« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
October 30, 2005
Long Island cheese
That's the name of a squash that several friends departed Chez Howard ce soir in possession of. (A special prize awaits the scholar who can parse that sentence.) I promised recipes for said friends. Given what a wonderful time I had with them today, I deliver. Viz.
Cooking pumpkin & pumpkin-type winter squash
Wash and cut it in half. For squash of this size, I cut into 4 pieces rather than 2. Remove seed & strings. Place in a pan, shell side up, and bake at 325° for 1 hour or more, till it is tender and begins to fall apart. Scrape the pulp from the shell. If you're working with pumpkin, you'll then need to strain it. But the Long Island cheese squash is so tender that all you'll need to do is mash it a little.
Pie crust
1-1/2 c sifted all-purpose flour1/2 t salt
1/2 c shortening (I use Crisco)
4-5 tablespoons cold water
Sift together flour and salt. Divide shortening in half. Using a pastry blender or blending fork, cut in first half till mixture looks like corn meal. Then cut in remaining half till like small peas. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of the water over part of flour-shortening mixture. Gently toss with fork; push to one side of bowl.
Sprinkle next tablespoon water over dry part; mix lightly; push to moistened part at side. Repeat till all is moistened. Gather up with fingers; form into a ball.
On lightly floured surface, flatten ball slightly and roll 1/8" thick. If edges split, pinch together. Always roll spoke-fashion, going from center to edge of dough. Use light strokes.
To transfer pastry, roll it over rolling pin; unroll pastry over pie plate, fitting loosely onto bottom and sides.
Pumpkin pie
1-3/4 cups cooked pumpkin (or LI cheese squash)3/4 cups sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 to 1-1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 to 1 teaspoon ginger
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cloves
3 slightly beaten eggs
1 cup milk
1 6-oz can evaporated milk
1 9" unbaked pastry shell
Thoroughly combine the pumpkin, sugar, salt, and spices. Blend in eggs, milk, and evaporated milk. Pour into unbaked pastry shell. Bake at 400° 60-70 minutes or till knife inserted halfway between center and outside comes out moist but clean. Cool.
Pumpkin soup
I haven't tried this recipe with this squash yet, but I'm pretty darned confident that I'll like the results when I do.6 cups chicken broth
4 cups pumpkin
2 medium onions, chopped
salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon flour
1/4 cup water
1 cup milk
In a large saucepan, heat the broth and add the pumpkin, onions, salt, and pepper. Cook the soup until the pumpkin is soft, about 20 minutes.
Puree the soup in batches in a blender or food processor, or force the soup through a sieve. Return the soup to the pan. Put the flour in a cup, and add the water, stirring until smooth. Add the flour mix to the soup and heat, stirring, till the soup comes to a boil.
Add the milk.
Posted by senioritis at 10:11 PM | Comments (3)
October 29, 2005
Preliminaries and prospects
Today,
- BP selected this year's cookie cutters: butterfly, bat, fish, pumpkin, candy corn (which doubles as a tombstone), skull, leaf, cat, hand, ghost, moon, cow, and owl.
- BP baked 800 sugar cookies.
- I baked a loaf of amaranth bread.
- I got lentil soup and squash out of the freezer.
- I prepared and froze 7 pie crusts.
- I rolled up the rugs in the dining room and covered the dining table with heavy-duty plastic.
- I strewed the dining table with cookie decors.
- I brought in the last of the firewood and prepared the fireplace.
- I made 2 trips to the grocery store (in addition to the 2 made earlier this week); altogether I've purchased items such as 300 sandwich bags, 5 pounds of butter, 10 pounds of sugar, 9 pounds of confectioner's sugar, 10 dozen eggs, 4 cans of evaporated milk, and 20 pounds of flour.
Tomorrow,
- BP will make a couple of gallons of cookie frosting.
- BP will prepare the back room for pumpkin-carving. This will involve his doing something with the hot peppers and soup beans that have been drying there since the September harvest.
- I'll cut up a couple gallons of veggies.
- I'll bake a loaf of pumpernickel bread.
- I'll bake 7 pumpkin pies.
- I'll put out breads, cheese, fruit, dip, pie, and chips on the library table.
- I'll put M&Ms, cinnamon imperials, candy corn, and other goodies in little bowls on the dining table.
- 20-50 people will drop by to frost cookies and carve jack o'lanterns. This will include the Colgate women's basketball team for their 9th consecutive year (they began helping out when I was in Texas and BP couldn't do the whole job solo; from that was born this big annual party); colleagues of BP who have been bringing their children here for 8 years; miscellaneous SU grad students (some with their own small fry) ready for something besides exams and dissertations; and a handful of students from BP's first-year seminar.
- The cats will hide out upstairs, hoping to survive the furor. Ruthie will make a couple of excursions downstairs in hopes of petting but will decide the hubub is just too much, Bub.
- As soon as the basketball team gets here, we'll feed them. Otherwise, no cookies would survive the day--or if they did, they'd have no decors on them. A basketball team right after evening practice is a force one must reckon with.
- The stereo will play all day, but once the basketball team gets underway, nobody will be able to hear the music.
- BP will put 2 cookies each in 300 zip-top sandwich bags that are labeled with our name and address.
- Approximately 200 kids will come trick-or-treating here. Those that haven't been here before will have the name and address to show their folks. Most, though, will already know what they're getting. One or two will yell to the waiting car, "I found it, Mom! This is the Cookie House!" Once a very tiny little girl whose mom was waiting at the bottom of the stairs looked up at me solemnly and said, "Thank you, Cookie Lady." Several parents will tell us that they used to come trick-or-treating here themselves. So of course we give the parents their own bags of cookies.
- BC and his girlfriend will stop by around 7 p.m., once the party at the firehouse is underway and trick-or-treating has subsided. BC used to trick-or-treat here; now he and B come to load up on leftovers and to fill us in on their year's activities.
- Our friends and students will get what the trick-or-treaters and BC & B haven't relieved us of.
Posted by senioritis at 07:19 PM | Comments (8)
Scientific misconduct
I read about the latest report of scientific misconduct, and I wonder just how much the journals and institutions involved will follow through on correcting the scientific record. Nature says (citation below the fold) that professional organizations and institutions don't always report plagiarism and falsification when they should, which leaves erroneous published reports standing unchallenged, with subsequent research being built upon them.
"Complacency About Misconduct." Nature 427 (1 Jan. 2004): 1.
Posted by senioritis at 08:33 AM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2005
Teaching daymare
Aerobil is one of the people with whom I share a longstanding fascination with teaching nightmares. Well, folks, yesterday one of them came true. First, know that on Tuesday I was not in class; I was at home hiding from what turned out to be a substantial snowfall. So my Writing 105 class, FYC, met without me. They reviewed each other's papers and discussed this year's notorious campus exhibition of white male supremacy. They were all in class; I wasn't. They did great work. Without me.
So yesterday, Thursday, I return to my class. I'm walking toward the classroom just at the time class is to begin, and JF is walking away from the classroom. She smiles enigmatically as she passes me. I walk into the classroom; everybody is talking; at first nobody seems to notice my entry. And then BS looks up and exclaims, "Damn!"
JF swore she was just going to the restroom, and BS swore that he was swearing at AT rather than me. But for just a second there, it was a highly bloggable nightmare come true. And now of course I have to figure out whether it really was a moment of teacherly paranoia, or whether my class really does now find me superfluous to their learning experience. In any case, I told em I was going to blog about em. And I have.
Posted by senioritis at 08:16 AM | Comments (1)
October 27, 2005
False analogy
Cashing in on the international plagiarism hysteria, the president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association tries to tie music downloading to the purchase of term papers:
The way that people approach material accessed on the Internet is tangibly different from how they treat physical property,” said CRIA President Graham Henderson. “If you can go on the Internet, and download a movie — it’s okay, fine. If you can find somebody’s writings and cut and paste big chunks of it into your essay, no problem.”Um. Both are done on the Internet, hence they're the same thing? At the Sweetwater conference, Lawrence Lessig recommended Darknet: Hollywood's War against the Digital Generation. Make that Canada's war, too, Larry.
Posted by senioritis at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2005
Gut check
In the Day, I used to hear the phrase "gut check" used in sports contexts. Don't know whether it still is. On the chance that it's not, I'll offer my own definition: a gut check is a physically challenging situation that takes a lot of determination and courage to meet and conquer. A gut check validates that you really are committed to your sport.
Today was two gut checks for this senior cyclist. With the summer road-bike season officially ended by yesterday's snow, the first gut check was getting out there on a mountain bike that feels like a tractor and riding, albeit for only 20 minutes, in 35° with a 10 mph head wind. The second gut check came a mile out, when the sleet started to fall and the temptation to turn around was hard upon me.
And for yet another Upstate winter cycling season, I passed the first (and crucial) gut check. Both of em.
Posted by senioritis at 06:48 PM | Comments (2)
October 25, 2005
Rasslin' with audience
Some writers communicate with their audience. Not me; I rassle 'em. And sometimes lose.
I don't want to lose this particular bout: the one in which I pitch a course proposal for an upper-level undergrad course, WRT 428, that I'd like to teach this fall. And my audience is of course multiple: first my proposal has to gain the approbation of my department chair and whomever else she consults on the issue; and then it has to gain student enrollments once the fall registration booklet is published. Because we don't yet have a Writing major (only a minor), we don't necessarily have a ready-made audience for our courses. "Making" an upper-level course is always an issue. So this course proposal has to appeal to an undergrad audience. Even the title has to explain and appeal, because many undergrads choose courses by titles alone. The bar is very high: check out these alluring course offerings for our Spring 2006 listings.
Here's a draft, and I'm hoping readers can give me suggestions for revision. Please!
WRT 428
The Author as Icon and Hero
Rebecca Moore Howard
Toni Morrison and Jayson Blair: one a famous author; the other a famous plagiarist. SchoolSucks.com and Turnitin.com: one enables cheating; the other tries to catch it. Authors and writers: also a contrast. Many people write, yet most do not think of themselves as "authors." Writers and students: yet another contrast to consider. Why is students' writing so often an object of derision, regarded as neither the work of a writer nor author? Why has U.S. culture been suffering from "literacy crises" for 150 years? How does a student become a writer, and a writer become an author? This course explores the cultural figures of the author, the writer, the student, and the plagiarist, asking what value each has—and why. We will look at U.S. and international contexts; strive to understand the cultural significances attached to the very act of writing; and ask how WRT 428 students might claim the status of "author" for themselves.
Posted by senioritis at 01:28 PM | Comments (3)
Winter
Lots of people worry about the Upstate weather: "What's it like in the winter?" "I couldn't stand that winter!" Etc. All of it focused on external conditions.
Well, yeah. Sure. It's an issue. Having had a nasty wreck on icy roads last winter, I can't deny it. Mostly it can be managed, though. Yes, I have an hour's commute to work on good roads, much longer on bad. But if I'm lucky, a lot of bad-weather days can be negotiated from home. That's what I'm doing today: with 7" of wet, heavy snow predicted for elevations of 1000 feet or more south of the Thruway, I'm teaching from home, with many thanks to Blackboard, IM, and email.
But the real issue isn't outside; it's inside. Inside the house, and inside my respiratory system. This morning I had to get out the Clorox, the vinegar, the Barkeeper's Friend, plastic gloves, rags, and a scouring pad, and I had to get that little humidifier sparkling clean, because if I didn't get it working and pronto, my sinuses would simply collapse.
Dryness. Pain. Postnasal drip. Pain. Hacking, dry cough. Headache. Nosebleeds. Oh lordie pie, it's winter again. Time for the humidifier, Vaseline, hand lotion, sparing use of Sudafed (the stuff runs your blood pressure up, and it's addictive, and if you take it too often, it doesn't work at all), Kleenex, nasal moisturing spray. And every year it's worse, because every year the body is a little dryer. Eyeuch.
Hey, nuttin's free. You got to suffer a little if you're going to have four seasons, beautiful snow, and lots of backcountry skiing and snowshoeing right from your own back door. There are prices. Like breathing.
Posted by senioritis at 10:35 AM | Comments (1)
A.M. tunes
I'm still convinced that the songs that are in my head when I wake up carry some deep meaning. Now if only I knew what it was. With all the research on dream interpretation, you'd think somebody would work on the question of wakeup earworm interpretation. Here are my most recent entries, just in case somebody out there needs a new hobby:
A Whisper—Coldplay —2002
Hallelujah, I Love Her So—Ray Charles—1955
California Blues—Doc Watson—1975
I'm Gonna Love You Too—Buddy Holly & The Crickets
Hide Your Love—Rolling Stones—1973
The Way It Is—Bruce Hornsby & the Range
Everybody Wants To Feel Like You—John Prine—1991
Highway 61 Revisited—Bob Dylan—1974
Ain't No Love—Maria Daines—2004
Hole In The Wall—Brownie Mcghee & Sonny Terry
Blaksnak Bite—C.C. Adcock—2004
Be Good Or Be Gone—Buckwheat Zydeco—1990
Run Run Run—The Velvet Underground—1966
Precious + The Phone Call —The Pretenders—1980
Let's Go Down to the Woods—Screaming Blue Messiahs—1986
She Came In Through The Bathroom Window—The Beatles—1969
A Wasted Life—Tom Petty—1982
Entre la jeunesse et la sagesse—Kate & Anna McGarrigle—1978
Get Myself Arrested—Gomez—1998
Posted by senioritis at 08:32 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2005
Clutter reduction
This is dangerous for a person like me. I'm messy and disorganized, but I also throw away heaps of things. I'm married to an accumulator; to some extent we balance each other out. But give me an excuse to ditch, and ditch I do. As I read this article, my mind started surveying the kitchen counter. On it, for example, I have a food processor that I inherited several years ago from my mother-in-law and which I have never used. Out it goes! I don't even do yard sales; I just throw away. Out, out, out. So now I'm waiting for the pronouncements of a National Study Group on Chronic Discarding. Will they decide that both accumulation and discarding are facets of OCD? Or will they tell me that, because I throw things away, I'm the opposite of OCD? And what, please, would be the opposite of OCD?
Posted by senioritis at 07:06 AM | Comments (3)
October 23, 2005
Cured Meats Hall of Fame
I know, you're thinking, "Huh?"
Friends, there is an entity called the Cured Meats Hall of Fame. Now I know you're wondering, "How did Becky know about such a wonderful entity?" The answer is, somebody from a neighboring town has been inducted into it, and the story made p. 15 of the October 19 Norwich Evening Sun.
It is good indeed to be home.
Posted by senioritis at 08:36 AM | Comments (1)
October 20, 2005
Lessons du jour
There were LOTS of lessons today, not just how to navigate the subway. I'll share a few:
- The MLA offices at 26 Broadway are in a building erected prior to the AC Era. So they had to make airshafts when AC was installed. The MLA offices are on the third floor; the windows look out onto the airshaft; and they have peculiar windowglass. The net effect is that all day long it feels as if it's 7 p.m. on a grey December day.
- You actually can see the Statue in the harbor from Battery Park. And it actually is sort of impressive. Who knew?
- The MLA International Bibliography is available through five vendors: Gale, EBSCO, Cambridge, ProQuest, and OCLC. What your interface looks like depends on which vendor you're accessing it through. SU's library accesses MLAIB via OCLC, whereas if it used ProQuest, the interface would be much more user-friendly. But each vendor may offer the MLAIB for a different price, so any given library may choose the vendor for a database according to price alone. So even though the SU library subscribes to all five of those vendors, it may not be an easy task to persuade them to switch from the OCLC access to ProQuest.
Posted by senioritis at 08:21 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2005
Urban transportation
I know how to bake fabulous biscuits from scratch; I know how to get out of a close encounter with a skunk without getting sprayed; I know how to change a bike tire in 90 seconds; I know how to find good bait, locate an excellent hole, and determine what time of day will be most conducive to catching bass and trout in freshwater streams; I know how (in theory) to make a 7-10 split; and I can turn kitchen waste and yard clippings into the best garden fertilizer in the world.
But I don't know how to navigate my way around Manhattan except by cab. In Washington or Atlanta, I have no doubt about my ability to navigate the subway unaided. Yet in New York, I ride the subway with Sandra, Cirron, Chris, or some other friend who knows the secret password.
Time to learn a new skill. Tomorrow morning I'm leaving my hotel at the corner of Park and 36th and walking to the subway station between 41st and 42nd. I'm buying a new card at the token booth. (I don't know where-in-hell my Metro card is, but it sure-as-hell isn't in my wallet). I'm going to the downtown track and taking either the #4 or #5 train to the Wall Street station.
If I now go for several days without blogging, you'll know where I am. Call the NYC police and put out a dragnet for me (I'll be wearing a brown suit and a tan sweater tomorrow, and my hair is still orange). And then call me a cab.
Posted by senioritis at 05:25 PM | Comments (4)
October 17, 2005
PreachingSucks.com
I guess my speculation about AdministrationSucks.com wasn't as far-fetched as I thought. Apparently there actually is a website for the busy composer of homiletics. For real:
The Rev. Timothy Merrill is a senior editor at Homileticsonline.com, a subscription-based Web site at which preachers pay $59.95 per year for tools to help them craft a better homily.He likened homiletics to a grocery store, with all the ingredients for a good homily lining the store's aisles. "We just do the shopping for preachers who are too busy and we bring those ingredients home and put them all on the kitchen table," said Merrill. "But once the ingredients are on the table, it's up to you to mix them together, put them in the oven and come up with your final product."
Posted by senioritis at 06:23 AM | Comments (1)
October 16, 2005
Bringing plagiarism home—step 2
I have now drafted a plagiarism policy statement for Syracuse University, and my little fledgling has ventured out onto the e-waves, wending it way towards the other members of the Vice Chancellor's Committee on Academic Integrity, who will deliberate on it (and no doubt revise it) this coming Friday, whilst I am in New York, attending yet another committee meeting—this one for two days—as the CCCC representative to the MLA Bibliography Advisory Committee. The latter is one of those geek-heaven gigs, and I'm really looking forward to it; the former is near and dear to my heart, and it somehow seems both terrifying and fitting that what I've drafted will be reviewed and revised in my absence.
Posted by senioritis at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2005
AdministrationSucks.com
A familiar story: a school administrator plagiarizes and either resigns or is fired. Also familiar: some school stakeholders say that the administrator's good deeds outweigh the plagiarism, and that the plagiarism should therefore be forgiven.
In the familiar scenario, the administrator includes unattributed text in a speech. Eugene Tobin, former president of Hamilton College, gave this a new dimension when he lifted text from readers' book reviews at Amazon.com and used it in a speech he gave about his summer reading.
And Southern Cayuga High School Principal Dennis C. Farnsworth comes up with his own variation on the model: he simply gave a speech written by someone else. The someone else, incidentally, was Donna Shalala. And I wonder, where did he find the speech? Is there an AdministrationSucks.com website?
Posted by senioritis at 06:40 AM | Comments (1)
October 14, 2005
Bringing plagiarism home—step 1
Last year our vice chancellor appointed a committee to review issues of academic integrity at SU and make recommendations. Since each college and school in the university has its own policy and procedures (or in some cases, an absence thereof) regarding cheating, one question for the committee has been whether the whole university should have a single policy and/or a single procedure. And of course one part of the committee's work—a part that consumed a considerable portion of the first year's work—was to bring in Don McCabe and his survey of students and faculty. (SU folks can fire up their Explorer browser and go here to read the report.)
The VPCAI, now in its second year of work, is comprised of over a dozen students, faculty, and administrators from across the university. The committee meets weekly. For two and three-quarters hours. On Friday mornings. Beginning at 8:15 a.m.
Now, I'm not much when it comes to committees. I get impatient, frustrated, confused, bored. And because I have an hour's commute to my workplace, I'm not keen on getting up before six a.m. and schlepping in for a frickin committee meeting. And because I'm a thoroughly socialized SU faculty member, I am most definitely not a fan of Friday meetings.
Yet I am a fan of good plagiarism policy. So I have hung in there, Fridays at 8 unholy 15 a.m. And today I got my reward: we reached the place where we were ready to discuss how plagiarism should be defined in SU policy. There were two features of the WPA statement that I really hoped to see in the SU policy: the specification that intent to deceive is a necessary condition for plagiarism; and the exclusion of misuse of sources from the realm of plagiarism.
In its initial deliberations today, the committee leaned toward the exclusion of misuse of sources from the realm of plagiarism. Now, the committee has not yet drawn up its recommendations, and those recommendations have not yet gone through the vetting process that will precede any institutional instantiation. But it's a so-far-so-good scenario on the exclusion of misuse of sources. The inclusion of intent is a harder task, and one that I'm not sure can be carried off.
In the weeks and months to come, I'll blog about this process to the extent that I can without violating confidentiality. It's an important process, I think: all the good pedagogy in the world doesn't amount to much if you have a repressive institutional policy that criminalizes bad writing (such as patchwriting and insufficient citation), lumping it together with text messaging during a test, or with downloading a term paper. So I'm thrilled to be part of the institutional deliberations on policy; chances like this don't come along very often. And I'm discovering that I'm not only advancing my own convictions about authorship, but I'm having to listen to and compromise with other, competing ideas. That's why I was at the dread Turnitin workshop yesterday (where I submitted a paper I'd given that was an extension of one that I'd already posted on the web, and sure enough, Turnitin flagged all the block quotations). And I'm compelled to listen with an open mind as people argue for the value of Turnitin or alternative plagiarism-checking programs. Will I be convinced by the arguments? Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment.
Posted by senioritis at 06:06 PM | Comments (1)
October 13, 2005
This says it all
Satire; it's a beautiful thing.
Forwarded by HBH.
Posted by senioritis at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2005
Confessions of a Turnit Inner
I've finally done it: I've been inside the Turnitin Machine, and have pressed the buttons and checked a paper. I would have actually done this a long time ago, except that the Turnitin folks discriminate against me (I can't imagine why; could it be something I've written?); when I've tried going to their website and asking for their promotional material, they unaccountably do not respond.
HOWEVER. My university has a trial license (pause for funeral dirge playing as soundtrack here) and today did a demonstration that I was able to attend.
The keynote address that I gave at James Madison University last fall was 59% "unoriginal."
Foster, Andrea L. "Plagiarism-Detection Tool Creates Legal Quandary." The Chronicle of Higher Education (17 May 2002): A37.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Should Educators Use Commercial Services to Combat Plagiarism? No." CQ Researcher 13.32 (19 September 2003): 789.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Forget about Policing Plagiarism; Just Teach." The Chronicle of Higher Education (16 November 2001): B24.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Cryoauthorship: The Mummy Walks!" Pre/Text
16.1-2 (1995): 38-53.
Posted by senioritis at 12:03 PM | Comments (2)
October 11, 2005
Grad students, beware!
I'm descended from Rebecca Nurse, who was hanged as a Salem witch in 1692. There's an extremely peculiar image of her trial here. You might want to reflect on this before you ask me to be on your committee. And if I'm already on your committee—well, you've been warned. Just don't hang me, okay? I can't help my heritage—especially given that I'm the first person in my direct lineage named "Rebecca" since her.
Posted by senioritis at 06:59 AM | Comments (1)
October 10, 2005
TV challenged
Last week our TV broke. Now to follow the playoffs BP has to pay active attention to gamecasts rather than having one idle ear on the TV broadcast. Now instead of surfing to find a cheesy movie to watch for 20 minutes, I have to read during dinner. (There's a very interesting article in the current Z, by the way, about the ways in which activist celebrities have abetted G8 failure to relieve African debt.)
To me it's surprising how little I actually miss the TV. And it's mildly interesting that we're going to replace the thing, anyhow.
Posted by senioritis at 06:49 AM | Comments (1)
October 07, 2005
Fabulous Furry Fred and his Friend
Teakettle (see below the fold) now has a friend, her first: Fred. They play together. Teakettle is eight years old; she found me on the streets of Fort Worth; and she has spent her eight years pretty cautious of everything, including other cats. But she and Fred are pals.
AND Fred is now experimenting with getting up on our bed at night. He doesn't stay long (Luigi makes sure of that)—so far.
Posted by senioritis at 06:38 PM | Comments (1)
October 03, 2005
Students as capital
This one practically analyzes itself; it needs no commentary from me:
"Meeks leads squad to seek out truants
Search also aims to save teachers' jobs"
You can't make up stuff this good.
Posted by senioritis at 07:39 AM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2005
New genres & media
This weekend Syracuse hosts the interdisciplinary conference Contesting Public Memories. Colleagues from my department (Carol Lipson, Collin Brooke, Eileen Schell, Madeline Yonker, and Derek Mueller) are on the program. So am I, along with Sandra Jamieson and Brooke Hessler. Brooke has been doing some amazing work with the Oklahoma City memorial, and Sandra and I have waded into the arena of public memorials as text in composition classes. At the conference, the three of us are going to be talking through some of the theoretical underpinnings of our work.
My topic is "Understanding Public Forgetting: Michel de Certeau and Hayden White on Presence and Erasure" (the program, alas, has assigned my topic to Sandra and hers to me), and I'm illustrating my claims with an analysis of a festival in Hamilton, New York, and the ways it creates the illusion of an upper-class bubble in the middle of a depressed, working-class area. So I'm using photographs in my presentation--on PowerPoint, natch. And here's the point of this post: For the first time, I'll be doing a presentation that includes photographs I have taken. Some of these are already on my hard drive, but many have yet to be taken. My son and daughter-in-law will be visiting for the next three days, and while they're here, I intend to drag them around on a photography expedition (which is a great way to introduce M to the area; she's only seen what's on the main highways). My point is that it's exciting to think of my photographs as serving some other purpose than personal artifacts. I actually intend to read the FM for my Coolpix tomorrow, and try to learn a little bit about all the possible settings. (SJ and BP have already given me some pointers, bless 'em.) As I take the pictures that I still need for the presentation, I'll be thinking of them in an entirely new way, thinking about what others will see in the resulting text--about what I want them to see--and about how I might convey that.
I like that.
Posted by senioritis at 09:26 AM | Comments (2)
NBC charity
How could I object to the charitable efforts in response to Katrina when there's something as nauseating as "Three Wishes" in the wind?
Back in the day, this was called Queen for a Day. Women would come onto the show and tell their sob stories, and the most pathetic would get her heart's desire, usually something along the lines of a new washing machine. Oh, rejoice, the idea has been resurrected in NBC's "Three Wishes." And bring out the lyre and the flute: they're looking for a poverty-stricken NY county, and ours is on the list. The Norwich Evening Sun is beating the drum, thrilled at the prospect. (I'll reproduce their story below the fold, since the paper doesn't have permalinks to its stories.) BP says that the print edition of the paper is full of locals' happy anticipation of the possibility of making their wishes "from the heart."
NORWICH - A new reality show might have its eyes set on Chenango County, if community members generate wholehearted interest.According to Bryan Stinson, a supervising casting producer with Glassman Media, the company producing the NBC show “Three Wishes,” an interest in Delaware, Otsego and Chenango counties are being targeted for this new series.
“We want to do a show in New York,” Stinson said.
The show, which made its debut Sept. 23, grants wishes to “deserving individuals and entire communities,” and is hosted by “five-time Grammy-winning recording artist Amy Grant,” NBC’s press release said. Some wishes fulfilled include children’s Christmas wishes, letters to Santa, saving a factory from closing, fulfilling lifelong fantasies, helping struggling inventors, and reliving an old glory.
Anyone interested in having ‘Three Wishes’ come to the area can log onto www.nbc.com and click on ‘Casting.’
The wishes can be for one individual person or an entire community, “as long as they are from the heart,” the release said.
Posted by senioritis at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)
October 01, 2005
Calendar
BP asked me for a rundown of what we're up to in the next couple of weeks. I think I might've been better off if I hadn't written it down; denial works so much better for me! But in the spirit of Getting Things Done, I've faced it.
From: rehoward@syr.edu
Subject: our social calendar
Date: October 1, 2005 8:56:35 AM EDT
To: BP@mail.colgate.edu
you were asking about it:
Oct 1-3, J&M visiting
Oct 3, HBH & her mom are staying at a hotel in Syr and I'll be having drinks with them in late afternoon after a dental appointment
Oct 4, SJ stopping here overnight (probably arriving very late Thu & leaving very early Fri for the conference in Syr)
Oct 5-6, Conference in Syr that will have me there all day both days; SJ & HBH staying in hotel there
Oct 6, SJ, HBH, & I come here for dinner, and you & I will have to strategize this b/c I won't be available for much cooking
Oct 7, S may be staying here for a day or two
Oct 15-16 T cousins & M may be here for the weekend
Oct 16 our anniversary (#29)
Posted by senioritis at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)