You may have noticed that this site was down for about a week at the beginning of the month. This is because my webhost, Dreamhost, had a problem with the server this site is on, a hardware failure that required all sorts of migrating and replacing. Now, on this site, that’s not a huge deal. I haven’t updated this blog in a month and a half anyway, and I don’t make any money off of it, so there’s no loss of revenue. I did have a post planned for May Day, but I’ll survive without it. I am looking for a job, though, and my CV is up here. I invite employers to check out the site, and a 404 error doesn’t look good. I also host a business site with Dreamhost, and this outage was a little more disruptive for that site, but still, not the end of the world.
I have been with Dreamhost since 2006, and there were a few problems in the beginning, but I was paying next to nothing back then and they were pretty quick to alleviate any problems. In the last several years, I have been paying more, but there have been few if any problems, and they have been top-notch.
The type of failure I experienced is unusual, but still nearly unforgivable. Seriously, this is what they do. I pay them and they provide server space for me to have my websites displayed to the world. That’s it. This is like going to a restaurant and being told they are out of food. Not just one thing, but all food. For a week. Not much of a restaurant, right? After I tweeted about it a few times, someone contacted me with apologies and a promise to credit my account with $10.95, the price of a month’s hosting. That’s nice, but that is the very, very least I would expect them to do. If they hadn’t done that, I would think they were out of their minds.
Any sane person would simply switch companies and be done with it. I have gone so far as to sign up for hosting at a different company, but I haven’t transferred anything over yet. This outage caught me right in the middle of final grading for a bunch of classes, and prep for a new summer class (although the latter was canceled last minute — more on that at a later date), so I didn’t have time to comparison shop. I think I can get comparable hosting for cheaper. I think I can more reliable hosting. But, in the end, how do I know that I won’t run into the same, or different, problems at a different host?
There are a few things I like about Dreamhost. I currently get unlimited storage and bandwidth, and can host as many domains there as I like. They have a good referral program that gives me kickbacks on referrals (although I did that once and they never credited me, and now I’m not sure I can recommend them in good faith).
There are also some intangibles. For example, they are dedicated to being carbon neutral. They are employee-owned. They also,unlike some companies, opposed SOPA from the beginning. Their newsletters are amusing. These things have nothing to do with service or quality, but they are important to me.
What to do? Forgive and forget? Move on? I might move my business site elsewhere but keep this here. I don’t know what assurances Dreamhost can give me that this won’t happen again, and I don’t know if I would believe them anyway. Then again, I don’t know how other hosting companies work, so I might be in the same boat elsewhere. Maybe I’m a fool, but I will probably end up staying here.
I’m sure I’ll get a bunch of spam here, like I did on twitter, but I wonder if any of the real people who read this blog have any suggestions.
I’ve been absent here for the last month, so I thought I’d tell you briefly what I’ve been paying attention to of late but haven’t had the time to write about.
Bully – the fight over the MPAA rating of the documentary Bully has me hoping that this sparks more discussion about the rating system in general, how capricious it is, how it favors violence over sex, and how it disenfranchises independent filmmakers. I am glad the Weinsteins are taking up this fight, and I hope that it that this sparks a revolution in the film industry to revamp the system. I am not naive enough to believe that it will, but one can hope. For those interested, watch This Film is Not Yet Rated, an enlightening documentary about the how the ratings system works. It’s streaming on Netflix as well as available on DVD.
Kony2012 – This was a rare instance of my a political issue that my students were on top of before I had ever heard of it, which is precisely why it interests me. A student mentioned it a few weeks ago, and I had no idea what he meant. I was thinking of coney dogs. Anyway, I don’t want to rehash anything about the video itself or the criticisms of it (support of militarism and imperialism, white guilt, the futility of it, the choice of cause over others, ahistoricism, masturbation in public), but I am interested in how this video caught the attention of a usually apolitical segment of the population. It would be interesting to look at the aesthetics of the video, the use of SEO and other marketing techniques to float it to the top of Youtube, etc., to dissect how this video was able to mobilize. I am sure someone has looked at this already, but I haven’t been on top of things, so point me in the right direction if you know of anything.
e-literature - I have been thinking quite a lot lately about printed versus e-text, and the shifting economies of publishing, both popular and academic. I will start to tease out some of my ideas about self-publishing, academic publishing, peer-review and the aesthetics of the various “print” media. Too much to synthesize here, but maybe a few posts when my semester settles down.
teaching philosophies - I’ve always thought these were stupid wastes of paper, but I am beginning to change my mind. I have been rewriting my philos0phy and ran across some good advice. For someone who has been teaching for a long time (like me), specific examples and an admission that you weren’t born a good teacher, but have learned from experience make a readable and informative philosophy. I like my teaching philosophy now, and I hope hiring committees do as well. When I was training to be a high school teacher eons ago, we had to construct these, and, of course, they all looked the same. We didn’t have any experience, let alone philosophy. Anyway, here is some of the good advice I found, via a simple google search. Also, Brian Croxall was giving some sound advice on twitter a few days ago one of which was this:
Everett: Main thing of teaching philosophy, reflect and then show evidence.
I don’t feel comfortable predicting or choosing favorites this year, because there are so many I haven’t seen. For example, of the best picture nominees I have not seen Hugo, Warhorse, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, or The Help. It was hard to keep up with 5, but ten is quite difficult. I also have not seen Albert Nobbs, The Iron Lady, or My Week with Marilyn. As you see, I am hardly qualified this year to judge, so I must recuse myself.
Of those I did see, I really liked The Artist and I look forward to watching it again. Bridesmaids was one of my favorite films this year, and Tree of Life was absolutely gorgeous and subtle. I found the the Irish film The Guard daring and unconventional. I am probably missing quite a few, but that’s my 2011 in review for now.
I arrived late at the screening, so I missed Sunday/Dimanche. Of the rest, I found A Morning Stroll to be fun, irreverent and just plain strange. In other words, good stuff. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore was visually stunning, and the subject matter was near and dear to my heart — books. It celebrates the power of stories and manages to leave the viewer feeling wistful yet hopeful. Not bad for 17 minutes. Wild Life was my least favorite. It is about a British man in the Canadian Western wilderness. It has some charm, but I felt it was too long. The Pixar film La Luna, is cute and fun, as Pixar films always are. I always want to dislike the Pixar selection, but this time I couldn’t. It was one of my favorites.
Live-actionshorts
All but one of the live-action shorts were whimsical. The non-comedic short, Raju, follows a German couple through an adoption in India, and the discovery that the adoption agency is offering kidnapped kids to Westerners, leaving the couple with a horrible decision to make. It is 24 minutes long, and moves quickly, through vivid cinematography and snappy editing. The Irish Pentecost features a kid who is trying to make the Catholic altar boy team, more or less, and is structured like a sports movie. Quite funny. The Shore, from Ireland, has its dramatic points, but is framed comedically. The Irish dialect is difficult to understand at points, but it’s a heart-warming, funny story. My two favorites were Tuba Altantic and Time Freak. In the Norwegian Tuba Atlantic, a man is told he has six days to live, and decides he has to blow a giant tuba he and his brother had constructed in order to contact his brother in the USA, but the wind has to be blowing in the right direction. A young “angel of death,” a girl sent by the church to help old people die, helps him blow the tuba, as well as kill as many seagulls as possible, as the old man seems to have an obsessive hatred of the birds. The American Time Freak follows a guy who has invented a time machine, but he is so neurotic he can’t get further back than the day he invented the machine, because he wants everything to be perfect. I keep thinking there is nothing new to be done with time travel, but this is a hilarious take on human nature and neurosis.
Some of these are available on iTunes (I know Time Freak is, and it’s worth the $3 download). You can find synopses and places to watch them here.
This is the third of what will probably be four hastily written reviews of Oscar-nominated films.*
Much of The Descendants feels like a travelogue to Hawaii. The scenery is beautiful and it is chock full of historical tidbits. The story involves a privileged family trying to decide what to do with a huge swath of Hawaii beach land. So, something we can all identify with, especially in these days of recession. Sarcasm aside (for now), the film has its funny and touching moments, but for the most part it is unconvincing.
The bright spot of the film is Shailene Woodley, who plays Alexandra King, teenage daughter of Matt King (George Clooney). She plays perfectly the sassy, pissed-off, defiant but supportive and tender daughter caught between a distant father and a cheating (now comatose) mother. She carries some scenes with only a look or body language, and she delivers pithy lines with a force only a teenager could muster.
George Clooney, on the other hand, is George Clooney, as usual. I don’t have anything against the guy, and I like a lot of his films. He does the aloof dad thing pretty well, because, let’s face it, aloof is something he does well. When it comes to showing emotions however, he looks an acting student. I kept finding myself thinking, “This is George Clooney acting sad. This is what George Clooney thinks hurt husbands do when they are angry.” Instead of prorraying grief or sadness, he just exudes Clooneyness. I think of Alexander Payne’s last movie, Sideways, and how Paul Giammatti played a damaged, lost man-child, and I wonder if Payne could have coaxed that out of Clooney.
That said, the film has its moments, and is not a total waste of time. The relationship between the daughters and the comatose mom is complex and difficult. The premise of a character being comatose through the entire movie is interesting, and the scenes in the hospital can be touching. Overall, the unconvincing performance coupled with the unrelatability of these characters makes it mostly forgettable.
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*I am disappointed that I lost the first draft of this. I usually compose in a word processor and paste into WordPress, but this time I composed right in the window, hit “Publish” on what felt like a good review, and lost everything because I was no longer logged in. C’est la vie, I guess, but I can’t help feeling that draft was better. Mark Sample has suggested Lazarus to prevent this in the future.
This is the second of several hastily written reviews of Oscar-nominated films. I will try to work my way through as many as possible between now and Sunday. These will be off-the-cuff reviews based on my memory of the films from whenever I saw them.
Let’s start off by saying I don’t know much about baseball. I like the sport, but I haven’t followed it since the 1994-95 strike, so, going into this I had no idea if the Oakland A’s went to the World Series or not. In other words, unlike real baseball fans, I didn’t know how this film would end, although I had a few guesses. I suspect I resemble many viewers of this film in that regard.
The movie, adapted from a book of the same name (which, you will not surprised to learn, I have not read), follows Billy Bean through a crisis as he manages the Oakland A’s, the poorest team in the league (it is called a league, right?). It starts with a game with the New York Yankees, and lists their respective budgets. The difference is staggering, and the Yankees win. The rest of the film consists of Billy Bean recruiting a young kid, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), to adopt a new strategy to predict good players based on statistical analysis, the doubt and conflict that arises from this, and Brad Pitt driving around in a truck.
The baseball footage looks alternately like real footage and extremely surreal, depending on the scene. There’s really not a lot of baseball in this film, actually, as most of the plot revolves around trades and the interpersonal relationships of the main characters. If you’ve read the book or follow baseball, you know how it ends. If you haven’t or don’t, I won’t ruin it for you.
The writing is what makes this film both engaging and annoying. On the one hand, Aaron Sorkin works some of the same magic in Moneyball as he does in The Social Network. In the latter, one wonders how a movie about a lawsuit could be interesting; in the former, the question is why anyone would watch a movie about sports statistics. In both, he makes it about something else. In The Social Network, the theme becomes that of the intelligent, quirky outsider that nobody understands, the young genius vs the world. In Moneyball, it’s about the underdog team, barely funded, against the rest of the league, flush with money. David and Goliath. Regular people vs the megarich. The problem with the writing is that everything is so snappy and well-timed that it reminds the viewer of how inadequate everyday, real-life encounters really are. Nobody is as quick-witted and wry as the people in these films, and the conversational setups are so opportune for one-liners and gotcha moments that they call attention to themselves as contrived. One example is when Billy Bean is in the field manager Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman)’s office, and he’s telling him he can’t play someone because he, Bean, has traded him. The back-and-forth is cute and fun, but unlikely. Then, another player comes into the office at just the right time for Bean to tell him, in front of the manager, that he’s being traded. Perfect timing. Unrealistic timing. It’s too clean. That said, it is entertaining and fun, like The Social Network. If my screenwriting students could write dialogue half as well as Sorkin, they would be quite happy, and potentially successful.
Pitt does a fine job in this role, as does Phillip Seymour Hoffman in his. The tension between the two is palpable, and Pitt creates a character one can root for. Jonah Hill stands apart in his role as the whiz-kid baseball-loving number cruncher. He eschews the goofy demeanor of past movies and inhabits the mousy, perpetually uncomfortable protege in the same way he inhabits his ill-fitting suits. Everything is too big for him, and he plays the uncomfortable over-his-head expert superbly.
All told, I enjoyed this film. It is well-rounded and engaging, even if a bit sanitary.
This is the first of several short reviews of Oscar-nominated films. I will try to work my way through as many as possible between now and Sunday. These will be off-the-cuff reviews based on my memory of the films from whenever I saw them.
I walked into The Artist wondering what I was getting myself into. A silent film? But I had heard good things. Turns out it is an entertaining and engaging film, full of slapstick, melodrama, and charm. It is the story of a silent film actor, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) struggling with the invention of sound and falling in love with a new actress Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo). The plot reminds one, unsurprisingly, of Singin’ in the Rain, but without the singing, dancing and color.
The opening scene is funny and heartwarming, and sets the tone for much of what is to follow. The use of necessarily exaggerated movements and facial expressions make the film work. The two main actors know how to act with their facial expressions, and the director (Michel Hazanavicius) knows how to capture them.
This film does what many films of the actual silent period couldn’t, due to faster, better-looking film. The images are crisp and lush, the sets well-constructed. After all, the filmmakers have a century of filmmaking precedent on which to draw as well as the attendant technological changes.
The story, as I mentioned earlier, is not wholly original, but that is forgivable, as the subject matter works perfectly for a silent film. In fact, in some ways it is the opposite of Singin’ in the Rain, which uses Technicolor and modern audio production techniques to make fun of the transition to sound, and to foreground the spectacular capabilities of modern technology. The Artist, however, chronicles the downfall of a silent actor, making more like Sunset Boulevard.
This film has also taken some flak for cribbing Bernard Hermann’s score from Vertigo, a decision I find strange. Perhaps it is a hat-tip to the great composer, but the scene in which the piece appears is quite long, crossing from homage to plagiarism. This didn’t, however, distract me much from enjoyment of the film.
What did distract me a bit was seeing John Goodman. Seeing a well-known actor in a silent film is a bit jolting, reminding the viewer that this is, in fact, a modern film. Don’t get me wrong, he does a great job as the over-the-top movie producer. It’s just that my familiarity with his face jarred me. The other actor that I think does a superb job is the dog. That sounds like a joke, but it’s not. The dog adds enough comic effect to the film to make me forgive some of the slower scenes near the end. He also balances out some of the melodrama.
Overall, the movie might be a bit schlocky but it is well-done schlock, an experiment that I think pays off. After all, producing a black-and-white silent feature film in the era of huge special effects is quite daring, and tests the audience’s ability to sit down and watch without the constant stimulation of explosions and witty or crass, or just plain loud, dialogue.
In yesterday’s NYTimes, Matt Richtel has an article entitled “Blogs vs Term Papers,” in which he sketches a debate about college writing. Cathy Davidson responds brilliantly, talking at length about her own experience with teaching methods that stray from the traditional academic writing still taught in many places.
Even Richtel’s piece points out the false binary in blogs vs term papers (why not both?), but another false binary, introduced in a quote, goes largely unexamined:
“She’s right,” [William H.] Fitzhugh says of Professor Davidson. “Writing is being murdered. But the solution isn’t blogs, the solution is more reading. We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.”
So, it’s blogs vs term papers, or blogs vs. reading, as if requiring blogs precludes assigning reading. And reading what, by the way? Articles? Blog entries? Novels? Academic essays? Comic books? And the prejudice remains that blogs are always short, sloppy, personal, ill-researched, and term papers aren’t.
I am having my students keep blogs this semester for the first time in many years. The blog entries I will require them to write take the place of short response papers they used to hand in to me. My rationale is that, if they feel they are writing for a public audience they will write differently, and be responsive to that audience in a different way. Their classmates will certainly read their work, and the general public also has access to these blogs. And guess what? They’re also writing more traditional papers.
I don’t believe that anyone thinks assigning blogs is avant-garde at this point, and I think the only way anyone could strongly oppose them is to come up with headlines like “Blogs vs Term Papers” and fall into stereotypes about what blogs do, as if the only function of a blog is to act as a 14-year old’s diary.
What I have found so far is that most of my students have never heard of, let alone kept, blogs. With a few exceptions, the few that have them use them for their English classes.
My hope is that they will treat them as a space for their own writing, for experimenting with prose and trying out opinions, and for seeing their own writing as potentially valuable to others. I also hope it will teach them to be accountable in their writing and consider an audience beyond their stodgy professor. Finally, I hope they will take ownership of their new blogs and keep them after the class is over.
In assigning them blogs, I recommended WordPress but told them they can use whatever they like, including Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous or whatever. I also gave them the following advice about anonymity:
Everything you post on your blog is public. You may use your real name on your blog, but you do not have to. You might prefer to use your first name and last initial, or a complete pseudonym. So long as I and your classmates know it’s you, you can use whatever name you like. Think hard about this, but know that with most blogs, you can change your display name whenever you want, so your decision is reversible.
(The anonymity bit is prompted in part by the strange experience my class had last time we did blogs.)
I know I have created for myself a total mess in allowing different platforms and levels of anonymity, but I have learned from experience that students have different levels of awareness about online identity, and I want them to make informed decisions since these are, after all, their blogs, not mine.
I am going to put together a list of all the blogs from the class, but I am not sure I will publish it publicly, because, frankly, I don’t know what the FERPA implications are. If you have any insight on this, let me know.
I realize that this blog post has become quite rambling and fragmented, but isn’t that part of the point? I wouldn’t submit this to a journal, nor would I consider this scholarship in any traditional sense. But neither is it a pointless diary entry about what I ate this morning (if you’re interested, I will tell you). And writing this blog entry doesn’t mean that I cannot or will not write more sustained and organized argumentation around this topic. I simply haven’t chosen to at this point, in this venue, and I think that’s ok. If that’s all my students learn in their blog entry assignments, I will be satisfied. After all, they still have to write a longer essay for me.
It’s been over a week since Hastac 2011, which was an invigorating and eye-opening experience. First, some highlights, and then my reflections.
Highlights
The day before the conference officially started, there was a workshop on alternative academic careers (or alt-ac, as it is popularly called). This workshop was quite informative and well-attended, given the tight job market and increasing number of people interested in working in the academy in a position other than full-time tenure-track position.1Some people expressed concern that alt-ac meant failure, while others stated that they simply prefer an alt-ac position. Brian Croxall showed some cover letters and resumes for these types of positions and pointed in directions to find listings.
Beginning of the first day brought Cathy Davidson, who talked about attention blindness and the need to collaborate to compensate for each others’ blindness. I highly recommend watching the video of this lecture, as well as those of the other keynotes. Although many feared that the entertaining introduction by Daniel Herwitz might overshadow the actual talk, Cathy Davidson presented an engaging and thoughtful talk that really set the tone for the rest of the conference. For a more detailed description of this and the other keynotes, go to the blog roundup page for the conference and look at Karen Petruska’s incredible liveblogs. I don’t know how she did it.
Daniel Atkins’s talk, just after Davidson’s, on cyberinfrastructure, was also quite informative and tightly packed with info.
After this came concurrent lightning talks at 1o minutes apiece, and ronudtables where people presented work and invited discussion. Later in the day was a discussion of academic publishing with Dan Cohen, Tara McPherson and Richard Nash. This was quite provocative, as all three of the speakers have a strong history of promoting alternative publishing practices. The video of this is well worth watching, especially for Richard Nash, who I trust will be as captivating on video as he was in person.
Day 2 began with keynotes by Siva Vaidhyanathan and Josh Greenberg, followed in the afternoon by a trip to North Campus and the Duderstadt Center for poster sessions and a tour of the 3D Lab, which has an incredible audio studio, a 3D video facility, 3D printing, electronic music studio, and, the most amazing thing I have ever seen, the Virtual Reality Cave. They had a representation of Yost Ice Arena that you could virtually walk through with special glasses and a controller. It was very lifelike. The best thing is that all of the technology there is open to all students, facutly and staff.
Reflections
I am glad I attended the pre-conference alt-ac workshop. I am on the job market now, looking both for tenure track and alternative positions. I have had trouble articulating this position, because I feel that if I let it be known I am looking for alt-ac, potential TT employers might see me as not serious, or as about to give up. Conversely, I fear that alt-ac employers will view my actively seeking a TT job as treating them as a second choice. Neither of these is true. I am truly looking for both, and will take the position that seems best for me, whether ac or alt. It was nice to see that others had the same attitude, and some of the advice on how to advertise my skills was invaluable. I have long felt that my graduate education has trained me for once specific job, and that I don’t know how to move into any other position, but I have since come to realize that I have a fairly unique set of skills that are transferable to any number of jobs, and that I need to figure out how best to explain them to those who can use them.
For me, the biggest draw to the conference was Cathy Davidson. I have been working on the concept of “attention” in various ways in past several years, and her latest book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn touches on many of the concepts I’ve been trying to explore (I will post a reaction to the book at some point in the near future). Her talk, as I said before, really set the tone for the conference, and became a challenge in some ways to introduce a greater degree of collaboration in the humanities.
The conference was unlike traditional conferences. It had the feeling of a mixture of show-and-tell and real discussion of pressing issues in digital humanities. After attending two Great Lakes THATCamps and now this, I almost dread going to a traditional conference where people read about very specific topics for twenty minutes, three times per panel, 10 panels per day. I leave these (un)conferences thinking about how we might revamp conferences like MLA or SCMS to be more dynamic and user-friendly. I’ll let you know what I come up with.
It is important to note that alt-ac refers to jobs that are still affiliated with the academy in some way, and not a job that is entirely not academic. Examples include university libraries and academic publishing. [↩]
The Washington Post has a good roundup and discussion of some of the funnier Rick Perry “Strong” ad parodies. To those, I would add this (NSFW) ad from funny or die, and the Bad Lip Reading ad:
The article points out that the ad is aimed at the Christian conservative base, and acts as a “dog whistle” to those voters, but it has inspired countless parodies at the hands of the “Millennial generation, showcasing their expertise in creating new media and their education in the use of humor as politics by years of watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.”
I’m not sure if making political video ads is confined to the Milennials, who, as the article points out, are overwhelmingly politically progressive, but I do think it marks an interesting shift in the ways these things get disseminated, as well as a difference in political strategy between left and right.
The right has long had talk radio and other news outlets, and the mode of rhetorical attack has been Rush Limbaugh-style derision and ridicule, and an appeal to “traditional” values, which usually refers to a particular (evangelical) Christian ideal of a simpler more homogenous past that never existed.
The left has never been able to harness the same sort of passion, as progressive issues don’t lend themselves well to yelling, talking over callers, or ostracizing others. Parody and satire have become the tools of the left, led, as the article suggests, by the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. How else to counter the claims and rhetorical devices of the right than to make fin of them and point out their flaws?
This is nothing new, but the participation of anyone with video editing software and a microphone changes everything. In 2004, when Howard Dean’s campaign essentially ended after the awkward scream after the Iowa caucuses, it was the mainstream media that started the meme.
This was an instance of pure appeal to affect. His downfall had nothing to do with policy or politics, but with this endlessly repeated scream broadcast on every channel, and then on the internet. Parody videos work the same way. There is no way to counter Perry’s stance on logical grounds, as his is an appeal to emotion. Parody works the same way to belittle the message and the messenger.
Eight years later, the internet leads the charge. The Rick Perry ad was made for television and aired on major networks. The parodies are distributed via Youtube and other video sharing sites. Where in 2004, parody videos existed but were on the margins, in 2011, they have much greater potential to undermine well-orchestrated policital media campaigns.
As the campaign season continues, I would expect to see many more of these, probably from both the right and left. With the Supreme Court demolishing any limits on campaign financing, we will see unprecedented tv and radio spots. Given that environment, I wonder if we will see the mainstreaming of parody such as this, if a political group decides to air these sorts of ads instead of (or in addition to) the straight attack or advocacy ads we are used to.
