first efforts

Producing

I was waiting to pay for my second cup of tea at Aroma today when the super-friendly server guy asked, "Productive morning?" This is a guy who obviously knows his audience: professors like me escaping their busy campus offices for the oddly private public space of the cafe. Likely he'd seen me tapping away furiously at the laptop, not surfing the web or checking email but actually writing. Thanks in large part to a looming deadline and some great feedback from Debbie on my work-in-progress, I was really humming along. "Yeah," I offered happily, "It has been a productive morning." I liked that he not only knew what to ask but also the right way to ask it, so I tipped him heavily.

"Are you productive?" is a common question around these parts. Mostly, it's the academic's shorthand for, are you doing the work that you love, the work that pulled you into academia in the first place? Or are you stuck doing the drudgery that often accompanies this mostly cushy job? Sometimes my running partner Joan and I wish each other a "productive day" rather than a "good day," because we know they really mean the same thing. Sometimes productivity can be framed more negatively, though. The question about productivity can be a litmus test veteran scholars use with their junior counterparts: "Was your semester off productive (i.e., worth all the trouble we took to give it to you)?" At other times, it's a way for anxious colleagues to size up the competition: "So have you been productive (i.e., more productive than me)?"

For me, "producing" has a more positive valence. Producing is very different from "getting things done." When I am producing, I am creating, writing, thinking, reading, researching, in a wonderfully endless cycle. When I am getting things done, I am clearing the mess from my desk and checking items off of my to-do list. Both things have their rewards and can be quite satisfying (anyone who knows me knows I like a clean desk), but I'm really only a happy professor geek when I am producing.

Vampires and Comedians

I heard on my local NPR station this morning that a guy named Jonathon Sharkey is running for governor in Minnesota. Not really news, except that Sharkey is a vampire and his nickname is not Tricky Dick or Saturday Night Bill but "The Impaler."

"The Daily Show" needs to jump all over this.

I think having a vampire candidate is great (not much different from Dark Lord Cheney, really). And certainly no stranger than Al Franken's plans to run for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota. I really hope he does, by the way, so that he can do a series of SNL-inspired campaign fundraising ads where he pleads, "Send your money to ME, Al Franken..."

Trash Wars

Ever since I became a homeowner, I obsess about the trash people dump in my yard. Maybe it's because I live on one of the main drags through town, but people seem to use my spacious front yard as their personal waste disposal site. This obsession with trash is one of the (many) ways that I know I am turning into my mother. When I was a kid, she used to patrol our yard vigilantly, screening the boulevard in front of our house for any bit of foreign matter. Now I do the same thing.

Most of what I find is the usual stuff: fast food containers, plastic straws, bottles and beer cans, and those flimsy plastic garbage bags that the prairie winds like to whip around. This morning, though, I hit the Mother Lode: a little bit of the usual (a soggy Kleenex and a hunk of styrofoam) plus a couple of more unusual items: a plastic breast cancer awareness water bottle, and yes, that long skinny black thing with buttons is a TV remote control (batteries and battery cover missing).

Now, I've found weirder things in my yard (don't ask), but this last one puzzles me. What prompts someone to drive by my house and fling that out of the car window? If every piece of trash tells a story, then what story is this little device from Sony telling? 

Retro, in a good way

Last night my friend Jordana and I met for dinner at the Jolly Roger in Urbana. The Jolly Roger is, well, a unique place. First of all, it features a pirate theme. The walls are covered with giant swordfish, ships, and pirate heads. The door to the women's bathroom says "Wenches." The woodwork is dark, the vinyl on the booths is blood red, and the safest thing on the menu for a vegetarian is pizza. It's the kind of place where the house salad is iceberg lettuce with thousand island dressing and the waitresses (not servers) call you "hon."

Most cities or towns have restaurants or bars like this, locally beloved places that have been around forever, maybe even run by the same family. Such businesses are weirdly and wonderfully frozen in time. In the "real" Twin Cities, one example would definitely be Nye's Polonaise Room in Minneapolis, where the claim to fame is polka, not pirates.

Places like the Jolly Roger are important because they remind people here that we do not live in Chicago, and that this is okay. Since I moved here in 1999, the other twin cities (especially downtown Champaign) has exploded with new bars and restaurants. This is really great, because it makes for a variety of fun places to hang out. But at the same time, lately it feels like the developers are going too far. Some of these new places insist on a kind of constructed "Chicago-ness" that I find irritating. The decor screams urban, the lighting is coy, the drinks are overpriced. After eating at one of these new places last fall, I said to my companions, "Why do I feel right now like I need to drive two and a half hours to get home ?" In other words, sometimes the coolness is just too forced.

Ahoy, maties! We aren't Chicago. And that's okay.

Dazzling Dewey

In my grad seminar this semester we are reading John Dewey's 1927 classic of cultural criticism and social philosophy, The Public and Its Problems. This is the third time that I have taught the book and at least the sixth or seventh time I've read it. Dewey was a great thinker, but let's face it, he wasn't a great writer. Max Eastman once famously noted of Dewey, "If he ever wrote one quotable sentence it has got permanently lost in the pile."

This week, for the first time ever, I actually noticed the hilarious blurb on the back of my well-worn copy of Dewey's book. Inexplicably, it comes from the Whole Earth Catalog:

"The potentiality for his ideas during this distressed period of history are ever more dazzling. And in this book, the dazzlement is fully let loose in a series of far-out proposals for experimenting with altered life styles."

What were those Whole Earth folks smoking? Let's look at a typical Dewey sentence: "But the difference between facts which are what they are independent of human desire and endeavor and facts which are to some extent what they are because of human interest and purpose, and which alter with alteration in the latter, cannot be got rid of by any methodology" (p. 7).

Dazzled?

25 Things

Today I came across screenwriter Nora Ephron's list of "25 Things People Have a Capacity to be Shocked by Over and Over Again." My favorites are:

#4: Beautiful young women sometimes marry ugly, old rich men.

#7: Nothing written in today's sports pages makes sense to anyone who didn't read yesterday's sports pages.

and I especially like #9: The Democrats are deeply disappointing.

View the full list here.

Dude, what's Grandpa's screen name?

Word on the finnfam grapevine is that Grandpa Jack is now on IM. If you don't know what that means, well, that means that my dad is hipper than you are. But you probably knew that already. I first got word of this development the other night as my nephew and I drove to Papa Del's to grab a pizza for dinner. Ben seemed to think it was pretty cool, but I'll admit that my first response to this information was horror. "Good Lord," I proclaimed, "I'm not even on IM!" -- as if I am somehow the measure of the technological cutting edge. Hardly. I'm only just getting around to this blog thing, for example, and everybody knows that blogs are so 2002.

Being the good journalism major that I am (or was), I e-mailed to confirm. Yes, Dad said, it's true, and he generously offered, "Want to be on my Buddy List?" Oh my. Now, let me be clear about this: it's not the technology thing that freaks me out. After all, back in the day Dad was boss man when the St. Paul newspaper computerized the newsroom. And at home, my parents were always early adopters. We had what surely was the first personal computer on the block, an Apple IIe (complete with two, count 'em, two floppy drives). We embraced early VCRs, too, buying one of those 86-pound metal monstrosities back in 1980. Today, Mom and Dad are both whizzes at e-mail, digital cameras, even online bill paying.

It's not the technology, but what the technology represents. In my universe, IM is a kid thing. It's what my students do when they should be reading for my class or writing papers. It's how teenagers communicate; it's how they court. It's what my nieces and nephews do to stay in touch, even though some of them live only blocks from one another. Imagining my dad IM-ing is like imagining my dad in baggy pants and a black stocking cap, zooming up and down a ramp at the skate park. Cool in one sense but, well, alarming.

Many commentators claim that e-mail, text messaging and instant messaging are ruining the quality of public discourse because our children are learning to write in weird, abbreviated acronyms rather than in clear and thoughtful prose. Such a decline should be something that Dad deplores. After all, he belongs to a group of retired journalists and teachers who meet monthly to discuss uses and abuses of the English language. Even using the term "IM-ing" is anathema to these folks who decry the "verbing of America." But then I got to thinking. Maybe this is really his subversive way of raising the quality of our public discourse, one teenaged grandchild at a time. I can see him now, Cool Grandpa Jack, vigilantly word-policing the IM landscape, encouraging the kids to "eschew obfuscation,"  admonishing them to "omit needless words," or cryptically invoking Strunk and White: "Be obscure clearly."

Go for it, Dad. Be as cool as you wanna be. And sign me up for the Buddy List.

Thundering who...?

My beloved sent me this SI.com article this morning; he did time in Fargo and knows a little something about the "thundering herd."

NDSU 62, Wisconsin 55. This is why I love college basketball.

Retreating

I spent this past weekend at a writing retreat with friends at the Atwood Retreat Center, where I got in 48 glorious hours of writing, resting, and sharing work with two other writers, Grace and Debra. What a luxury. Add in heaps of good food and conversation, a starkly beautiful prairie setting, the company of four cats and Buddy the dog, and that’s pretty close to my definition of a perfect weekend.

This is the view of the prairie I got on Saturday morning when I opened my eyes, sat up in bed, and looked out the window. The filmy curtains partially obscured a clear view of the trees and the pasture beyond. I photographed this scene because I saw it as visually analogous to what I am trying to do with the family history project:  see through the murky film of the family stories, legends, and memories to try to locate the truth of that time and these people. I worked on two parallel trajectories this weekend. I did what might be described as journalistic writing to help Dad and me get started on the article we want to write, but I also worked on a series of character sketches, merging what I know of the facts of my ancestors’ lives with a more narrative attempt to discover how these people might have felt or thought about their experiences.

            It was a good weekend.

Are you Professor Finnegan?

It happened again this morning. I got the question. Here's the standard scenario: A stranger knocks on my office door, the door on which is painted (really, in the old-fashioned way, painted) my name: C. A. Finnegan. I say, "Come in." I am in C. A. Finnegan's office. Sitting at C. A. Finnegan's computer. Doing C. A. Finnegan's work. Yet despite all of these obvious cues the perplexed stranger insists on asking, "Are you Professor Finnegan?" Sometimes the stranger's inflection is neutral, the question serving as an odd sort of conversation starter. But sometimes it's the "you" that's emphasized, as in, "Are YOU Professor Finnegan?" And, on more than a few occasions, I've gotten an entirely different, even more irritating, version: "Can you tell me when Professor Finnegan will be in?"

So I ask, dear readers (if indeed I have any), what exactly is it about the sight of me working in my office behind a door with my name on it that leads people to believe that I am not me?