How I Read Plans

Plan Archive

10/11/03-11/03/03
9/21/03-10/10/03
8/21/03-9/20/03
8/11/03-8/20/03
6/2/03-7/21/03
5/5/03-5/9/03
4/26/03-5/4/03

Travel links for fall break:

How to road trip

Confluence.org, which is trying to archive photograph the intersections of lines of latitude and longitude

A peek up from grading:

What a lot of us need this time of the semester

Spanish Google!

Reuters headline: "Palestinian PM Threatens to Quit, Arafat Lays Low." AAAAAAHHHH! Lies! Lies Low! Lies Lies Lies! (The continued problems in Palestine are also upsetting, of course, but it's easier to be self-righteously pissed about verb usage.)

Oooo--cool Flash dance animations meet the gendered mind debate and create their fascinating cyberprogeny: the Bio Motion Lab Walker.

[caseevan]: yes, I've been using [cjacobso]'s Mac laptop at home a bit more, and I think I could get used to it. I haven't tried the big tests of switching documents and stuff. By the way, Mac OS X Panther is coming soon. Also by the way, here's a column explaining why Windows is so vulnerable to viruses.

[wgemigh]: I don't know whether verbing works in other languages. Anyone? The best quotation about verbing ever is of course from Calvin (as in Calvin and Hobbes): "Verbing weirds language." The "quote" phenomenon is nouning rather than verbing. That seems more unusual to me, but I haven't thought about it much.

Thanks for the good dental wishes, [rochest1]. Unfortunately, my appointment has moved to Tuesday. I had already scheduled around it being today, and this week has whupped my sorry butt sufficiently anyway, so I haven't shifted anything. And now I have to go to the dentist next week. I am particularly frightened of this visit because I think it will result in follow-up appointments to remove my two remaining wisdom teeth and fill in the damage they've done to their neighbors. Yuk.

[sarafsau] again: indeed, ISE-APE. Perfect. Yours is a good quick and dirty way around recurring expenses. One day, I'll build them into the calculations. On the Phelps monument about Matthew Shepherd: it's interesting that it can't be blocked because the government set up rules to allow the 10 Commandments to be dislpayed. Mmmm . . . yummy short-sighted pandering. But that aside, I think a great response would be to erect dozens of monuments with all of the nutty prohibitions from Leviticus on them. As I understand it, the city would be required to allow them along with Phelps's. Wouldn't that be sweet? I'm completely serious about this. You could have the Phelps thing alongside 40 others of the same design saying, for instance, "And the two kidneys, and the fat that is on them, which is by the flanks, and the caul above the liver, with the kidneys, it shall he take away." This must be done!

[sarafsau]: I've tried some basic budgeting spreadsheets before, and I've wanted to do good projections of expenses. I've often gotten hung up by irregular expenses like annual insurance payments or (from a student perspective) book expenses. I know that I could solve those problems with variables that let me spread the expenses out, but I haven't taken the time to develop the formulas and layout yet. Have you solved that problem with your projection algorithm? I'd be interested to know what you did. (Goofy story: a couple of days ago, a grad student at Penn called me on my office phone with a question about spreadsheets. He was referred by a professor whom I had tutored a bit on Excel in London over the summer, and I fixed his problem. Does this make me an internationally-known spreadsheet expert? That would be way cool. :) )

Someone asked recently what I thought of Wes Clark's entry into the Democratic race. (The comment is deleted now.) I had mentioned Clark's early struggles, but I think he has recovered pretty well from them. Everyone who has worked on campaigns seems to think that his logistical challenges will be formidable because of the late entry, and Clark doesn't seem like a natural grass-roots populist. His ability to jump straight to a virtual tie for the lead in national polls, however, is really impressive. Yesterday, his campaign manager resigned; this was the guy who ran the grass-roots Draft Clark website, and he sayd the former Gore people aren't listening to him. I have to guess that the move signals the end of the idea that Clark would try to run an innovative Deanish campaign.

Kerry's big move yesterday was to propose a chowder bet with Dean about the playoffs, taking the Red Sox and implying that Dean backs the Yankees--as he did when growing up in New York--rather than the Red Sox, whom he now supports. Kerry's gesture strikes me as a mystifying bout of juvenile pettiness. He's such a good candidate and such a smart guy--who is advising him to pull this nonsense?

Oh, one more political thing while I'm on the topic: this is an interesting piece about Libertarians' disenchantment with the Republican party.

scroll lock

The Du Bois symposium is going to be great. Everyone should go to lots of it.

[archerda]'s Plan is flat awesome. Check this Honda commercial out.

Londoners! There's a new tube map with walklines. Excellent. 'Course, if you dislike the Tube as much as I do, you discover that everything is walkable in central London. Also for Londoners only: Angle-Grinder Man.

This is great: The 2003 Rock Paper Scissors International Championships. If you have a high-speed connection, this short video is not to be missed. I speak as, well, something of an expert, if I may make bold to say so, having stayed up for a couple hours thinking up a system to win my first-year dorm RPS contest. Sweet, sweet victory brought me a two-inch replica of "The Noid," the then-mascot of Domino's Pizza. Avoid the Noid, everyone. Yes, indeed. Avoid the Noid.

[archerda] asks how I became a Giants fan. (Sorry about the A's, by the way.) Naturally, I answer such a question by going back a century and a half. It went something like this:

1. Five generations ago, all of my paternal grandmother's eight ancestors left the northeast with the first migration of Mormon pioneers. One of my great-great-great grandmothers forded the Colorado River with a piano because she wouldn't give up music for her kids because of a lousy river. Therefore, the family ended up out west.

2. After meeting when they attended Stanford and Berkeley, my grandparents moved to LA, then Seattle, then settled in Palo Alto, where my dad lived from age six or so.

3. Dad's father had been a minor high-school sports star in LA, so he knew the scene when Jackie Robinson became a major high-school sports star in LA. The family loved the Jackie Robinson story and become Brooklyn Dodgers fans through the fifties.

4. The Giants moved to San Francisco in '58. Dad was about 16 at the time, and the closest major league team had always been, what, St. Louis? I asked him recently how long it took him to convert to being a Giants fan. "About five seconds." His glee was balanced a bit by his father's concern: "That's a terrible thing they're doing to the people of New York." But the Giants allegiance stuck.

5. After grad school, my parents moved to western New York. I was born there and have never lived on the West Coast, but my first sentence was "Go Giants; beat Reds." (I think it was transcribed with a comma, but I like to think I knew it should be a semicolon.)

6. I was a Giants and Pirates (Mom's from outside of Pittsburgh) fan until 1978, which began the Great Yankee Apostasy of '78 and '79. I took great joy in ranking all of the then-26 teams--I'm not that young, [brownj] :)--and putting Dad's hated Yankees at the top and the Giants and Pirates at the bottom. There were a lot of Yankee fans in western New York, including my best friend. Peer pressure, you know.

7. Then Dad took me to Game Four of the 1979 World Series, which the Pirates lost to the Orioles. In spite of the loss, I was mesmerized by the huge Pirates crowd and re-converted to the Pirates and Giants on the spot. I'm not proud of my fickleness, but hey, I was an impressionable little kid.

8. The Pirates won the next three games to win the Series after being down 3-1. The rest is history. I'm still a joint Pirates-Giants fan, but the Pirates have been almost entirely uninteresting for a very long time now.

[cjacobso]: be sure to see [brownj] for the lowdown on the bugs.

[arnone01]: I agree about the brokenness of Dowd's record. I don't think she measures up to the best writing there.

[hibbard], that's excellent! You knew what was coming!

[jansonp], I agree that the ruined abbeys are stunning, but I can't figure out why. Back in the day, they were a powerful cultural symbol of the victory of Protestantism over Catholicism in England, and that was part of the appeal, but--much as I enjoy taunting my Catholic wife with Protestant slogans and cheers--that's not what's in it for me. Maybe they're just purty.

Very nice, [wray].

Oh! I forgot to mention the [layeliz1]-directed play on Saturday night, which I enjoyed muchly. Congratulations to Elizabeth as well as [mandelia], [ofosuapp], [dickinso], and others whom I don't know.

Exams done. Papers to go.

A Dave Barry must-read.

The Giants are finished. (Thanks, [brownj]). For me, this was incredibly sudden, since I was in Iowa City Friday night and therefore watched Game 3 on tape Saturday morning. In my head, we went from tied 1-1 in the series to the end of the season in the space of five horrible hours. And of course both games were particularly heartbreaking losses, not 8-2 affairs where one can adjust to the slow dashing of hopes. For the record, I think the Giants were very lucky this season; I'm not sure they were that good this year, and I think they will take a big step back next year. Anything can happen in the playoffs, so I had hopes this year, but I don't think they'll be a playoff team next year. I hope I'm wrong. Now I'm rooting wholeheartedly for the inspiring Cubbies in the NL and for whoever wins the Sox-A's series in the AL. I still can't quite decide whom I'm pulling for in that latter series--I probably like the A's a little better, and I fonud myself pulling for them at first, but I do feel for the Sox fans. Even watching the games hasn't settled it. I tend to pull for whichever team is losing.

As an English teacher, I think it's great that we have a serious poet in the White House. By the way, this Esquire article about Karl Rove and the administration is becoming something of a landmark--it's long, but it gets more interesting as it rolls along. Predictably, other writers have picked up on the moment where the author hears Karl Rove screaming about someone who has displeased him, "We will f*** him. Do you hear me? We will f*** him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f***ed him!" (The censored words--censored by me, not the article--are not "fondle," "flatter," and "flattened.") But there's a lot more to the article than that, including an interesting treatment of John DiIulio.

The weekend was otherwise nice--crammed into the grading were Carolyn's theater performance in Iowa City, which went well for her and otherwise, and playing some horn for Jazz Sunday--right back atcha, [harrisle]. Those things balanced out the work a bit.

[heider]: most efficiently, 'n'.

I'm behind on correspondence. I shall return.

Looking up from 37 exams and 23 papers--about, what, 350 pages to grade. Yikes.

The way the cookie crumbles

Last year, 24 children were named Unique.

[stutelbe] gets to call students "goofhead"! Man, I never get to do that. Erin and others might want to see this interesting article about a new book on middle-school culture. It's a Salon.com piece, so you have to watch a short ad to get in if you're not a subscriber.

[jansonp], fer ta love o' Mike, how can you--a good lad by all accounts, a fine basketball player, a world traveler, even a grizzled veteran of one of my seminars--go ahead with full knowledge of your options and use "quote" as a noun? And to do so when, I gather, [jansonla], warming the heart of her teacher and advisor [simpsone], has showed you the straight path of righteousness! It is too much! I groan! I expire! Oh, but not before saying the clippings in the library sound great. Neato.

New research on the old problem of the relationship between madness and creativity. Interesting.

How to write bad documentation that looks good is a very funny piece about computer programming, corporate life, and writing style.

[written a few hours ago] This is (one reason among many) why I am a huge nerd: I'm going through the assignments for my Victorians seminar, which are setting up a workshop on annotations and research methods in class today, and I love, love, love it. I love thinking about how annotations can be more useful to researchers! I shout from the proverbial rooftop that I love comparing electronic databases! This, I submit, is a whole world of nerd beyond loving Walter Scott novels.

Here's another reason: I read [jansonp]'s ever-fascinating Plan about the literary goings-on of Dublin, and my reaction is: BUT WHAT HAPPENED AT THE LIBRARY? (He writes, "During the day I was at the national library, and I must tell you more about that later...")

[zdyrkoem], you've got it: the Abbey wasn't in the poem, but Levinson says that we're meant to think about it and its meaning. I've never been to Tintern Abbey, but I did go to Rievaulx Abbey, which is the same sort of thing. Neat, huh?

Thanks, belatedly, for the comments about my ambitions in language acquisition. [weimerda], I hear you, but I don't think Greek is going to happen. Maybe in retirement. Some things just have to go. I'm very probably not going to acquire Greek, be a professional musician, learn advanced physics, become an adequate downhill skier, join the Peace Corps, or do a lot of other things that I really want to do. I still remember when some of those doors closed. Choices stink. [rochest1], thanks for the now-deleted tip on French. That's the kind of advice that should begin every foreign-language phrase book: here's what to say to make your slip-ups seem charming.

[weimerda], I read your Coleridge piece quickly-a big stack of other papers awaits-and enjoyed it. The tension between the blank verse and ballad-style archaic diction is really interesting. Thanks.

Thanks to [GWS SEPC] for a fun sundae event. Mmm . . . cookies and cream in a tub.

Argh. Got home from Trads review session at 11:30. Saw that the A's-Sox game was almost over. Got sucked in, so I kept working, though very tired. Worked and worked. Game went on and on. Then fell asleep right at the end. The bad news is that I missed the very exciting last play. The worse news is that I've become my father.

For [stutelbe] and the secondary teachers of the world:

When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness. Because it's true. Latin, geography, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome: unless you know these things, you'll be limited to doing the puzzles in People magazine, where the clues read "Movie title, Gone _____ the Wind" and "It holds up your pants." --David Sedaris, "Down."

[watts]: Oh! My bad. I'll try again when I can.

I'm taking a brief lunch break, which I hereby use, as I would have when I was seven, to rank the eight playoff teams in the order of my hope that they will win, worst to first.

8. Marlins. It's not that they're playing my Giants. It's that, well, who cares about the Marlins? Even Florida only kind of cares about the Marlins, and they have no sympathy creds at all, since the franchise has already won a Series.

7. Yankees. Obviously, they don't need another series, and the acquisition of Giambi should lose them any sympathy they might have built up with anyone. They rank higher than the Marlins because a worthy enemy is at least interesting.

6. Braves. They might move up the list if they hadn't won a Series at all yet--I'm a Bills fan, so that would get to me--but I can't go very far with the notion that they haven't won as many as they should have, even though it's true. Aren't we all a little weary of these guys?

5. Twins. I love them for making contraction look so stupid, but that worked better last year. Of course they should beat the Yankees, but the rest of the teams have sympathy creds that the Twins can't overcome.

Now the tough part--the real competitors for sympathy support:

4. Cubs. This is almost a three-way tie for second place. I'm rooting hard for the Cubs in the first round, and of course it would be great for Cubs fans to get their title, but hey, it's a tough field this year.

3. A's. The hardest decision of all is whether to go for the A's or Red Sox in the first round. Like all hard rooting decisions, this one can't really be made until the teams start the first game and emotion pulls in one direction or the other. I adore the A's for making the owners' lies about the economic structure of the game look as stupid and cynical as they are. And they more than anyone have brought sabermetrics to the masses. But I give the pregame nod to the Sox for this reason: a Red Sox win would be worse for Yankees fans than an A's win. That's my spiteful tiebreaker.

2. Red Sox. For all the obvious reasons, plus the fact that I caught the bug a little bit the year I lived north of Boston and saw soem games at Fenway. Let Bill Buckner enjoy his retirement.

1. Giants. Of course. With all the talk about the curses of the Cubs and Bosox, I want to point out that the Giants have some formidable claims to sympathy as well. Unlike Chicago and Boston fans, San Francisco fans have never had a Series title. We did, however, have to endure one of the great heartbreaks of baseball history last year--a Buckner-level episode. And Barry, having shed for good the notion that he chokes in the playoffs, needs his ring.

Addendum: and now the Cubbies! A perfect day!

Theater folk might consider a late-night trip to Iowa City this Friday for a big No Shame Theater Reunion Event. My very own wife [cjacobso], known in theater circles as Carolyn Space Jacobson, will be performing, as will a lot of other No Shame legends.

I'm clearing out some email, and I found this bit I've been meaning to share, courtesy of [cjacobso]'s sister Bess: While sitting at your desk, make clockwise circles with your right foot. While doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change directions.

The Onion continues our polling conversation: "85 Percent Of Public Believes Bush's Approval Rating Fell In Last Month. And though it has nothing to do with anything, Breakup Secretly Hilarious To Friends tickled the ol' funny bone.

Twins beat the cursed Yankees, my Giants beat the Marlins as the walk-Bonds approach backfires. What a glorious opening to the playoffs.

[layeliz1], thanks. We've got our tix.

Seeing [adamsc] writing to [rochest1] in French reinforces an old frustration of mine about grad-school language education. I can read French a little--enough to understand that Plan conversation with no trouble, enough to pass a "proficiency" exam for the Ph.D. But grad-level language instruction was geared to those purposes exclusively, which is to say, I can't speak or hear the language at all. This is among the many things I want to fix about myself.

Others, not counting direct job responsibilities or grand moral imperatives:

* Do the same with German (same situation)

* And build on the tiny bit of Italian I know

* Oh, and learn a whole lot more Latin--since one must make choices, Greek can wait for another lifetime

* Read a lot more contemporary literature

* Write more contemporary literature :)

* Learn another programming language for interactive teaching applications

* Play music (sax or piano, no matter) every day

* Develop a reliable left-handed shot from the post

* Recapture the short game (golf) I once had

* Learn to frame pictures

But for now, read papers and get ready for tomorrow's seminar.

Hmm, I'm back and now very behind on Plan correspondence. And whatever will I share with you? Is it too nerdy to say that there's a new way to graph three variables that eliminates some of the problems of three-dimensional bar graphs? I think so! And a clever Onion piece on the death of "Encyclopedia" Brown, a literary favorite of my youth, gave me a chuckle, but you probably have no patience for such silliness. Or for a Doonesbury strip on Iraq, for that matter. I could set your brains afire with thoughts of electronic paper that will make the Daily Prophet's moving images a reality, but it's Monday-none of us are ready for that. No, I've got nothing for you today. Must be M urphy's Law in action.

Let me start to catch up:

[watts]: I went to noonball today, but no ball was nooned!

[plowman] and [adamsc], it was great to have you all over. I learned a lot about Sylvia's work that I hadn't known before, too.

[archerda], I'm looking forward to your Cy Young analysis. [brownj] and other Cubs fans, I'm really glad your Cubbies aren't playing my Giants in the first round. It'll get awfully lonely for us Giants fans (for me Giants fan?) in Grinnell if both teams win the first series.

[caseevan], [others who told me to get a Mac laptop]: thanks for the input. I'll do some testing on [cjacobso]'s machine to see how it would work. I'm already testing OpenOffice, with mixed results so far. (It looks great in general, but I'm having some trouble with the formatting of my most complex Word documents. I'll work on it.)

[fagan], we still planlove you! I remember how weird it was to see my own college become a little more foreign every year, and that was a much bigger and less tight community than Grinnell.

There is more to say, but not now.

[vanwilli] regrets her lack of culture (in her own opinion). Why, I'm here to help! And I feel that goofy contests are the key to real culture. To become cultured, therefore, first see the World Beard and Moustache Championships page. Then, when you're ready to step up to really high culture (har har), see the results of the Most Phallic Building in the World contest. I present the latter link with a feeling of shock and horror that anyone could think of putting such a thing on the Internet. I hope that none of you will click on it, think its contents funny, or in any way take the link on my Plan as an endorsement of such vileness.

And if you like even non-phallic skyscrapers, check out the diagrams section of skyscraperpage.com and the cool skylines on [archerda]'s Plan.

[bergman], I understand you better now. Thanks. I'll be back to that conversation soon.

I'm moving this here to make room for a new epigraph at the top:

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

--S. T. Coleridge (capitals in source)

Quick note between conferences: [arnone01], the Bush numbers are similar in other polls, too. The parts that surprised me were the war numbers and the polling on the Democrats. But the 50% approval for Bush is in line with other sources: Newsweek just did a poll putting his approval at 49%, and some others are in the low fifties. Your fellow Ohioans approve at a 55% clip. It should be said that these numbers are very good considering the state of the budget, the economy, the situation in Iraq, and (contrarily) Bush's money-making prowess. 50% approval at this point in the cycle is formidable.

Everyone should read this article about the security problems with the present touch-screen voting systems. (It's from Salon, so you have to watch an ad to get access if you're not a subscriber, but it's really worth it.) It's utterly hair-raising. Unfortunately, the issue has a partisan element because the maker of the insecure systems is a Republican operative, but the security problems should be everyone's non-partisan concern.

Hmm, a few people have asked me interesting questions that will require some thinking when I get a chance. A little patience, and all will be answered.

I find this USA Today/Gallup poll stunning. Clark fares best among the Democrats in spite of his initial bumbling, and for the first time (to my knowledge), Bush trails named Democrats (Clark and Kerry-Bush narrowly edges Dean, Gephardt, and Lieberman) in pre-election polls. All of the important indicators for Bush are plummeting faster than I ever would have thought possible. For instance, was it worth going to war in Iraq? Yes, 50-48%. A month ago the margin was 63-35. 41% said in May that the war was over in Iraq. Now, 10%. In other news, the big recent jump in worker productivity in the U.S. is going to make it wickedly hard for the economy to generate more jobs before the election rolls around because strong economic growth of 4% or so will be absorbed by gains in productivity and the normal slow growth in the size of the workforce. That is, economic growth produces some combination of jobs for new workers, increased productivity, and new jobs; it seems that the first two will absorb all or nearly all of the benefits of short-term growth. From what I've seen, nobody sees how the economy can grow fast enough to outpace that rate by much before the election. If I were a Bush strategist, that would really frustrate me: the jump in productivity wasn't expected by anyone, as far as I can tell, and it will further the jobless recovery.

[bergman]: you're disagreeing with a pollyannish caricature of what [brownj] and I wrote. Disagree with me if you like--I enjoy thoughtful disagreements--but please don't do so by making me sound silly. Thanks.

Tuesday, September 23nd(b)

Adding on: [stone], the new material is definitely harder, as I see more clearly with more of it to read. Short and middling words aren't giving me much trouble, but the longer ones are killers--much harder than in the randomized text. I wonder whether it's possible to contact the Cambridge researchers about your process.

[stone]: Interesting! I had no trouble except for "mlmlxaaiy." That stopped me cold for about ten seconds.

Tuesday, September 23nd

Hooray for banned books week!

Upcoming.org is a new site attempting to organize ground-up collective calendars. It's an interesting idea, I think, and another indication of how many institutional functions are going to be challenged by decentralized alternatives. here is a bit of blog commentary about upcoming.org and "social software."

[jansonp]: I saw The Lieutenant of Inishmore last summer in London. I wonder if your new actor friend was in it. I saw it with a Penn professor with whom I've seen a boatload of plays. He loved it. I wasn't as sure. I went to the interval thoroughly disliking it, went into the last scene unsure, and was then thoroughly impressed by the ending. Part of my struggle with the play is that I have grown less and less interested in contemporary art that stages extreme violence as a vehicle of dark humor in order to remind the audience how desensitized we are to watching violence. A lot of works do that brilliantly--Pulp Fiction and Fight Club come to mind with The Lieutenant of Inishmore. As much as I admire those works, I find myself less and less interested in watching them. Come to think of it, those two films are both ones I used to teach but have dropped, even though they both make for great discussions. Random Pulp Fiction notes: 1) The structure is not linear (obviously) but chiastic. 2) A lot of it is about interpreting texts that can't be accessed; we never see the inside of the briefcase, and the Biblical passage that the heroes discuss is fake. 3) Whenever the film makes you expect sex, you get violence, and vice versa. This is a common formula in stuff that strives to be edgy. Oh, wait--am I rambling?

Hmm. It seems I have entered a parallel subjunctive universe for both [schunaca] and [baileyja]. Plans is becoming my source for my own most interesting adventures! [baileyja], at least I'll know what's going on when you all come back from London in the spring and people start coming up to me saying, "Oh, how could you?"

I vote for hopping, [parkerma]. Excellent idea.

Adding on--no offense taken aside from the comical, [parkerma]. I think you articulate the limitations of NC nicely. In this abstraction, though, we are avoiding the toughest and most important question: how shall we read "The Kangaroo"?

Oh, [parkerma], say not that I am no fan of New Criticism! My English-teacher parents won't give me any birthday presents! :) You heard my best and sincerest tribute to New Criticism: it's a great teaching method, and its dedication to close reading has produce the methods of presenting evidence that underlie all subsequent forms of criticism. It's true that I'm not a new critic, but whatever I am (some blend of New Historicist, feminist, literary historian, cultural critic, and some other things, probably--most critics I know are similar mongrels at this point), I owe a great deal to New Criticism past and present, and I want to read more of it.

This is for [walshjen] in Australia and anyone else who like kangaroos or Australia or kooky nineteenth-century poetry:

The Kangaroo (from
RPO)

by Barron Field (1786-1846)

---- "mixtumque genus, prolesque biformis."
VIRG. Aen. vi.

Kanagaroo, Kangaroo!
Thou Spirit of Australia,
That redeems from utter failure,
From perfect desolation,
And warrants the creation
Of this fifth part of the Earth,
Which would seem an after-birth,
Not conceiv'd in the Beginning
(For GOD bless'd His work at first,
And saw that it was good),
But emerg'd at the first sinning,
When the ground was therefore curst; --
And hence this barren wood!


Kangaroo, Kangaroo!
Tho' at first sight we should say,
In thy nature that there may
Contradiction be involv'd,
Yet, like discord well resolv'd,
It is quickly harmonized.
Sphynx or mermaid realiz'd,
Or centaur unfabulous,
Would scarce be more prodigious,
Or Pegasus poetical,
Or hippogriff -- chimeras all!
But, what Nature would compile,
Nature knows to reconcile;
And Wisdom, ever at her side,
Of all her children's justified.

She had made the squirrel fragile;
She had made the bounding hart;
But a third so strong and agile
Was beyond ev'n Nature's art;
So she join'd the former two
In thee, Kangaroo!
To describe thee, it is hard:
Converse of the camlopard,
Which beginneth camel-wise,
But endeth of the panther size,
Thy fore half, it would appear,
Had belong'd to some "small deer,"
Such as liveth in a tree;
By thy hinder, thou should'st be
A large animal of chace,
Bounding o'er the forest's space; --
Join'd by some divine mistake,
None but Nature's hand can make --
Nature, in her wisdom's play,
On Creation's holiday.

For howsoe'er anomalous,
Thou yet art not incongruous,
Repugnant or preposterous.
Better-proportion'd animal,
More graceful or ethereal,
Was never follow'd by the hound,
With fifty steps to thy one bound.
Thou can'st not be amended: no;
Be as thou art; thou best art so.

When sooty swans are once more rare,
And duck-moles the Museum's care,
Be still the glory of this land,
Happiest Work of finest Hand!

Notes

1] mixtumque genus, prolesque biformis: Virgil's description of the
minotaur.

7] would: should (1823).

22] The second edition of 1823 adds these two lines after line 22:

Or Labyrinthine Minotaur,
With which great Theseus did war,

24] hippogriff: mythical beast that is in part griffin, but with a horse's
body and hind-quarters.

36] camlopard: giraffe.

59] duck-moles: duck-billed platypuses.
"The cygnus niger of Juvenal is no rara avis in Australia; and time has here
given ample proof of the ornythorinchus paradoxus" (Field's note).

No real update at the moment--just housekeeping before completing a marathon work weekend. Be sure to catch [brownj]'s clever riposte to my science jobs article.

[watson]: [bergman] and I are talking about different parts of his article. The part I'm addressing below is not the controversial bit. About that part, to say the least, I see whence the controversy arises.

Sunday, September 21st

OK, some of this is just obnoxious and unfunny, but some of it is a gas if you're in the right silly mood: Tony Hawks answers email to Tony Hawk.

Nicholas Kristof has a devastating column in the times about the unintended effects of "gag rule" policies on women and children around the world.

Monopoly Probabilities!

A paragraph of [bergman]'s column in the paper raises the issue of research activity and dedication to teaching. On one hand, it posits a kind of teacher with a "mindset" of being "'primarily' a scholar" (I'm not sure what his quotation marks indicate there) who "will probably not give the students the respect they deserve." On the other hand, it acknowledges that many of Grinnell's finest teachers also excel as researchers and asserts that those aren't the people with whom the column is concerned. I think the argument of the paragraph is somewhat circular: it asks whether there's a problem with a scholarly orientation in teachers, but it asks the question in a way that excludes the best teachers from consideration. Even if the dice are unloaded, however, the larger questions stand, and I think they're complicated enough that I won't try to answer them. But I will toss out some thoughts.

The opposition between "scholarship" and "pedagogy," routine as it is, is misleading in some ways. Some people would say that it's a false opposition because scholarship informs pedagogy directly, giving teachers a more current and useful knowledge of their subject and attracting talented and well-matched students through the prestige of their research. I know of three counterarguments to that position. First, teaching involves much more than the skills involved in scholarly pursuits, and pedagogical skills are at least partly independent of scholarly skills, so a school that hires people primarily on the basis of scholarship (unlike Grinnell) is unlikely to hire the teachers best able to impart the value of scholarly activity to students. Second, good teaching simply takes a whale of a lot of time, as does good scholarship. Can a school (like Grinnell) try to get both and expect its faculty to survive? Third, the term "scholarship" includes a lot of very different activities, from participation in professional associations to reading the current literature in one's field to researching for publication, which involves a much narrower and deeper kind of reading. Undergraduate teaching is most obviously improved by the second of these three activities, keeping up with the literature of one's field in general. Promotion, tenure, and the accumulation of scholarly prestige, however, are most obviously facilitated by the third--and those two ways of being "scholarly" are often at odds with one another.

So it's all very complicated, but I think [bergman]'s questions are a good starting point, and all this is very much worth considering. These issues require touch choices to be made by institutions and individuals.

Finally, an unadulterated opinion: as a whole, the Grinnell faculty is almost unbelievably dedicated to undergraduate teaching, and I find it remarkable how many of the most revered teachers on the faculty are also the most accomplished scholars (in many different senses). I say this with a lot of other faculties at various sorts of places in mind. Your mileage may vary.