It wasn't really until years after I rejected the discipline known as "film theory" in graduate school that I recognized the parallel to the other great rejection of my life -- that of god.
Fair warning: What follows is a long and rambling post that takes roughly forever to make a point.
A friend of mine forwarded along the following snippet of bad academic prose from a communications department announcement:
Technologies & Organizing Contexts | Configurations | Contradictions | Contingencies
Technology mediated organizing processes have particular contexts with specific configurations, and always entail contradictions and contingencies. Yet these nuanced aspects of information and communication technology (ICT) use are often overlooked in scholarship on technologies and organizing.
Sadly, this is far from the worst academic writing I've seen. In fact, it's comparatively straightforward, which is still not saying much.
Bad writing is a time-honored and proud tradition among academics, and has even been rewarded satirically via an annual prize given out by Denis Dutton, the editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature. The 1996 winner was Judith Butler, an atrocious writer whose 1990 book Gender Trouble was required reading in just about every class I took throughout the following decade. Her winning sentence:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
In researching this blog post, I also found an amusing review of a book titled Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. It seems that back in 2003, a number of hardcore academic theorists wrote essays justifying "bad writing" in an academic context. True to form, the contributors questioned and "deconstructed" what it means for "writing" to be "bad." The reviewer writes:
None of the contributors denies the label "bad writing" or aims to show that theoretical prose is good writing. That's the conservative or common sense application, and the theorists know better than to accept its conditions. Rather, as Culler and Kevin Lamb's introduction puts it, the entries "are less about proving innocence than contesting the terms of the allegations, exposing to interrogation the history, conventions, and assumptions underlying the designation 'bad writing' and its almost inarguable efficacy."
The reviewer continues:
The cheap partisan spirit [of the book] reinforces the point made by [Denis] Dutton, David G. Myers, Katha Pollitt, and others that the jargon and bloat of theory prose excludes every readership but other theorists—a damning claim given that the theorists purport to labor for social justice.
And, really, that's what just galls me -- that supposedly progressive or leftist scholars deliberately develop and employ opaque jargon and tortured linguistic constructions to supposedly "challenge" "common sense" and "question" "transparency" and just end up excluding anyone who can't afford to go $50,000 in debt to get a Ph.D. from being able to read their stunning insights, pronouncements, and criticisms of the patriarchy/capitalistic/monolithic establishment.
See also: "Lucidity is Fascist" elsewhere on this blog.
I've been getting more and more into Facebook lately. A growing number of my friends and colleagues are on it, and I've gotten to know some people better, I think, as a result of observing their online activities and periodic status updates. I also realize that my ass wasn't getting kicked at Scrabble quite enough, so now, thanks to the Scrabulous Facebook app, I can lose multiple games simultaneously!
The one thing that bothers me about it, though, is that the status update form forces you into a particular syntax by hard-coding (a) your name and (b) the simple present form of the verb "to be" (i.e. "is") at the beginning.
There are two problems with this.
First, it means that you necessarily have to refer to yourself in the third-person. If I want to update my status to indicate I am finishing up my work, I have to write "[Jim is] finishing up his work." I remember reading once that serial killers tend to refer to themselves and their victims in the third person ("It rubs the lotion on its skin..."). This practices causes a disassociating effect between the subject and the object or the listener. It is not I that am doing something, it is "Jim."
Second, the verb "to be" has two primary uses that are both faulty, according to linguist Alfred Korzybski: the "is of identity" (e.g. "Jim is a petty complainer") and the "is of predication" (e.g. "Jim is pedantic"). Korzybski advocated for the elimination of the verb "to be" from English to avoid using abstractions of language to attribute identity to individuals. Thus, one could say "Jim complains," or "Jim acts pedantically." The E-Prime method of speaking and writing is attributed to Korzybski's work.
So, with this analysis, one can conclude that Facebook developers are attempting to create an elite legion of strongly identified mass murderers. To what sinister end, we can only speculate....
Now Jim must go tackle the problem of having "OITEEUU" in his Scabulous rack.
Lately, I've been observing more and more people using the punctuating phrase "I mean" with increasing frequency. It was particularly notable during a workshop I just attended; the "I mean" speakers hailed from all parts of the country and included both native and non-native English speakers.
I don't recall having heard "I mean" a lot until fairly recently. I always thought "you know" was the punctuating phrase of choice for English speakers. But the more I pay attention, the more "I means" and the fewer "you knows" I hear.
I am not a linguist, and I have no idea if there's any real connection between these unconscious expressions and their actual semantics. It is interesting to me, however, that both expressions are concerned with the conveyance of meaning, but they have different perspectives. "I mean" is focused on the speaker; "you know" is focused on the listener.
Both phrases, it seems, are involved with the process of making meaning more clear. By employing "I mean," the speaker asserts that there has been a disconnect and strives to make herself better understood by rephrasing her statement. By using the more interrogative "you know," she queries the listener to judge the success of her message and responds or rephrases accordingly.
Perhaps users of "I mean" are more certain of their abilities to detect a possible misinterpretation (or think they are) and take the initiative to correct it, whereas users of "you know" are less certain and need to seek additional feedback to judge if their message has been correctly understood.
How about you, dear readers: are you, you know, a "you know" user, or are you more of an "I meaner"?
After I finished college, I stood at a veritable crossroads. The path I took led to graduate school in film studies at the University of Iowa; the other -- the path not traveled -- to the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon.
Last night, from a stool at the bar of the Earth & Ocean restaurant, I watched the kitchen crew moving about in a seemingly well-orchestrated dance of pans, cutlery, and platters, deftly piling scallops atop mounds of kohlrabi and artfully drizzling caramel sauce over butternut squash tarts. I recalled my brief interest in the life of the taste-bud, and experienced a strange yearning to revisit the idea.
Leadership textbooks talk about the need to apply three different "lenses" when analyzing or interacting with aspects of an organization. Typically, the lenses are described as "strategic," "cultural," and "political."
I keep getting encouraged to "pull out the political lens." My glass-is-half-full interpretation of that is that I seem to do well with the strategic and cultural ones. The inverse interpretation (and probably correct one) is that the political lens is valued more than the others.
I also hear quite a bit of praise lavished on those who are "masters" of the political. I can't help but believe, though, that those masters, when they achieve leadership positions, tend to create political situations where none exist, just to perpetuate an environment that supports their own competency. This tends to create both a "political culture" (one obsessed with power and influence) and a "political strategy" (doing work toward a political end). The result is that one "lens" is focusing on the other two and not on the values or objectives of the organization.
How does an organization re-calibrate the three lenses? How can one peel the cultural and, especially, the strategic away from the political? How can one train the lenses onto the problems and proposed solutions instead of from themselves?
These are the questions I have on a sunny autumn afternoon. Please help me....
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
"But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks.
"The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form."
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."
Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
But is it enough? Do we too often value the brick over the arch?
In thinking through this issue, I was reminded of an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker a few years back called "The Talent Myth."
The piece focuses on the then-recent crash of Enron, the leaders of which were major proponents of the so-called "talent mind-set." This philosophy espouses a "deep-seated belief that having better talent at all levels is how you outperform your competitors." Using Enron as a cautionary tale, Gladwell suggests that the company's downfall was in over-emphasizing the value of the "star" to the detriment of organization and systems.
The broader failing of ... Enron is their assumption that an organization's intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don't believe in systems. ... But companies work by different rules. They don't just create; they execute and compete and coördinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star.
Where I work, there is an oft-discussed phenomenon known as "heroic effort." Such herosim is needed on a daily basis just to make the proverbial trains run on time. The heroes, therefore, become essential. They become stars.
I am encouraged, however, that this culture of heroism is finally being recognized as indicative of an immature organization and that greater emphasis is being placed on fixing the system. It's not that people are unimportant; it's that with the right system in place, everyone can do their job down here on earth -- it's not just the stars up in the cosmos that hold it all together.
My biggest fear is that we try to fix the system simply by moving star "bricks" higher and higher and continue to pay too little attention to the line of the arch.
There has probably been more written about the martini than about any other cocktail. Most of the ink spilled comprises endless debates about the nature of the "true" martini recipe and whether variations can still claim the same name.
The general consensus is that a "basic" martini is made from either gin or vodka with smaller amount of vermouth and then capped with some kind of garnish (usually a green olive, but also a lemon twist, onion, or other such tidbit).
What no one can seem to agree on, however, is whether gin or vodka is the proper martini liquor, what the correct ratio of booze to vermouth should be, and whether a change in the garnish changes the nature of the entire drink. Other issues include the type of vermouth to be used, the style of glass required, and whether or not additional ingredients (bitters, liqueurs, etc.) are permitted.
I enjoy a good martini (sometimes too much; ask Amy about my birthday experience from a few years ago). I like it made with gin, very little vermouth, and served in a real martini glass with an olive or two. Most martini "purists" will insist that is the original and only correct recipe for a drink called a "martini," but as prescriptive as I am in most other linguistic matters, I can't say that I care too much. It's just like what I like.
After nearly getting plowed by a car driven by a cell-phone-yapping asshole the other day, I began thinking about my life as pedestrian and the whole "us vs. them" culture that has grown up between walkers and drivers over the last decade or so.
When I was growing up in the Detroit area, no one ever talked about pedestrian rights. There were few pedestrians in the Motor City, and for the most part, the only people out walking around were, in fact, stumbling around and too engaged in heated arguments with mailboxes or with urinating on piles of garbage to care whether or not drivers properly yielded to them or not. You might think I'm exaggerating, but take a stroll down Woodward Avenue in the middle of the day and tell me you don't feel like Charelton Heston in The Omega Man.
Upon moving to Iowa City, I experienced the biggest cultural shock in my then-young life when I was suddenly sans auto. After saying my goodbyes and watching my mother and father zoom off toward I-80 East, I suffered a mild panic attack when I realized I had no idea how I was going to obtain food. (Luckily, there was Secret Pizza.)
I wasn't the only one limited to manual means of transport; there are, in fact, only about a dozen or so registered vehicles in Iowa that aren't, you know, tractors. But seriously, Iowa City was described in the promotional literature as a town one could easily navigate on foot or bike, and for the most part, the literature was right. For the four unmarried years I lived there, I had no car and I functioned just fine. Even during the year I spent there with The One Who Shall Not Be Named, I was restricted from driving said person's car (more on that later, maybe).
Even still, though I frequently spent my day in the role of a pedestrian, I never gave any thought to my identity as a pedestrian. I thought of myself simply as a "student" and, later, as a "University employee," and, finally, as an "unhappy spouse." My pedestrian status just never rose to any existential level. Even after reading Walter Benjamin and his account of le flâneur -- an identity, one would think, would be a perfect fit to my intellectual pretensions -- I never stopped to reflect upon the notion of "pedestrian" as a social class.
It wasn't until I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, that my consciousness became raised on the topic. Shortly after Amy and I bought our first house near Monroe Street, we got involved in the Neighborhood Association and their zan madcap plan to address pedestrian crossing issues on that main thoroughfare.
The other day, a friend of mine mentioned that her last name was actually a holdover from a previous marriage. She said she had no great fondness for her maiden name either and that members of her office had suggested she hold a contest to come up with a totally new surname. I thought that was a great idea, as I had considered changing my last name at times as well.
Amy and I have often discussed the fact that neither of us truly feels "grown up" -- whatever that means. Yesterday, when I took Ray to the playground to meet other kids from his school (and their parents), for example, I felt much more at ease with the other 3- and 4-year-olds than I did their mamas and dadas. The other parents seemed like parents to me in ways that I don't seem like one myself. I pitched whiffle balls to Ray and another little boy while the other grown-ups watched from the sidelines, and I preferred that.
I'm not sure what it is I feel I should seem like. I don't feel unqualified in anything I do. I don't feel undeserving. I certainly don't lack for responsibility. I have a wonderful child and a beautiful partner, have owned two homes, earn a good salary, supervise eight staff, manage a multi-million dollar budget, have lived in four cities, have traveled to six foreign countries, have been married and divorced, and have graying hair on my temples. What could be more grown-up than that?
I tell myself that it's good to feel this way ... that I have not lost touch with my inner kid. Yet every time I write the mortgage check or think about Ray's impending school days, there's a part of it that seems like it's happening to someone else -- or that I'm doing all of it for someone else ... just filling in until the big person gets back.
Objectively, I look at all I've done and all I have going for me and I realize how silly I am being. I know that I'm trying to measure up to some standard or template that either doesn't really exist or is undesirable. Yet, the script for the role of Adult Man outlines the character traits pretty clearly and I frequently feel as if I'm not right for the part -- that the critics will be merciless.
Tom Waits' song "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" provided the title of this post; here's the video from YouTube.
I'm reading The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank, the author of A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. I have a sneaking suspicion that the book is considered "Chick Lit," so I'm hiding it behind a copy of Maxim magazine when I'm on the bus.
In today's passage, a junior high school character is thumbing through a worn copy of her elementary school yearbook. The girl is described by the narrator as the leader of a gang of bully girls. Now, however, the other girls in her gang have turned their attentions to boys and being pretty, and their former leader is feeling left behind. The now-pathetic girl clings to the yearbook, and her out-of-style friendship bracelets, as a reminder of her former glory.
I rarely hold onto things purely out of nostalgia, though I do to wax about the past (especially on this blog). I've moved far too many times in my life, and usually into smaller places, and have learned to not shed too many tears on my way back from the Goodwill donation box.
But there are some things that I've carried around from place to place, and I wonder what they say about me.
If you look at the timestamp on my blog posts, you'll note that I use a 24-hour time format. This is consistent with the way that my blog software, Movable Type, requires that I enter the time on "scheduled" posts. I have sometimes been tripped up by that and entered a time of "04:30:00" intending the post to go out sometime in the afternoon, only to later realize that it went out immediately and appeared as if I had posted it earlier in the day at 4 am.
The other day, my confusion over am/pm resulted in a moment of panic followed by brief public embarrassment.
The recent discussion about the 9/11 conspiracy theories got me thinking about my experience in college with Oliver Stone's JFK. This is especially timely as Mr. Stone is all set to drop another cinematic hodge-podge onto the silver screen with his World Trade Center.
I spent a semester doing an independent research project on JFK, which was still in the theaters at the time (which meant I had to shell out $5 every time I needed to go back to see it). My paper didn't take on the veracity of the numerous (often contradictory) conspiracy theories suggested by the movie, but my roommate Karl and I, as a side hobby, read everything we could get our hands on regarding the Kennedy assassination (our conclusion: Oswald did it and acted alone).
It was really my first exposure to the intoxicating sport of conspiracism.
My former boss killed herself yesterday by jumping out of a forty-story building in San Francisco. Those of you who know my True Identity know whom I'm talking about (and others who read the news can probably figure it out).
Despite my professional relationship with her, I didn't know her that well. She left me pretty much alone to run my department, and I rarely needed to bother her with much. She was a strong, confident, intimidating figure and the manner of her death has shocked a lot of people.
The incident that my mind raced back to as soon as I heard the news occurred shortly before she left my university to start a new job in California. She was always very outspoken, and there already had been a lot of controversy and media coverage about some things she had said. She called me in to help her handle her email transition from our school to the other. It was a routine technical matter that my department handles all the time, but when I tried to delegate the task she insisted that I meet with her personally. We spent about an hour determining which messages needed to be saved and which could be trashed.
During that time, she was more animated and excited than usual. She shared with me several messages she had received from reporters and the general public -- some supportive, some critical. She fixated on the critical ones and asked me repeatedly if I thought the writer seemed crazy. "I mean, that's just nuts, right?" she asked of several after reading them aloud. "I can just trash this one, right?" she asked me before every press of the "Delete" key. It was odd to me that she was so interested in my opinion, in revealing this much anxiety -- it just didn't fit the character of the independent and secure woman that I knew. She was also insistent that her deleted mail really would be deleted. I assured her that it would be, and when I returned to my department I asked my sysadmin to securely shred her mailbox. Overall, it seemed she was having fun with it all -- the attention, the scandal, the new opportunities.
As I now know, she wasn't having fun -- not then, probably, and certainly not lately.
It still doesn't add up -- the image of her walking tall and proud through the corridors of our school with the image of her taking those last strides to the edge of a balcony and into oblivion. Only in that single hour I spent in her office staring with her at a computer screen did I glimpse her underlying vulnerability and insecurity. For all her accomplishments, all her victories, she still needed someone to reassure her that she wasn't the crazy one, someone to make all her problems (or reminders of them) go away.
