first efforts

Nesting

A pair of robins is building a nest in the bushes outside of my kitchen window. I noticed them for the first time yesterday, and their new place is already pretty far along. The owners are clearly in major home improvement mode--flying back and forth between ground and nest, returning each time with muddy twigs in beak, poking and sticking and stuffing to get it all in just right. I don't think there are any eggs or babies yet, but they are getting ready.

Yesterday I was also in nesting mode. It was rainy and cold and there were no engagements on the calendar--the perfect conditions for building my own nest on the couch. I propped myself on pillows, wrapped myself in a giant comforter and kept all the essentials nearby: Kleenex (allergies), TV remote, tea, and lots of books. Maybe it was my way of getting ready for the end of the semester.

I heart Dublin

What European city do you belong in? According to this web quiz, I belong in Dublin.

Of course, I didn't need a web to quiz tell me that.

(Nod to epist).

Oh, and my inner pop princess is Hilary Duff. But I do not heart Hilary Duff.

The decline of western civilization

The front page of today's Daily Illini tells me that syndicated columnist, FOX News commentator and Illinois alum Robert Novak has endowed a $1.25 million dollar Chair in Western Civilization and Culture in our very own University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Why western civ? Novak says,

"Although certainly the non-Western cultures have a lot to offer, I think that our country owes so much to its straight-line descent from the [Western] culture in all fields, starting with the ancient Romans and Greeks and through the European civilizations. . . . Western civilization is important because it's our background and our culture. And to be an educated person, you have to learn about the roots."

Oh, my. As for the glories of Western civilization, well, where does one begin to illustrate that Novak is certainly a fine representative of those?

How about here?

Or here?

Or perhaps even here.

"Straight-line descent" indeed.

Cloudy

My friend Sara recently achieved blogger fame for writing a "fib" about "fibs," 6-line poems based upon a  mathematical progression known as the Fibonacci sequence. Not being a math or science girl, I prefer the literary simplicity and second-grade nostalgia factor of the haiku. After a morning of sneezing and wheezing, I composed this poem in my (cloudy) head on the way back from lunch at Subway:

Spring: head feels cloudy

Runny eyes, runny nose, yuck

Why won't my drugs work?

Fun with newsreels

                                                      

On a tip from my colleague Scott, this morning I checked out Google Video's newsreel collection, which features short films from the 1930s and 40s culled from the National Archives. One in particular caught my eye: 1938's "Cradle of the Father of Waters," a propaganda film made by the U.S. Department of the Interior about Minnesota's state parks system. This ten minute film is, shall we say, very much of its time. It valorizes government planning, offers racist representations of the local Ojibwe (I doubt very much that they *really* ran around in full feathered headdress), and it glorifies the productive labor of the CCC boys--all of whom are shirtless, very blonde, and very, very skinny. Like most government films of this period, it's pretty boring. Which is, in fact, precisely the thing that makes it interesting.

Visual conferencing

I just returned from the Kern Visual Communication Conference in Rochester, NY. I like this conference because in addition to featuring the usual crew of academics and academics-in-training, it also features visual art and artists. One panel featured a curator and three artists who spoke about the artist-curator relationship. A landscape photographer talked about "Watersheds," a local environmental effort that depended heavily on the production of beautiful images of wetlands to sell itself. One evening featured a trip to the George Eastman House and International Museum of Photography (Rochester is, of course, the home of Kodak).

Perhaps my favorite presentation of the whole conference was one by a woman from Iowa State. Seeking to develop in her students a more critical consciousness about advertising and design, she described a graphic design course in which she gave students an assignment to engage in culture-jamming (if you aren't familiar with the concept, Adbusters offers lots of good examples). Each student was asked to identify an issue about which they are concerned, such as the destruction of the environment caused by corporate greed. Then, they were asked to design a satirical, graphics-heavy campaign in faux-support of that issue. For example, one student invented "Oil Day," a worldwide celebration of the environmental devastation caused by oil. The students' projects were amazing, maybe even *too* amazing, in that "A Modest Proposal" sort of way.

Two firsts at this conference...one, this is the first conference I have attended in which every single presenter I saw used some form of visual aid; and two, this is the first conference I have attended where a presenter's cellphone rang and he answered it in the middle of his presentation, telling the audience, "I'm sorry, just a minute, I have to take this." The topic of his talk was information overload in the digital age and the dangers of multitasking. I am not making this up.

Inside man

Nephew Ben has gotten an interesting inside view of the university this semester. In February I tapped him to be my "date" for the Chancellor's research dinner and last night he joined me at the campus teaching awards banquet. Ben is a great date because he cleans up nice, he talks equally comfortably about art or science (handy when you are sitting next to physics people), and he looks enough like me that strangers don't assume that I date undergraduates. Most undergrads don't get exposed to what My Brother the Dean calls the "rubber chicken" circuit, the university's ritual moments of community-building over institutional food (in Minnesota, he says, it's actually "rubber walleye"). Ben claims that he has enjoyed this view of the "inside." So far he has learned that there are some pretty accomplished people on this campus, that research dinner attendees get wine while teaching dinner attendees have to settle for punch, and that our Chancellor tends to give multiple versions of the same speech, all of which emphasize the topos of "creativity."

Peeped

I returned home from work yesterday to find this:

Let's look closer, shall we?

 

Tucked inside the back door, I also discovered a note announcing that I had just been "T-Peep'd" and wishing me a Happy Easter. It was signed "The Peepetrators." The note was paired with some nice Easter candy; the Russell Stover marshmallow bunny with chocolate coating was very tasty; thank you, Peepetrators.

Of course, I called PSI (Peep Scene Investigators) right away and as I write this they are examining all the evidence: the skillful use of needle and thread to impale the little marshmallow creatures, the M.O. of hanging, oh-so-aesthetic in its arrangement; and most of all, the perky variety of colors meant to evoke the coming of spring.

The question is, who do I know who can sew, has an aesthetic sensibility, possesses an impish sense of humor, thinks peeps are hilarious, and can be placed in Champaign, Illinois on Monday, April 17th? I wonder...

April is the cruelest month

T.S. Eliot was right: April is the cruelest month, for academics at least. During the month of April on a college campus, all institutional forces seem to conspire against us: defenses, discussions, dinners and deadlines heaped on top of conferences, convocations, and conversations, all of it crammed into a heart-stopping, mind-numbing thirty days of hell. I think April is the institution's way of making up for all that labor that is supposedly lost when professors have those mythical "summers off." 

Dear Professor: Eschew obfuscation!

In this entertaining story from The Guardian, Michael McCarthy tells the story of this sentence, as well as other abuses of the English language that give academics a bad name:

"Using large, computer-based corpora linked to databases of socio-geographical information about speakers does, however, give us access to a bird's-eye view of what present-day spoken usage is, and we must surely accept as 'good' spoken English that which is widely attested across speakers of different ages, genders, social and geographical backgrounds, that is to say, our common coinage, the plain, everyday talk of the plain people of the speech community, and not just that of its super-skilful members who command the airwaves and the public platforms."