first efforts

Some are going to call this grandstanding...

...but I call it putting your money where your mouth is.

President Obama went to Dover Air Force Base last night to be there to receive the latest war dead from Afghanistan. The bodies of 18 Americans were returned to U.S. soil; October has been the deadliest month in Afghanistan since the war started. You'll recall that the ban on photos of the transfer of remains at Dover was lifted last February. Families may make the choice to open the transfer to news media or not. That means that the family of this service member gave the okay.

This image could come back to haunt him, but one hopes it illustrates where his head is really at as he makes the decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Image: Doug Mills, New York Times

Fall

"An Affecting Incident"

I spent part of this morning working on some research for a book chapter I'm working on. In one of my secondary sources I came across a passing reference to a newspaper article from November 1863 and decided to follow up. The headline of the article was "An Affecting Incident." Thinking that was pretty specific, I hopped into the 19th Century Newspapers Database and typed that in as a title. But I hit search before I remembered to limit the search by date. No matter, I thought. It's not like there will be very many returns of that phrase.

I was wrong. Apparently the 19th century U.S. was chock full of "affecting incidents." The search turned up 116 articles with the headline "An Affecting Incident." Here are just a few of the affecting incidents I wasn't looking for:

"Female of advanced age" robbed of her life savings of thirty-two dollars, Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 1833.

"Exhibition of the affection of a slave for his master," Raleigh, NC Daily Register, 1853

"Unexpected Meeting and Recognition of Two Sisters After Separation of 20 Years," Daily Cleveland Herald, 1861

"A Bride Killed at the Altar," New Haven, CT Daily Palladium, 1864

I love research.

How important is your research?

I advise a small group of doctoral students. In addition to my one-on-one work with each of them, the whole group gets together a few times a semester to discuss academic life. In the past year we have explored issues related to writing, networking, and work/life balance. The students have also used these meetings to share work-in-progress.

All of the students are currently in the prelim exam or dissertation phase, so our recent conversation about unstructured time was especially, well, timely. I gave them a couple of articles that addressed the issue of how to create structure when your schedule doesn't necessarily create it for you. One of the articles was called "Keeping Your Research Alive" by Richard Reis of the Tomorrow's Professor listserv and blog. Though directed more toward faculty, the article offers a nice list of things to do to help you keep research on the front burner. The piece as a whole is useful, but the opening lines from a math professor really struck me:

I treat my research time the way I treat my class time. It is high priority and I don't cancel my research time unless I would cancel a class for the same reason.

Whoa. That's a hell of an analogy. How many of us can say we do the same? I sure can't. Things I allow to derail my research time? That list is shockingly, shamefully, embarrassingly long. Too many of us let go of the minutes or half-hours we have here and there, thinking we can't do much for our research in that time. And too many of us build up in our minds that one day a week where we can write uninterrupted, but when that day comes it's less than fulfilling. What I like about the "canceling a class" analogy is that it keeps things in perspective. It challenges me to think of research as just one of the many things I do in a day. In teaching I prep, I show up, I try to do it well, and then I move on to the other things I have to do that day. But, like teaching, ultimately it all boils down to the fact that you gotta show up. 

Field trip flea

This week at Illinois we had the pleasure of hosting Michael Leff as the final speaker in the Lincoln's Rhetorical Worlds speaker series; Oratorical Animal has a great summary of our reading group conversation yesterday. Before that meeting, I took Mike on a little field trip. His visit happily coincided with the campus exhibition of the Morrill Land Grant Act, signed by Abe himself. It only seemed right to bring Mike to see it at the Krannert Art Museum.

On the way back from the Krannert, we swung by the Rare Book Room at our library to see the recently-acquired 11 millionth volume: Ben Franklin's 1744 printing of Cicero's Discourse on Old Age. It's the first English-language translation of a Latin text printed in the new world, and according to those who know, a fine example of book printing for the period. Franklin printed it in extra big type to help those with aging eyes. Leff was pleased to see it; he said it was the first text he read all the way through in Latin.

As we readied to leave, the Rare Books curator wandered over. "I just finished with a Shakespeare class in there," he said, gesturing toward a glass-walled, locked room. "Shakespeare's First Folio and some other things are in there, if you want to check them out." Um, yeah.

And so we wandered over the checked out the First Folio - one of about 200 copies still in existence, worth somewhere in the realm of 6 million bucks (hence the locked room). The curator had also pulled various other books from the period to give the students a sense of what book publishing looked like in the 1600s. Stuff like Hooke's 1665 Micrographia, a compendium of illustrations of the natural world as seen through the new technology of the microscope. It features an unbelievably cool, foot-long pull-out image of a flea (see above). And Topsell's History of Four-Footed Beasts, which, among many other things, discusses medicinal uses for the fur and flesh of cats. Here, kitty, kitty...

What a joy it was to play tourist in my own backyard and be reminded, yet again, of the amazing, amazing stuff you can find just lying around in our library.

Visual synecdoche

The NYT front page has given me much to work with this week. Yesterday's edition offered this photograph of U.S. Marines in Afghanistan by Getty photographer David Furst:

 

As best I can tell, all four of these marines are women. I'll admit that I expected the caption to note this, but it didn't. It simply said, "American marines rested at a makeshift patrol base in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday." And I expected the story to be "about" these women, or women in the military. But it wasn't. It appears as though this photograph of marines was simply used to illustrate a story about the president's Afghanistan strategy. Female marines as visual synecdoche, parts for the whole, representative of the average soldier. Wow.

Counterterrorism's mise en scene

Obama visited the set of "24"! Where's Jack Bauer? Where's Chloe?

That's what I thought when I saw this photo on the front page of this morning's New York Times. This isn't the fictional CTU, but we should be forgiven for making the mistake. It's Obama speaking on Afghanistan yesterday at the National Counterterrorism Center's headquarters in McLean, Virginia. 

Film scholars use the term "mise en scene" to describe the visual style of a set, especially the way it appears on camera. When done well, the mise en scene becomes another character. Certainly that's the case for "24," where its metallic military-industrial glamour, strategically placed catwalks, and be-REEP-ing phones are almost as important as Kiefer Sutherland's taut, husky whisper.

The NCTC was founded in 2003-2004 during the heyday of the Bush administration's war on terror. Is it a coincidence that the NCTC's headquarters look a lot - a lot - like CTU's? For further evidence check out this video, which offers a "rare peek" into the NCTC's "state-of-the-art Operations Center" and also traffics a bit in CTU-style excitement (minus all that messy Jack Bauer torture stuff). Whether the physical space was actually created with "24" in mind is beside the point. I'm more interested in the idea that perhaps the "24" aesthetic taught us what counterterrorism looks like. Once this mise en scene is in your head, how could you possibly envision anything else?

This week in visual politics

A smattering of good stuff in visual politics this week...

The National Archives Flickr Photostream is featuring images from DOCUMERICA, an FSA-like project sponsored by the EPA, which hired free-lance photographers to photograph America's environmental problems during the 1970s. Really amazing photos here, many digitized for the first time. There's a dissertation project (or three) in here for sure...

Lens, the NYT visual politics blog, discusses the work of AP photographer Julie Jacobson, whose photograph of a dying marine provoked much conversation last month when it was distributed by the AP.

BAGnewsNotes offers a conceptual photo essay of images from the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh last week.

At The Guardian, photographer Sally Mann discusses her newest project: photographing the slow deterioration of her husband's body from muscular dystrophy.

Garden update

Hard to believe it's October 1st already. It's been awhile since I did a garden update, so here goes...tomatoes stopped cold about two weeks ago (which was weird), but we're still getting green beans, cukes, strawberries, jalapenos, and red and green peppers. On these last two we've gotten only one pepper per plant so far, but more look to be on the way. There's also potential for carrots and radishes again, but I have no idea what these are doing underground at the moment. Several weeks ago I planted spinach and lettuce seeds along with broccoli starters for fall. So we'll see how much we can extend things into late fall here. Will be a fun experiment. No early freezes so far; our usual frost date is around Oct. 15, so keep your fingers crossed.

This weekend I'll be all pesto, all the time, so a big basil harvest is on deck. Green AND purple! Tasty!

Photos from this morning...