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September 30, 2005
Dr. BP's Verdict
So today I finally asked Beloved Partner the question that has been terrifying me. First I had to beg him to give me a serious answer as well as the obligatory sarcastic one. I was moved to ask because the Michigan conference was my first since the wreck, and people were asking me how I was, and I was telling them quite honestly that I'm pretty good but I still don't feel like the brain is working as well as it was before the accident. So here's the truth, Dear Readers: I've really been worrying about this. Lots of dementia in my family, in my grandparents' generation, and everybody following them has worried themselves sick when they reached the age that I have now attained. My father, who got increasingly crabby with each passing year but was otherwise pretty darned sharp when cancer got him in his 80s, worried every day of his life, starting at about age 50, that he was going to lose his cookies and not know it. So as a stalwart Moore, I started worrying at about age 50, too; and then at age 58 I went out and whacked myself hard three places on my head and gave myself a doozy of a concussion, to the extent that three weeks later I got lost twice trying to drive myself to school (a day that I will never, ever forget) and got better but still spent a good deal of the spring trying to regain the ability to, like, read for more than a half hour at a time. And now every time I get confused or forgetful, I think, oh brother, it's the dementia, hastened by the concussion.
Trouble is, I've been confused and forgetful all my life. BP told me about 15 years ago that I'd chosen a great profession, one in which the Absent-Minded Professor is a tolerated and even beloved figure. So how am I to know whether confusions and forgetfulness that I now experience are, like, my lifelong norm, or whether they're a dire sign that Things Are Sliding Downhill?
I ask BP, that's how. The man has never minced a word in his entire life and can be trusted not to start now. So here's his reassuring answer: "No, I haven't noticed anything. You've been capable of acting like an idiot at the drop of a hat for the 29 years I've known you, but you're no more of an idiot now than you ever have been." God bless him, that was his honest, unsarcastic answer.
So I swear now I'll find something else to worry about. BP would notice if I was, like, not getting well from the concussion, and he would tell me.
Ya gotta imagine the intonations of a 1950s Southern revival meeting here:
I'M HEALED!
Posted by senioritis at 08:33 PM | Comments (4)
September 28, 2005
Two simple questions
Is it possible to have your laundry, your paper-grading, your cycling, and your writing done? If so, will someone please tell me how?
Posted by senioritis at 09:47 PM | Comments (9)
September 26, 2005
Michigan paper
Here's the link to the paper, "On the Relative Merits of Teaching Textuality, Codifying Textual Behavior, and Detecting Transgressions," that I gave at the Michigan conference on Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism. There's an accompanying PPT, downloadable here. I don't know what the audience thought; I'm afraid they may have been put off by a bad PPT (but thank the gods that AJ gave me some help on the design, or it would have been worse!) or by a very taxonomic conference presentation. Or they may have found, as do I, that diagramming the approaches to plagiarism is a useful way of thinking through the underlying values and use values of those approaches. This diagram (or what will no doubt be a revised version of it) will be part of my in-the-works Plagiarism and Privilege in the Academy, and I have to mull over just how to present it there: as an information graphic or just as linear prose.
Linda Adler-Kassner gave a terrific presentation related to a book she's working on, and I'm going to investigate the possibilities for her language of frames (as in media frames, not terministic screens) as a better option than my somewhat-off-the-mark language of epistemology.
Posted by senioritis at 11:54 AM | Comments (3)
Plagiarism and terrorism
Likening plagiarism to terrorism (by establishing categories of risk for plagiarism), John P. Lesko single-handedly adjudicates plagiarism cases and publishes his conclusions here. Ward Churchill is among the convicted.
Elsewhere on his site:
A Plagiarist sucks the lifeblood right out of a text for his own selfish nourishment. He cares not that the life of the Author is forfeited through his bloodthirsty textual savagery-ravagery and asserts blasphemously that a text has somehow attained “the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author” (Foucault, M. "What is an Author?" 1986: 140). The Plagiarist siphons off the life giving crimson fluid as ink for his own pen, without a thought for either the Author, or for the Reader. And he splashes this stolen red ink freely on the pages of his own textual plagiarations. To the Plagiarist, the words are there for the taking. After all, whose words are they really anyway? Who can rightfully claim ownership of the discourse that characterizes human communication? The Plagiarist justifies his plagiarisms through pseudo-philosophizations and self-justifications as he happily helps himself to your blood, my blood—anybody’s blood, as long as that red ink remains life-givingly fluid, un-encrusted, as yet un-congealed. A Plagiarist is a textual vampire . . .
He goes on in this vein, and if you're interested in cultural metaphors for plagiarism, you'll want to scroll down to his catalogue.
One more, and then I'll stop. This is from his bio:
Digital Plagiarism and the "Cheating Crisis" in America's SchoolsI've also got an interest in what has been called the "cheating crisis" in America's schools, most recently in an ABC Primetime News report. While at an educators conference in San Francisco in July 2004, I met the founder and CEO of Turnitin.com, Dr. John Barrie. He invited me to the Turnitin headquarters where I met his staff and got to see the inner workings of this cheat detection enterprise. I must say that I was rather impressed! In the server rooms, Dr. Barrie showed me on a monitor screen the papers which were coming in by the thousands to the Turnitin.com paper database. He also suggested that I get in touch with the SVSU newspaper to let the university community know that plagiarism is being taken as a very serious issue, and that it's just not worth taking the chance of getting busted by downloading a paper or cutting and pasting from the Internet. Click here to read the article in the Valley Vanguard that was written after an interview with the student editors.
In case you're interested, you might also want to check out the current list of "cheatsites" which I've been monitoring. These represent only a small portion of the cheatsites out there on the web, and it's staggering to think of how much academic dishonesty is going on at campuses across America. Sure, there are companies such as Turnitin.com and other cheat detection services available, but from what I've seen, cheatsites are now specializing more and more in paid "research services". In other words, you pay the $$$, and they will write your paper for you!?!?
Posted by senioritis at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2005
Bikevac
I had wondered about this, and Cycleicio.us provides answers: Yes, so people did evacuate via bike. You have to be single and hardy to do it, but it averts gridlock and running out of gas.
Posted by senioritis at 10:17 PM | Comments (1)
September 24, 2005
On charity and revolution
A provocative perspective from the BBC. I appreciate the articulation of a principle that I've long held yet have never felt comfortable with:
Charity is part of the warp and weft of American life and it is telling that Hurricane Katrina has encouraged an outpouring of giving on a scale never seen before.Americans are cross with the government and disappointed with the response from Washington, but they have not sat on their hands and waited for the government to sort itself out. Much the opposite.
Americans have given with unbridled enthusiasm and generosity.
Is that not something governments do?
Americans do not think so and never will.
This is unquestionably a source of strength and spine in troubled times, but boy does it put a dampener on revolution.
Charity ameliorates it, softens blows, pours oil on troubled waters. It does not lead to social change.
Given a choice between high taxes and charity, I prefer high taxes. There's something just wrong about going to a ball or a concert or buying a product that one will use oneself for one's own pleasure and calling it "charity." Community service? I've got no problem with that; it's a fine thing. Charity, though, seems to me a powerful preventative to social justice.
Posted by senioritis at 10:50 PM | Comments (0)
Back to the index card!
Current infatuation: index cards. It's the 43 folders Hipster PDA idea. So right now my calendar and a host of various notes are on my PDA, but my to-do list is on index cards, and it's working very nicely, TYVM. But me being me, infatuated with color and complexity, my to-do list is actually on color-coded Post-Its on color-coded index cards. God forbid I should succumb to simplicity.
Hilariously, though, 43 folders posts a list of provocative sites about index cards, and guess what one is: yeah, the index card system of conducting research. Nutty.
Posted by senioritis at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)
This just in
One of those flyers you get at a conference: A CFP for a new journal, Plagiary.org. If you go to the site and browse around, you'll find a link to the home page of the editor, John P. Lesko. There and on the various links you'll find statements such as these:
"P" is for Plagiarist. "P" also represents Postructuralist Hypocrisy which hypocritically ignores the moral culpability involved in issues such as plagiarism involving very real and alive authors. Postructuralist absurdities such as the "Death of the Author" construct simply do not hold up to close analysis and criticism. If the Author is dead--murdered by French poststructuralists--does that mean that plagiarism is now acceptable? Can plagiarists freely help themselves to the texts which previously belonged to an author? I think not!
Posted by senioritis at 07:01 AM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2005
First day
Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: some interesting moments. I'm too tired for extended, intensive entry, but here are the Greatest Hits of my day.
- Mario Biagioli (Harvard University), "Plagiarism and Authorship in Science": The "most pernicious plagiarism" in the sciences is the denial of authorship that occurs when grant reviewers appropriate the ideas in grant proposals and do the work themselves, before the people who developed the ideas can.
- Michael Grossberg (former editor of the American Historical Review), "History and the Disciplining of Plagiarism": the journal's editorial board wanted manuscripts to continue to be distributed to reviewers in hard copy. They were didn't want manuscripts distributed electronicaly, for fear that the medium would tempt reviewers to appropriate from what they were reading. Grossman believes we have to get beyond the fear of electronic plagiarism and develop new understandings of textuality and plagiarism.
- Daniel Oakrent (former ombudsman, The New York Times), "Journalism and Plagiarism Scandals": Manufacturing data (and of course his case study is Jayson Blair) is worse than plagiarism because plagiarism may have some relation to the truth, whereas fraudulent data inescapably disseminates lies.
- Amy E. Robillard (English, Illinois State University, Normal), "Young Scholars: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices": The decision to cite is not exclusively determined by the application of citation conventions but in part by our relationship to the cited author. What does this mean for comp/rhet scholars' disinclination to cite their students in the way they cite published articles? (Stay tuned for the answer, in the January issue of College English.)
- Kami Day (Johnson County Community College) and Michele Eodice (Writing Center, University of Kansas), "Students Honoring and Acknowledging Each Other": The plagiarist denies participation in a community. We should replace our notion of citation, which is a competitive model of textuality, with a "gift culture" model for classrooms. They're drawing on Lewis Hyde, Marcel Mauss, and Claude Levi-Strauss's anthropological study of gift-giving: the gift must move and circulate.
- Marilyn Randall (French, University of Western Ontario), "Authentic Imitation: Literary Lessons": Why do we expect more of our students than we do of canonized authors such as Shakespeare and Coleridge?
- Anne Berggren (English, University of Michigan): "Does the thesis sentence short circuit student originality?": The thesis statement becomes an articulated item in textbooks in the 1940s, at a time when increasing numbers of students from diverse backgrounds were being educated on the GI Bill, and when composition was increasingly taught by adjunct faculty. The essay front-loaded by a thesis statement is easy to comprehend, hence easy to grade.
Tomorrow, alas, I must work on the PowerPoint for my Sunday presentation and won't be able to hear as many presentations.
Posted by senioritis at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2005
Freakin out
So I get to the hotel before AR does and I figure that since I'm rooming with her for the first time, I'd better not just spread my junk all over everywhere the way I do when I'm rooming with SJ (who's just as bad as I am), so the first thing I do is change into my jammies and the second thing I do is start unpacking, and I'm going along just fine: I figure out which bed AR will probably want, and I divide the closet hangars in half so's I don't take too many of them and I get the suitcase unpacked but then I dump out the briefcase onto the bed (after all, it's collected a bunch of junk, even in the short trip from Syracuse to Detroit—which short trip, by the way, was made immeasurably longer by a too-chatty shuttle driver whose only passengers were me and his common-law wife; I made the tragic error of answering honestly when he asked where I was going, and for my sins, I then got to listen to the tape of his college plagiarisms, played on continuous loop), and as I start to sort through the briefcase junk that's now sprayed onto the bed, I see a tiny bright thing, and guess what it was.
It was a piece of windshield.
I thought I got all that stuff out of the briefcase back in February. But no. Here's this one little piece, now in a hotel room in Detroit Michigan, reminding me that in January I nearly killed myself.
It took me awhile to finish unpacking. Fortunately AR showed up, spirited me away for a salad and glass of wine, and got my mind on something other than that little piece of windshield.
Posted by senioritis at 10:00 PM | Comments (5)
September 19, 2005
Churchill interview
Posted by senioritis at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)
glug glug glug
That's the sound of me drowning. In the few short days between the end of week three and the beginning of week four, I have gone from basking on the beach to drowning in work, and it looks as if this will go on for the next several weeks. Experience tells me that really, it will go on till about 10 days after the semester ends. Writing a chapter a week? It was fun while it lasted.
But dang, I'm organized. It's nice at least to have a sense that you know what it is that's killin you. This morning I'll finish grading FYC papers, and that will be one good thing.
glug glug glug
Posted by senioritis at 07:19 AM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2005
Upping the ante: Patent + copyright
Although plagiarism regulations and copyright law arose from a common discourse, in the nineteenth century they separated, with one becoming local and often unwritten code based in morality, the other becoming law based in economic profit. Another fundamental difference in the two is that the notion of plagiarism includes the appropriation of ideas, whereas copyright does not.
Not yet, anyhow. But soon? (via Phosita)
I'm not liking this at all. Patent law has long been separate from copyright, but in the move that the enterprising Mr. Knight is pursuing, patent law would take up the slack in copyright law, protecting ideas as well as words. "Great!" the plagiarism police might respond. "But wait!" I would answer. Haven't we gone far enough in the capitalistic mania that has trampled all over fair use? Do we really want more Sonny Bono-style expansion of author's rights in intellectual property?
At the end of this week I'll be attending the Michigan conference on Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism. One session is devoted to "The Current Plagiarism Panic"; and Chuck Bazerman and Martine Courant Rife will each be talking about fair use. And I will be reveling in conversations about intellectual property that do not take economic profit as the Prime Directive.
Posted by senioritis at 04:57 PM | Comments (1)
September 17, 2005
Athletics and academic integrity
Yesterday in FYC we were talking about types of claims (facts, opinions, beliefs, prejudices, and superstitions) and I was illustrating each. Religion provides a good example of beliefs, but I said there were other types of beliefs, too—for example, my belief in writing and education as generalized Good. I illustrated prejudice by limning a writing teacher (not me, I specified!) who expects her female students to be better writers. Such claims, I explained, are derived from evidence (in this case, essentialized statistical data about gender and academic socialization) but can then feed stereotyped prejudice.
A more troubling example (and one that I'll use in Tuesday's class) is the LSU case. It involves findings—by the NCAA—of academic integrity violations. That's a (socially constructed) "fact." But the fact easily turns from a type of claim to evidence for a prejudice against athletes.
I hate that some athletes are robbed of education, shoveled through a system and used solely as capital for that system. I hate that grades can be changed by corrupt administrators and that faculty can be strongarmed (good metaphor, eh?) into preferential treatment for commodified athletes. And I hate that documented evidence of such incidents becomes evidence for an academic prejudice against athletes, an assumption that they are anti-intellectual ignoramuses, an assumption that can be reduced to the ludicrous belief that brains and brawn don't mix.
Posted by senioritis at 05:41 AM | Comments (2)
September 16, 2005
Interim report
So the conclusion of Week 3 of the fall semester is here, and so far this semester--
- I've written 3 handbook chapters.
- I have set up my 43 folders, and I'm liking it a lot. Now my tabletop is not piled high with stuff. Instead, I have fat, organized folders.
- I have set up folders for each of my students. Now my desk isn't piled with miscellaneous stacks of informal writing and contact information.
- I've been doing class preparation on PowerPoint (sample here); taking notes during class on the slides; and then putting the file in the Blackboard folder after class so that my students have access to it. The early returns are promising. I might blog about this later in detail, once I have a better sense of the pros and cons.
- I have begun thinking through the possibilities for differentiating projects and to-dos and supplementing the PDA with index cards. ("And remember: your to-do list is not the place to park your ambitions or test the limits of your grasp. . . . If it’s on your list, it’s a commitment")
- I've remembered the principle that if it takes less than 5 minutes, you do it right away. You don't even put it on a to-do list if you can avoid it, and you certainly don't let it roll over day after day.
- I have talked with my editors and found out that they are calm about the fact that I won't have all the chapters done by September 30 and that in fact they're pleased with the rate at which I'm working.
- I have articulated a major conceptual principle for Plagiarism and Privilege in the Academy, one that's going to require some conceptual mapping to supplement the inevitable paragraphs, pages, and chapters. (I'm going to ambush AJ and get her to help me with this mapping.)
- I've drastically slacked on exercise and have resolved to step it back up. 30 miles a week should be my year-round minimum.
- I have figured out that if I eat junk food day in and day out, I feel like crap.
- I have decided that I have to ease off on the writing a little bit, or I will die in my tracks. Last night I baked some apple bran muffins (yes, with those wild apples) and turned the compost pile. It was a beautiful thing.
Posted by senioritis at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2005
Prosecutions
So the owners of the deadly nursing home are being prosecuted. Fine. Now can we have prosecutions of some of these elected and appointed officials? And instead of starting at the bottom and working our way up, let's start at the top and see how far down we need to go. And the top is of course B***, who demoted FEMA from a cabinet-level position; appointed a hack with no job credentials to head the agency; and then vacationed while NO flooded. He now accepts responsibility? Yeah, sure. It ain't enough, Bubba.
Posted by senioritis at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)
Apple cake
Some twenty years ago, a student from Long Island was at my house for dinner and remarked, "You're the first person I've ever known who goes grocery shopping by the roadside." And he was right. I was serving a dish I'd learned from a Japanese friend who had survived WWII privations, when roadside grocery shopping was a necessity. It was ordinary colt's-foot (whose Japanese name I no longer remember), cooked to a delicacy and served over the yummy sticky Japanese rice.
Yesterday I did my grocery shopping at Wegman's—and then by the roadside. The wild apples are coming in, and I had been keeping an eye on a promising-looking tree at an abandoned farmstead. So yesterday after Wegman's, it was roadside grocery shopping. The ones I harvested may not be fully ripe, but they're close enough, I think. The basketball team has been pestering Beloved Partner for a dinner date, so they're coming over on Saturday. BP will take care of the whole dinner, except for apple cake, an annual ritual that I'm really looking forward to enacting. Apple cake can be made with tart storebought apples, but it's best with the wild ones.
The recipe is actually just one variant on a homemade cake mix. I'll give the mix recipe here and then the apple cake variant. If anyone's interested, I'll post the other variants on this cake.
SNACK CAKE MIX
Makes about 13 c.
Before using, stir mix; then spoon loosely into measuring c & level off.
6 c flour
3 tablespoons baking powder
1-1/2 c shortening
4 c sugar
2 teaspoons salt
In lg bowl combine flour, sugar, baking powder & salt. W/ pastry blender, cut in shortening till mixture resembles cornmeal. Store in airtight container in cool, dry place.
APPLE CAKE
Makes 8 svgs. Per svg w/o ice cream: 202 cal, 3 g pro, 35 g car, 7 g fat, 33 mg chol, 161 mg sod
1 med-size tart apple, peeled if desired, quartered, cored & cut in very thin wedges. If you're using wild apples, it will take 2-3 of them.
2 T sugar
2 t lemon juice
1/4 t ea cinnamon & nutmeg
2 c Snack-Cake Mix
2 egg whites, slightly beaten
1/3 c milk
In sm bowl toss apple w/ sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon & nutmeg; set aside. In 8" layer-cake or sq pan stir cake mix, egg & milk w/ rubber spatula till well blended. Scrape down sides of pan. Press apple slices, rounded sides up, into batter in rows. Drizzle any melted sugar mixture remaining in bowl over apple slices. Bake at 375° 30 min or till pick inserted in center comes out clean.
Posted by senioritis at 08:09 AM | Comments (3)
September 11, 2005
Something to say
Sometimes a blog just insists on being written. This entry has been nagging me for days, as I told TO while we were IMing a few days ago. I'm so damned tired that BP insisted on bringing in the wash in from the line himself, saying I was "47 shades of pale." But hey, Chapter 28 is finished, and it's an ultrafine overview of writing in the social sciences. And now this blog entry is demanding that I pony up and write it.
Collin and academom have both been blogging about blogging, raising really troubling issues. What they've been talking about has been on my mind for lo these many days, and here I'll make a couple of remarks that began as a comment on Collin's latest post and then mushroomed into what I figured should be a freestanding entry.
I wonder how much of the hostility to blogging derives from its association with diaries, hence with personal writing, hence with the feminine, hence with the body, hence with the bad. AND hence some readers of blogs are not as much into the intellectual inquiry and free exchange of ideas as they are into the surveilling of individuals, whether those individuals are job candidates, colleagues, or students. I'm thinking here of feminist rhetoricians like Suzanne Clark who have analyzed hostility to personal writing, though I'm not sure I've yet actually articulated the chain of reasoning. (Academom's rasslin with this one, too.)
But I'm also thinking of the early days of print publication, when the necessary authorial attribution was not so that the creative author could be credited with (and rewarded for) the publication of the text, but rather so that the author could be held accountable: A brief-lived 1642 English parliamentary edict mirrored a 1545 Venetian law, legislating that texts not be printed without the author's permission and name—primarily to prevent "libelous, seditious, or blasphemous" publications (Rose 22). How different is that from the currently circulating recommendations that bloggers use pseudonyms so they don't face recriminations in the workplace?
On the positive side, I'm thinking of SJ, who periodically announces that my writing has gotten better since I began blogging. And of course she delivers this not so much as a compliment on the high quality of my writing but as a comment on how very much my writing needed improvement :) So seriously, I blog because it's doing wonders for a prose style that tends too much toward the stuffy, a problem that SJ has, over the years, helped coach me through.
Blogging also connects me to others. So does IM. Though I'm very sociable, I'm also very much a loner, one of those people whose marching beat is, like, from Mars. (The fact that I'm a cyclist is a dead giveaway; cyclists are notorious loners.) I'm just not a team player—not so much because I'm deliberately perverse as that I just don't usually "get" what's going on in a social organization, so I either trample all over it in my fervor, or I just skulk away, confused. Instead, my connections with others are spontaneous and usually one to one. This paragraph is a little heavy on the self-analysis, I know, but I'm trying to get at what for me is an important point about blogging: this activity works well for me not only stylistically but humanly; it keeps me in communication with and thinking about unseen groups. And that makes blogging worthwhile, even if some people think I'm wasting my time, or if others use it to keep tabs on me in quite unpleasant ways. No such thing as a free lunch; blogging has its prices.
Clark, Suzanne. “Julia Kristeva: Rhetoric and the Woman as Stranger.” Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1995. 305-18.
Clark, Suzanne. "Rhetoric, Social Construction, and Gender: Is It Bad to Be Sentimental?" Writing Theory and Critical Theory. Ed. John Clifford and John Schilb. New York: Modern Language Association, 1994. 96-108.
Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.
Posted by senioritis at 09:23 PM | Comments (4)
September 10, 2005
Happy Pet News
Like many pet lovers, my anguish over the Katrina disaster has been compounded by the dog-and-cat situation there. I have sympathized with the plight of people who were faced with the choice of abandoning their pets or staying to face the flood. And in addition to my horror over the human lives lost or destroyed, I have been sickened by the media images of luckless pets trapped on roofs and balconies. The government failure to prevent and then respond to this disaster has meant that human bodies have been left to rot and pets have been left to die, while the too-late government assistance has had to focus on saving live humans. So images like these do provide scraps of comfort. Some pets survived, and some were reuinted with their people.
Update: And now there's some systematic efforts being made to rescue stranded pets.
Posted by senioritis at 06:41 AM | Comments (0)
September 09, 2005
Bragging about cheating
Um, I think if I wrote something like this, I'd use a pseudonym. And I think if if the author of something like this approached me for testimony about my past excursions into cheating and academic fraud, I'd decline.
But that's just me.
Posted by senioritis at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)
Scapegoat + incompetent
Brown is both: he's a scapegoat, and he's incompetent. So taking him off Katrina duty is a start. Getting him out of FEMA altogether is another step yet to be taken. Getting FEMA out of Homeland Security = yet another step, and Hillary's taking it. Getting U.S. budgeting priorities actually focused on the security of its citizens (which apparently isn't the same thing as "homeland security"): now, that would be a very fine step, indeed. So yes, I'm glad to see Brown the Bungler taken off the Katrina job. And yes, I'm hoping that isn't going to be the Regime's PR fix for this fiasco. I'm hoping they'll be held to account by a public whose indignation doesn't abate.
P.S. Brown has announced the end of the debit card program, and even the Dallas Morning News acknowledges that the program privileged B***'s home state.
The Sydney Morning Herald provides gloves-off commentary: "None of the men entrusted with preparing for or responding to such a disaster had even a moment's experience in emergency service. The three agency leaders had no qualification other than blind loyalty to the Republican Party." Kinda takes your breath away, doesn't it? And then, in the coup de grace, the Morning Herald concludes, "In the other decisive political action of the week, Bush declared Friday, September 16, a national day of prayer and remembrance for the hurricane victims."
9/10 p.s. The Bungler's former boss says he's just average.
9/11 p.s., from the LA Times:
At first, there was a hint of swagger in the attitude of Brown, the FEMA director, toward Hurricane Katrina. The day the storm tore into the Gulf Coast, Brown told a television interviewer: "We were so ready for this…. We've planned for this kind of disaster for many years because we've always known about New Orleans and the situation. We actually did catastrophic disaster planning for this two years ago."
Posted by senioritis at 07:55 PM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2005
Kitty quandary
I swore I wasn't going to feed ferals anymore, because I didn't want our place to become headquarters for a colony of sick cats. Friends on a farm a couple of miles away have precisely that problem. They feed 'em; they can't catch 'em; even if they could catch 'em, they can't afford to take care of them; and the colony is really appallingly sick. So once we had Fred indoors, we quit feeding the ferals. Geraldine and Bart have nevertheless kept close tabs on us all summer, hoping the food would reappear.
And yesterday I broke down. The inner door was open whilst I was feeding our four-cat crew, and then I heard some piteous meowing. It was Bart, sitting on the porch by the screen door, watching Fred eating and crying for some. Yeah, I took some food out for him. And this evening I fed Geraldine.
I really don't know where all this is going. These are gorgeous cats. Both are small; Geraldine is grey with white accents; Bart is a black polydactyl with a white chest smudge. People see them and say, "My, that's a nice cat." But nobody can take either of them in.
Including us. We have four, and hard experience has taught us that's our upper limit.
But if somebody wanted one, we could trap 'em the same way we did Fred. And Fred, after three months indoors, is an adorable, happy housecat. Somebody? Somebody? Speak right up!!!
Posted by senioritis at 07:42 PM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2005
Light diversion
Donna is responsible for my falling prey to this meme. And I'm betting I'm the only memer whose high-school graduation dates back even to the 1960s, much less to 1964. That was 41 years ago, just in case there's a reader who didn't instantly calculate my age. And yeah, I didn't miss the fact that Music Outfitters' lists only go back to 1960, presumably in the belief that anyone who graduated from high school any earlier than that cannot navigate the Internet nor for that matter remember what year they graduated.
Anyhow. I've obediently gone to Music Outfitters; typed in the search string "top 100 1964"; copied the resulting list here, below the fold; marked songs I loved in bold and struck out those I couldn't stand. In my own defense, I should note that my tastes have since somewhat changed, insofar as I have, in my golden years, developed an appreciation for Roy Orbison's music. But I still can't stand Dean Martin.
And I've introduced another facet to the meme, for those of us who are of, ah, a "certain age": I've italicized the songs of which I have no memory.
1. I Want To Hold Your Hand, The Beatles
2. She Loves You, The Beatles
3. Where Did Our Love Go, Supremes
4. Oh, Pretty Woman, Roy Orbison
5. I Get Around, Beach Boys
6. Everybody Loves Somebody, Dean Martin
7. My Guy, Mary Wells
8. People, Barbara Streissand 9. Last Kiss, J. Frank Wilson and The Cavaliers
10. Hello, Dolly!, Louis Armstrong 11. We'll Sing In The Sunshine, Gale Garnett
12. Java, Al Hirt
13. A Hard Day's Night, The Beatles
14. Love Me Do, The Beatles
15. Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Manfred Mann
16. Under The Boardwalk, Drifters
17. Dancing In The Street, Martha and The Vandellas
18. Little Children, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas
19. Love Me With All Your Heart, Ray Charles Singers
20. Please Please Me, The Beatles
21. Chapel Of Love, Dixie Cups 24. Rag Doll, Four Seasons
22. Suspicion, Terry Stafford
23. Glad All Over, Dave Clark Five
25. Dawn (Go Away), Four Seasons
26. Bread And Butter, Newbeats
27. It Hurts To Be In Love, Gene Pitney 29. Come A Little Bit Closer, Jay and The Americans
28. Dead Man's Curve, Jan and Dean
30. A World Without Love, Peter and Gordon
31. Have I The Right?, Honeycombs
32. Don't Let The Rain Come Down (Crooked Little Man), Serendipity Singers
33. Baby Love, Supremes
34. Let It Be Me, Betty Everett and Jerry Butler
35. Wishin' And Hopin', Dusty Springfield
36. You Don't Own Me, Lesley Gore 37. Walk On By, Dionne Warwick
38. The House Of The Rising Sun, Animals
39. G.T.O., Ronny and The Daytona
40. Twist And Shout, The Beatles
41. Memphis, Johnny Rivers
42. White On White, Danny Williams
43. Hey Little Cobra, Rip Chords 44. The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss), Betty Everett
45. Bits And Pieces, Dave Clark Five
46. My Boy Lollipop, Millie Small
47. Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Major Lance
48. The Little Old Lady, Jan and Dean
49. Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying, Gerry and The Pacemakers
50. A Summer Song, Chad and Jeremy
51. The Girl From Ipanema, Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto
52. Can't Buy Me Love, The Beatles
53. Remember (Walkin' In The Sand), Shangri-Las
54. C'mon And Swim, Bobby Freeman
55. Do You Want To Know A Secret, The Beatles
56. Keep On Pushing, Impressions
57. Baby I Need Your Loving, Four Tops
58. Navy Blue, Diane Renay
59. Diane, Bachelors
60. Out Of Limits, Marketts
61. Little Honda, Hondells
62. See The Funny Little Clown, Bobby Goldsboro 63. Because, Dave Clark Five
64. (Just Like) Romeo And Juliet, Reflections
65. For You, Rick Nelson
66. Today, New Christy Minstrels
67. Can't You See That She's Mine, Dave Clark Five
68. Leader Of The Pack, Shangri-Las
69. Funny, Joe Hinton
70. The Way You Do The Things You Do, Temptations
71. Anyone Who Had A Heart, Dionne Warwick
72. I Love You More And More Every Day, Al Martino
73. It's Over, Roy Orbison 74. Ronnie, Four Seasons
75. Surfin' Bird, Trashmen
76. What Kind Of Fool (Do You Think I Am), Tams
77. The Door Is Still Open To My Heart, Dean Martin
78. You Really Got Me, Kinks
79. The Shelter Of Your Arms, Sammy Davis Jr.
80. I'm So Proud, Impressions
81. Money, Kingsmen
82. Haunted Houses, Gene Simmons
83. Dang Me, Roger Miller
84. Do You Love Me, Dave Clark Five
85. (You Don't Know) How Glad I Am, Nancy Wilson
86. I Wanna Love Him So Bad, Jelly Beans
87. Don't Throw Your Love Away, Searchers
88. Hi-heel Sneakers, Tommy Tucker
89. How Do You Do It, Gerry and The Pacemakers
90. Walk, Don't Run '64
91. Cotton Candy, Al Hirt
92. Shangri-La, Robert Maxwell, His Harp and Orchestra
93. Chug-a-lug, Roger Miller
94. Steal Away, Jimmy Hughes
95. Louie Louie, The Kingsmen
96. A Fool Never Learns, Andy Williams
97. Bad To Me, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas
98. There! I've Said It Again, Bobby Vinton
99. I Saw Her Standing There, The Beatles
100. Needles And Pins, Searchers
Posted by senioritis at 10:01 PM | Comments (1)
September 05, 2005
3 things
- The Katrina Cataclysm. Energy costs skyrocket, and we think anew about our consumption of non-renewable resources.
- Madeline's ongoing pursuit of sustainable living.
- A visit this afternoon to friends who really live in the country, off the grid; their home accessible only by truck; their dwelling a pair of trailers stacked against the hillside, with the previously occupied trailer simply abandoned on the property; their communications conducted via cell phone that gets a lousy signal in really-rural Chenango County; their media a 5" color TV operating off an old-fashioned antenna; their water from a well that has run pretty damned low in this drought; their bathroom an outhouse; their laundry washed by hand; their power from solar panels and a generator.
Posted by senioritis at 05:02 PM | Comments (1)
Bookmarking sources
A postdated entry-in-progress where I'll collect sources that my FYC might look at. Suggestions very welcome!
- Blog entry 9/1/05
- Blog entry 9/2/05
- New Zealand Herald 9/3/05
- Kos, where some illuminating data are collected
- Houston Chronicle blog
- Le Monde: une Amérique humiliée
- London Independent: Mad Max
- Sydney Morning Herald: angry America
- Village Voice: big oil
- The National Review's deeply amazing encomium for New Orleans
- NewsMax's explanation of slow aid
- The Fox News version
- The Progressive version
- The Washington Times congratulates Bush
- The Nation on race and class
- MSNBC: Class and privilege in the escape
- Newsweek takes it all in stride: "It is a simple fact that in the Deep South those who are poor are especially likely to be black. It is also true--and America can take no pride in this--that the poor almost inevitably get the worst of any deal."
- AP via Yahoo via Kos: The delay is Congressional investigationworthy.
- NYT, 9/4/05: "The white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind."
- A transcript of the mayor's radio interview. The audio is also online. (also here)
- Spin control reported by San Francisco Chronicle
- Maxine Waters' remarks are reported in the Times-Picayune (scroll down for story).
- The Washington Post evaluates the federal disaster response system developed by the B*** regime: "Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday. . . ."
- The Post also explains the personal economics of being unable to leave
- The NYT offers a good summary: "The flood-control apparatus, which government officials and scientists had long said was inadequate, gave way, but federal engineers did not even realize that a major breach had occurred until the next morning, when citizens began reporting rising flows on Web logs. The city's evacuation plan worked, except for the thousands who were too poor or disabled to find their own way out of the city before the storm. The radios and cellphones that officials and police officers use to communicate failed, erasing any remaining semblance of authority in a city beset by chaos and crime. And finally, a full federal response came only after the dialogue between local and federal officials devolved into anger."
- The Boston Globe overviews the violence.
- The government response that worked really well, really fast
- Maureen Dowd's "United States of Shame"
- Kanye West on NBC breaking from teleprompter script
- Michael Moore's open letter on Friday
- St. Petersburg Times goes beyond the AP wire for insights into individuals who have stayed.
- Home burial
- Fixing blame
- NYT's tale of 2 families
- The Condi factor:
Many African-American leaders, noting that the vast majority of victims trapped inside New Orleans were poor and black, have suggested that racism may have played a part in the federal government's delayed response.
"How can that be the case? Americans don't want to see Americans suffer," asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as she toured damaged parts of her native Alabama on Sunday. "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race."
- The BBC's summary of world press commentary
- National Geographic's prediction of precisely what happened. Link forwarded by Tyra under the title "holy sheeet."
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet.
Well, actually, most of it now has. And the rest, I reckon, will, too.
- Crooked Timber on Katrina, the economy, and class (via vitia)
- And who gets the cleanup contract? Why, it's our old friends at Halliburton. Via M2H.
- The del.icio.us site
- The Times-Picayune: "Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially."
- Being Poor
- The 9/6 mayoral mandatory evacuation proclamation
- Gun sales in Baton Rouge
- The term "refugee"
- The National Guard is recruiting among the victims in the Astrodome.
- Video timeline of the administration's account of the disaster and relief effort
- Sources pertinent to research projects in WRT 303
- Does being linguistically challenged indicate that one is humanly challenged? See here and here.
- B*** acknowledges poverty as a problem
Many thanks to Derek, Madeline, Clancy, Ty, Jeremiah, and Tyra for adding sources to this list.
Posted by senioritis at 11:09 AM | Comments (4)
September 03, 2005
Diversity at Syracuse
Just another reason that I'm so happy here: 24% of the entering class is students of color. After my first day of classes on Tuesday, I was remarking to colleagues about what a pleasure it was to walk into both my classes and discover a diverse enrollment. It's an even greater pleasure to know that it's not just that I pulled a couple of lucky cards, but that this is where SU is going now.
Posted by senioritis at 09:54 PM | Comments (3)
#28
We were married on September 3, 1977, in Morgantown, West Virginia. We often don't think a lot about our wedding anniversary, because we lived together prior to getting the State's sanction to sleep together. Still, a wedding anniversary is a sentimental day, and this one shapes up very nicely. Sunny, breezy, warm but not hot. Beloved Partner goes off to his sporting clay shooting club this morning, an activity that he loves dearly. I finish up (she said, with determination) the writing about lit chapter and go for a bike ride. Then we have our celebratory dinner, the traditional gringo tacos, with a good bottle of Malbec. The words of Eels' hooky song on Daisies of the Galaxy come to mind: "Goddamn right, it's a beautiful day."
Posted by senioritis at 08:56 AM | Comments (2)
September 02, 2005
Collecting sources
Yes, I'll be incorporating this into FYC. I'll put a syllabus link here when it's ready. Meanwhile, from the NYT:
"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?" Mr. Naison wrote. "If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions."
Posted by senioritis at 05:01 PM | Comments (1)
Friday cat blogging
Boldly, where no woman has gone before, I have moved the cat food out of my study and into the kitchen. Doing the Cat Power dance is always something of a circus. The cat food has been in my study so that a succession of bottom-rungers (Zora, Teakettle, and for a while, Fred) would have my "protection" while they ate. But as Freddie has gained confidence, he's also gotten pretty busy at keeping Teakettle (the current bottom-runger) out of my study altogether.
So I've moved the food to the kitchen, to kind of keep Fred from thinking that this room is the be-all and end-all of Chez Howard. Now while Fred's in here hanging with me, Teakettle can get down to the kitchen and snatch a bite. She may have to take a thrashing from Ruthie and/or Luigi, but neither of those cats is quite as aggressive as Le Fred. (And, as BP points out, Teakettle's not exactly skinny, anyhow.)
So the upshot of this story for you Fred Followers is: the boy is doing well, flexing his muscles, getting lots of petting, feeling pretty feisty. His coat, though not yet smooth, is no longer rough. He spends very little time in the windows, calling to his old buddies. In just three months he's gone from feral to complacent.
Posted by senioritis at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)
September 01, 2005
Reality checks (in)
So after four days of rushing around, getting classes going and committee meetings underway and celebrating Beloved Partner's birthday, which came in the middle of it all, I spend an evening at the computer, catching up on the news of the week. The hurricane. What until now has been for me just flashes of random information encountered in passing is becoming a fuller picture. And I experience all at once what has for others probably been an unfolding story.
Part of that unfolding story is for me the inexplicable inability (inability, really?) to evacuate all those people from New Orleans. The New York Times is already famous, apparently, for its scathing review of B***'s performance.
And a reporter for the BBC makes some remarkably racist statements:
Matt Frei: New Orleans, LA : 21:03 GMTI drove into the city just a few hours ago and it was one of the scarier journeys I have made. It looks like the set of a Hollywood disaster movie.
The battle between nature and man is almost over, but the battle between man and man is just beginning. The scene here is more Africa than America.
From the air the destruction is humbling, luxury yachts thrown about like toys. Looking closer there is stagnant, dirty water, and then there are the survivors, mostly poor, black and angry. You see dead bodies here as you wander around the streets.
Good. Lord. It's hard to read this on the heels of today's FYC class, in which we talked about what does and does not belong in the categories of "diversity" and "discrimination" (questions that were raised by an assigned reading). The students are passionate about these issues, though divided/undecided on whether political affiliation should be protected by law the way race and gender are. (My own opinion is of course pretty obvious here.)
Meanwhile, some sap in England feels perfectly free to make these statements, and the BBC astonishingly prints them, and the world keeps right on turning. But all those people whom this Matt Frei seems to find so contemptible are still trapped, unaided, in that hell.
& furthermore:
Yesterday's Slate notices that the media are trying not to notice the issues of race and class. Well, yeah—unless you're the BBC. And then the Slate writer, Jack Shafer, hits me where I live: "So, it's safe to assume that the reluctance to talk about race on the air was a mostly white thing. That would tend to imply that white people don't enjoy discussing the subject. But they do, as long as they get to call another white person racist." Ouch.
Shafer goes on to offer his definitions of racism and latent racism, and I'm thinking this is going to make its way into my FYC syllabus. Shafer offers a great conclusion: "What I wouldn't pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, 'Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?'"
Posted by senioritis at 09:22 PM | Comments (3)
Ethos adjustment?
So on the second day of classes, a student in my advanced class wants to know where I get my nails done, and a student in my FYC wants to interview me for her First-Year Forum, because she has to interview a faculty member and I'm such a "character."
Um, d'you think maybe I'm starting off the semester already over the top?
P.S. But d'ya think I'm havin fun? Um, yeah. I am. It's not sposta be fun, but it is. It always is. I love the start of a new semester, and I'm having more fun than the law should allow. And now I have four days to try to get the adrenaline level down to normal (what, me, manic? Impossible!) before another week of teaching and committees. Committees. Committees. How's a girl sposta get any writing done, hmm?
Posted by senioritis at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)