Greatest New Band Ever: The Cascade

So, I'm trying to preserve some modest degree of anonymity as a blogger, but I'm also in a band. And we're in the final stages of producing our first album. And we need publicity, which means that we need you, dear readers, to click on the link below to hear a pre-mastered preview of one of our songs:

Invisible Forces



Let us know what you think, and if you like what you hear, tell your friends!

Consipratorial Thoughts: A Riddle for Bill Cronon and Other Friends of Legislative Transparency

Question: Where do the inalienable rights of "all men" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" become instead "individual citizens' inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the fruits of their own labor"?

If I provided a link to that quote, I'd give away too much. But if you haven't been to Bill Cronon's blog yet, as I encouraged you to do in my previous post, go there now and perhaps find a clue -- but then again, maybe you have better things to do.

The real question is what happens when you make that ever-so-slight change in this famous and founding phrase? What is the difference between the "pursuit of happiness" and "the fruits of their own labor"? Certainly, "pursuit of happiness" is more rhetorically compelling, but is there any direct correlation between "pursuit of happiness" and "fruits of their own labor"? The original suggests the right to action and agency, to "pursue" what makes you happy, whatever that might be. It might be money and property, but it might also be beauty and truth, or knowledge and power, or love, wisdom, justice, sanity, or any number of other intangibles. The revision suggests the right to property and possessions, a narrow interpretation of the original. The revision suggests that happiness can be reduced to an economic relationship between work and the "fruits" of your work -- between production and consumption.

Whereas the original permits, the interpretation limits, and whereas it's a legitimate interpretation for an individual to hold and abide by in his or her own life, it's a restrictive interpretation to use as a basis for public policy.

Don't citizens have the right to know where those who influence their legislators stand? Shouldn't these influences be transparent? And what's at stake in keeping them secret?

(The substitution of "individual citizens" for "all men" will have to wait for another day.)

One Thing I Miss About Academe -- Or, Why I Admire Professor Cronon

If you've been following this blog, you know there are plenty of things I don't miss about academe, but you shouldn't imagine that there aren't things that I do miss. Good writers and smart readers know that omission is a powerful tool of expression (think Hemingway's eighth of an iceberg). What isn't said is sometimes a more powerful force within a narrative than what is.

The recent $hitsorm that has arisen over University of Wisconsin professor Bill Cronon's blog post about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) reminds me of one thing I do miss about being a formally participating member of an academic community: I miss the central role in my daily life -- as teacher, researcher, and writer -- given to paying close and careful attention to the nuances of language, both to what is said and what is left unsaid.

Cronon's analysis of the Republican Party's attack on his motives and integrity, which you can read about on his blog Scholar as Citizen, illustrates why critical thinking and the language skills that make it possible are so crucial to a well-functioning democracy -- the very thinking and skills that are themselves under attack in many current educational "reform" plans that would replace the liberal arts core (and all it entails) of a traditional university education with vocational training, online classrooms, for-profit institutions, and standardized testing.

If you haven't been following the Cronon story, the gist of it is this: Cronon, who is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin (where he migrated from Yale in the 1990s), was invited to write an op-ed for the New York Times on the current political situation in his state. You can (and should) read the op-ed here. Cronon, a self-described political centrist and independent who has never been a member of any political party (and has in the past written favorably about both Republican and Democratic policies), insightfully discusses  how the current Wisconsin Republican Party represents a radical departure from its own historical and genuinely conservative roots.

However, the op-ed itself is not the subject of the controversy surrounding Cronon. Rather, it is the research he did in preparing to write it -- and the publication of that research on his blog -- that has led to Republican attacks and FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) demands for the surrender of his university email.

Go read the entire lengthy story on Scholar as Citizen. It will take you some time, but it's worth it. In a nutshell, though, in the course of researching his op-ed, Cronon wanted to find out more about who is currently influencing Republicans in his state and what their goals are. In a blog post dated March 15, one week before the op-ed was published, he discusses several influences, including ALEC:

The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills it seeks to promote.

You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. 

Cronon doesn't say anything untrue or controversial about ALEC. He just provides factual information and links to their own site. His purpose, clearly, is to make readers aware of who is influencing their legislators and to allow them to decide for themselves what to make of that influence. There is nothing in either the blog post or the subsequent op-ed that suggests he was using his publicly funded role as a professor to motivate partisan political action.

Yet, just two days after this blog post went up, the university's legal office received a FOIA request from the Republican Party of Wisconsin to turn over Cronon's emails.

Now, much of great interest exists in this unfolding story, but what interests me most is how Cronon has responded to the request. A true scholar as citizen, he fearlessly confronts complexity in a public forum -- and asks readers to do so, as well. In a post entitled "Abusing Open Records to Attack Academic Freedom," he at once praises FOIA as "a precious asset to democracy in the United States" but also asks the following questions:

When should FOIA and Wisconsin’s Open Records Law apply to universities?

Answer: When there is good reason to believe that wrongdoing has occurred.  When formal academic governance proceedings are making important decisions that the public has a right to know about.  When teachers engage in abusive relationships with their students.  When the documents being requested have to do with official university business. And so on.

When should we be more cautious about applying such laws to universities?

Answer: When FOIA is used to harass individual faculty members for asking awkward questions, researching unpopular topics, making uncomfortable arguments, or pursuing lines of inquiry that powerful people would prefer to suppress.  If that happens, FOIA and the Open Records Law can too easily become tools for silencing legitimate intellectual inquiries and voices of dissent—whether these emanate from the left or the right or (as in my case) the center. It is precisely this fear of intellectual inquiry being stifled by the abuse of state power that has long led scholars and scientists to cherish the phrase “academic freedom” as passionately as most Americans cherish such phrases as “free speech” and “the First Amendment.”

Cronon isn't saying that he is above the law (a few commenters accuse him of elitism); rather, he is saying that laws can be both used and abused and citizens need to know and respect the difference. He illustrates this point by drawing a comparison to the misuse of subpoenas during the McCarthy era.

But what I really admire about Cronon's response to what he sees as an abuse of FOIA by Wisconsin Republicans is how he brings close reading, a basic skill we teach in the humanities, into the sphere of public discourse.

There's much more to read (and you should go read all of it), including the request itself from Stephan Thompson of the Wisconsin Republican Party, but I excerpt at length here because what Cronon is doing in his response is exactly what we try to teach students to be able to do in introductory humanities courses, but they don't often see the connection to "real life" situations -- nor do those who would defund this important part of a university education (or perhaps, if I were more cynical, those who would defund the humanities know exactly what they're doing). Cronon writes:

Under Wisconsin’s Open Records Law, anyone has the right to request access to the state’s public records, and can do so without either identifying themselves or stating the reasons for their interest in those records. But since Mr. Thompson made no effort to hide his identity or his affiliation with the Republican Party, since his request came so soon after my ALEC study guide was published, and since he provided search terms to identify the particular emails that most interested him, it’s not too hard to connect the dots to figure out what this request is all about.

Let’s subject Mr. Thompson’s email to some textual analysis. That is, after all, what we historians do: we read documents and try to interpret their meanings.

The timing of Mr. Thompson’s request surely means that it is a response to my blog posting about the American Legislative Exchange Council, since I have never before been the subject of an Open Records request, and nothing in my prior professional life has ever attracted this kind of attention from the Republican Party. It doesn’t take a great leap of logic to infer that Mr. Thompson and his colleagues aren’t particularly eager to have a state university professor asking awkward questions about the dealings of state Republicans with the American Legislative Exchange Council. This open records request apparently seemed to Mr. Thompson to be a good way to discourage me from sticking my nose in places he doesn’t think it belongs.

* * * * *



The narrative they would like to spin about me seems pretty clear from the search terms they’ve included in their open records request.  For instance, they name eleven politicians in that request.  Three of these–Governor Scott Walker; Speaker of the Assembly Jeff Fitzgerald; and his brother, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald—are the Republican leaders who have engineered and led the policies that have produced so much upset in the State of Wisconsin over the past two months. They would thus likely be lightning rods for any inappropriately partisan emails one might be tempted to send as a state employee using a state email account.

But the other eight Republican legislators named in Mr. Thompson’s open records request are probably even more important: Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, and Mary Lazich.  Why seek Bill Cronon’s emails relating to these individuals?  Answer: because they’re the eight Republicans currently targeted by petition campaigns seeking to hold early recall elections in response to recent legislation.

It’s these eight names, in combination with a search for emails containing the words “Republican” and “recall,” that Mr. Thompson is hoping he can use to prove that Bill Cronon has been engaging in illegal use of state emails to lobby for recall elections designed to defeat Republicans who voted for the Governor’s Budget Repair Bill. (One might also infer from his request that a blog post about the influence of ALEC on Wisconsin politics might somehow have an impact on those recall elections—a thought that wasn’t much on my mind when I put together my ALEC study guide, but that seems more intriguing now that we see how forcefully the Republican Party has responded.)

In this context, the remaining search terms are almost certainly intended to supply a key additional element in a narrative designed to undermine a professorial critic not only for misusing state email resources, but for being a puppet of the public employee unions which Mr. Thompson and his Republican allies would like the wider public to believe are chiefly responsible for criticisms of their policies.  The request for emails containing the search phrases “AFSCME” and “WEAC” are of course seeking emails to or from or relating to the two largest public employee unions in Wisconsin. Marty Beil and Mary Bell—also named in Mr. Thompson’s request—are the leaders of those two organizations. Emails containing the words “rally,” “union,” and “collective bargaining” would just be the icing on the cake to show that I’m a wild-eyed union ideologue completely out of touch with the true interests of the citizens and taxpayers of Wisconsin.

I suspect this is the story Mr. Thompson would like to be able to tell about me if his open records request yields the pay dirt he imagines he will find in my emails.

By close reading the language of his attackers' communications, he exposes the political motives of these would-be investigators and how their action arises not from righteous outrage over the potential misuse of (partially) publicly funded university email but from the desire to silence him for "com[ing] pretty close to hitting a bull's-eye" in citing ALEC's influence over Wisconsin politics and encouraging readers to learn more about it -- indeed, that his "little study" of

an organization that has exercised such extraordinary but almost invisible influence over American political life for the past forty years may finally start to receive more of the scrutiny that its far-reaching activities deserve.

I admire Bill Cronon because he exemplifies not only the Scholar as Citizen but the Citizen as Scholar. He demonstrates why broad public access to a liberal arts education matters in a democracy in terms of both what citizens know about their elected leaders and how well they are able to think critically about that information. At stake is the capacity for citizens to act responsibly and elect leaders who will best represent them.

Most citizens are not scholars by trade, but they can learn to read closely and think critically.

One thing I miss about academe is participating daily in activities that train the next generation to do so.

Sex, Drugs, and...

Ha, got your attention, didn't I? Well, since I'm not going to write about the first two sins of this unholy trinity, even under the pseudo anonymity of the blog, let me tell you about my rock and roll adventures this weekend.

First off, as a classically trained flutist, I grew up listening to this guy:

And he is pretty amazing, but as time passed, after I'd spent years and years learning the technique and repetoire -- and after I had more or less given up on the possibility of a career as a musician, I began to expand my musical horizons.

Notably, I joined a bunch of musically inclined members of my grad school cohort who got together now and then for "hootenanies." We had vocals, guitars, bass, occasionally drums, and me, and we'd jam out on bad renditions of Bob Dylan songs and similarly inspired folk rock classics, which got louder, crappier, and more fun the drunker we got -- all taking place late into the night in the decrepit basement designated by the English department as the grad student lounge and redesignated by us as "The Happiest Place on Earth" (yes, there really was a sign on the door, near the pile of cigarette butts, that said that).

Anyhoo, besides being a useful outlet for venting grad school frustrations, I learned through my hootenany years, something about how to improvise. After all the rigors of my classical training, it was so refreshing to play music we were essentially creating together in the moment. Even though we played mostly covers, I didn't know them -- and most didn't have flute parts anyway. I'd just play by ear and invent as we went along. You know how you always tell your students in writing or language classes how they have to learn the rules before they can break them? It's true in music, too. My classical training gave me the technique I needed to do this well, to play "outside the box," and to make music with anyone, anywhere. As much satisfaction as I got from the challgenges of learning the classical repetoire, nothing matches the sheer pleasure of making music in the moment with your friends and for your friends -- and, well, just plain rocking out, like this guy, my new flute hero, does:

(Seriously, he is the master of flute rock -- check out his other stuff, if you don't know it!)

Flash forward to this weekend (there's much of Recent's musical history intervening, but you've got enough back story for the moment). Today I had the opportunity to play a studio gig, something I haven't done in a really long time (and never under these circumstances). One of my current bandmates invited me to a state-of-the-art recording session. A folk rock group needed flute on one track. I'd never heard the song before, never met any of the other musicians (except my bandmate), never heard their stuff, but I showed up, listened while they finished laying down some of the other parts, and then just jumped in and did my thing. I nailed it in one take, all improv! We did a few more, just for variety, to see what would work best with the final vocals, and then we shook hands and parted ways, me with $50 for less than an hour's fun work.

I'd trade my Ph.D. for the opportunity to make my living as a musician.

Who knows what the future may bring?

Green Beer, Anyone?

I saw the delivery truck from my window this morning unloading at the bar downstairs:

I've never actually had any. Looks too much like something that came out of a bad scene like this:

I guess that's not really funny. What's happening in Japan is more than a little scary, but what's more appropriate than bad nuclear apocalypse humor on St. Patrick's Day? I say drink to it! And then go for a swim here:

Yes, that is really the Chicago River, and, yes, every year for St. Patty's Day the city dyes it plutonium shamrock green. Sure looks radioactive, but they say it "has been thoroughly tested by independent chemists and has been proven safe for the environment."

Whatever floats your boat.

Cheers!

Spring Break Book Recommendation: Arin Greenwood’s Tropical Depression

If you’re on Spring Break this week or looking forward to it next and wished you had made plans to skip town for a tropical island, then I recommend picking up a copy of Arin Greenwood’s first novel Tropical Depression (2010). Catch a vicarious flight (or 5) to a remote would-be paradise, “part of a chain of islands right smack in the middle of the Pacific, in that big stretch of blue—south of Japan and north of Australia, east of the Philippines and west of Hawaii—that looks empty on the map.”

Aren’t you already eager to escape your wintery doldrums and mountains of midterm grading? Ready for warm turquoise waters, gentle surf, soft beaches, languid afternoons, lush jungles, bright flowers, exotic birds, mangoes that fall ripe from the trees?

Perhaps, like the novel’s protagonist Nina, you are expecting to “escape to paradise. Get a tan, forget your troubles, forget yourself. Wear a thong?”

Paradise is never what we expect it to be.

As the novel opens, Nina, a young attorney from New York City, finds herself—all in the same day—fired from a job she hates at a firm that defends Big Tobacco and dumped by a boyfriend she still very much loves. When the opportunity arises to take a job as a law clerk on an island that is part of the U.S. territories in the Pacific, Nina jumps at the opportunity to put relationship angst and professional malaise behind her, embracing a fantasy in which the island is “empty, devoid of people, devoid of judgment.” She imagines, “sitting on a quiet beach where no one will see me, except whoever is in charge of bringing me fruity drinks. I see myself having a torrid affair with a beautiful local boy who climbs coconut trees to fetch me coconuts, who doesn’t speak English and so can’t ask me why I have absconded to this deserted island and how I plan to spend the rest of my life.”

A fantasy, indeed. While the island, “Miramar,” does have some beautiful beaches, it also has a “fecal lagoon” (there’s no proper sewage treatment), countless stripper/poker/karaoke dive bars (the detritus of a decaying tourist industry), corrupt judges and politicians, Americans expats, and all manner of drunks and gossips. There’s even an attractive, bad-boy CIA operative (probable—we never find out for sure if he’s a spy) who reminds Nina of her ex-boyfriend.

While Nina is somewhat horrified when she first arrives (not least by the lack of decent vegetarian food and the wretched polyester suits her boss makes her wear), she eventually begins to fit in among the locals better than she ever expected she would—a “misfit” among “mercenaries, missionaries, and misfits.” She snorkels, SCUBA dives, goes parasailing, has affairs with two men, and generally entangles her life in the life and lives of the island.

But even amidst these entanglements, the past is never far away. The island has rumors of ghosts of its own, and Nina can't ever seem to forget the joy and sorrow of her old relationship and the life she left behind when it ended. Why should it so hard for a girl just to get away? To escape herself and start fresh? To let go of the past?

Perhaps it is most difficult to get away from the past when one has never truly lived—or forgotten how to live—in the present. By the end of her adventure, Nina wonders, “if I ever really appreciated anything while I actually had it.”  

Who ever really does? It’s one of the hardest things to do: to accept the simple pleasures of life and the people who share them with us, to accept and relish the present, whether in New York or on a tropical island—to appreciate and then, when the time is right, to let go. As Nina is preparing to leave, she finds, “it is mango season again.” With her sometime lover, “sweet George,” she tastes the gloriously sweet flesh of the fruit, “try[ing] to record the taste of this fruit on my tongue, in my brain.”  They “eat the mangoes together and don’t talk much.” Indeed, the present is sweet, and it’s so easy to forget that sweetness of the here-and-now while you are—as we all often are—caught up in the what-has-been or what-will-be.

And so we seek escape in order that we may return to taste the present.

Wherever you are this week of break and almost spring, release your thoughts of past and future. Let go of your expectations. Put your students, your job market woes, your research and writing plans aside. Enjoy your well-deserved mid-semester escape, whether you are at home or on an adventure of your own. Eat a mango—or whatever fruit falls nearby.

 And read Arin’s book.

Blogger's Block

Have any of you readers experienced this? What do you do to get back in your bloggy groove?

I'm just drawing a great big blank right now. There are things to write about, but none of them seem worth writing about right now. What are they?

Well...

There's the novel published by an acquaintance. I'd like to write a review, but I haven't finished it yet.

There's the Atlas Shrugged movie coming out soon. I have some things to say about the novel, especially given my current workplace, but it's been so long since I've read it that I need to reread in order to say anything intelligent. Haven't gotten around to that yet, either.

The Event in April on Cupcake Heap is going to be really fun-times to help organize, but it isn't far enough along for me to have anything to say about it yet (and, who knows, it may actually be fun).

Then there's other workplace nonsense, like the flooded basement that's been flooded for several days and is beginning to make the back hallway, even up here on the second floor, smell like rat corpses.

Let's see...what else?

What about unions/pensions/protests in Wisconsin? As the offspring of K-8 teachers who were active in their union (and, in their retirement, beneficiaries of it, as I am by extension), I feel like I ought to comment on recent events, but I don't feel like it.

Hmmmrumph....you get the idea. I could go the route of RBOC, riffing on the theme of "broken":

• Broken dress zipper -- it zips properly but then, midway through the day, starts pulling up from the bottom. No wonder the thing was on sale! 
• Broken chair arm -- the screw keeps unscrewing, until I taped it with blue packing tape today.
• Broken vacuum at home that won't pick up cat fur anymore (and, yes, that's a problem!)
• Broken yoga routine -- haven't been going to practice lately.
• Broken band practice -- yes, I'm in a band, but no one wants to practice until the album's done, and it's not yet (well, everything's recorded, but we need to get funds together for mixing and mastering and cover artwork and CDs -- and no one feels like thinking about new material or practicing old material for new shows until the album is "officially" done).
• Broken screens -- on the enclosed porch of my house where the cats like to go when the weather gets warm. We leave the inner door open when it starts turning nice out, so they can go out and air can circulate in through the house, but it's on the second floor. And the broken screens are a hazard to cats who think they can fly (I lied in my earlier post about my cat being smart), not to mention an invitation to the bugs I'm not looking forward to hosting.
• Broken door knobs -- front door at home. Knob's been broken for a couple of weeks now. Just needs a screwdriver and some attention. No one bothers. It falls off every other time you open or close the door. 
• Broken....I dare not say (bl_g)??

And that's about all the bull$hit I can muster, but, for realz readers, if you've made it to the end of this silly post, how's about sharing your tips for overcoming blogger's block?

They Are Already Asking Me to Adjunct This Fall

Yes, friends, after they stiffed me this semester and offered only 2 classes (which, if you've been following the blog from the beginning, is what finally pushed me over the edge into secretaryland), Scheduler of Adjuncts at Grad University is now e-mailing that there will be "several sections" available of Intro to Ruining Your Life by Majoring in English, a required upper-level course. This is in addition to pretty much as many sections of freshman comp as I'd be willing to take -- all of this after I bailed out a week before classes started this spring.

Right. Um. I Don't Think So.

Let's remind ourselves of why:

If I quit my secretary job to teach 4-6 classes in the fall (which would only just barely match the salary for that same period), would I have to scramble again for work in the spring with the usual drop in enrollments? Yes.

Would it be fun to teach Intro to Ruining Your Life by Majoring in English again? No. It was fun a few years ago, but, back then, it was called The Joyful Hermeneutics of Self-Delusion -- Or, Why Literary Studies Rules.

Would it be fun to teach freshman composition again? No. The students improve by the end, and they know it. That's a nice, warmfuzzy reward, but I'm done with the warmfuzzies. You can't pay your winter gas bill with warmfuzzies. Also, after teaching this class for so many years, I got pretty good at it, and I've also become pretty bored with it. If they want me to teach this, they should offer more money.

Would I teach it if they offered me more? No. Salary alone would not make up for lack of job security and lack of respect.

Would my work as an adjunct ever lead to permanent employment? No.

Even if I published my heart out while teaching 4+ classes, would I ever be eligible for promotion not to the tenure track but to -- let's say-- a three-year contract position? No, not at Grad University.

Would I ever get a raise for doing my job well? No. I didn't even get the raise I was supposed to get upon receiving the Ph.D. (don't ya love budget cuts and salary freezes?).

So, yeah, Scheduler of Adjuncts, the answer is NO.

Does Persistence Get You What You Want?

Dear Honorable Colleague,

I agree that persistence can pay off sometimes, but where do you draw the line between being persistent and being a pest? Within the past 24 hours, I have sent 5 emails and left 2 voicemails for the Important Person you asked me to reach. I suspect IP is not responding because -- while I mention your name and indicate I am trying to make contact on your behalf -- I am an inconsequential Nobody. If IP is someone you know, wouldn't it make sense for the initial contact to come from you? You could then direct IP to me, and I could take care of the details you don't want to deal with.

Maybe I'm wrong, but if IP has been checking hir messages and voicemail, ze must surely be aware that I've been trying to get in touch regarding your event, but I'll keep trying if that's what you want. Honestly, though, I don't think this is going to go anywhere until you reach out yourself. I'm pretty sure IP's secretary, after asking my name when I called this morning, checked to see if ze was "in" first before directing me to voicemail. I'm also pretty sure IP was, in fact, in.

I hope you understand I'm not trying to to shirk my duties here. I'd really like to help you, but you might need to take the proverbial bull by the horns on this one.

Sincerely,
Recent Ph.D.
P.S. It'd also be nice, when you ask me to email people inviting them to your event, if you included their last names. An email address and/or company affiliation would be optimal, but at the very least, I need last names. Otherwise, Peter, Paul, and Mary are just a bunch o' hippie communist folksinger freaks (and I'm sure you wouldn't want me inviting THEM). Thanks!