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May 9th(b) No material to prepare for class today, and conferences are over, so here's a lunchtime Plantry: A statement: Dari Barn is alarmingly reminiscent of the ice cream shop in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. A side note: Leonardo DiCaprio is a wonderful actor, even if his later roles don't show off what he can do. An invitation: would any of you like to share your sense of the secret treasures of the Dari Barn menu? My experience so far has been pretty limited. When I’m trying to be good, I go with the yogurt twist cone with sprinkles. The sprinkles are key, though I wish we could call them “jimmies,” as they do in Philly. Am I the only one older than nine who still orders sprinkles? Not that it will stop me. I adore the peanut butter cup cyclone, but I only allow myself to have it once in a while. I have only recently gotten some of the hot food. I’ve tried the hamburger and lamburger (lambburger?) and enjoyed them about equally. Still, the menu teems with untried treats. Recommendations? [stone] writes, “In American national politics, approval voting would indeed demand somewhat greater maturity on the part of the voters.” That sounds right. Perhaps I need to achieve that greater maturity myself. At times I still feel the tug of the childhood drive to rank things that inspired my best friend and me to spend the late hours of sleepovers reducing human interaction to purer and purer forms of ranking. “OK,” the seven-year-old Professor Erik would say to the seven-year-old Professor Jason (now an architect and teacher in New York), “I’ll name a baseball player, and you name a better one, and we’ll go back and forth.” Predictably, some sort of stalemate would ensue pretty quickly as we debated the merits of Hank Aaron (most homers), Babe Ruth (most homers in a season, also a pitcher), and Reggie Jackson (we got Yankees games on TV, and he seemed awfully wonderful). Eventually we happened on the pure mathematical version of the game: naming higher and higher numbers, which got us quickly to learn what a googol was and then to debate the problem of adding to infinity. I think I learned about mathematical powers (“Infinity to the infinitieth!”) in that way. So the seven-year-old in me wants to say that simply approving of the Hammer and the Babe and Mr. October is unsatisfactory. My more sensible adult side—the side that rather likes the old-fashioned bowl system in football because it allows many teams to end the season happily and avoids a false sense of certainty—finds itself persuaded by approval voting. But all of me still says that Alex Rodriguez has earned at least two more MVP awards than he’s won. So there’s that. [youngs], sorry you can’t make it tomorrow! I’ll still see you at the English reception, if you’re there, and at graduation, but Carolyn will have to work, so I hope she has a chance to see you before you take off. May 9th Ugh--heartbreaker for the Sixers, in spite of just the game they needed from Kenny Thomas. Hey, [torresg] is here! Right on! And [scannell], too, it appears. It's a Brazilian music reunion--soon we'll be able to do a full version of "Agua de Beber" right here on Plans. [rebelsky] asks me, "Will you be around this summer? Can I have my research students talk to you about ways in which they could make it easier for you to write your site without handcoding HTML?" Yes, I'll be around, more or less, except for the last three weeks of July. Writing my web stuff feels pretty easy at this point, thanks to Advanced Find and Replace, which I have found to be more efficient than the server-side functions and symbolic links that I used to use. I would be very happy to talk to your students about ways to make the programming even easier, however. [stone] points out an interesting drawback to Instant Runoff Voting and proposes approval voting as an alternative because "Approval voting has the considerable advantage that there is _never_ an incentive to vote insincerely." I'm intrigued by the example; I wonder how frequently such problems would arise, since they require detailed and accurate polling data and remarkable logistical coordination. Have any of the existing IRV elections run into such difficulties? Regardless, I take the point. The drawback to approval voting seems to be the inability to rank; to take the last Presidential election as an example, the symbolic expression of a ranked Buchanan-Bush-Gore ballot seems very different from an approval ballot of Buchanan and Bush. In sum, I guess I want to know more about the practical risks of insincere IRV voting before giving up on the idea, since sincere IRV voting seems more meaningful than sincere approval ballot voting. Doesn't approval balloting provide an incentive to be even more blandly inoffensive than candidates already strive to be? In any case, I'm really happy to learn of this third way. Seeing [rebelsky]'s thoughts and some of the linked comments about mental illness at Grinnell has gotten me thinking and writing a lot about that issue. Today, for starters, I will simply say that I'm deeply concerned about the issue, and I second [rebelsky]: "Do you have suggestions for things we can do to help you? If so, tell us." I'll share more thoughts soon. May 8th [gumben], I'd take your commentary on the Spurs-Lakers over the pros' any day. The Internet is back, but the cats still can't look at each other without spitting. On the vet's advice, we've started putting them in their carrying cages in the same room to get used to each other. They're not crazy about the confinement--or more accurately, Kirby hates it, while Giddy bizarrely just puts his belly up and falls asleep--but they don't get aggressive. But we still can't let them loose. These are cats who have lived in the same house for seven years, gone through a number of moves together, and so forth. Have any of you readers dealt with something like this before? The Economist has an article about the release of the anthrax genome: "in a nutshell, it appears that nobody apart from the scientists who sequenced the information has specifically evaluated the risks and benefits of publishing the anthrax sequence." The article has some interesting comments about the way scientific released more generally. Get on board the Instant Runoff Voting bandwagon! IRV lets you rank candidates so that votes can be counted in stages, ultimately ensuring that the winning candidate receives majority support. Such a system better measures the will of voters and allows people to support less visible candidates without risking unintentional support for major-party candidates they oppose. IRV would have let people vote for a Nader or Buchanan without sacrificing their ability to support one major-party candidate over another. May 7th My Internet connection went down last night, so I am scrambling to catch up today. (Trads students, I'll be setting up conferences shortly.) The cats are currently in their respective cat carriers facing each other in the living room. We hope they're getting used to looking at each other without spitting (so far, so good) so that we can restore our peaceable kingdom. Sixers. :( A couple of links for you as I take a break to avoid throttling my computer-- Once again, readers, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "I tied my shoes this morning, and they seem to be sticking to my feet all right, but did I choose the most efficient and/or strongest way to tie them?" Reader, I'm here to help: at last, science has answers for us. The new Onion is online, and again I offer you my highlight of the week: Local Man Ruins Date by Just Being Himself. Sample moment: "I'm glad he felt comfortable being himself," said brother Chris Scanlon, 39. "But when you're in full-blown mid-30s-crisis mode with misogynist tendencies and a desperate, neurotic need for approval, maybe 'the real you' is not the best thing to put forward." And yet more applied math: Slate's Brendan Koerner here examines William Bennett's claim that he has about broken even overall while incurring more than eight million dollars of gambling losses on slots and video poker. Not bloody likely, says Koerner. May 6th(c) Doing some other web stuff, I just discovered that my home page's link to Paul Ford's My Busy Day is broken. Sad! But the link here should work. It is not to be missed. Also see How to put a whole harmonica in your mouth. The cats are calming down but have not proven ready to be in the same room. When Carolyn asked the vet about the problem, somebody in line said that animals were going nuts generally over the weekend. I'm guessing the storm system that brought the awful tornados to the midwest freaked them out. May 6th(b) OK, at last: what is my book about? This is a great exercise for me, since I’m heading into a summer of hard work on the project. Therefore, please forgive the self-indulgence of writing the answer at some length in overlapping ways. Perhaps my students will find some comfort in seeing that I’m wrestling with the same sort of process they are this time of year. Perhaps academic book descriptions will now become all the rage on Plans! Whee! Here we go-- The shortest version: It’s about minstrels, bards, and improvisers in British literature of roughly the Romantic period. The working title is Minstrels, Improvisers, and Authors, 1750-1850: Antiquarian Imagination to Blackface Performance. The slightly longer version: It’s about the way writers of that period suddenly made minstrelsy a prominent metaphor for the work of modern authors. Minstrels—wandering musicians who recited inherited or original songs—had been around Britain for centuries, but they had not been the primary concern of imaginative works. For example, no title of a full-length creative work included “Minstrel” or “Minstrelsy” before 1771. In the following fifty years, dozens of such works were published, including some of the most popular and acclaimed works of the period. The rise of the literary minstrel coincided with the rise of the Romantic (or Wordsworthian) conception of the author. I argue that Romantic authorship and minstrelsy developed in conscious opposition to each other and that we find a lot of interesting material if we look at both sides of that opposition together rather than concentrating only on the kind of Romantic authorship that came to dominate later literary criticism. The still longer version, wherein paragraphs give way to a list of seemingly random stuff that surfaces along the way: Looking at the development of minstrelsy alongside that of Romantic authorship lets us see, among other things, * how the terminology of “improvisation” entered the English language as part of the first articulations of women’s minstrelsy in 1807 * how the well-known Romantic-era debate about poetic diction also constituted a debate about self-representation and sincerity, as minstrel writers tended to split their “selves” among voices in narrative frames, songs that break up the narrative flow, and editorial footnotes * how those footnotes constitute a way of annotating creative works that was non-existent before the Romantic period and disappeared afterwards until very recently, when (as I see it) the commentary tracks on DVDs created a very similar model * ways in which Irish, Scottish, and women writers used the displacements of writing about minstrels (who were represented as poets of past times or other places) to express the otherwise inexpressible in a period of formal and informal censorship * how minstrelsy was the primary way by which Irish writers strove to make sense of their contradictory political situation following the Union of Ireland and England in 1801 * how Wordsworth, who spent most of the Romantic period as a beleaguered writer getting bad reviews, moved to the center of British letters by framing his own work as an alternative to minstrel writing in 1814 and 1815 * how Byron’s perpetual status as a borderline Romantic resulted in part from his deep engagement with the minstrel tradition where the other Romantics defined themselves against that tradition * how the kind of minstrelsy my project talks about provides a context for considering a heretofore unanswered question: why American blackface performance came to be called “minstrelsy” (usually “Negro minstrelsy”) in the late 1830s * and, again, how the boy didn’t even know he was a wizard! The End May 6th Not feeling funny this morning. More Frankenstein news: Romantic Circles, the website that consistently demonstrates how the Internet can support top-quality collaborative literary scholarship, has just released a volume of essays on Frankenstein's dream. I haven't read the essays yet, but the volume is edited by Jerry Hogle, a professor at Arizona who does great work (and who was incredibly nice to me when I was in grad school), so it should have good stuff. According to this piece by Nicholas Kristof in today's NY Times, the State Department knew full well that the infamous Niger documents were forged a year before they became drums in the march to war. With administration officials now openly admitting (off camera but on the record) that the rationale for the war was overblown for political effect, the pressure on constructing a successful government in Iraq is enormous. I confess limited knowledge of the history of such operations, but I gather that success in a context of opposition from neighboring governments would be unprecedented. I think the Clinton administration also manipulated military actions for political gain, by the way, and I was furious about that, too. Obviously, there's a difference of scale now. Some days ago, I mentioned Slate's column on Today's Papers. I should add that there is a parallel International Papers column--it's here today--that provides a fascinating contrast. I'll take a shot at my promised answer to Carly's question about my book later today. May 5th(c) I didn't know Lenko. My condolences to all of you who did. The soul behind you no longer inhabits your life: the unlit house with its breathless windows and a chimney of ruined wings where wind becomes an aria, your name, voices from a field, And you, smoke, dissonance, a psalm, a stairwell. --from Carlyn Forché, "Elegy" May 5th(b) The good news: the Bush vs. Bush debate the [gumben] praised last week is online, brought to us by Carolyn. See this page. The bad news: Perhaps wooked out by the storms yesterday, our two cats are suddenly treating each other in good earnest as enemies. It's very distressing. Any veterinary miracle George Mitchells out there? May 5th My Harry Potter reference supplies a smooth transition to a Plan entry (a Plantry?) on The Matrix: It's Harry Potter with Guns, says Slate's Chris Sullentrop. From that article one can get to 101 Reasons We Hate The Matrix, which has some clever observations and a transcript of Neo's dialogue. Then, of course, there's the obligatory page of The Matrix in Legos. Put your hands together for free speech! The Dixie Chicks make a triumphant return to touring. |