whatever that may be. They may become members of the United Church, or of some other church, or practice on their own; that’s up to them. He evangelizes in the broadest sense, but not narrowly or denominationally.

His own foundation is Christian, but he doesn’t try to force his version of God down people’s throats. Since he’s a Christian, he’s going to be presenting a Christian perspective in his work. Students will come into contact with Christian ideas and the United Church way of looking at the world through him. But his approach is a profoundly open and welcoming engagement - it’s not a “believe this or burn in hell”, or even a “come to the United Church (or even the Christian church) because it’s the only way”. He encourages students to find their own way, with the tools of spiritual practice that he assists them to acquire.

And this sermon reminded me of how very much I love the United Church, because this committed practice, but liberal theology, is exactly my own understanding of God, and of what God wants of us. The United Church believes that the function of a Christian is not just (or perhaps even) to sit at the service on Sunday, but to get out there in the world doing good work, practicing as a Christian, not necessarily evangelizing our own perspective, but giving people a chance to come to God as they understand God themselves - and in the meantime trying to make sure that people also have food, good water, a warm and safe place to live, and maybe malaria nets. I couldn’t agree with all of this more.

It may be that other churches are similarly liberal theologically; I don’t know. But I do know that the United Church is, and that is why I am a member. And it’s why I am going to contribute to keep the chaplaincy alive, because I think its work is essential.

my fantasy

2010-10-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

I admit, I got this out of Spider Robinson. So sue me, it's a great one, and warms my idle moments:

In this fantasy I meet my class on the first day and tell them "everyone gets an A. If you're on the roster, you get an A."

"But what about papers?" asks one student.

"Oh, sure, if you have an idea you'd like to work up I'll be very happy to critique it and look at your drafts".

"But that won't affect my grade?"

"No, everyone gets an A."

"What about exams?"

"What for?"

Silence. One student finally blurts out "but, then why should we come to class or do any readings or ...?"

"The pleasure of learning more about the text, of course. The pleasure of learning."

This would empty the class of about 98% of its members. The remaining 3 would be such a pleasure to teach ...

More interim True Blood research

2010-10-21T18:41:00.000-07:00

A chart of the scenes that satisfy the Bechdel-Wallace test in seasons 1 & 2 of True Blood.

Some idle thoughts:

1) Sookie isn't getting as many female-female scenes as Tara. But Tara is not only the B-story, she also symbolizes the "women's world", with which Sookie is only occasionally associated.

2) The spike in the middle is the first 2 episodes of S2, where we first meet Maryann, who spends a lot of time interacting with Tara. Once that storyline is established it's no longer necessary to keep giving us a lot of girl-girl scenes, apparently.

3) I really had to stretch it in the later episodes to give anyone any points at all, especially Sookie. Many of these scenes are quite literally 1 line from each female, and I have been giving 0.5 points if 2 female characters talk, but it IS about a man.

So for example in 2.7, Arlene and Tara talk, but about whether Arlene may have had sex with Terry; that's a half point. Later in that episode Maryann and Daphne speak very briefly, one line each.

Daphne: "I've missed you!"

Maryanne: "Thank you, for your service." And then she motions Eggs forward to murder Daphne.

I gave that 1 point.

Or in 2.10, "New World In My View", I gave one point for the conversation between Jessica and Hoyt's mom, but in fact the conversation is almost entirely between Hoyt and his mom, who is contemptuously ignoring Jessica while insulting her - to Hoyt. But the last two lines are between the two women:

Jessica: "Give me one reason not to drain you!"

Hoyt's Mom: "I don't have to give you nothin." And then Jessica fastens onto her neck.

I gave that 1 point.

I've also been counting conversations between women where a man is present, or conversations that are implicitly about men (e.g. the one between Jessica and Hoyt's Mom), but the man isn't explicitly named; just to be able to come up with some points.

In the last episode I gave 1 point to the confrontation between Maryann and Sookie, even though Sookie doesn't speak. (Maryann shouts "this is your fault" vel. sim. twice, and then tries to kill her. Sookie says nothing, and runs.) It was female/female interaction however, so I figured I'd give it 1 point.

4) In both seasons, Sookie has, early on, a fair number of female-female scenes, and then nothing. In S2 this happens faster. I'm wondering if what we're seeing here is a developmental arc: in each season, we start with Sookie situated in the childhood world, that is, the world of women, accompanied by her grandmother (S1) or her best friend since childhood (S2), and her female co-workers. But then she moves into the "adult" world, with the male boyfriend, the mostly-male vampires, and the women's world is left behind.

5) at the end of S2 Sookie has to be saved by male activity (Sam and Bill). At the end of S1 Sam and Bill try and fail to save Sookie, who ultimately saves herself.

Season 3 is coming: I haven't finished watching it yet.

interim research on True Blood

2010-10-18T00:21:00.000-07:00

Why yes, there ARE other things I should be doing right now, why do you ask?

Here is a graph of the number of scenes that pass the Bechdel-Wallace test in each episode of True Blood, season 1:

NB I didn't rewatch all the episodes, but have just relied on the HBO episode recaps to jog my memory; so some short scenes may have escaped me. I think though I've got them all.

Note that Sookie's interactions with other women decrease sharply after she loses her virginity (at least I'm guessing that that's the turning point), and in the last 3 episodes there are none. Tara, however, has not yet formed a secure relationship with a man, and in the last several episodes almost all the Bechdel-Wallace passing scenes involve her.

Single Feisty Females and the Bechdel-Wallace test

2010-10-17T16:15:00.000-07:00

A friend pointed out to me after watching True Blood 3.5 ("Trouble") that the show is becoming less and less Bechdel-Wallace-friendly. I had entirely missed this, because Sookie Stackhouse is still onscreen a fair amount (though, in Ep 3.5, not enough) . But the presence of one female on-screen does not make for female-friendly films, however positively that female is represented. And, in fact, the presence of one significant female character on-screen is a very common feature of Hollywood film-making; let's call it the Single Feisty Female Story Pattern.

Bechdel-Wallace Test

Any film passes the Bechdel-Wallace test (1) if it contains one scene in which

Two women
Talk to EACH OTHER
About something other than a man.

This is a blunt but remarkably effective tool to assess not only the importance but the role of female characters in a film. Any film, feminist or not, with strong female characters and any interest whatever in women’s stories, personhood or lives will contain many such scenes, but the bar is deliberately set low; one such scene will do to make a film pass the test. A film can pass the Bechdel-Wallace test without being female-positive, but it cannot pass without at least two female characters with a) speaking parts and b) an agenda that isn't entirely bound up with the story-line of the male characters.

The Single Feisty Female
The appallingly small number of movies that pass the Bechdel-Wallace test is obscured, for the viewer, by the presence, in many films, of the Single Feisty Female (2). This trope is particularly egregious (and reprehensible) in children's films, but may be found anywhere. The Single Feisty Female is a female character, often ostensibly central to the film. She may have quite a few lines, and may even be the lead or ostensibly the lead character in the film. However, she will be surrounded by male characters and will have no significant interaction with females. Her story is important because it is taking place in an entirely masculine world. (3)

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Thanks to my child-rearing activities in the last decade, I am much more conversant with children's movies than I used to be, and the Single Feisty Female is all over these, when there are any female characters in the film at all (by no means guaranteed, in the children's film genre. Think of "Up" (2009), after the first 10 minutes during which we are shown the main character's entire life with his beloved wife, ending with her death in old age, as a setup for the actual story.)

To choose a few examples: in the animated children's film "Bolt" (2008), the title figure, a dog, works with a Single Feisty Female child star. The dog itself is male - though there is no clear reason for this choice, as it's a dog with no physical gender-distinguishing features, the film is an animated feature, and most actual Hollywood dog stars are female - and all the dog's motley team of helpful hamsters etc. are male too. The girl does have a mother, who gets a single line, when the girl is offscreen. The whole 'important' story surrounds the (male) dog and his team of (male) talking animals. In the end the dog saves his mistress.

Or take "Meet the Robinsons" (2008), about the family that forms around a young orphan boy genius, in which we find a Single Feisty Female orphan girl genius, whose talents are however directed

Cover of Meet the Robinsons

entirely towards endearingly impractical ends (she is teaching frogs to sing in harmony), where the hero's genius is directed towards inventing machines that transform society and make him enormous piles of money. There is one other female character, but the two females never exchange a single line of dialogue and if I remember correctly (and no, I don't propose to rewatch the film to find out) are never on screen together. The SFF grows up to marry the hero (of course).

In Monsters vs. Aliens (2009), the appealing 50-foot female lead heroine, Susan, saves the world and is converted to feminism on realising what a jerk her ex-fiancée is. But every other member of her motley, colourful team of monsters is male, for no obvious reason (they're animated insects and blobs, you could easily give one or two girl names, but no ...); there is almost zero interaction between females at all (aside from Susan, there barely are any female characters). The movie passes the Bechdel-Wallace test on the strength of a single line, from her mother, who says "Sweetheart, I always knew you'd grow up to - uh - save the world, or something ..."

Image by Brave Heart via Flickr

For an adult example, consider "Inception" (2010), in which Ariadne, a single female figure, is (we are told) a better dream architect than the lead male, is the lead male's conscience, guide, helper, etc etc - in fact, is everything but the lead character herself. But Nolan, the director, does not make films about women; in fact, given his track record, she's lucky she didn't die. Ariadne's importance lies in her importance to the story of the men in the film, and her effect on the otherwise all-male mission. She has one short conversation with an ostensibly female character who is, however, really a projection of the subconscious of the (male) protagonist.

To take a well-known and much-loved example, consider The Princess Bride (1987). It's well-known that the Princess Bride does not pass the Bechdel test. (5) But we do not notice the lack of any interaction between women in the film, because we're distracted by the Single Feisty Femaleness of the title character.

As an exercise to the reader, however, recall the scene after the wedding, when Buttercup is being escorted to the honeymoon suite by the king and queen, Prince Humperdinck's parents. The queen makes a couple of remarks to the king (thus establishing that she isn't mute, something we otherwise would not know). Buttercup has a brief conversation with the old and very deaf king, thanking him for his kindness to her and telling him she's about to commit suicide. The queen is a couple of steps ahead, offscreen, during this conversation. With that scene in mind, here is your exercise:

Imagine that Buttercup's brief conversation is not with the king but with the queen. How does that change the scene? How would it change the entire film, to give Buttercup one scene, however brief, with a supportive female character?

For other egregious examples, consider the popular sub-genre of female-action-figure films: Lara Crofts (2001); Salt (2010); Aeon Flux (2005). All of these have strong, in fact ass-kicking, female leads, none of whom ever talk to another female. There is, not infrequently, no other female

Image by alfredituzz :B via Flickr

character in the film to talk to, though there is occasionally a fridged female victim to jar our hero into action (as in Aeon Flux). But anyone can think of 50 Single Feisty Females without much effort; it's a very old pattern. (His Girl Friday (1940), anyone?)

The Single Feisty Female is, in all these imaginary worlds, operating in an entirely or all-but-entirely male environment. All of the other significant characters are male - indeed, all of the characters period may be male. The writers may honestly feel that they have successfully crafted a female-positive film because there is an important, even central, female character.

However, when that female is alone, in a masculine world, and all of her significant interactions are with men, the message is really that the only interesting stories are those that take place in the world of men. (4) Women are significant when they are in masculine space, interacting with men, because stories about men are assumed without argument to be inherently interesting. A woman interacting with men becomes an honorary man - a significant and interesting character - because of, and for the duration of, that interaction.

But a woman interacting with other women is not interesting. It's not a story if it doesn't involve a man, in the same way that it's not sex if it doesn't involve a penis (6). And the Single Feisty Female trope, far from reinforcing positive female role models, reinscribes the dominant paradigm, in which only men's stories matter. (7)

Now, in a television series, with a lot more time and a lot more characters, it is easier to get away from the "Single Feisty Female" trope, because you will (possibly) have more females who can sometimes interact. But many TV series do not take advantage of this opportunity. For an analysis of webs of female interaction (or the lack of them) in a few favourite series (Buffy, Xena, Star Trek:TNG; Babylon 5; Angel in the comments) see Gabrielleabelle's charts here, and further charts, revised and with comparisons to networks of male interaction here. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one need hardly add, passes the Bechdel-Wallace test with ease in every single episode. )

Next post, True Blood and the Single Feisty Female.

----------

Notes

(1) NB the link will send you to a site with a modified version of the test which also stipulates that the female characters should have names. This is not the original version of the test, and I don't think it's a necessary addition. It raises the bar on a test that deliberately, for its shock value, sets it low. And frankly I'd be happy to see a scene in which two unnamed women discuss ammunition, or legal loopholes, or gender stereotyping in the media, as they pass in a hallway. You won't see these scenes, though.

(2) I've looked through TVTropes and can't find this one, but may have simply been looking in the wrong place. If anyone can find a TVTrope describing a strong, confident, central female character who is, however, entirely surrounded by male characters and never interacts meaningfully with another female character, often because there are none, please send me the link and I'll edit accordingly.

(3) All female protagonists in Greek tragedy are Single Feisty Females. The Greeks had an excuse for this, of course: the plays were being put on at a men's religious festival, in front of a male audience, by male actors occasionally cross-dressing as girls. Naturally the plays interest themselves in the world of men. Hollywood has no such excuse.

(4) Masculine space - so defined by the presence of men rather than women in it - is generally, I add parenthetically, represented as public space - outdoors, public buildings, outdoor chase and fight scenes. Domestic space is often not represented, or is represented with women in it, who quickly fall out of the story. The Athenians would be right at home with this representation of the division of space by gender, I add in passing. Sometimes I despair. Have we come any distance at all in the last 2500 years?

(5) See here (bechdeltest.com) for discussion of whether or not the conversation between Buttercup and the old woman for some reason universally described as "the witch", though all she seems to be is old, poor and ill-kempt, passes the Bechdel-Wallace test. The general consensus is that it does not, because a) the conversation is about Westley and b) it is only Buttercup's dream in any event, so really a conversation she is having with herself - about a man. )

(6) I really cannot get away from that analogy here; I think that is the underlying association. A woman interacting as an equal with men has been given an honorary phallus, for the duration of the story. No phallus, no story. And while "phallus", as post-Freudian feminist analysts have shown, does not have to = "penis", but rather is the abstract quality "ability to function as in independent adult in society", in the orthodoxy of Hollywood film-making, "phallus" still has a one-to-one correspondence with "penis", and penis-owners are therefore the only things worth representing.

(7) It was when my daughter realised this - she was around 8 - that she stopped wanting to watch children's movies, except for anything by Miyazaki, a consistent and honourable exception in his portrayal not only of significant female characters but significant interactions between them.

A Mary Sue that actually works

2010-10-03T00:40:00.000-07:00

On the Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test , by my scoring, Sookie Stackhouse scores 144. Now maybe I scored her a little high on some questions; when I wasn’t sure, I gave her a point. Still, the fact remains that on that test, anything above 50 is scored as “Kill it dead” (i.e. "irretrievable, unrevisable Mary Sueness detected"), and I may have given her 5 extra points, but I sure didn't give her an extra 94 . Sookie is an over-the-top Mary Sue.

What is a Mary Sue? Here is a quick rule of thumb (for more information, go to the Wikipedia article on Mary Sues):

if everyone in your story immediately likes (or loves) your character, but no obvious reason is given why they should do so (because it never occurred to the author that they wouldn’t, is the likely answer), then you have probably written a Mary Sue.
But if every attractive member of the opposite sex appears to have been introduced into the story for the sole purpose of falling in love with the character, then you have definitely written a Mary Sue.

There are other standard characteristics of a Mary Sue - unusual, usually supernatural powers that qualify her to move freely as a valued member of a high-status community, though she has never been properly valued in her own world; unsuspected links to the nobility of that high-status community; etc - that are unnecessary, but that Sookie also has. Let's just accept that Sookie Stackhouse qualifies as a Mary Sue wildly, overabundantly and in spades.

Now the reason to avoid writing Mary Sues is because they are, among other things, very very dull. But I can’t stop watching the show. It can’t be only because if I watch long enough Eric will swan by the camera in his black tank top again; eye candy is the one thing Hollywood gets right and loads all productions with, so I could be watching practically anything to see an Eric-equivalent. So I have been wondering why.

And while wondering, I was re-watching Ep. 3.2, (“Beautifully Broken” - go here for the hilarious io9 recap), in which Bill Compton responds emotionally, and homicidally, to a threat to Sookie’s welfare; Eric the outrageously beautiful psychopath responds emotionally (!) to seeing Sookie cry and later shows up at her house and offers to have sex with her in addition to protecting her from whatever bad guys are out there, a duty he’s taken on himself for the manifestly made-up excuse that he owes her one. And Tara meets what looks like a bad vampire. As opposed to the good ones Sookie hangs out with. Though actually they weren’t good vampires before they met Sookie, and Eric at least is only good to her, so Sookie must (once again) be EXTRA-SPECIAL ...

So, total Mary Sue. At this point I really don’t need to keep looking for verification. So why do I keep watching?

Here is my theory. First, Sookie is a Mary Sue in the original novels, and the TV series, although it can and does make major revisions to the novels, can’t entirely overcome that original characterization. However, the TV series is very well written and overcomes the limitations of the Mary Sue as much as it can, largely by giving Sookie sufficient in the way of virtue, courage, loyalty, intelligence, persistent dignity, and genuine generosity of character that it’s reasonable that people would respond positively to her.

But second, it’s because Anna Paquin is a simply marvellous actor. She entirely sells you on Sookie Stackhouse as genuinely being all those things.

And the result of these two factors - superior writing and brilliant acting - is that Sookie Stackhouse has become that rarest of fictional creatures, the Mary Sue that actually works and can carry a story, for the simple reason that the audience joins all of those onscreen in liking her, being fascinated by her, and in general wishing her well; which clouds our ability to ask why on earth everyone on-screen feels that way.

As I watched 3.2, I was only really happy when Sookie was on-screen. The rest of the time, I was waiting for her to come on-screen, a little bored, because she's the only thing I'm really watching for. In this my mental state matched that of the characters. Bill may not be with Sookie but he thinks about her all the time and waits impatiently for the next time he’ll see her. So does Eric. Sam is pre-occupied now but last season he was literally ready to die for her. The only scenes I didn’t spend impatiently waiting for Sookie to get back on-camera were the ones with Tara and Lafayette (both of whose lives she’s saved), largely because, hey, Lafayette, talk about a scene-stealer ... Even Terry tries to protect her.

So because my emotional state - where is Sookie? Is Sookie okay? Will Sookie get what she wants? Is Sookie going to be happy? Oh no, she’s crying! Must fix whatever’s making Sookie cry! - mirrors that of every damn character on screen, all of whom love her, I find it very hard to question why it is they all feel that way. Her essential Mary-Sueness, her “to see her is to love her and to love but her forever” core, slips by me unnoticed, because I am a full participant in it.

So, hats off to whoever signed Paquin to play that part. Because I can’t imagine that anyone else could pull off a Mary Sue so well.

***

p.s. It has become clear to me, on reading the io9 recap, that other people may not be watching the series for Sookie Stackhouse. I can only say, what? What else would you watch it for? :) (Besides Eric's tank top I mean.) But also, I sure hope we don't get much more vampire politics, because io9 is right: dull.

Sookie is a darling, but she's no Buffy Summers

2010-09-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

Image by §atsukiame via Flickr

Buffy and Sookie are both the One Girl: the ones with an unique Gift. But from there the stories diverge sharply.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a myth, about the girl whose gift saves the world over and over without being able to save, or even at the expense of, pretty much everything anyone conventionally cares about (social status, money, education, her mother's life); and then she doesn't even get to die, she has to carry on and live in the world and keep on saving it. It's about growing up and becoming an adult and accepting adult responsibilities and setting aside your own ambitions, when you have to, in order to fulfil those responsibilities, even when it's very hard.

The romantic relationships are the emotional engines here, and they figure her relationship with both the supernatural world and her own responsibilities, but they are not the point. "Buffy Grows Up" is the point.

Buffy herself is an outsider who never gets into the In Crowd. Her friends are all geeks and nerds too, and although she moves in the supernatural world, she never loses track of her friends or the people she loves, never moves entirely into the supernatural world. She does not, say cast off her human acquaintance like worn-out dishrags as soon as she meets her coolio new supernatural friends. Her Gift does not give anyone reason to love her; quite the contrary. Buffy's Slayerness gets in the way of her social life. She's the weird kid with the troubled past, who blew up her last high school, who is an outsider, and she stays that way.

True Blood, by contrast, is no myth. It's a romantic fairy tale (literally as it turns out, to which I can only say "ewww" (see note, below)). It's about the Ugly Duckling who turns out to be a swan, the goose girl that the local prince notices because of her ability to spin thread into gold, or something, and who uses her magical plot device to successfully moves into aristocratic (= supernatural) circles, casting off her human family and friends (not that she had many) like worn-out shoes in the process, as soon as the opportunity arises. It's about the nerdy girl in high school who uses her unsuspected talent for (plot device) to leverage herself into being able to eat with the Cool Kids. (Maybe vampires are supposed to = disadvantaged, lower class, black groups in True Blood, but they don't really seem to. Bill Compton is old aristocracy with excellent manners; Eric is 1000 year old Viking coolness with very good manners when he's not ripping someone apart with his bare hands and eating them raw. Both of them are much more interesting, cooler, and, it would seem, better-raised than any human in Bon Temps. )

As the books progress, humans are completely unimportant as far as I can tell. They're doing a better job in the series, by giving her a brother, and giving a new vampire, Jessica, a human boyfriend, and these all seem so far to be continuing characters. But True Blood Degree Zero, the books, have no real interest in humans. Humans are the lower-class nerds and geeks, and Sookie can't shed them fast enough. Sookie is taking her adult role as major player in the Cool Kid world. The story is simply about social advancement.

Where the romances are not the point in Buffy, they have to be the point in True Blood, because they are the mechanism that propels Sookie into the Cool Kids lunch table. Buffy is already fighting the good fight among vampires etc before she ever meets Angel. If anything he gets in the way of the mission. Sookie is brought into her new (= "true") social circle (since she's "natural aristocracy", literally, we eventually find out) because she and Bill fall in love. And when they break up another ship will be required to keep her in that world.

True Blood is, then, a highly conventional romance: it is a parable about social advancement in which our heroine finds her "true level", and she finds that true level through marrying up. The story is ultimately self-serving, for our heroine, and it is conventional, because the mechanism is marriage (or the equivalent). The point is not to save the world, but simply to move Sookie into her "true level"; and she gets to do so not because she belongs there by right, but because the males there find her attractive. (If you're female, it doesn't matter if you can spin straw into gold if the local prince doesn't hear about it and marry you. )

Buffy was about the mission, with romance on the side. If you take the romances away from Sookie she's got no reason to carry on dealing with supernaturals at all. She HAS no mission, beyond finding a suitable mate. Now, I like Sookie a lot (even though the social-advancement part of the story kinda turns my stomach), and it would be nice if she found a good mate; but hers is a completely different story from Buffy's.

But fans, even (especially?) women, want Buffy's story to be all about the romance too. We want the romance to be the point, because that is the only story we have ever been trained to think one can tell about a woman.

In the conventional story about women - to use fairy tales, again, as a handy example - the only important choice a woman gets to make is at the threshhold of adulthood (since "marriage" is, in these stories, the rite that initiates women into the adult world), in her choice of marriage partner, because that will define her entire future life, social status, and happiness. And we also tell many romances - they became conventional in the first place - partly because courtship is the only place where a woman's choice will acceptably have a major effect on a man's life, and men's lives are, in Western convention, the only ones we really think deserve to have stories told about them.

We are trained readers of this sort of story; it is overwhelmingly the only story we see about women, and we expect it. So Buffy's story, which didn't follow that pattern, was dissatisfying to many of us. (I'm including myself here because so did I, frankly; I wanted Buffy's story to have a "happy ending", and such is my training as a reader that I found it hard to accept that saving the world, and all her friends, and being able, at long last, to get on with her adult life, was "happy ending" enough.)

It may be that it's particularly women who felt this way about Buffy, because our training in conventional story patterns has led us to accept and welcome the idea that we do at least have the power in courtship, if nowhere else; and the object of that power is to acquire a suitable permanent partner. A story which does not give our heroine a permanent partner then looks like a story in which our heroine has failed - either did not have the power, or failed to exercise it. It looks, through the lens of the Western romance story pattern, as if our heroine has been robbed of her power in the only area the fairy-tale pattern ever gives women any power at all. Even Mulan, having saved China single-handedly twice, has to be given a handsome captain as a husband at the end of the story.

We're missing the point that Buffy DOES have power in a thousand other areas that the heroines of conventional romances do not, and that her story is quite literally empowering, in that it, duh, gives her powers, and stories, that women don't traditionally get. But the conventional story pattern has taught us to see only one power as appropriate for women, and if the heroine fails to exercise that, then she has been disempowered; she is a failure.

Sookie's story, by contrast, is following on exactly the lines of conventional romance. Her story is about mating; her power (despite her unusual Gift(s)) consists in her ability to choose a partner. And so the camera hesitates in slow, luxurious slow-motion over the moment of that choice; because that is the only power women conventionally have, and women, like men, like to see stories in which they are represented as having power. But once Sookie ultimately uses that power, by choosing a permanent mate, she has relinquished it; that moment of power, of maximum erotic tension, evaporates precisely when it is finally used. Since it's the power that interests the (female) viewer, not the choice itself, the moment of choosing is endlessly delayed - for ten books now, and counting. (For another and particularly egregious example of the "delayed choice" solution to the problem of the romance genre, consider Janet Evanovitch's "Stephanie Plum" novels.)

This problem, this paradox, lurks at the core of the 'romance' story pattern. Women's only power, in the romance, is erotic, and it is relinquished (into the male's control) the moment she finally uses that power to choose a permanent mate. However, failing to choose a mate also constitutes the failure of the pattern. The story is disappointing if she does not ultimately mate, and also if she does. There is, in the conventional romance, no way that a woman can use her power and also keep it; either way, she is stripped, by the end of the story, of the only independent power she had. Still, women read and watch romances by the millions because romances do, at least, show women wielding power, if only temporarily, and only the only kind of power 'good' women are allowed to hold in conventional Western stories, before they give it up. We read these stories faut de mieux, because they are all we have.

But Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows us that these stories are not all that we CAN have. The solution to the "romance" paradox - that the only power women can have is erotic, and successful wielding of that power consists in relinquishing it to male control - is not to endlessly linger over the woman's choice of partner, but to represent her as having other powers that matter, frankly, more. The solution is to have stories in which women have more than one route to adulthood.

Women become adults in Western conventional stories through the initiation rite of marriage, as I said above. But in marriage, they submit their (erotic) power to male control. This aspect of marriage was quite conscious in, for example, ancient Greek thought, where the same word (damazo) was used of taming a wild animal, breaking a horse, and marrying a wife; and it is still implicit in Western story patterns (whether or not it is true of the actual institution of marriage). So women, in the conventional Western romance, can only become adults by relinquishing the only power they are represented as having - control over their own erotic potential - to male authority. Adult women are either subordinate to a male authority, or they are evil (but that's the subject for another post.)

Buffy's story gave us another option. Buffy is undeniably good - saving the world seven times gives you a certain amount of street cred - but she enters adulthood without the traditional initiation rite of marriage, and with all her powers intact and firmly in her own control. We need more stories like Buffy's.

But True Blood, I can confidently predict, is not going to be one. The climax of that story will be "Sookie (eventually, after a lot of dithering and gratuitous but admittedly entertaining sex) gets married." I do wish that, like Buffy's, the climax to her story was going to be "Married or not, Sookie grows up".

***
Note:
Guaranteeing Sookie a high-status mate because of the magical zingy wonderfulness of her love-potion fairy blood is incredibly lazy writing (like Bella's wonderful smell), but it sure tells us what the important point is for Sookie's story (and Bella's). Both have an inherent characteristic, like the incredible beauty of all those Most Beautiful Girl In All The World fairy-tale princesses, that is completely outside their control, and has nothing to do with virtue, skill or character. This characteristic, whatever it is (let's call it the Black Box of Lazy Writing) has multiple functions, and so is very handy shorthand for the Lazy Writer (TM) who doesn't feel like interrogating any of their assumptions:

It makes the holder irresistible to high-status males, and thus can be manipulated to increase the heroine's social standing through a marriage into a higher social class. Though of course Good Girls (TM) will not use their BBLW to manipulate anyone; ideally they don't even know they have it; because heaven forfend that a female be shown using her own powers for herself. Only evil women do that. Still, it gives her choices most of us don't have.
For high status men, the BBLW is both both in itself attractive, and invaluable as a status marker for the hero who proves his worth by successfully attaching the woman who has it.
And finally, use of the BBLW to explain a male's attraction to the female love object in all these stories has the happy side effect of removing from the story any necessity for the heroine to have a character, a personality, or an independent will. Sookie DOES have an independent will and a strong - and admirable - character, but in terms of the conventional plot we are following here, these are irrelevant.

But I digress.

Sunday post: the morality of makeovers

2010-09-21T20:21:00.000-07:00

Image by BitchBuzz via Flickr

Apologies in advance: this is a bit rambling ...

I've just stumbled across an interesting blog, "Irresponsibility", and a recent post there "
God in Your TV-The Insidious Morality of Make-Overs".

It's a good and thought-provoking article. It analyses the narrative of makeover shows, which, it accurately demonstrates, don't simply take some poor schlub whose clothes sense needs retuning and gently and co-operatively help her (almost always her) do that. Instead these shows create drama by ambushing the ~~victim~~ lucky participant, remorselessly abusing, badgering and insulting them into confessing they look like hell, throwing out all their clothes, and then rewarding them with a new hairstyle/ shopping spree/ makeup session - even, in the more intensive shows, to plastic surgery, new eyes and teeth, for which the vic weeps tears of gratitude.

This process, the article cogently argues, follows a very old pattern - the Christian sequence of sin, confession and redemption through a higher power : "Break it down and the millennia-old pattern emerges: confession, renunciation, purification, submission, and redemption. Christianity, repackaged for a culture that worships shopping malls." And the point of these shows is not merely to teach people how to dress, but to " construct social order. They exist not merely to dispense style tips and business advice, but to reinforce behaviours and ideologies that benefit the dominant culture" - consumerism and submission to an external authority. The next paragraph is worth quoting in full:

Anglo-American culture can do without God, but it cannot do without the ordering force of religion. To maintain a profoundly unequal society the minority has to convince the majority they deserve their second-class status. For centuries the Church held off the peasantry by promising them treasure in heaven if they submitted to their divinely appointed place on earth. Now, the elite no longer have God in their corner, nor heaven to promise. This makes fire-and-brimstone social control impossible; the powers-that-be have to persuade the majority to internalise oppression. It makes perfect sense to invoke the rhythms of religion, to create a secular liturgy that – like the old, sacred version – reassures people a higher power knows best, and urges them to accept stricture, and delay gratification, in hope of a future reward."

I think this is a fascinating insight. And it does make sense that makeover shows would, at their hearts, be a secular version of the radical spiritual transformation, through grace and submission, which is the heart of Christian faith.

I take issue however with the title. This profoundly consumerist secular transformation via makeover shows, where the reward of the appropriately penitent reformed worshipper is a shopping spree at Saks, has nothing to do with God (obviously enough, and the author doesn't claim it does). But the sad but undeniable function of the Church in the middle ages, and earlier, and later, to co-operate in and bolster social control of the masses had nothing to do with God either. That was the abusive appropriation of religious power for secular ends no less - in fact, much more - than the vulgarization and mercantilization of the process in makeover shows, rightly pointed out by this article.

I think the author is right, in that the narrative of accusation, abuse, confession, repentance, submission to authority, and redemption is one that is built into the fabric of Western society. It's a story pattern we're all very familiar with and if it did not originate in the Church it certainly has strong parallels there. It's one they can rely on to supply emotional punch in makeover shows because we are trained readers of this pattern; we can spot it a mile away in any form, and it comforts us.

But the article goes farther, and implies, or perhaps assumes, I think, that the misuse of this story pattern demonstrates that God does not exist. (For example, this line - "Now, the elite no longer have God in their corner, nor heaven to promise" - presumably implies not only that people no longer believe in God or heaven, but that God and heaven don't exist.) And one can understand and sympathize with the author here. The many evils done in God's name or by means of a story pattern we associate with religion cannot help but destroy faith.

Nevertheless, it is a false implication. The misuse of that story pattern - by the church, in the service of the elite and a hierarchical social order, or by a ten-cent makeover show, or by anyone else - does not demonstrate that God does not exist. The elite no longer have God in their corner, true; but they never did; that was organized religion. God was never in the elite's corner. God is equally and always in everyone's corner. Heaven is in God's hands where it always was. As organized religion loses the secular power it should never have had in the first place, that point will become increasingly clear.

Holy cow, the victim-blaming here truly boggles the mind

2010-09-14T23:11:00.000-07:00

Surrey man apologizes for killing stepsons

The criminal murdered his 15 and 17 year old stepsons Ranjit and Amarjit Gill, shooting one while he slept and the other in front of his mother as he called out to her to help him, and then beat the mother, his wife Sukhwinder, nearly to death and slashed her throat with a butcher knife. She is disabled for life.

I grant you that the victim-blaming is done by the defence lawyer, whose job (I suppose) it is to find some kind of mitigating circumstances. The prosecution is asking for 20 years without parole. The defense wants 10 years without parole because the criminal is 68 and will certainly die in prison with a 20 year sentence. Still, listen to this:

Chamberlain argued (the criminal) was fundamentally a good man but was at the "end of his tether" after being burnt continuously by love. Divorced by his first wife and ditched by the second, Singh was ill-equipped to deal with the spurning of his third wife, Sukhwinder, shortly after she and her two sons arrived in Canada. She was about to leave him when the murders occurred.
"This woman did not engage in a marriage other than a sham and she treated this man infamously," Chamberlain said.

Particularly given the stigma attached to divorce in the Indo-Canadian community, one has to wonder why his first two wives divorced him. Well, one doesn't have to wonder, given what he did to the Sukhwinder. But it still takes a hell of a lot of gall, even for a defence lawyer, to claim that it was Sukhwinder's fault he SHOT HER SONS AT POINT BLANK RANGE, in front of her, and then beat her nearly to death and almost decapitated her.

The prosecution has a clearer grip on matters:

But Crown Don Wilson said any consideration the judge gives to Singh's age in making her decision "pales when one thinks of the circumstances of this event."
"[Sukhwinder] is not responsible for the deaths of her 15 and 17 year old sons," he said. "Let's be clear. Whatever this man says she was doing to him ... is in no way an explanation for the murder of the 15 and 17-year-old sons of the woman he says deceived him."

I hope the judge is thinking clearly too.

demographics, or why we parents are doing everyone a favour

2010-09-08T23:43:00.000-07:00

Still pursuing this question of what good parents do their culture. Are we all really just narcissistic jerks having children for our own amusement and benefit, who deserve no assistance in our self-indulgent reproductive agenda?

Here's an article from 2006, on what's going to happen in Canada if the fertility rate - currently between 1.3 and 1.7 - doesn't get up to replacement level. By 2015, there will be more people over the age of 65 than there will be under age 15. Graphed by age, Canada's population will look like an inverted pyramid. Who's going to support the elderly? That is, us? Good question.

A couple of bits from the article:

What's most interesting is that the most serious decline in fertility is affecting those whom the nation would most like to see as parents. The highest-paid, highest-educated women are forgetting about motherhood entirely or seriously reducing their number of desired offspring in what has been called a revolution in fertility. ... higher-income, professional women aren't marching with their feet to protest the dearth of truly family-friendly policies; they are responding pragmatically by first delaying child-bearing and then having only one child or remaining childless.

These missing 'family-friendly' policies are precisely the ones that my sister-in-law's childless co-workers object to as 'perks'. Why should there be family health insurance/ onsite day care/ maternity or paternity leave/ absences to take care of sick children? they argue. After all, the childless aren't benefitting by these policies, so they're unfair. In the larger social context of "policies that it might be a good idea to put in place, to persuade women to have children at all", however, these policies make sense. All working mothers already know what recent research has demonstrated ("Mothering and the Workplace"), that childless women advance faster in their careers; that for women, success in a career vs having children is a choice, and one that they tend to delay making. Women delay having children, have fewer children, or have none. This is demographically a time-bomb.

Margaret Somerville argues that

... delaying or avoiding child-bearing as just another aspect of society's drift toward a culture of "intense individualism," where children are seen more as "a desirable thing to have, rather than as new individuals to repopulate the world."

In a culture driven largely by the rights of adults to reproduce on their own timeline, to have access to the technology that affords reproduction at later ages, to limit reproduction in order to better pursue a career path, what may have fallen by the wayside is the consideration of the greater good for society, Prof. Somerville says.

This may be part of the reason for the lower fertility rates, but Prof. Somerville is missing some practical concerns. A recent British study found that the reason women were delaying motherhood wasn't because they were being selfish individualists who didn't want to benefit their society, but because they didn't have the money to support one. It is all very well to say that people ought to be willing to make sacrifices for the good of their society, but when it comes to parenting, at least in Canada, the sacrifices are overwhelmingly made by women. Those that have the opportunity to delay motherhood and thus decrease its negative effects on their careers and lifetime incomes are rationally likely to do that.

The rational social response is to increase the incentives for women to have children. Increase family-friendly policies in workplaces; subsidize child care and make it well-paid; stop penalizing women for "selfishly taking time off work" for maternity leave; that sort of thing. If they were doing any of these things in Japan, their current age-demographic graph wouldn't look so much like a mushroom. As it is, women in Japan are overwhelmingly choosing to have one child, or none.

What are the results of the imploding fertility rates in Japan? To quote the same article:

The economy will not be able to get enough skilled work force for its manufacturing and services sectors. Labour would become costlier, increasing the cost of production. There will be more elders to tend, straining the medical and pension systems. The social sector expenditure by the Government will have to increase. By 2025, it is expected that there will be two dependents for every three workers. A drastic fall indeed from 1:12 in the year 1950. The dwindling work force would also result in lower purchasing power and reduced demand for goods and services. The domestic market will shrink, production will fall, as will the Government’s revenue, forcing it to manage higher medical and pension expenses with a lower income.

Family-friendly policies are not 'unfair perks for selfish jerks' who self-indulgently decided to pop out a sprog or too. They're essential to maintain society; to make women willing - and able - to have children and raise them. Parents are doing a massive social good in bearing and raising children, and it is the job of society to encourage us to carry on the good work. Otherwise, fewer and fewer of us, particularly women, will choose to do it.

On the contributions of parents, economic and otherwise, to society

2010-09-04T18:59:00.000-07:00

I've been asked to find articles or studies that back up the (to me obvious) contention that parents contribute a great deal to the economy, through their enormous (and unpaid) contribution in child-rearing labour - that child-rearers are doing something of value, not only for themselves, but for their society.

The notion that parents contribute to society seems self-evident to me, but of course it isn't to everyone. The prevailing notion, particularly in the US, where child-bearing behaviour, especially in women, is ruthlessly penalized in the workplace, seems to be that those who bear and rear children are not performing a service to society. Rather, they're selfishly and self-indulgently choosing to indulge in an expensive and time-consuming hobby - on a par with, say, building a sailboat - that they really shouldn't expect anyone else to cut them any slack for. If you choose to pop out a sprog, it's your business and your problem, seems to be the idea; we'll give you six weeks to get over childbirth, which we are willing to do you the favour of considering a medical condition, albeit a self-induced one, you selfish jerk. But after that you're on your own.

In fact without the selfish behaviour of parents like me, the economy, not to mention the entire civilization, would grind to a halt in a single generation. To name one contribution parents make, but perhaps an important one.

One approach is to consider the value of unpaid labour - much of which is the care of other people, mostly children, in the home - to the GDP. In fact until the 1860's in the US, "homemaking" was considered a very valuable economic contribution to a family, as Mary Peake points out  . As long as the largest proportion of the economy was supplied by family farms, it was clear that every able-bodied member of the farm family was doing work of economic value to the whole. AFter the 1860's, when labour was increasingly done in wage-earning jobs by males, "work" became wage-earning behaviour, generally by men, and "homemaking", which remained unpaid, no longer counted.

The basic assumptions of traditional economics, and their devastating effect on valuing the unpaid work, in childcare and otherwise, of (primarily) women, can be found here (and various other places, but this is a convenient and well-laid-out article). Women's unpaid work is estimated to contribute 41% of the GNP in Canada (and the entire article is worth reading); but none of it "counts". To be unpaid is to be considered economically completely inactive, not only by your culture, but sadly, by your family, and even yourself, and to be treated that way by a government that (for example) awards you a pension based on your contributions from your years as a paid worker, and gives you not a cent for all the years you spent taking care of other people - so that they could work, or go to school and get an education and then go out and work - without getting paid for it.   (Ask, among every other woman in her generation, my mother, whose Canada Pension is pathetic, despite a lifetime spent caring for everyone in the family. )

Some efforts are being made to devise instruments that will measure the contribution of unpaid work to the economy. See for example here.  CIDA in 2007 released a study on the Economic Contribution of Women in Bangladesh Through their Unpaid Labour (pdf). Oregon has assessed the economic value of (paid) child care in the state.   Statistics Canada in 1998 released a paper on its measurement and valuation of unpaid work (pdf), but that was back before Stephen Harper gutted it this year. Stephen Harper has of course no interest in quantifying the value of women's unpaid work - in fact, he is, as is abundantly obvious from many of his other decisions, ideologically invested in keeping women at home, unpaid, unquantified, voiceless, and likely, in his ideal world, voteless as well - which may help to account for his cutting the Census question on unpaid labour from the census.   And see this issue of Feminist Economics (2005) , by Martha MacDonald, Shelley Phipps and Lynn Lethbridge - a paid download, and I didn't - on the value of women's unpaid work.

However, all of this deals with women's unpaid labour in the home, not with the question of whether those, male or female, stay-at-home or in the workplace, who are rearing children, are doing something of value to their culture, which ought to be supported and assisted by that culture. And there is one question we need to consider right away:

By "value" do we have to mean "economic value"? If it doesn't make money, does it not count at all? The answer to this is obviously "are you kidding me?" Obviously there are many things and activities of enormous value to individuals, families, and our culture which cannot be quantified in terms of money. (The recent book "Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture", by Shannon Hayes (2010), deals with this question specifically. The link is to an interview with Hayes; here it is on Amazon.)

So, are parents doing "something of value for the culture" - economic or otherwise - in their work of child-rearing?

This question frankly stupefies me; I can't begin to get a grip on it. I have no problem with those who have chosen not to have children, for whatever reason, but it had never crossed my mind that anyone would ask whether there was any value to the culture in child-rearing. I have always considered child-rearing the most consistent and massive project of volunteer work I have ever undertaken, or likely ever will undertake. The value to a culture of having adults who are raised to be empathetic, courteous, considerate, kind, respectful of others and productive is surely so obvious as not to need my efforts in pointing it out. That, without the constant efforts of parents, teachers and other adult mentors, children would be unlikely to turn into such adults also surely needs no discussion. Of those adult mentors, teachers are paid (though not enough); and other mentors - Scout and Guide leaders and volunteers in all such similar enterprises - are rewarded at least with respect for their voluntary labours. It's only parents whose work is considered of questionable value; presumably because parents are thought to be self-interested in the work they do for children. Teachers and youth leaders are clearly doing it for the children; parents, however, are apparently believed to be doing it for ourselves. We are thought to receive rewards for our labour that teachers and other mentors don't.

Now let's be fair: we do. I (for example) love my children and their company, their activities and their welfare give me enormous happiness. Having children is the very best thing I ever did. So I do benefit from the decision to have children. I certainly hope that other parents benefit in the same way; I know that at least some of them do. But that personal benefit does not mean that we are producing nothing of value to society as well in our child-rearing work. I get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of my paid work as a classics professor too; there are many things I love about that job. But others benefit too: that's why they pay me.

And in fact the only reason that anyone suggests that society does not benefit from child-rearing is that parents are not paid for their work; and unpaid work (like the people who do it) is always undervalued. But we pay child care workers, and foster parents - though, again, not enough - so we do recognize that the work of child-rearing is worth paying for. Only we don't pay parents, because they'll do it for free.

But as for the economic benefit parents confer on society, I need to think about this at greater length; and to find others who have too. That the children of some of us support all of us, through their taxes and their labour, in out old age, is clear enough. That's why they're worried sick in Japan, where the economic disincentives to women for having children are so severe that they have stopped doing it, with the result that the burgeoning elder Japanese population has a decreasing number of productive young adults to support and care for it. That if we all simply decided to forgo the selfish pleasures of child-rearing entirely, civilization would die out in a generation, is clear enough too. But apparently these arguments are not enough. What more do parents do for our society? I need more information.

To be continued ...

On Street Harassment

2010-09-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

Street Harassment

I just happened on this, and it nails the problem. There is the reverse issue too - if you don't happen to fit what they think women, or, excuse me, girls, should look like, the same creeps are happy to shout insults - or worse, come up close and mutter them - because you dared to appear in public at all.

I remember once in my thirties I was out running, and when I'd done my run I stopped at a playground by the side of the trail and was happily swinging, something I've always enjoyed. A guy roughly my age, whom I'd passed once or twice on my run and we'd nodded to each other, as one does, went by and shouted as he ran "you looked better standing up!" Translation (I assume) "you have a big fat ass!" or possibly "you lazy cow, how dare you sit down when you should still be running to get rid of that big fat ass!"

The thing was, I looked a hell of a lot better than he did, running, walking, sitting, or even covered in mud. Did I say so? Of course not. I was raised to be courteous. And it would never occur to me to criticize some total stranger's appearance as I ran by. I was too astonished to say anything. (Yes, I do regret this now. I started regretting it about 5 seconds later, when it was too late.)

Letting my hair go grey has taken me off their radar, but I'd be back on it fast enough if I dressed 'too young'. Would I criticize a man who was dressed 'too young', complete with combover and Corvette? Well, not to his face... but that's the point, isn't it. We all have opinions; but we don't all feel entitled to inflict them on other people.

An open letter to Jack Layton, on the long gun registry

2010-09-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Layton,

please read this article:

Heather Mallick: Jack Layton on Guns - I've Had Enough

I agree with every word. I have had it too. Please do the job you were elected to do.. Show us some commitment. If you can't, then it is time for you to resign and give us a leader who's willing to lead. I voted for the NDP in the last election but I cannot see how I could possibly do so again, unless you reform or resign.

I am sorry you're ill and I hope you are recovering well. But sick or well, we need a committed leader, not a panderer to right-wing fears. Please do your job.

yours sincerely,

Merely Academic

Dear Coca Cola

2010-09-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Coca Cola:

I've always enjoyed your products. Today however I read that you have cancelled health insurance for 500 of your employees, who are on strike.

FOXBusiness.com - Employees File Suit Against Coke for Cancelling Their Health Care

This is not only unprecedented, it is disgraceful. I note that the employees were forced into striking after Coca Cola refused to bargain for 10 weeks, beginning in April, and then, according to Fox Business.com - hardly an apologist for the rights of workers - "began an aggressive campaign of unfair labor practices." The employees' contract expired on May 25, 2010.

Among the many affected, an employee who had a kidney transplant two years ago has had her anti-rejection medication cut off.

Your company's behaviour is appalling, and I will not be buying any of your products until you have rectified the situation and restored your employees' medical coverage.

Yours sincerely,

Merely (an) Academic

Machismo's cost

2010-09-01T02:23:00.000-07:00

The Female Factor - Counting the Cost of Machismo - NYTimes.com

This makes perfect sense to me. I'm very interested in the evidence that women in the most socially-progressive countries (i.e. with guaranteed maternity leave and subsidized child care) both work in greater numbers, AND have more children. As if, if they don't have to make a choice between career and children, they don't - they do both. This is what you would expect but not what anyone predicts.

I know that if I hadn't been able to get a job I would have been nervous about having 2 children, because I would have been concerned about my ability to support them. But without maternity leave, I would also not have been able to have 2 children.

An Open Letter to Joss Whedon

2010-07-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Whedon,

I'm delighted, as is everyone, that you are directing The Avengers. We know it will be fantastic, and we can't wait.

I hope that as you make it, you will play to your real strength - love. The center of your shows is love, as you say yourself at the end of "Serenity". The ship - and the show - can't fly without it.

I don't mean romance, couples finding each other, though that can be part of it. I mean the love that moves us all to do our best to care for and safeguard our friends, our families, and our worlds. I mean the love between friends and neighbours and allies and even enemies, when it exists, and when it matters that it does not. I mean your obvious love for every single one of your characters, even the complete rotters; and the love you makes us feel for them in turn.

Love is the warm, beating heart of everything you do best. It was the heart of your masterpiece, Firefly, and of Buffy. Angel was fascinating because it explored what happens when love really isn't there, though the protagonist - whom you loved - desperately wanted it to be. It was developing in Dollhouse, through the surprising moral growth of Topher and Adelle. It's always there, in your best work.

Sometimes you seem to think that plot or action scenes are your main strength, and what we watch you for. And don't get me wrong: you're great at those and we wouldn't enjoy your work as much if you weren't. But they aren't the point.

The fight scenes in Serenity were great, but they took up so much of center field that they took the focus away from the characters we loved in Firefly. The end of Dollhouse wrapped up the loose plot points very neatly, but it all happened so fast that again we lost something of the characters. (Though Topher still broke my heart.)

It's a tricky balancing act. You have to have plot. You have to have action. People will complain if you don't. But I hope that while you're working on the Avengers, you remember that we can get fight scenes anywhere. Lots of people write good ones. Half the films out there today are all about the fight scenes. But those films can't do the thing you can do. They can't make us love their characters or care what happens to them. That's what you do better than anyone else.

Show us how you love the characters, and we will love them too. Eye candy and flashy fight scenes and cool plots only matter if we care about the people. Let your love for your characters be the center of the film. Make us care. And then it will be another Whedon masterpiece, and a truly great movie.

Yours faithfully,

A devoted fan

Writing your Journal Article in 12 Weeks

2010-07-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

I bogged down in Week 3 of the first article I tried this book with, and came to the conclusion I needed to know phenomenally more about construction of identity, and whether sociological identity construction really mattered enough for me to have to actually read through any sociology papers. Not to mention the fact that I was way, way out of my field and needed to, at a minimum, know something about film studies. Preferably feminist film studies. And, finally, it was not at all clear to me that my paper was methodologically sound.

I am trying to learn to use buzzwords like "methodological'. I have no idea what "methodological" means to the people who regularly use the term. The term here means, "had a bad feeling that there was actually no way to apply my actual field of expertise to the field of pop culture, at least, not in this instance."

So now I'm back in Week 2 of another article. I have selected a conference paper to revise, written an abstract (which was surprisingly difficult), and am now looking at finding a "model article" to use as, well, a model.

There turns out to be a hella work done on Euripides.

Image via Wikipedia

Well, I knew this. But I have been avoiding, until now, diving into the pond of "recent bibliography". Holy crow. I'm just saying. I can see why I was hesitant. I'm supposed to get the reading done in a WEEK?

Also experimenting here with "Zemanta", which provides links and possibly relevant articles from elsewhere on the web for me to include if I wish. Highly entertaining, though nothing much of relevance yet. Well, I do wish I'd found "How to Write a Bibliography" years ago ... also far, far too late to learn How to Write the Right PhD Dissertation, alas.

Oh, and if only all journal referees read "Advice for Journal Article Referees!" Which actually doesn't come from Stephen Kinsella (as below); he's only quoting it. It actually comes from Philosophersanon.blogspot.com
(I also let Zemanta wikify me, hence the links to random words.)

The Hathor Legacy

2010-07-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Hathor Legacy

I found this site a year ago and lost it. Phenomenal site on women in popular media.

Also, you know that website I wanted to set up giving Bechdel-Wallace ratings for films, and then, being a lazy slob, I didn't get around to it? Well someone else did! It is here:

http://bechdeltest.com

Everyone go volunteer to contribute, right now. I mean it.

Gender Inequity in Academe

2010-06-30T22:32:00.000-07:00

I've just found, via a link on the Feminist Philosophers blog, this study on Women, Work and the Academy, by the Barnard Center for Research on Women (2008). Very illuminating reading! I'll add it, or recommendations from it, to the report I'm preparing on gender inequity in SSHRC grant success rates 2003-2009.

Impostor Syndrome

2010-06-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

Of course I'm not nearly good enough to have Impostor Syndrome, I'm just faking it ... still, a good article:

Wondering How You Stack Up

Maybe chicks are just lousy scientists? (the Summers hypothesis)

2010-06-24T13:47:00.000-07:00

female scientists paid substantially less than men, worldwide

So I guess Harper was just playing along when he awarded $10 million grants to 19 male scientists, no females, last year, and there were no females on the 36-member shortlist either. After all, everyone knows that women and science don't mix.

It's mom's fault! Our presuppositions told us so!

2010-06-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

Moms' full-time work tied to childhood obesity | Reuters:

Two snippets from this article:

"The current study lacked information on the children's diets and exercise habits, so it is not known whether kids of working moms did in fact have poorer-quality diets or were less active."

And

"However, even if mothers' employment is a factor in the rise of childhood obesity, it would only account for a small portion [at most 8% - ed]of that increase, the current findings suggest."

So, in conclusion: we actually have NO data on whether working mothers affect children's diet and exercise. The effect, if there were one, seems to be small in any case, and there are lots of much more serious issues affecting children's weight. And, now that you mention it, no, it had never occurred to us that children have TWO parents who might, you know, share responsibility for their health ...

Open Access Euripides Scholia

2010-05-24T22:44:00.000-07:00

Open Access Euripides Scholia

Brontësaurus - with barrier-breaking Feminist Vision (TM)!

2010-05-07T12:51:00.001-07:00

90 second inspirational video - the Brontë sisters as Power Rangers!

100 novels, and only 8 women?

2010-05-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

The Modern Library "100 best novels of the 20th century" - apparently only 8 women made the cut.

11 women-authored books show up on the "readers' choice" list (on the right), but 4 of them are by Ayn Rand.

I don't think "accidental" is quite the word.

2010-05-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

UVA Lacrosse Murder: George Huguely's Lawyer Says Yeardley Love Death Was 'Accidental'

George Huguely V, UVA lacrosse player, son of George Huguely IV, scions of a prominent family in Chevy Chase for 100 years or more, is in custody for the death of Yeardley Love, also a UVA lacrosse player, whom he had dated for more than a year. His lawyer has this to say:

"...we are confident that Ms Love's death was not intended, but an accident with a tragic outcome. "

Do I think George meant to kill Yeardley? No.

Do I care? Well, no. Here is the evidence:

Affidavits requesting search warrants described witnesses finding Love face down on her pillow in her bedroom. Her right eye was swollen shut, there was a pool of blood on the pillow, and her face was bruised, according to the affidavits. The door to the room had been forced open and had a hole in it, according to the documents.

The door to Yeardley's room had been forced open and had a hole in it. George V had bruises on his arms and scratches on his hands, which he first claimed were lacrosse injuries but eventually admitted came from a fight with Love. He admitted kicking the hole in her door. He admitted that he shook her and repeatedly hit her head against a wall.

Did he mean to kill her? No. He only meant to break into her locked room, terrify her, severely damage her, and beat the hell out of her in a rage he saw no reason to moderate. He was 6'2" and 209 lb. I'm guessing he was bigger than she was. Still, no doubt he was genuinely surprised that she died.

Does that make her death a "tragic accident"? Hardly. A "tragic accident" is when someone leans over a balcony railing and it breaks loose and they fall. A "tragic accident" is when a crane falls on your car as you drive past a construction site. An "accident" is an unforeseeable outcome of normal behaviour.

If a large person beats a smaller person's head repeatedly against a wall, the behaviour is not normal, and death is not an unforeseeable consequence. If they kicked their way into the dwelling in the first place it's hard not to think that some kind of further violence was intended.

What would have made George V think he could do this? She was his ex-girlfriend. Very likely he felt he had rights over her space (which he broke into), her computer (which he came to steal), and her body. She stood up to him, sounds like. How dare she?

Is it tragic? Yes. It's tragic poor Yeardley ever went near George. It's tragic that nobody ever seems to have successfully taught George he had a duty to control his temper. It's tragic that he thought he had a right to strike her; that no internal voice seems to have told him that kicking in her door, grabbing her, and beating her head repeatedly against a wall were so far over the line as to be invisible from the perspective of ethical behaviour.

But it's not an accident.

Ottawa to refuse abortion funding? Not in my name - The Globe and Mail

2010-05-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

Ottawa to refuse abortion funding? Not in my name - The Globe and Mail

Go Timson! But what about her last question - "so what do we do?" What we have to do is throw the bum out of office. But how?

The Rape of the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

2010-04-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

The Rape of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” : Ms Magazine Blog

Now I very much want to see this film, having read this review. I had no idea what it was about. Two things: it sounds as if the title of the book, "Men Who Hate Women", would have been a much better description of what the movie is about; and, at the very least, they should have called it "The Woman With the Dragon Tattoo." "Girl" makes her sound, you know, juvenile. Childish. Vulnerable. Cute. Sexually available. And she is not those things.

The Curse of the "Good Girl"

2010-04-29T00:28:00.000-07:00

My First Rant: Why Can’t Women Keep Up with Men? Try the Curse of the Good Girl � Rachel Simmons

Must get this book and (after reading it) leave it around the house for my daughter to get a look at. She hasn't quite grasped what being a bitch looks like, which is surprising, when you consider that I've been role-modelling that one her entire life ... one thing this book does seem to miss, though (just from reading the description) is the fact that according to what studies there are, being assertive in school and in jobs doesn't actually get women anywhere, which is why, as rational creatures, we don't do it. If a man has a temper tantrum, he's being appropriately manly, and gets a raise and a bigger office. If a woman does, she's being a hysterical bitch and she loses all her credibility (and doesn't get what she wants, either). If a man demands a pay raise, good for him! He knows his worth. Give him the money. If a woman demands a pay raise, who does she think she is? Sideline her, she's "difficult".

So girls may learn to be "good" not just because self-confidence is systematically beaten out of them from puberty onwards, but because being assertive and confident will not get them anything they want, and in fact will be interpreted negatively by teachers, colleagues and employers. Better to learn to sound diffident. And the best way to remember to do that consistently is to BE diffident, and just hope that everyone will be nice to you because really you're not worth very much - if you try hard enough, it's easy enough to believe that.

YouTube - Leslie Gore- "You Don't Own Me" Live

2010-04-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

YouTube - Leslie Gore- "You Don't Own Me" Live

I've always loved this.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker!

2010-04-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

Parliament has the power, says Speaker of the House Peter Milliken. Thank you! It's about time someone stood up to Canada's dictator. We live, or are supposed to, in a parliamentary system; it's time Harper figured that out - and since he refuses to, I am delighted that Milliken has made it clear.

And see Brian Topp, "The Speaker is brave and right". Couldn't agree more.

Freud, meet Tragedy. Tragedy, meet Freud.

2010-04-27T23:13:00.000-07:00

Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 2010.04.30: Rachel Bowlby, Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities.

Looks worth reading for my myth class, and possibly on its own account.

The hidden damage of psychiatric drugs - Nonfiction - Salon.com

2010-04-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

The hidden damage of psychiatric drugs - Nonfiction - Salon.com

Terrifying. Two quotes:

"...84 percent of the children treated for bipolar illness -- at the Luci Bini Mood Disorders Clinic in New York -- had been previously exposed to psychiatric medications."

The report went on to say that before they had been medicated, a bipolar diagnosis had been considered for only 10% of them. And between 10% and 25% of children treated with Ritalin degenerate into psychotic or manic episodes and an eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Others find their growth stunted and various other issues. But meanwhile, a three-year study shows no improvement in behaviours, grades, or any of the other things that schools force Ritalin into children for.

Or about schizophrenia:

"...(NIMH) didn’t announce the 2007 outcome study for schizophrenia patients. In that study, the recovery rate was 40 percent for those off meds, but only 5 percent for those on meds."

I feel so very grateful that the various professionals I've talked to over the years have never offered me drugs. Because of course I would have taken them. I would have been so glad to think that whatever was wrong with me could be cured with a pill. And maybe it does work for some people, in the short term; but not for the number of people who are getting drug therapy instead of talking to someone sympathetic.

"It is Canada and Canadians who will make Canadian decisions".

2010-04-26T23:09:00.000-07:00

"It is Canada and Canadians who will make Canadian decisions."

This is our misogynist Prime Minister, who doesn't seem to grasp that a) abortion is legal in Canada; b) a large majority of Canadians are in favour of abortion being legal. He isn't, and the misogynist right-wing nuts in his party aren't, so the hell with what the majority of his country thinks.

He is an embarrassment, and I do not know how we are going to get rid of him. I don't know what to do and I despair. The Liberals are in utter disarray and the NDP will never win an election. Proportional representation is the only way to form a government that actually represents us, but no party in power will ever go for that.

Sexism Sinks Sales

2010-04-15T09:14:00.000-07:00

This week's letter to the Globe and Mail:

To the Editors:

Corus CEO Cassaday seems to feel some sympathy for his advertiser's impression that if the man of the house isn't watching the show, there's no point wasting advertising dollars on it. ("“Not that many men are that interested in their wives' mascara", How to Look Good Naked? Men Wouldn't Know). What a pity that he doesn't choose instead to enlighten them on the basic economic fact that women control 80% of all household spending. If only one person is in front of the tube, advertisers should only pray that it's the lady of the house.

Yours sincerely.

(a few additional thoughts below, that didn't make it into the letter ...)

I could have added that the assumption that all women buy is mascara, and men buy all the Important Manly Stuff like, you know, food, clothes, school supplies, diapers, cars, investment products, furniture and houses is a phenomenal example of sexism bankrupting companies that richly deserve to go down in flames. Women buy all that stuff. In my experience the only thing men are 100% responsible for is stereo equipment.

Corus has already changed its lineup in its W ("Women's") network, to get more guys to watch (more Home Improvement, less self-improvement). Their advertisers are morons. If they actually want to sell stuff, cater to women's tastes FIRST. Which is not to say that women don't enjoy home improvement shows. But that isn't why they put more on, is it.

Mac Wallace, still missed

2010-04-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

Had a dream about Mac last night; or rather, a dream about him being dead, which he has been for a year and half now. I miss so much our conversations. He was always sure I had something to contribute, always wanted to hear what I was working on, and never put it down. I didn't realise until he was gone how rare that is for me or how much I relied on it. I only talked to him once or twice a year, but it leaves such an emptiness that I can't anymore. Colleagues matter so much, even at long distance.

I woke up thinking how much I need a colleague to share work with, and within two hours a friend I'd phoned for quite another reason called back and, it turned out, was in the identical position in her own work - needs someone to have coffee with and talk to about it every couple of weeks to help her keep on with it. So we are going to do that.

I wasn't even aware that I'd prayed about it, but I think God must have been listening anyway.

memo to self: talk to God more

2010-04-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

I missed church today, thanks to staying up till 3 a.m. fretting about work and re-reading Pride and Prejudice (a sovereign remedy for fretting, but better not at 3 a.m.) So, this morning, feeling grumpy and underslept, I pruned my to-do list (I spend much more time moving stuff around on it than I ever spend actually doing any of it ...) and decided to go and try to uproot the remainder of the enthusiastic ground cover some misguided previous owner of the house had put in. It was fine until the rose tree died last year, but now it has nothing to keep it from taking over the entire yard. Its roots are about 12 feet down and only Agent Orange is ever going to actually get rid of it. While I worked, I listened to an old interview with Anne Lamott broadcast last year on CBC's Tapestry, that I had on my iPod. I see CBC still has it up; it's worth listening to.

She reminded me that I should be talking to God more. Or possibly listening to God more. Or both. For those of us who veer erratically from grandiosity to humiliation (which is a kind of grandiosity, I mean, "I am the worst X in the entire history of the universe!" is still making it all about ME), it helps to hear someone talk about humility. Accepting your weak points and your strong points and that neither of them matter much, the important thing is to keep doing what you can do today and letting the result be what it will, and not expect the universe to run according to my whim.

But also, that when you don't get what you want, which is usually instant gratification, you're often better off than if you had.

So, at the moment, what is really distressing me is that my department still doesn't want to promote me. And when you boil down the reasons and take out the obfuscation and the civil ways of putting it, it's because they think not only that I haven't published enough, but that not enough of what I've published is worth reading. And this is bloody hard to hear. But, frankly, maybe they're right. Which is not a thing I want to think about, but maybe they are.

But if the result of this is that I up my game and try to produce more worthwhile stuff, there's a net gain, not least to me. I mean, even if in fact it turns out that I am not capable of producing more worthwhile stuff, the effort will have been good for me. And if in fact I try very hard but, it turns out, really don't have the capacity to do this job well, then that would be useful information too, because it would mean that instead of simply talking about quitting, I should actually do it.

Still, this is hard to hear. But as Anne Lamott says, when I look back it will probably turn out that this was all good for me. Character-building. A useful reality-check.

Anyway, it's not as if they're planning to fire me. And nothing that really matters is in danger, and I'm living in the most beautiful place on earth, with enough money to pay the mortgage here. I have nothing whatever to complain of. This is a status issue, and status really doesn't matter as much as pretty much anything else on Earth.

It's not pleasant to hear that there is a large part of my job that I am not doing well. But I shall have to continue to work on fixing that, day by day, and hope it turns out that I can.

So what has this to do with God? All kinds of things. Any time I try to move out from behind my ego long enough to listen to anyone say anything, that is talking, or at least listening, to God. Though it always makes me feel as if I'm a turtle, crawling out of my shell to cringe naked, moist and pink in full daylight. Ow.

Easter Sunday service

2010-04-05T10:04:00.000-07:00

Got there late. Church was full. Even my husband came! (Cultural Christians come to Christmas Eve and Easter). Unfortunately missed part of the first part of the service, which was a reading of whatever the text is from John, to music and an interpretive dance. And I know that people will just laugh and laugh - I mean they make jokes about the United Church adding interpretive dance to the liturgy. Interpretive dance is used everywhere as a synonym for foggy thinking, new-wave silliness, we make jokes about academic programs without rigour allowing their students to express their feelings in an interpretive dance instead of, say, handing in a paper.

But the thing is, it was amazing. I am so sorry I missed the first bit. Mary's heartbreak that her teacher's body had been stolen, her amazement when she saw and recognized him, her excitement, ecstatic joy as she runs to tell everybody "I have seen the Lord! I have seen the Lord!" was so moving. I can still see it. I had no idea how powerful dance is.

There was also a video, which didn't work, or the sound didn't. I think they should stop trying to use videos; at least half the time they don't work. But the rest of the service was great. Sorry we couldn't make it into the new sanctuary (which, I'm hoping, will have a working sound system! And not be painted calamine pink and not be an old gym ...) by Easter; we'd hoped it would be done by then; but likely we'll be in there in May. The carpenters working on the sanctuary made us a cross for the Easter service.

I had a wicked caffeine-withdrawal headache all day yesterday. Back to the Elimination Diet. After patiently and diligently losing 20 lb last year I have inflated back up to exactly where I was before, or very nearly, thanks to the 2 a.m. bagel inhalation and 3 chocolate bars a day that seems to hit me when a) trying to write or b) during a heavy teaching term. And I have tried other things but skipping wheat, sugar, dairy, caffeine, alcohol (which I don't drink anyway) and any ingredients I can't pronounce seems to be the thing that works. As my husband remarks, moderation is not my forté; abstinence is. But Easter is always a good time for new beginnings.

Three more days of lecturing! Not that I'm counting ...

On graduate education and the job market in the Humanities

2010-04-05T09:46:00.000-07:00

An honest, but depressing, article from the Chronicle.

Harperite thugs and maternal health

2010-03-30T16:39:00.001-07:00

My letter today to the Globe and Mail:

To the Editors:

Thank you, Mr. Caplan, for pointing out so clearly the real Harperite agenda ("The sad truth about Harper and maternal health", March 30, 2010). The Harperite approach is ideological, not practical, its only intent to grab a few points in the polls while appeasing, at all cost, the religious right fringe (or center) of his party. If Harper had the slightest real concern for women's or children's health, his "maternal health initiative" would show some cognizance of the mounds of data that make clear the link between women's health and easy access to all forms of contraception and family planning. I salute Secretary Clinton for calling him to task on this. Harper is an embarrassment on the global stage. I have never until now felt ashamed to be Canadian.

Yours sincerely.

the post-modern church; or, why I am a Protestant

2010-03-28T16:51:00.001-07:00

There was a good Palm Sunday service today, and a congregational meeting on “the post-modern church” that I was curious about and decided to stay for. Everyone seems to have a different definition of of “post-modern”, and their only real point in common is “multiple narratives”. Still there was some interesting stuff: the “post-modern generation” is those born after 1965, and they tend to expect chaos over order, and value peers over elders, personal experience over authority or expert advice, personal happiness over wealth or work or status, and, as for their predecessors the “modern” generation, relationships matter more than pretty much anything. So the question we were supposed to be discussing was, how to appeal to “those” people in “our” church?

But for me it was all rather odd because although I am chronologically solidly in the “modern” generation everything they said about “post-moderns” fit me perfectly. For one thing I couldn’t come back to the church at all until I had discarded pretty much everything I had learned about it in my youth, and decided that my personal experience of God was what mattered and everything else could go hang - so the question I would ask of a Bible passage, if I were to read one, which is by no means guaranteed (though I did get through the New Testament, as in duty bound, once, and partway through the O.T. before I ground to a halt somewhere midway through Kings), is not “what does the Bible tell me to do?” but “how can I understand this passage in the light of my own understanding of God?” Which, I grant you, is a pretty dangerous approach, but it is the best I can do.

(And here let me add that one thing I've found extremely useful is the Irish Jesuits' online guide to Ignatius Loyola's spiritual exercises, Sacred Space, updated weekly. You can also get it in book form., updated annually.)

I honestly don’t believe that this generation is any more chaotic than any previous, and frankly a lot less chaotic than most. Try living through a world war, or a local war, or a famine, or a plague; we've got it pretty easy and I can't help but wonder if, perhaps, we tolerate multiple narratives because we have the leisure and wealth to do so - not because the world is more chaotic than it was, but because life has so much MORE certainty than it ever did.

I grant you that we are less likely to accept authority over experience - in fact when I teach I tend not to teach as “I am the Great Authority, Do This because I Said So”, because I don’t believe I could ever pull that off, and anyway I think it’s much more helpful to use the approach “try this, it works for me, it might work for you”. And I think you can approach any authority the same way - as someone whose personal experience of an issue, or a skill, or a personal relationship with the Divine, can be a useful source of advice or information for the rest of us, even if they lived 2000 years ago. I mean, I certainly don’t sign on to everything St. Paul says but I have no doubt that he talked to God every day and God talked back to him sometimes too, and that he faithfully narrates that experience to the very best of his ability.

But one problem I have had with “post-modernism” and the church was that I didn’t really see how one could be both ‘post modern’ and Christian - because if ‘post-modern’ means ‘ having a mulitple set of conflicting discourses in the place of a central, unitary self’, well, where is this ‘I“ that can talk to God - or listen to God, rather much more to the point? Where is this ”I“ that makes the choices between the different discourses? If post-modernism is really arguing not only that that’s what characters in books are, but that that’s what we really are in real life, then there is no ”me’; neither I nor anyone would have a soul to stand in relationship with God (and the existence of God is a whole separate question, of course).

However I think that as the church uses “post-modern” regarding individuals - and this isn’t how literary criticism uses it, or I don’t think it is (must read more!)- the point is to integrate these conflicting narratives, so there is still a central self choosing a path through these various routes. But the United Church is still trying valiantly to also regenerate the church as a whole through accepting and integrating the multiple narratives of the individuals that make it up. And this strikes me as perfectly naturally the thing the church should do, which causes me to finally understand a few things:

a) I am postmodern, in that I believe in grass-roots over top-down organization.
b) I am Protestant, extremely Protestant, one could say, perhaps, ‘Protestant as hell’ (if one is not Protestant), because see a)
c) and I’m not one of the fundamentalist churches either, because see a).

Because trying to integrate the individual visions of the millions of those who make up the church is not really the project of that many denominations. Top-down is still very much the organization of a lot of churches. Which is why I like my own.

But here’s the other thing that I think I’ve finally got a grip on: how post-modernism (seen as “multiple conflicting narratives”) can be Christian. Because it doesn’t mean that one has to accept ALL narratives. There are millions of different visions of God, and not all of them are Christian. There are millions of other visions that don’t involve God at all. They aren’t Christian either. The Christian church is made up of those people who have prioritized personal narratives that include a Christian vision of the universe. Obviously that isn’t everyone.

I don’t know why I had so much trouble with this concept. I mean, now that I’ve thought it through. As through as I’ve thought it so far.

my computer goes monitor-up as my marking comes home to roost

2010-03-26T23:27:00.000-07:00

My electric bike controller died this morning, thanks to heavy rains. The printer jammed as I was racing to print a quiz for my Greek class - no doubt its stress-detector went off - and I had to write the quiz on the board. Then this afternoon my laptop died.

The university has as of March 31 cancelled the excellent computer support we've had in Humanities and fired the staff, I gather not as a cost-cutting measure as much as a result of political infighting between Computing User Systems (or whatever it's called) and the various faculties. We are now to rely on the Computer Help Desk, which is staffed by eager but not especially knowledgeable Computer Science co-op students, none of whom has ever seen a Mac before. We used to rely on the Help Desk, and that was why we hired dedicated tech guys who, you know, knew what they were doing.

Went down to the computer store to see if they could help, since my laptop is still under warranty, and discovered that the Computer store is being shut down next week too, and they're firing 2/3 of the staff and sending the rest of them over to the Bookstore, leaving us with, again, pretty much nobody who knows what they're doing.

I can't help but think that these changes haven't been especially well thought through.

I can teach my remaining lectures using the blackboard I suppose, but how I'm supposed to retrieve the iClicker data that was worth 10% of their grade - well, never mind. Maybe someone will be able to fix it soon, ha.

I have quizzes or essays from every one of my classes. The good news is that I could, if I really chained myself to my desk, finish all the marking this weekend. And I won't be distracted by playing on my laptop, either.

Humanities is cost-effective

2010-03-25T16:49:00.000-07:00

Turns out Humanities is the only part of a university that actually turns a profit. Humanities students are also a gold mine for the society that funds their production, because we are so much cheaper to train, and start out at lower wages, but over the course of a lifetime we get paid as much overall as sciences grads, and therefore pay as much in taxes. So there's a huge net profit to the society over time, and the university even while it's training us.

But university administrations continue to think that we're the weak sisters, the ones that make no money.

my letter to the Liberal MPs who failed to support the contraception bill

2010-03-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

I have sent this to the five Liberals whose lack of support for the contraception bill caused it to fail in Parliament. I am truly appalled. I'm thinking I may be an NDP supporter hereafter. But here is the letter:

***
Dear X:

I am a lifelong Liberal supporter, and have campaigned for the Liberals in previous elections. I am writing to express my utter dismay at your behaviour in refusing to support the Liberal bill guaranteeing that contraception would form part of the global maternal health initiative.

Perhaps you have forgotten that you live in a country in which contraception is legal and freely available to all, and in which women's rights over their own bodies are respected. Perhaps you have not read any of the literature that demonstrates conclusively the connection between access to contraception and decreased maternal mortality. (I recommend the USAID 2008 report on the subject, for a start). Perhaps you have forgotten that as an MP, you have a duty to represent your party and your country, not merely your own opinion.

I hope you remember these things quickly, will educate yourself on the strong connection between women and children's health, welfare and longevity, and ease of access to contraception, and alter your behaviour in future. If you cannot do this, then I hope you have the decency to resign, and let someone who does represent not only Liberal policy, but Canadian policy, have your seat in Parliament.

Reading about the vote yesterday, I was not merely embarrassed to be a Liberal supporter; I was ashamed to be a Canadian. Until now, only Harper's Conservatives have made me feel that way.

yours sincerely.

a subject on which I feel increasingly passionate

2010-03-21T15:56:00.000-07:00

I was just directed towards a very interesting NYT article on how the web, the media, and the loss of the book is changing our minds and our whole approach to, well, everything; making us shallow, quick thinkers with ADD, by prioritizing what we can do and say THIS INSTANT, with this fragment, because God knows we didn't bother to read the whole thing ...

I read with great interest, albeit while reading five other things simultaneously and booking airline tickets. I also saw Rick Groen's review of Shield's book Reality Hunger in the Globe and Mail yesterday.

As regards the dangers of increasing ADD in the population through web-surfing, uh, what was that again? I was just checking something else ... oh yeah, well getting back to you: that could be. It works with our tendency to always be looking for the brighter berries in the next bush over, alert for any quiver of motion, always on the qui vive. Concentration was always hard and all this crap coming at us and easily available to peruse, or rather, skim, sure makes it harder.

On the other hand as one of the books cited pointed out, most of the stuff on the web IS crap. A forest of mediocrity, indeed. And as Gregory Crane, who put together the Perseus website, pointed out, academics and the intelligentsia do and will still have a job - the job is to help people learn how to filter and and recognize the good stuff, through the skill of critical thinking. and this is not the only era when that's been a skill held only by the minority. There's never been an era when that WASN'T true.

Two of the comments on the review of Shields' book I think summed it up well: that we are not the only era to think that we're unique, that our world is more complex and terrifying than any previous, but we're wrong about that. What about either of the World Wars, or the Industrial Revolution? And as far as literary forms go, try to find anything more postmodern - and still worth reading - than Tristram Shandy. We aren't so special as we'd like to believe.

My own addition to that would be that reality has always come at us in bites and dribs and drabs and conflicting narratives and chunks from different directions, and there's always been more to process than we really could; and sure this is even more true with The Web and The Media and what have you, but it's a difference in degree, not kind. And story telling is very far from being a thing of the past, because it is what we have ALWAYS done to make sense of a world that doesn't. Because it never has, without work.

Another commenter on Shields' book pointed out that all of the people Shields cites, and he cites very very many, without footnotes, but did include a source list at the back at his publisher's insistence - all of them but one, Zadie Smith, are male. And is this because women's writing doesn't lend itself so easily to postmodern interpretation? Or because women see more easily the value of relationships between things, data and people? Or is it just because Shields, like so many mmembers of the intelligentsia, thinks that only men are worth reading and has never actually bothered to read any women? I would choose "all of the above".

I am reading more, very slowly, about "postmodern" refusal to find connections between stuff, or to force connections by pasting things together without bothering to say what the connections are, the work is left as an exercise for the reader. And I'm just not buying it, so far. Stories are how we understand the world, and it doesn't matter if the author tells us a story or leaves us to figure one out for ourselves, it's how we do it.

I loved the conclusion in the NYT article, that most commentary and bricolage and reworkings and further treatments is about or of or from older work, done before people lost their faith in storytelling, and that by re-producing the old stuff instead of making new, we're essentially "eating out own seed stock". As I watch the 27th adaptation of Pride and Prejudice I can't help but think this is true. We'll get over it, and start telling stories again. but until we do, we will have to keep cannibalizing the old ones,because we still love them; because we love stories and that isn't going to change.

travel plans, augh!

2010-03-21T01:48:00.000-07:00

Trying to figure out travel plans RIGHT NOW THIS SECOND to co-ordinate what feels like 6000 people all planning to be in 47138 different places at overlapping times.

1) We're in theory going to China in May. This opportunity came up quite suddenly. When in May? The university wants us there May 5, but isn't paying anyone to go,so I don't feel that it gets much say. My husband is giving 2 lectures in Shanxi, uh, sometime in May. Possibly also in Beijing. When? No one knows. I've offered to give a lecture too if anyone in Beijing cares about the ancient Mediterranean; it's not clear anyone does however. Meanwhile the children's passports have expired and we have sent them in to acquire new passports, and maybe they will get here in "around 2 weeks" as the passport office says, and maybe they won't, either. And after that we all need China visas for which we need to send them away, again, and that takes another week. but if we don't get all this stuff together in advance we aren't getting on the plane. And then there are vaccinations to take into account. Do we have time to get a full course of ANYTHING to make sure my children don't die of hepatitis? Not clear. But the longer we waits to buy tickets the more expensive they gets. 10 days ago we could all get there for $4200. Now we're up to $6000. Should we cancel? Should we buy tickets and pray that we'll actually have all the paperwork by the time we have to get on the plane?

2) I want to go to Toronto in April. I have one exam on April 27. I am supposed to show up at a "sponsoring supervisor" for an "Undergraduate Research Something" (URS) grant party on April 14, for one of my students, who is supposed to do a presentation of her research for which she got $1000. So far as I know she has done absolutely nothing on this project. Is this my problem? Increasingly I'm beginning to think that it's not. Do I have to be at this party? Unclear. If I book late enough to be at this April 14 event my ticket to Toronto will cost me another $200. What do I do now? By this time tomorrow the ticket prices will have gone up again.

3) Trying to book holidays for the summer. I have to be there August 1-8 to babysit my niece so my brother can tour with his choir. Was planning to spend the week up at my parents' farm with kids and niece. A friend from Scotland has just announced she'll be coming to Toronto August 5 to stay for 5 days, to see me. So, okay, we're staying until the 10th, and apparently not spending as much time at the farm as I'd like. Daughter wants to go to her usual camp July 26-30. Son would like to go to his usual camp but it's August 9-15, so that won't work. Daughter would also like to go to a Guide camp but it's August 1-7. I can get us all there on points, for free, but only if we set out July 29, and my daughter will miss her camp. I can get 2 of us there on points and pay for only one of us if we start on July 31 - good! - but only if we start from an inconvenient airport, change planes once and fly overnight, which I refuse to do. If we don't fly on points it will cost us $2250. Plus, my husband may want to come.

If I spend, say, 12 hours thinking this over all of the prices will have gone up and any tickets I could get on points will go through Moose Jaw, Churchill Falls and Omaha, Nebraska, plus a dogsled detour through Timmins.

Sigh.

the conference

2010-03-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

Conference was great, many good papers, and four excellent papers back-to-back in the last session of the day, which is highly unusual on all fronts - 4 great papers in one session, and that's the last session of the day, and I'm awake enough to be able to tell.

My own paper went very badly. I had been considering writing a few days before the conference to pull out because I couldn't get the paper ready in time, but thought I ought not to do that to the conference organizer so shortly beforehand. However, I should have pulled out.

What I have learned from this: in future, if the paper isn't at least half-written 2 weeks before the conference, I will write to cancel my participation. I'm never doing this again.

Ms. Magazine's blog

2010-03-12T13:45:00.000-08:00

Ms. Magazine has started a new blog! Here.

damn March conferences

2010-03-11T11:51:00.001-08:00

I am giving a paper in 2 days, that I have not yet started to write or indeed to do the reading for, and I have 40 or so undergraduate exams and 2 graduate papers I have to hand back before I can begin work on it.

Also I'm not especially sold on the topic, anymore. It sounded good when I wrote the abstract. But I am so very far from having anything to say.

Dear God, this is depressing

2010-03-08T11:10:00.000-08:00

A recent post from Rate Your Students.

Especially the conclusion:

"No one else cares about this enterprise, really--otherwise they'd fund it better and actually look in the windows from time to time. They'd check in with you for reasons other than limiting their liability. The ship is sinking; we're all going down. Don't be the last person playing cello when it happens."

The posts on RYS are getting darker generally. I'm not sure if this reflects the state of the field, or just the current editing of the blog; but I fear it is the former. I am grateful every day for my tenured position in a field that interests me, being adequately paid to teach interested students. And that when I got my job there were still tenure-track jobs around. I'm not sure I would recommend that either of my children go into this line of work; at least not in humanities. At least not with any expectation of getting a permanent job. At the very least, have a plan B - "if I haven't got a job in 3 years, I"m doing something else".

Of course, that was my plan B. But I got lucky, thank heavens.

the Conservative vision of Canada

2010-03-03T09:26:00.000-08:00

This is Harper's crony Kenney, a dimwitted, petty bigot relishing his moment of power. Harper doesn't stop these people. He actively recruits them. The Conservative vision for Canada is profoundly different from mine, and from that of the majority of Canadians. They have to be stopped. Ignatieff, where the hell are you, and what are you DOING?

All is explained

2010-03-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

I just did a "Career Counselling" test that assesses you entirely by your colour preferences. Apparently I'm a "creator" and a "persuader", both of which sound pretty bang on to me, though of course I don't know what the other choices were.

However it then breaks this down by jobs I would enjoy most. The top five jobs I would enjoy most are:

1. Child, family or school social worker
2. General or operations manager
3. Legal secretary or support assistant
4. Bookkeeping, Accounting or Auditing Clerk
5. Teacher Assistant

"University Professor" is #50, well below such other career paths as "Customer Service Representative" (# 11), "Preschool Teacher" (# 13), "Receptionist" (# 15), "Retail Sales" (# 17), "Athlete" (# 25 - apparently aptitude is not considered on this test), "Truck Driver" (31), "Psychologist" (32, actually a possibility, but ranked UNDER retail sales?), "Daycare Provider" (45)...

Suddenly it's all clear. What am I doing here? It's time to quit and go into retail.

In honour of the fast-approaching International Women's Day ...

2010-02-28T23:48:00.000-08:00

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work!

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

(reposted from Feminist Law Professors)

things I was supposed to do this weekend

2010-02-28T00:09:00.000-08:00

And I will! tomorrow afternoon! All of them!

Grant proposal (due Monday)(unstarted)
7 graduate papers to grade (due last December)
translate 3 choruses of Medea + another 110 lines (due last thursday, mostly)
read an article for Euripides class
find out which article I'm to be reading for Euripides class
possibly not in that order
do all of the reading for a conference paper I haven't started yet, for a conference in 2 weeks
get some exercise

Worio - FAQ

2010-02-26T22:54:00.000-08:00

Worio - FAQ

Interesting new search engine, that supplies suggestions based on my previous click-throughs.

Advice on writing

2010-02-23T00:09:00.000-08:00

From the Guardian, 10 rules for writing from as many writers as they could line up, beginning with Elmore Leonard:

Part One:
Part Two:

And from Lester Dent, the Master Pulp Plot:

From the American Historical Association, some really good advice:

I really want to find a way to transmogrify the "Master Pulp Paper Fiction Plotter" into a template for academic articles. It's got to be possible.

a shocking discovery

2010-02-22T23:31:00.000-08:00

Some of my students are not entirely honest! What's more, they have a lot of nerve ...

Wish I could post the whole exchange. A student has written claiming that he took the online quiz but then it disappeared when he tried to submit the answers. This is all very well BUT - the online course software will tell me if he's tried the quiz, if he's ever looked at it, when he visited the site and how often and for how long. So I wrote to him explaining that there was no record that he had ever opened the quiz, or in fact visited the site any time in the last two weeks. So his grade of zero would stand.

So, okay, fine. I don't blame him entirely for trying it on. What leaves me breathless is that he then wrote back, didn't admit a thing, when I had him (essentially) on video, and couldn't understand why he couldn't just take the quiz now. Uh, no, honey. Even the honest students who forgot the quiz got zero.

PTSD and Childbirth

2010-02-18T00:19:00.000-08:00

Motherhood - Salon.com

This article argues that PtSD comes of a situation in which you're afraid you're going to die. Then it argues that probably mothers never used to get PTSD but now we do because a terrible outcome - the mother dying - is very uncommon these days. However I would argue that this is likely an error, and that PTSD has always been part of childbirth for some of the mothers who survived it, and that it was MORE common, not less, for those who gave birth during any other era but our own. The risk of dying in childbirth was as high as 10% before the modern era; and on top of that was the risk of living but being crippled by it. If PTSD comes of a traumatic event in which the victim has no control, and fears loss of life, why wouldn't childbirth fit the bill? That was exactly the situation in which women found themselves.

But we're not supposed to think that PTSD could result from childbirth because only warriors get PTSD; women are doing something 'natural', which translates - at least for those who haven't done it - as "miraculously easy" - if it isn't, you should feel guilty because you're doing it wrong. As if childbirth does not involve pain, uncertainty and fear, which must be met, just like battle, with submission to circumstances, courage and will.

But no. Only heroes get PTSD, and women risking their lives in childbirth don't get called heroes. So we can't admit that they might have PTSD.

race and the UAH shooting victims

2010-02-14T23:48:00.000-08:00

There are so many very disturbing things about the tragic shootings at the University of Alabama at Huntsville that I hesitate to add one more. But I haven't seen this observation anywhere else.

If you look at the faculty webpage for UAH Biology, you will notice that of the active 14 faculty members, 9, including the shooter, were Caucasian, and 5 were not. The 2 staff members were both Caucasian.

She shot six people. Four of the faculty members she shot were non-Caucasian; only one was Caucasian. The staff member she shot was also Caucasian.

There was only one non-Caucasian member of the department - an Asian - whom she did not shoot.

We don't know how many of the department were actually at the meeting. We don't know what her selection process was. Maybe she just shot the ones nearest the door, or the ones who tried to stop her.

Still. She shot all but one of the non-Caucasians in the department. I can't help but wonder if the one she missed was just lucky enough to be home sick that day.

***
Edited to add: I was wrong. The Asian, Dr. Ng, sent an email to his former advisor after the shooting. He was at the meeting, along with 11 others, including the shooter. She just got up halfway through the meeting and started shooting, first everyone on her side of the table, one after another in order, and then when she paused to reload, those on the other side of the table, including Dr. Ng, rushed her, pushed her out of the room, barricaded the door, and called 911 while they tried to help the wounded and dying. Her intention was obviously to kill everyone, and the order was simply those who happened to be on her side of the table first.

Dr. Ng's email, assuming it's authentic, is reproduced here.

further on those wretched quizzes

2010-02-14T22:19:00.000-08:00

Five students wrote weeping to say they'd forgotten to take it. They had two whole days. I reminded them about the quiz in every one of four previous lectures. I emailed them twice during the week to remind them again about what the quiz covered and when it would be.

I think next term I definitely go back to in-class quizzes. This is just silly.

distressing resonance here

2010-02-13T00:46:00.000-08:00

Man Stays Up All Night Procrastinating | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

I so resemble this ...

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recent discovery

2010-02-12T23:08:00.000-08:00

I use online quizzes for my 300-student myth class. There are a large number of questions for each quiz, and each student gets a random assortment of 20 drawn from the question bank, so they don't all get the same quiz. The quizzes are open-book, obviously, but they only have 1/2 hr to write them, so I figure that doesn't give them time to look EVERYTHING up, and those who are prepared still have the advantage.

But today I discovered that students are taking the quizzes in groups, so their buddies tell them "the right answer is d", and they don't learn a damn thing; and some of them freely admit to not even bothering to crack the text open before the quiz.

Now this isn't 'cheating', because I didn't tell them they couldn't do it. But I"m not happy with it. At all.

But I can't police it either. The whole point is that they take the quiz not during class time and not under my eye, so we can spend class time on something more interesting than filling in Scantron sheets.

I think I'm going to have to accept that we have to waste class time filling in Scantron sheets. Because taking quizzes in groups is just over the line, for me.

I wonder if I'm over-reacting. Sure doesn't feel that way.

I'm sure I should be in bed by now

2010-02-10T00:34:00.000-08:00

I have prepared tomorrow's major class, more or less, posted the template for Friday's quiz in one class, posted and captioned the images for Friday's quiz for the big class, and written and posted the questions, instructions, and grading rubric for the in-class essay for the big class.

I have not made up 64 new multiple-choice questions for the online quiz for the big class which is to go live Thursday at 10 a.m. I have not disambiguated Apollodorus entries. I have not marked the papers from the graduate class last term, partly because they were evaporated by Moodle, which does not seem to me to be stable enough for prime time. Still it is mildly embarrassing that I didn't notice they were gone until this afternoon.

There's also a couple of quizzes for class # 3 to mark, and 150 lines of Greek to read for Thursday, and an article to read. I think making up the quiz takes precedence.

Still, I'm sorry I haven't got to my own narrative theory project yet - I'm giving that paper in a month ...

interesting commentary on the iPad

2010-02-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

Alex Payne argues that it's a "deeply cynical device". David Parry on Profhacker argues that it may well actually be bad for education.

Hm. Maybe I'll get a crappy netbook after all, for presentations. It wouldn't be as pretty, but it might be more what I need.

On the other hand, here's Fraser Speirs, saying "who says it isn't for content creation?" - and the OmniGroup is already jumping on the bandwagon to create apps for the iPad, like Omnigraffle for example.

So maybe we should just all wait and see what actually comes out. And what apps are available for it. I personally need something that will let me search and annotate pdfs. If it's got that, I will be happy. (Though if it would run iClicker, even happier. Not sure how it's going to do that, though, since it needs a USB port to attach the iClicker receiver. Now perhaps if it could do that over bluetooth ...

Edited to add: excellent discussion here. Which points out the implications of the design and makes a point I actually rather like, that Steve Jobs claims it's "the most important thing he's ever done" and the guy's not an idiot.

interesting Dollhouse discussion

2010-02-05T14:19:00.000-08:00

Some there are who object to Dollhouse's overtly feminist agenda in season 1 turning into an anti-corporate agenda in season 2, for example Tigerbeatdown here and Asking the Wrong Questions here. Contemplating , myself, and more when I'm done. I think however that one could argue that in season 2 everyone is in the same objectified position as women are in season 1; so you could argue that it's radically feminist, in that it shows what happens if feminism isn't taken seriously.

more chipper but

2010-02-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

I slept 10 hours last night - didn't mean to, but it was probably just as well. I meant to get up early and do some marking, but my subconscious caused me to forget to set my alarm. Good for it.

I like teaching; I like it a lot. Still, I don't think this is what I thought the life of an academic would be. I thought I would be dealing with abstract concepts and living the life of the mind and reading ancient texts a lot more than I do. I wasn't expecting the grind, the constantly being behind on administrivia and marking, the always having something that needed to be done yesterday that I feel totally lame for not doing, while everyone else seems to be functioning just fine, and none of it anything that interests me. I wasn't expecting to never have time to research, or just sit down and read something I find interesting, because there's always 27 undone tasks screaming in my ear that I have to do them first, so I never seem to have the concentration to let that all go so I can actually work.

I might reasonably have expected the procrastination, though, since that has always been my problem and my problem alone; I mean, it would have afflicted me no matter what my working conditions.

And after all, the teaching term only lasts 13 weeks. It's not so bad. It's kind of fun, in fact.

So: I need to find a way to set aside an hour a day to read in. Maybe not every day during the teaching term; but every day, for sure, when I'm not teaching.

Also, exercise! I haven't got any in ages. This is ridiculous.

right, exhausted here

2010-02-03T23:19:00.000-08:00

Husband was away for 3 days, giving me, as always when he travels, a renewed respect for single mothers. Holy crap. I'm exhausted. While he was gone I gave one quiz, taught four classes - why am I so tired? I think it's the lack of any down time at all; no one to hand off to and say, can you make dinner/ deal with homework/ get child A or B to bed?

I did get all the administrative work done, except the now 2 month overdue quizzes and papers. Which now belatedly reminds me that I have 2 quizzes to grade for tomorrow; if I haven't lost them, which I earnestly hope I haven't. And a lot of Greek to read.

Trying to get the Moodle support people to come up with a grading rubric sheet like the one in the old Workshop module, which they are no longer using. It made grading papers so much easier, and did all the calculations for you, and broke down the grade so students could see where they were going wrong. unfortunately the module itself was buggy. The first paper is due February 22. They are overworked and understaffed. I am not sure I'm going to get my rubric.

Teaching the Homeric Hymns is always fun. So I had, on balance, a good day, and get to teach 4 more of the hymns, too, in the next couple of weeks. And may persuade a few of the little darlings to read them, even.

Monday morning

2010-02-01T09:39:00.000-08:00

I should not stay up until 1:30 a.m. to do administrative stuff. I should do it during the day, instead of procrastinating and web-surfing.

However, the references are done, the annual activity reports are done, so today I have only to - let me see - do a study leave report, a SSHRC referee report, make up a quiz, 2 lectures and a set of tutorial questions, put a handout up on Moodle, and mark some 2-month-overdue papers and quizzes. And find out why my bicycle battery isn't charging, and pick the kids up from school by 3 because Prof Dad is out of town till Wednesday.

This would be more doable if I didn't want to take a long nap right now...

I'm excited about starting work on the Sophocles, Whedon and narrative theory paper though. Though I will have to learn something about narrative theory. Soonish, since I have to give the paper in 6 weeks - holy crow, 6 weeks?

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