Reading List 2010 (20/92)
Oh, Shannara!
I discovered Shannara young; it reminds me of endless Saturday afternoons sprawled across my bed, reading in a shaft of dusty sunlight until the dusk came down and my mother called me for dinner. Still, I’m a bit embarrassed that I just read all twenty (twenty! when did that happen?) books in the series. Brooks does a great job of dramatic action sequences, and I like the way he connects his fantasy world to the one we know, but ultimately, these are candy.
If you’re actually curious about the list, you can see it below the cut.
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Tags: books
Finding My Line
Over the last two months I’ve been working intensely on my dissertation. If you’re wondering whether this relates to my adviser’s imminent return from sabbatical, you’d be right! But I’ve been really surprised by how much this intense focus helps both my productivity and my mood. I wake up every morning raring to dissertate (yes, I did just say “raring to dissertate”), and I still have several hours to devote to other projects after I hit my daily targets.
Today, I came across Merlin Mann’s article on Making Time to Make and realized what I’ve been doing. I’ve been drawing a clear and firm line around my time. While I hardly have the problems of a Neal Stephenson, I do have lots of people who want my time: academic colleagues, former students, potential consulting clients, friends I haven’t seen recently, and more. All these relationships enrich my life, but there’s more of them than I can manage! Worse, making daily decisions about how much attention I could spare was killing my productivity even when I wasn’t actually available.
I’ve made a few exceptions, but my so-far-successful ruleset looks like this:
- No meetings that end after 10am, unless data collection requires it.
- No leaving the office for any reason until I’ve hit my dissertation goal for the day.
- No new freelance projects or academic commitments.*
- No organizing social events of any kind; let other people be in charge!
- No long emails. (And a private IM account that only my boy’s got access to.)
- No apologizing for putting my dissertation first.
What’s especially interesting to me is just how much of this was made possible by the dissertation-completion fellowship program I’m in. The office they gave me is hidden away**, meaning I don’t get interrupted unexpectedly. The workspace is ergonomic enough that I can work until I’ve hit my daily goal without killing my wrists. The meeting room is heavily booked during the late morning and afternoon, so I’m not tempted to schedule midday meetings. It’s amazing how these structural changes help me enforce my own rules!
That’s not to say that line-drawing has no drawbacks. There are people I really like who aren’t getting the attention I want to give them, and I’m feeling pretty darn broke without any new projects in the pipeline. Just yesterday I had to tell a former student I couldn’t meet with him, which I hate to do! And there are less obvious drawbacks, too: I’m not really good at letting other people organize my free time, so instead of hanging out with friends I’m doing more one-on-one activities with the boy.***
I think that some of the specifics of my strategy will have to change during the upcoming year. For example, I’d like to have one “open afternoon” a week, where I go work somewhere I’m casually available for conversation and brainstorming. I also don’t think I can go a whole year without organizing any social events! But having rules, even if they’re less strict, seems to work really well for me. The less time I spend making decisions about how to spend my time, the more time I actually have to spend.****
* Okay, I’m really bad at this one. Why must so many things be so interesting?
** In a basement, as usual. Do you think I can write “Must have workspace with window” into a job contract?
*** Though this isn’t all bad, since it’s resulted in dance lessons!
**** Which is why I may have to do a piece about rules as cognitive technology. But not now! My rules say I can’t!
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Tags: dissertation, productivity
Reading List 2010 (7/72)
Oh look! A Dark Tower binge!
- The Gunslinger, Stephen King
- The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King
- The Waste Lands, Stephen King
- Wizard and Glass, Stephen King
- Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King
- Song of Susannah, Stephen King
- The Dark Tower, Stephen King
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Tags: books, project
Reading List 2010 (7/65)
A new batch:
- From Student to Scholar, Steven M. Cahn
- Stinger, Robert McCammon
- Panic, ed. Michael Lewis
- The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
- Drood, Dan Simmons
- The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, DC Pierson
- House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds
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Tags: books
Red Flowers, Pink Flowers
Camara Jones’ article on institutionalized racism is wonderfully written. What really impresses me is the way she makes current scholarship on race accessible to the casual reader – or at least to the casual reader who makes it past the slightly academic opening.
Most people’s personal understanding of racism stops right around “intentional” and “personally mediated.” In other words, most people think that racism is located in individual behavior and requires conscious intent. Jones’ story does a nice job of showing how discrimination goes far beyond that – which is also what I’m trying to do. I’m hoping that by letting people experience the way individual choices create biased systems, people will have to think twice before limiting their ideas about racism to the personal and intentional.
Unfortunately, plenty of people will just dismiss an analogy, so I’m hoping that experiential learning will affect some of the ones who do!
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Tags: racism
Thinking about Criticism
I just read “In Praise of Tough Criticism” over on the Chronicle. I almost didn’t make it more than two paragraphs in, because of course the author chose to characterize the non-confrontational, compassionate, intellectually mushy, teaching-oriented academic as a woman. But people in the comments pointed that out – see #9 and #10 particularly – so I’m not going to rant about it, I swear.
Once I finished being annoyed, though, the article made me reflect about my own persona as a critic. I recognized myself in both Smith and Jones, which you wouldn’t think would be so easy or possible from the way Di Leo writes. Either one puts social affirmation ahead of critical truth, or the other way around. What I find myself doing, though, is taking on different critical personae in different situations, depending on my goals, who else is involved, and the consequences of my actions for all participants.
Consider this. As a teacher, I make a point of never shutting a student down in class discussion, no matter how off-base their ideas. Like the fictional Jones, I find that there’s something worthwhile in everything a student has to say, even if it’s only an insight into what they’re thinking or an intellectual provocation for the rest of the class. On the other hand, my students get extensive written critical feedback about their class projects, including specific and concrete pointers to problematic elements in their work, in a positively Smithian fashion. The difference, to me, is critiquing ideas versus critiquing products. I want my students to develop their own ideas within an intellectually serious framework. However, if they’re going to do work that builds on those ideas, I expect it to be rigorous and persuasive. They can disagree with me on their core ideas, but that doesn’t change my standards for how well they need to follow through.
At the same time, when it comes to both scholarly activity and teaching, I often find myself taking a third path. Rather than emphasize idea formation (Jones) or summative evaluation (Smith), I ask questions like “How can you make this better?” Instead of being a critic outside the author’s intellectual process, I put myself into that process with them. My job as a critic becomes asking them the hard questions, and building together on the answers they give. Unlike Jones, pointing out the hard problems is the point of the activity; unlike Smith, doing it collaboratively creates an affiliative community of its own, where good relationships and good work are mutually supportive, not in tension with each other.
I’m most able to achieve this kind of critical engagement when I’m both an expert and a peer. I’m really excited, for example, to meet with a former student of mine tomorrow and talk about her dissertation. I expect to give her a hard time, joyfully, and to have my own ideas challenged joyfully in return.
I also don’t think it’s unrelated to the field I’m in. You could call this critical model intellectual play-testing. (Emphasis on both play and testing!)
So, what about you? When are you a Smith or a Jones? And are you ever a Hammer?
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Tags: academia
Reading List 2010 (8/58)
A new batch!
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Caroll
- Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Caroll
- Chalice, Robin McKinley
- Like You’d Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard
- The Hollywood Economist, Edward Jay Epstein
- Nasty, Brutish and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare, Ira Rosofsky
- Hospital, Julie Salomon
- A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis
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Tags: books
Go Go Mimi Ito!
Mimi Ito is all of five minutes into her talk, and already ripping to shreds the “polarized public debate” about technology. She points out that the promise of new technologies, and the fear of them, are attitudes to which people choose to affiliate. The problem is that each attitude comes at the expense of the other, when both are actually true.
What new technologies do is challenge our existing values – for example, around what learning should feel like and how it should be done. She’s setting up tensions between individual and collaborative learning; originality and thoughtful appropriation; stocks and flows of knowledge; and assessment and reputation. There are tradeoffs to any point on each of those spectra. We just have to learn to be thoughtful instead of knee-jerk about how we make those decisions.
Also, there is something really delightful about sitting in a room full of Very Serious Academics watching the Numa Numa video.
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Tags: nmc2010
The Time Traveler’s Knife
Hey! A game I worked on won “Best Narrative” at Come Out And Play this year!
I had to bow out of being an on-site GM because of my foot surgery, but Andy and I had a blast coming up with the world for the game. I’m a sucker for anything involving time travel, as anyone who knows me will learn pretty quickly. My other obsession is inventing alternate histories, so designing this game pretty much hit the spot. I’m glad people enjoyed playing it as much as I enjoyed making it!
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Tags: awards, yay
Reading List 2010 (7/50)
This week’s reading:
- Nineteen Seventy-Four, David Peace
- Nineteen Seventy-Seven, David Peace
- Nineteen Eighty, David Peace
- Nineteen Eighty-Three, David Peace
- The Manual of Detection, Jedidah Berry
- Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories, Agatha Christie
- BoneMan’s Daughters, Ted Dekker
Ack! I have a pile of read books as high as my waist, so I’d better get a move on with this.
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Tags: books
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