Posts by Tim

Some blogs written for university presses have gotten really good, featuring excerpts worth reading even if (especially if) you have no particular interest in plunking down beaucoup bucks for a hardcover scholarly book. For instance, here’s a choice bit from classics/philosophy prof Paul Woodruff’s The Necessity of Theater, featured at the website for Oxford University Press, which looks closely at both drama and sports (those two forms of theater both American and Athenian):

Why does theater need a measured space? In order to practice the art of theater successfully, some people must be watching the actions of others. Whether your job tonight is to watch or be watched, you need to know which job is yours; the watcher-watched distinction is essential to theater. We shall see that even this can break down at the end of a theater piece, with marvelous consequences. But one of those consequences is that the event is no longer theatrical. When no one is watching, it’s not theater; it has grown into something else. Marking off space in theater is a device for meeting the need to distinguish the watcher from the watched. In most traditions there is a circle or a stage or sanctuary or a playing field…

“Sacred” is a word we have almost lost in modern times, like “reverence,” to which it is related in meaning. Sacred things and places call us to reverence, as to do sacred timed like the Sabbath; perhaps in out own century we are too alert to the dangers of idolatry to recognize that we are, still, surrounded by what we wordlessly take to be sacred. And Christians have come more and more to neglect the Sabbath. Like reverence, the sacred is best known in religious contexts, but, if we are to recognize it now, we must looked for it also in the secular world, such as the football field. I will say that a place for an object or person is sacred if it is held to be untouchable except by people who are marked off, usually by ritual, so as to be allowed to touch it.

What makes theater sacred? Ritual, or a tradition based on ritual, defines the space and calls for penalties against those who violate it. All theater, football games and Antigone included, is the heir of a long line of spaces made sacred for religious ritual. Sometimes the space is permanently scared, like the adyton, the un-enterable room in an old Greek temple. Sometimes it is sacred for the time of the event, and the boundaries of time and place work together. So it is with the stage, after a performance of Hamlet, if you are invited as a sponsor to a reception with the cast on the set. Nothing wrong now with setting foot on this space (although, if the performance was good, I dare you to step on the stage afterward without a shiver.) So it is also with a trial at law. For the time of the trial the courtroom theater is sacred and may be entered only designated people and used only according to certain rules.

Which leads me to question another kind of reverence at play here: why do these wry observations need to be in a book-length work, a monograph, for them to be taken seriously?

Let me back up. Before I read Woodruff’s excerpt, I also read Rohan Amanda Maitzen’s look at academic publishing over at The Valve, which includes 1) laments that nobody buys academic monographs, and 2) wonderment that blogs don’t seem to have really affected either the purchasing or accreditation habits of academics much.

Not everything in Maitzen’s post is in her voice, but it’s a good round-up — for instance, here she quotes Cathy Davidson:

If we believe in what we do (and I happen to be a believer), we should be writing for readers, first of all, and, second, we should be reading one another’s work and, third, we should be teaching it. Right now, a sale of 300 or 400 copies of a monograph is a lot. That’s appalling. The result, materially, is that we do not pay our own way and certainly not that of junior members of our profession. Intellectually, our students never learn the value the genre of the monograph because we teach excerpts in our courses, even our graduate courses. We do not teach the kind of extended, nuanced thinking that goes into the genre that our very graduate students will have to produce for tenure. We say the scholarly monograph represents the epitome of our profession and a hurdle to “lifetime employment” at a research university. So we do not practice what we preach, adding to the crisis in scholarly publishing and the crisis in the profession of English in particular.

Now, note that slippage: the need for “extended, nuanced thinking” actually turns out to be material primarily because it’s required for tenure. Monographs remain absolutely essential to the legitimation rituals of academia (especially the PhD and tenure), even as they’ve diminished in importance for readers both in and out of the scholarly spheres. They’re only important at designating who gets to go inside the temple. They don’t do anything to maintain the relationship with the audience.

This is something I wrestle with in my mind frequently — when is a “book” necessary? particularly as a “work” is now more frequently coming to mean an ongoing project composed of many, many individual pieces of writing, which are extended and nuanced and interlinked but frequently not a single thing with a clearly defined architecture.

In short, the book is not always necessary. In fact, it sometimes isn’t even a book.

But when it is, it should be one deliberately — not merely to invoke a ritual of time or space or authorship, but to genuinely fulfill all of those demands. As Mallarmé would say, the book should attempt the impossible and abolish chance. How can we do that? Where do we begin?

Well, NPR is:

The average Farmville user is a 43-year-old woman. More women than men are “avid” users of social games like Farmville. Women are more likely to play these games online with their relatives and real-world friends than men. Two-thirds of these social gamers play at least once a day. One in four spend money playing them.

All Facebook’s Application Statistics show that Farmville will soon have more than 80 million active users on Facebook — 31 million of those will be playing Farmville daily…

This new data challenges some preconceived notions about just who is actually playing games online. The image of the nerdy, male, mid-thirties recluse, playing shooting games over the internet with fellow nerdy, male, mid-thirties recluses on the other side of the world might be forever shattered.

The craziest statistic? Of the 200 million people who log into Facebook each day, 15 percent of them are playing Farmville.

And now we know that one of them might very well be your Mom.

Via.

Every so often, Twitter feels less like a service I use than a place where I hang out — and one of the users that I feel like I would love to hang out with (in that sort of detatched, ambient way one does in, say, a college dorm or TA office) is Tom Henderson, aka @mathpunk. At some point in the not-too-distant past, I found him or he found me. Yesterday, I was delighted to be pointed (also via Twitter, but not by Tom) to an interview he gave technoccult.net where he sketches a bit of what he’s about:

Many students want teachers to “show me the steps.”

They want a sequence of steps that they can perform that will give them an answer. This is not unreasonable; they know that their performance on exams, and therefore their performance on the All-Seeing Grade Point Average, is largely determined by being able to Do The Steps.

But “The Steps” are cargo cult mathematics.

The Steps are seeing the sorts of symbols that count as “right”, and trying to replicate that dance of steps. It turns out that the easiest thing in the world is to look at a student’s work, and tell the difference between “Knows what’s going on, made mistakes and dozed off” vs. “Can memorize steps, has no idea what’s going on.”

Now, the way that I explain mathematics, it sort of looks like I’m torturing the poor bastards. I handwave. I refer to certain groupings of symbols as “Alphabet soup” and write it down as a wild scribble with one or two symbols around it.

Because I’m trying to avoid showing The Steps and instead show them enough of The Idea that they can reconstruct what the steps MUST be.

Many students want to know the formulas, so that they can float them on top of their short-term memory, ace the exam, and then skim them off. Why do they want to know that?

Probably because, for their entire mathematical careers, math has been a sequence of Steps, and if they get them wrong, they get red pen, bad grades, No No No Look What You Did. Plus, bonus, there is no apparent relevance of these algorithms other than To Get The Answer.

What’s wrong with math education in the US? What’s wrong is, Whatever it is that makes my students uninterested in learning any more math than is required to minimize feeling stupid.

So that we’re clear, lots of my students are totally awakened to the interesting weirdnesses of mathematics. But, it takes some doing, and I can’t do it by myself. Hence the podcasts and the lunatic twitter stream and the plans for TV shows and online games and godknowswhat else.

I’m trying to get across that if you are highly motivating, if you have a high degree of fire and “Fuck yeah!” and “What, that’s impossible, but true!”, you can get students to express interest in theorems named after dead Hungarians.

I also love this idea, which seems important and true (particularly re: mathematics and its models):

Let me tell you a theory about math knowledge. A mathematical concept can be expressed in symbols (algebra), in pictures (geometry and diagrams), verbally, and numerically. This is a common theory; my additional spin is that math knowledge also exists as a performative concept. Like, the way that I direct the attention of the students (“If you ignore this alphabet soup for a minute, you can see it’s really just a product of two things…”) Or, the way I will use physicality. Like, the other week, I climbed onto the chair and then onto the desk while I was trying to explain slope.

ANYway, the theory goes that you don’t understand a mathematical concept until you understand it in TWO modalities. I do very well with visual knowledge, so my notes of understanding are full of color and pictures and mindmaps and arrows linking concepts, and I highlight the holy hell out of math books. However, I don’t believe I KNOW a concept until I can explain it verbally, because I can barely understand anything if someone just talks it at me.

First swipe is through my best modality, second swipe is through my worst modality. The whole “learning style” thing may be overstated, but it remains true that getting students to understand things in a variety of modalities seems like the way to go.

Maybe they don’t get the picture. So you ask them many verbal questions. (Questions, not explanations, 99% of the time.)

Check it out.

If it makes us less likely to eat or dance or drink or screw, and sometimes makes us kill ourselves, then why do people get depressed?

This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease”…

But Andrews and Thomson weren’t interested in ancient aphorisms or poetic apologias. Their daunting challenge was to show how rumination might lead to improved outcomes, especially when it comes to solving life’s most difficult dilemmas. Their first speculations focused on the core features of depression, like the inability of depressed subjects to experience pleasure or their lack of interest in food, sex and social interactions. According to Andrews and Thomson, these awful symptoms came with a productive side effect, because they reduced the possibility of becoming distracted from the pressing problem.

The capacity for intense focus, they note, relies in large part on a brain area called the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is located a few inches behind the forehead. While this area has been associated with a wide variety of mental talents, like conceptual knowledge and verb conjugation, it seems to be especially important for maintaining attention. Experiments show that neurons in the VLPFC must fire continuously to keep us on task so that we don’t become sidetracked by irrelevant information. Furthermore, deficits in the VLPFC have been associated with attention-deficit disorder.

Several studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients. Most recently, a paper to be published next month by neuroscientists in China found a spike in “functional connectivity” between the lateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain in depressed patients, with more severe depressions leading to more prefrontal activity. One explanation for this finding is that the hyperactive VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing people to stay focused on their problem. (Andrews and Thomson argue that this relentless fixation also explains the cognitive deficits of depressed subjects, as they are too busy thinking about their real-life problems to bother with an artificial lab exercise; their VLPFC can’t be bothered to care.) Human attention is a scarce resource — the neural effects of depression make sure the resource is efficiently allocated.

But the reliance on the VLPFC doesn’t just lead us to fixate on our depressing situation; it also leads to an extremely analytical style of thinking. That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness. When people rely on working memory — and it doesn’t matter if they’re doing long division or contemplating a relationship gone wrong — they tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.

The bad news is that this deliberate thought process is slow, tiresome and prone to distraction; the prefrontal cortex soon grows exhausted and gives out. Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma. The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.

One of my favorite moments in Annabel Scheme is the party thrown by a mysterious musician known as “The Beekeeper”:

If you had electronic eyes and night vision—I had both—you would have seen slips of paper passing from person to person. On each slip was a phone number. Each one was different, and there were a dozen circulating in the crowd. Each wandered and blinked like a firefly as kids used their phones, torch-like, to illuminate the number, then passed it on. Here and there, then everywhere, they were dialing numbers, switching their phones to speaker-mode and pushing them up into the air like trophies.

The buzzing was coming from the phones. It was a low, rhythmic drone. At first you couldn’t hear much, but apparently, if you put enough phones on speaker all at once, it starts to get loud.

Really loud.

So that was the trick: There were no speakers because the crowd was the speaker. The bees did not sound so far-off now.

Scheme clenched her teeth. “This is hurting my face.”

Suddenly it stopped. The graveyard fell silent. It was a field of pale arms thrust to the sky, swaying like seaweed. Kids were bouncing silently on the balls of their feet. Waiting.

Then there was a count-off, a tat tat tat tat and then the music started and it was everywhere, megawatts of power flowing out of every palm and pocket. There was no focal point, so bodies were pointed in every direction, ricocheting and chain-reacting. Kids were losing it, jumping up and down, colliding and cuddling in the dark grass.

The music had a clear beat, but it was warped and scratchy, like someone was tuning a giant radio. Snatches of singing would ring out for a moment, then decohere. There was a trumpet that pealed from somewhere very far away…

The music was coming together as kids followed their ears. If your phone was buzzing with bass, you joined the bunched-up sub-woofer section. If it was sending high notes sizzling into the air, you joined the line that snaked around the crowd’s perimeter. The music worked its pattern on the crowd. It was both amazingly high-tech and totally pagan.

The first question I had after reading this was — I wonder if Robin knows about Zaireeka, the Parking Lot Experiments, or the other stuff that The Flaming Lips tried in the late 1990s?

I still don’t know. But I was reminded of that perplexity today reading this interview with Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson that’s all about the amazingly high-tech and totally pagan crap that the Lips tried before exploding with 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. Complete with YouTube videos, several of which were new to me.

If you were taken with either (Scheme or the Lips), try both.

I read Marc Bousquet’s recent post on the academic labor market with chagrin and recognition:

Today, [only] 1/4 of faculty are tenured or in the tenure stream. Less if you address pervasive undercounting of nontenurable faculty, teaching by staff employees and graduate students. The trend line points steeply down.

All of the under- or un- employed scientists with doctorates could be employed overnight if more science, and more science education, was done by persons holding the PhD. Instead, we do science and science education with persons who are studying for the PhD, or who gave up on studying for the PhD simply because they can work cheaper than persons who actually hold the doctorate.

If the percentage of faculty working in the tenure stream were anywhere near what it was at the high point of US scientific and technical dominance, we’d actually have a vast, sucking undersupply of persons with the PhD. Hell, just one large state system could absorb most of the so-called surplus doctorates in a few years–and as I’ve already noted, taking students out of the workforce and working toward full employment for faculty would be an actual stimulus plan.

But what do we do to try to fix the system? Michael Drout maps some of the options (all bad):

This situation cannot be fixed as long as there exists the mismatch of the number of people who want to be professors with the number of paid positions to be a professor.

There is no solution that can solve this problem, just as there is no solution to solve the ‘problem’ of the number of people who want to be famous authors, movie actors, rock stars or professional athletes being far greater than the number of job openings for authors, actors, rock stars and athletes.

Making it easier to get tenure once hired does not solve the problem, it only pushes the decision back from the tenure process (where the candidate is known and has a six-year track record) to the hiring process (where the candidate is less known and has only a grad school record).

The desire to make it easier to get tenure once someone is hired may seem kind to the particular person (whom you know as an individual), but it is unfair to the many, many other people who would like that job, who may be more qualified, but who haven’t had a chance, possibly because they were passed over in the hiring, possibly because they entered the job market a few years later, etc. So by reducing the requirements for tenure–whatever they are–you are doing an injustice to all of these people.

Reducing the number of Ph.D.s awarded, a proposal mooted frequently (usually by people who already have Ph.D.s; people applying to grad school who want to get Ph.D.s. are usually less keen on the idea) does not solve the problem, it only pushes the decision process back from the hiring process to the graduate school entrance process, where the candidate has even less of a track record.

I began graduate school in 2001, during a global recession, and finished in 2009, in the middle of another one. I dangled on the job market twice (pre- and post-diss completion), with no luck. There’s clearly greater pressures than ever for undergraduates to complete their education, and pay more money to do it, but that has never (and it appears will never) translated to an increased demand for more non-casual faculty. I’m thirty years old — a husband and father. I barely survived a terrible accident this year. I can’t wait any more. It’s time to walk away.

I’m quite taken with George H Williams’s ProfHacker write-up of his experience using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to transcribe some audio, all the more so since he followed FOS (Friend of the Snark) Andy Baio’s methodology. I don’t have any audio to transcribe, but if I did, I’d definitely give this a whirl.

This might bear watching:

T. S. Eliot once said that “good writers borrow, great writers steal.” Apparently taking this advice to heart, Helene Hegemann, a seventeen-year-old German writer, has “mixed” (her word) together a best-selling novel titled “Axolotl Roadkill.” According to an article in the Times, Hegemann lifted entire pages from a novel by a lesser known writer, and she doesn’t seem at all apologetic about doing so. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Hegemann in response to accusations of plagiarism. The judges of the Leipzig Book Fair seem to agree with her, at least in principle: even after the author admitted to copying another writer’s work, “Axolotl Roadkill” remains a finalist for the Fair’s $20,000 prize in fiction.

The Leipzig committee’s decision not to strike the book from their finalist’s list, effectively endorsing, or at least approving, Hegemann’s actions, is either an alarming or a progressive response. The cultural-relativist argument is that Germany, specifically Berlin, is a hotbed of artistic mixing and mashing, sampling and re-sampling, and that Hegemann is simply employing these same tactics in her writing. If a d.j. can thread together twenty different songs and package the end product as her own, why can’t a writer? This seems to be the question Hegemann is using as a defense. Original content, then, becomes subordinate to context, meaning that as long as a newer, larger work is being created, portions of prior works are fair game.

First, just to be clear — are we using periods and lower-case for “d.j.” now? What’s wrong with DJ? Goes well with MC, doesn’t it? Or is it “m.c.” or “emcee”?

It probably doesn’t matter, because we don’t need the disc jockey remix paradigm to try to understand what might be called “synthetic literature.” Lee Ellis looks back at T.S. Eliot, but in a skewed way:

Perhaps looking at the meaning behind T. S. Eliot’s quote can help clear up this situation. I interpret “steal” to mean, in this context, the act of taking from other texts themes, ideas, rhythms, structures, but not the sentences themselves.

No. I mean, Ellis can interpret Eliot’s sentence this way, divorced from his practice, but it doesn’t change that Eliot the artist stole. Not just the themes, ideas, rhythms, or structures, but the exact sentences.

In fact, you could say that by stealing the sentences, he emptied them of themes or ideas; a line lifted from Baudelaire (about a “hypocrite lecteur,” no less — “a hypocrite reader, my double, my brother”) and repurposed for “The Waste Land” comes to mean, by way of that refraction, something quite different. Like Borges’s “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” a word-for-word recreation of a text arguably becomes a profound transformation of that text.

On the other hand, you can’t just translate someone’s ideas, themes, or structures into superficially new sentences and act like everything is cool. If I rip off your movie idea — plot, themes, characters — but switch some of the words around, I’ve done something much more dangerous than quote a line from your screenplay (especially if it’s relatively well-known).

You could contest Old Possum’s claim that this theft was a sign of “maturity,” but you can’t just act like he isn’t doing it. Nor was his theft all that novel — the pastiche has been a literary game for a long time, and it was particularly popular in the early 20th century, from Pound to Proust.

But calling something unoriginal isn’t identical with calling it plagiarism. Without being entirely arbitrary, let me posit a few things:

1. Plagiarism really only makes sense in a scholarly or journalistic context. It’s a mistake in the handling of sources, and can be malicious or nonmalicious, and can completely damage a work or be relatively incidental to it;
2. In art or fiction, assuming that there is a distinction, you need a completely different set of criteria. Hegemann’s shift to “authenticity” is probably not so far off;
3. Ultimately, judging acts of egregious theft in fiction is going to have to be like judging pornography — you know it when you see it.

So what do we have left? If we’re starting off with the assumption that artistic creation is and should always be ex nihilo — sadly, not much. Maybe instead we need to distinguish between works that are synthetic and analytic — works that combine something to produce something new, versus works that only contain what they borrow (and in some cases, contain LESS than what’s borrowed).

Dear Snarkmatrix,

Apologies for my recent silence. I have spent so much time at the hospital in the past few months that I should have a card to punch that gets me free sandwiches or something. But I wanted to stop and thank you for your notes and inquiries, let you know that I am working my way to being all the way back, at least on the internet… and am FASCINATED by the recent flurry of posts here about the early twentieth century, why so much of that time feels like now, not just an unchanging now, but an unchangeable now, yet still feels old and distant and foundational (or counter-foundational). Anyways, as always, you’re giving me things to think about.

(If you’re patient with me, I might even be able to write something about it)

I’m torn. On the one hand, you’ve got the Neal Gaiman quote Robin pulled:

[T]he bar­ri­ers [between so-called ‘lit­er­ary fic­tion’ and ‘genre fic­tion’] are imag­i­nary, the walls have already been breached and the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of con­flu­ence. There’s not much high and low cul­ture any more: there’s just min­gling streams of art and what mat­ters is whether it’s good art or bad art.

And then you’ve got this NYT magazine profile of James Patterson, who isn’t an author in the traditional sense so much as an empire:

Patterson may lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but he outsells them all. Really, it’s not even close. (According to Nielsen BookScan, Grisham’s, King’s and Brown’s combined U.S. sales in recent years still don’t match Patterson’s.) This is partly because Patterson is so prolific: with the help of his stable of co-authors, he published nine original hardcover books in 2009 and will publish at least nine more in 2010.

There are many different ways to catalog Patterson’s staggering success. Here are just a few: Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson. He is listed in the latest edition of “Guinness World Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1.

Patterson and his publisher, Little, Brown & Co., a division of the Hachette Book Group, have an unconventional relationship. In addition to his two editors, Patterson has three full-time Hachette employees (plus assistants) devoted exclusively to him: a so-called brand manager who shepherds Patterson’s adult books through the production process, a marketing director for his young-adult titles and a sales manager for all his books. Despite this support staff and his prodigious output, Patterson is intimately involved in the publication of his books. A former ad executive — Patterson ran J. Walter Thompson’s North American branch before becoming a full-time writer in 1996 — he handles all of his own advertising and closely monitors just about every other step of the publication process, from the design of his jackets to the timing of his books’ release to their placement in stores. “Jim is at the very least co-publisher of his own books,” Michael Pietsch, Patterson’s editor and the publisher of Little, Brown, told me.

Like Robin pointed out a year ago, all that literary stuff, even all of that cultural stuff — the Harry Potters and Da Vinci Codes that crack the popular consciousness — sits on top of the real book business, where the Pattersons and Nora Robertses move product like Wal-Mart.

At nine books a year, collaborating with and supervising “five regular co-authors, each one specializing in a different Patterson series or genre,” it almost doesn’t even make sense to talk about it in terms of stock and flow anymore, at least in the way Robin mapped it for writers working at a different scale — although Patterson deftly managed his own marketing that way at the beginning. But now, the production and publication of the book becomes its own marketing. It’s just… grinding.

I also love the idea that even blockbuster fiction of the last thirty years has its own history (again, a history that tunnels beneath but supports the rest of the entire book industry):

When Patterson published his breakout book, “Along Came a Spider,” in 1993, Little, Brown was still a largely literary house, whose more commercial authors included the historian William Manchester, biographer of Winston Churchill. Patterson’s success in the subsequent years encouraged Little, Brown to fully embrace mass-market fiction. But more than that, Patterson almost single-handedly created a template for the modern blockbuster author.

There were, of course, blockbuster authors before Patterson, among them Mario Puzo, James Michener and Danielle Steel. But never had authors been marketed essentially as consumer goods, paving the way for a small group of writers, from Charlaine Harris to Malcolm Gladwell, to dominate best-seller lists — often with several titles at a time — in the same way that brands like Skippy and Grey Poupon dominate supermarket shelves. “Until the last 15 years or so, the thought that you could mass-merchandise authors had always been resisted,” says Larry Kirshbaum, former C.E.O. of the Time Warner Book Group, which owned Little, Brown until 2006. “Jim was at the forefront of changing that.”