And in other news...

Well, the wind hasn't stopped, but it's amazing how one night of super high winds will make you feel like 30 mph gusts are a nice, quiet change of pace. Still, I managed a full night of sleep last night with an odd dream that I somehow talked my way into playing piano for Tom Waits in spite of the fact that I can't play piano. I did okay, though, until I the stop in Nebraska where Tom got mad at me for trying to play and flirt with a girl in the audience.

No one wants to get kicked off a tour in Nebraska. Not even in - maybe especially in - their dreams.

In more interesting news, I just received my copy of the edited collection my most recent chapter came out in, and it looks spiffy. And - I didn't know this before - I'm in the book with a bunch of people who I'd drool about being in a book with. Many of the names I cite are in the table of contents with me.

And my 3rd year review crap is done and ready to go in - now with a spiffy copy of my book chapter.

And I'm listening to this in my office and hopefully it won't piss off the neighbors.

Rambling...oh, and then a question....

A bit of wind late last night/early this morning took out the power at my apartment, which meant no heat and no hot water in addition to the no alarm clock and no lights. That meant no smoothie for breakfast - and indeed, no breakfast. Modern life seems to be kicking my ass so far today. There also seems to be some sort of joint in the roof right above the headboard of my bed that creaked ominously every time the wind picked up. This woke me up, and the continued noise of it combined with an anxious pooch who stood at the side of my bed wanting comfort meant a bit of a loss of sleep.

I'm tempted to cancel office hours today, except that would mean going home where, odds are, there is still no power or heat. And I can't really afford to not get work done as I'm watching those days my teaching release are supposed to give me to work on my book get progressively reclaimed by the University by candidate searches - there's no dodging those duties in a department this small (I'm one of 3 tenure track people at the moment, so...).

I'd be curious to hear from other people who have gone (or are going) through similar situations. I generally feel like I'm pretty good at saying no to things, but evidently my skills aren't quite up to this negotiation yet. Any tips on how to politely make sure that the department and the University are allies in this little bit of time to research rather than enemies?

RBOC: Lunchtime edition

Sitting here in my office, having just eaten my meager lunch and skimming the edges of the blog world, and I'm thinking about all the ways food (and by food, I also mean booze) has played a way in my academic life.

Khora, whose handle makes me think of all sorts of 80s songs and Spanish questions, asked what was one thing we wished we'd been told in graduate school before we leaped out into the world, and my response was predictably "what other job"-ish. But today, I think it'd be about how food is tied into all of this. Here are some examples:

• you can absolutely tell who cool a theory/school of thought/disciplinary division is by how good their parties are. The best conference party I ever attended was thrown by a bunch of broke Marxists, but they shared the bottle and the music was good. For my money, a party thrown by Marxists or Feminists usually tops the situation (curiously, Marxist feminists are hit and miss...hit or Ms....or...I just know as a joke that's going to fail); folks who do cultural work come in a close second foodwise, while historians have the best stories
• Don't be mistaken by size of the party or lavishness, however. The Marxists' polar opposites in my field tend to throw huge parties at conferences which are noteworthy for the enormous amounts of booze which somehow do nothing to make the moment pleasant
  
• if someone can include a bottle of Patron in their contract for a speaking engagement, you can bet they'll be an interesting speaker.
• maybe we really go into academia because we like eating the same type of food we've eaten for years. I was just finishing my PB&J (strawberry jam, suckas - the only way to roll), a container of yogurt, and a banana and suddenly it was 3rd grade all over again (except it's harder to have a crush on my home room teacher now)
• interestingly, academics have the worst manners around food I've ever seen. At a recent conference, I watched academics swarm waiters as they emerged from the kitchen with trays of fresh goodies, nearly throw elderly British scholars to the ground, circle tables like sharks, and what appeared to be an inadvertent exclusion of third world scholars and graduate students from the buffet
  

So that's my thought on this. I should probably go back to doing real work. Unless you're not going to eat those fries....

Now if it were Jesus' social security number, that'd be a big deal...

One of the things that frustrates me about the my university - and incidentally, I've been working at coming up with a pseudonym for it, since applying pseudonyms to things seems like one of the pleasures of blogging that I've long been denying myself - is that organizationally, we exist with a very confused communications style.

For example, my syllabus this term would top nine pages if I followed the required guidelines that now demand a chart be put in explaining how my course goals link to the department goals, and how those goals link to the general education goals, and how those goals link to the university's mission. I hated that song about the old lady who swallowed a fly when I was four years old, and I certainly can't stand a bad remix of it now.

But today's affront was an entirely different affair. As I've eluded to previously, my university carries with it a religious tie. That's fine. I believe in science, scrambled eggs and Tabasco as the surest cure for a hangover, and The Clash; you can believe in God. Whatever; we can work our differences out. Or ignore them. In keeping with this, however, we're regularly treated to e-mails asking us to pray for the recently departed. For example, over the holidays, I received an e-mail notifying me that the brother of one of the University's board had passed. It wasn't a personal e-mail, mind you, or even the typical interoffice spam, but rather, it went out as part of the official e-mail bulletin that gets sent out about major campus events.

Anyway, you can imagine how amused it made me then that today's e-mail of campus big events contained only a hint of important news, forcing me to go look for the real story myself. Evidently, the university has finally decided on a policy about disposing of documents. You know, pesky things that might have student information on them and such? Of course, the e-mail doesn't tell me what the policy is, or even where to go find it quickly.

Good times.

Why I Teach...

Dance tagged me for one of the more interesting memes going at the moment. Not surprisingly, it seems to have started over at the ever trend setting Dr. Crazy's, but there are also some interesting discussions with it happening at some of my other favorite places, including Free Exchange on Campus, Tenured Radical, and at New Kid's. I don't think my spewage is going to be quite as eloquent as those. I fear that tackling this is going to wind up sounding like I'm giving one of those Parents' Day Job talks to an elementary school class, except focused on academic inquiry to an already well-educated audience. Apologies in advance.

I spent a decent portion of yesterday wrestling with how to tackle it myself. I rather enjoy the illusion of anonymity that has come with not identifying my field so far (in part because it has resulted in some interesting guesses about who I am and what I do). If I must be honest, I love my privacy and a bit of mystery, so this isn't all about my protection. But this line of topic seems to beg for some specificity. I could, of course, list specific general courses - Research Methods - but who really wants to hear that the real reason I teach it is because I was the low man on the totem pole and no one else would do it? Or I could talk about why I've found I enjoy teaching intro sections, but even that doesn't seem terribly compelling.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that I'm in a field that has pretty porous boundaries. On one hand, we pride ourselves on the interdisciplinary nature of what we do. On the other hand, we have regular debates - we're about due for another one - about whether we're really a field at all. That's meant that what I teach plays well in a variety of areas at the same time that it can be regarded with a fairly questioning eye. This year, for example, I've been able to apply and be fairly competitive in four different types of academic departments. I probably could have done more than that, but a couple of fields I could make a run in are already glutted so who needs one more applicant challenging for those jobs?

So what I think I should talk about is something that falls into what I teach but isn't the field I teach in; something that has those interdisciplinary implications (both positive and negative). So today's topic:

Why I teach Popular Culture*

Popular culture itself is a sometimes maligned area of inquiry (often rightly so). First, because culture itself is a word with not one but many histories. We're not likely to agree on a definition here, but it shouldn't be hard to imagine that tacking an adjective onto an already contested concept is only going to multiply the distress.

The very notion of popular culture, after all, carries with it the notion that it is somehow less worthy by virtue of being popular, that what happens in popular culture is somehow demeaning, secondary, or less valued than what happens in the other kind(s) of culture. In one sense (sorry, anthropologists, this might grate), culture is meant as counterpoint to and a mechanism of change and comment on the things that are less than ideal in society. Culture is art, art is political, political is not popular seems to be the logic.

But in spite of that contested space - maybe because of it - there are some pretty compelling reasons to teach popular culture.

• "You're Soaking In It" - sadly, for much of our society, share culture isn't about the great works of literature (whatever they are) or living through similar events and lives anymore (growing up in the South, for example, has taught me just how radically someone ostensibly in the same American culture differs based on whether they live in a place where it snows). Popular culture, though, often serves as that glue. I've tried talking to tons of people about my favorite books and found glassy eyes, but I can engage virtually anyone on the street by talking about the relative merits of reality TV. That's the power that teaching popular culture gives: the ability to engage virtually anyone who walks into your room.
• "The Pause That Refreshes" - At the same time, it doesn't mean I can't relate things to the great works or to shared experience. It provides an easier entrance to whatever needs talking about and can be taken in any direction you need to go. Want to make a student care about authorship of something? Tell them about how much Milton's estate got for "Paradise Lost" and how they viewed it in comparison to today's views. Good teaching of popular culture isn't just about why this is cool (I'm talking to you people who teach technology in particular), it asks the questions that more formal disciplines tackle.
  
• "Have It Your Way" - One of the real joys, though, is that teaching popular culture means I'm not limited to one approach. I get to play with the toys that more traditional disciplines (or at least departments) often put off limits. I've worked places where certain approaches were clearly not welcome. Teaching popular culture well requires an openness to approaches. I get to talk history, economics, psychology, sociology, business, cultural studies. I can use Karl Marx or B.F. Skinner or Benedict Anderson or any other notable under the sun. Sometimes I have to, and I'm always glad to.
  
• "It Keeps Going and Going and Going..." - One of the beauties of it is that popular culture changes constantly, and so there are always new questions to be asked and, hence, new ways to engage. Maybe the most useful thing about teaching popular culture topics is that it provides a way to keep yourself feeling fresh (sorry, having stolen ad slogans to help with this, that phrase makes me pause) in a job that often lends itself to sameness.
  
• "Make Yourself Heard" - Even before the 500 channel universe, the Internet, social networking, blogs, media literacy, network identity and such, popular culture has tended to be participatory. Recent years have only made it more so. The power to see themselves in popular culture - to shape it - is one of the things that makes it such a useful tool pedagogically. One of the things that often seems frustrating to students is that they get no say in the Canon or the great moments of history; they can want to write the Great American Novel, but the classroom doesn't always provide a path - or at least a clear path - to that sort of goal. It takes a special student to be able to see themselves in Hawthorne or the works of Cicero. But the realm of popular culture, particularly now, is one that almost any student can not only envision themselves but more easily make themselves felt.
  
• "Now You're Playing With Power" - One thing that often gets missed about pop culture as a topic is that it is more often than not where the first battles over those ideas that high culture and art are meant to challenge really take place. It would be foolish, for example, to suggest that "Will and Grace" made homosexuality acceptable on its own in America, but it is an interesting signpost in that struggle.
  

Of course, popular culture is a two way street, and it's very easy to teach it badly. We've all been in classes - and probably even been the one to teach a class (I'll certainly admit to it) - where the professor couldn't quite "kill his darlings" about some popular notion. But when it's done right, popular culture as a subject area offers a lot of benefit to students - particularly students who have a hard time grasping the less immediate - and to the teacher.

I'm not going to tag anyone for the meme specifically, but I would love to hear from anyone reading about it. Let me know, and I'll add links to your posts.

*[Edit: a close second to this would have been why I teach Marx, but since that seems to happen in smaller, more sporadic doses and is generally seen as either obvious or blasphemous by most with no in-between, this seemed the more interesting way to go]

Reference Letter Friday

Thelonious Monk is playing right now, and there's somehow sunshine creeping in through the window. I've managed, though, to hide out in the office with no one the wiser (and no complaints over the noise). In my one encounter with someone in the building today, I was told that my evals of the freshman course I taught in the Fall were so positive they had to be read twice and now the person who looked them over wants to take the class themselves.

All of this makes today such a ridiculously good day to have me writing reference letters. In fact, I've managed to put six of 'em in the mail today. Also two articles to review for the journal I (perhaps foolishly) agreed to help edit. I should probably take this moment to write a letter for myself to one of the jobs that's opened up a bit closer to the family.

And later this weekend, I'll take on the meme Dance tagged me for about why I teach what I teach, once I've had a chance to look at the format and allow the general giddiness that comes from listening to good music in the sun to reach a level that makes me seem less like a morning person or someone with inspirational kitten posters hung up around the office.

Three cheers for a good day

It seems my MP3 player has come back from the dead. If it could turn my water into liquor, I'd found a religion. Essentially, once the battery ran completely out, plugging it in and letting it recharge did the process.

But really the whole term seems to be going well right now. Both of my courses are cruising along and even when - as in today's lectures - things are dry (and there were moments in the last lecture today where the topic could've been used to scour your pans), my students are hanging in and asking good questions. And even though the next month appears to be built to steamroll me - potential candidate interviews, a major departmental event, my third year review due - that the students are hopping seems to be enough right now to pull things through.
I'd still like some movement on my own job front, but I'm prepared to try a little patience at the moment and hope something interesting comes my way (*cough: PARIS!*). That does mean, though, that I'm a little at a loss for blog topics, so suggestions are certainly welcome (I'm also behind on my blog reading, so perhaps there are memes or something that I'll rip off and, at the very least, maybe I'll turn up elsewhere).