The Long View

Reported today in the New York Times, the US Food and Drug Administration failed to mandate vaccination of chickens against salmonella, a method with dramatic and proven results in England.

The vaccination only costs a few cents per dozen eggs. After institution of the chicken vaccination in England, reports of instances of salmonella from infected eggs droppe 96%.

According to the Times:

The F.D.A. estimates that each year, 142,000 illnesses in the United States are caused by consuming eggs contaminated with the most common type of salmonella. It has said the new rules would cut that by more than half. People who eat bad eggs that have not been cooked thoroughly to kill the bacteria can get diarrhea and cramps. Rare cases can be fatal.

There are no laws mandating vaccination in Britain. But it is required, along with other safety measures, if farmers want to place an industry-sponsored red lion stamp on their eggs, which shows they have met basic standards. The country’s major supermarkets buy only eggs with the lion seal, so vaccination is practiced by 90 percent of egg producers . . .

Makes you wonder what the “F” is in FDA, doesn’t it?

Widely reported recently, including this excerpt from the New York Times:

Since October 2008, the percentage of Americans who say the president is a Muslim has risen from 12 percent to 18 percent. The percentage of people who think he is a Christian has fallen from 51 percent to 34 percent. The polling data indicated that those who identified themselves as conservative Republicans were most likely to say that he is a Muslim.

Of course that is the same tea-and-nut bag crowd that thinks he was born outside the US (which, as Ahnold Schwarzenegger can tell you, prevents you from becoming president of the US).

The previous presidential incumbent took every opportunity to remind us that Jesus was his BFF and that God was on his (and therefore our, if you were for him not against him) side. Obama does not wear his religion on his sleeve.

So what would Jesus say? (WWJS). Let’s see:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. 7But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. 8Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. (KJV, Matthew 6: 5-8)

Looks like Obama’s a Christian. Really Christian.

One of the more annoying currently popular phrases is “I’m in a relationship . . . but it’s complicated.” This particular banality, popularized perhaps by a movie, seems to be roughly translated as: “I’m desperate for a relationship, so I’m involved with someone who is either already married or mentally ill, or both.”

The phrase comes to mind on the global scale in light of the “Afghanistan papers” released by WikiLeaks.

My generation had the “Pentagon Papers,” which exposed two decades of American duplicity in Vietnam. For Frank Rich’s “Kiss This War Goobye” in the Sunday New York Times, the WikiLeaks release does not tell us anything new, except that it reinforces what a majority of Americans feel: Time to wind this thing down. Rich also notes that when the Pentagon Papers were first released by the Times Americans were distracted by more important things, like the wedding of President Nixon’s daughter. People only started to pay attention when Nixon tried to censor the publication of subsequent documents. Now my generation is running the show in Afghanistan.

There is no question in the mind of any sane person that the George W. Bush administration and the Republican controlled Congress utterly “misaccomplished” the mission in Afghanistan, which David E. Sanger analyzes in “Rethinking a War’s What-Ifs” : “As recently as two years ago there was still debate in Washington over whether George Bush had fumbled the strategy in Afghanistan and vastly underestimated the resources needed there. Today there is virtually no debate: Liberals and conservatives, generals and even many Bush administration policymakers agree that American approach was seriously flawed for the first six or seven years.”

But it’s complicated, as Thomas L. Friedman observes on the same pages of the Times. In “The Great (Double) Game” Friedman notes:

China supports Pakistan, seeks out mining contracts in Afghanistan and lets America make Afghanistan safe for Chinese companies, all while smiling at the bloody nose America is getting in Kabul because anything that ties down the U.S. military makes China’s military happy. America, meanwhile, sends its soldiers to fight in Afghanistan at the same time that it rejects an energy policy that would begin to reduce our oil consumption, which indirectly helps to fund the very Taliban schools and warriors our soldiers are fighting against.

But wait. It’s more complicated still:

This double game goes back to 9/11. That terrorist attack was basically planned, executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis. And we responded by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? The short answer is because Pakistan has nukes that we fear and Saudi Arabia has oil that we crave.

These two deeply flawed boyfriends manage their own internal psycho-political landscapes with their own “complicated” relationships:

The Pakistani Army is obsessed with what it says is the threat from India — and keeping that threat alive is what keeps the Pakistani Army in control of the country and its key resources. . . . Saudi Arabia is built around a ruling bargain between the moderate al-Saud family and the Wahhabi fundamentalist establishment: The al-Sauds get to rule and the Wahhabis get to impose on their society the most puritanical Islam — and export it to mosques and schools across the Muslim world, including to Pakistan, with money earned by selling oil to the West.

But our own neediness gets in the way of healthy geo-political alliances:

So we pay Pakistan to help us in Afghanistan, even though we know some of that money is killing our own soldiers, because we fear that just leaving could lead to Pakistan’s Islamists controlling its bomb. And we send Saudi Arabia money for oil, even though we know that some of it ends up financing the very people we are fighting, because confronting the Saudis over their ideological exports seems too destabilizing. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.)

Oil junkies. We’re in a relationship . . . but it’s complicated.

We learned this week that Target and Best Buy, where I have been for many years a frequent shopper, have donated $250,000 to a political committee supporting the campaign of a candidate for Governor of Minnesota who has promised to veto marriage equality legislation and has ties to a Christian rock band that advocates death to gays.

I have written to both businesses to say “Goodbye.”

My hard-earned queer dollars won’t fund their troglodyte agenda.

Should you be so inclined, I urge you to contact both companies (they don’t make this easy by the way):

Target “Contact Us” Page

Best Buy “Contact Us” Page

According to the Human Rights Campaign:

Earlier this week, reports surfaced that Target had donated $150,000 to the political committee MN Forward. Best Buy pitched in another $100,000.

MN Forward’s mission? Elect as governor an anti-LGBT state representative with a long history of attacks on LGBT Americans. This representative’s campaign even donated to a controversial “punk-rock Christian ministry” whose leader has advocated executing gays and lesbians!

After all these two companies have done to build a fair and equitable workplace, it’s a slap in the face. In years past, Target and Best Buy consistently received 100 percent ratings on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index.

They need to make this right – by donating an equal amount to support candidates who will fight for equality. But they won’t do it just because we ask. They need to see that hundreds of thousands of customers across the country are upset and disappointed.

Eva von Dassow, a professor of classical and Near Eastern studies, spoke at a recent public forum of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents.

According to an article in today’s Inside Higher Ed, the video of her talk is inspiring many of her colleagues at Minnesota and elsewhere, many of them fed up with what they view as unrelenting budget cuts, particularly of humanities disciplines.

Nicholas D. Kristof, writing in last Sunday’s New York Times, “Death By Gadget,” describes how “[a]n ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.” Our digital devices use several rare metals that are becoming the equivalent of “blood diamonds,” funding the barbarism in Equatorial West Africa.

Next time you’re porn surfing the Web on your iPad or iPhone or other e-device in search of material for onanistic self-pleasuring, or just texting (and, really, we are not in love with you, so we really are not interested in what’s on your mind or where you are from one moment to the next), view this video first:

Attention Facebook Customers:

This may come as a shock to some of you–Facebook is a commercial business.

Facebook is not a nation state. It does not have a constitution or a supreme court that guarantees you a “right to privacy.”

In exchange for allowing us to dance around the Bonfire of the Banalities, Facebook uses data that we voluntarily give to Facebook to make money for Facebook.

That is known as a “business exchange.”

Netizens need to understand that nothing on the World-Wide Web is free. Everything on the Web entails a value exchange (though not necessarily a monetary exchange, thus Facebook apparently still does not earn a profit).

Netizens, it’s time to move from petulant cyber adolescence in digital adulthood.

At a conference of scholars (mostly historians) on the Oldest State of the South. . .

Uniformity. Unlike MLA meetings where blue jeans or black on black on black (with black Euro eyewear) prevails, the uniform of the day is the blue blazer and khaki pants (mostly men, but sometimes unisex). Depicted below, my uniformity: blue blazer, blue shirt, UConn blue and white tie.

McDonnellitis. Although we meet on a campus whose president is a former Republican senator and whose students are the sons and daughters of Republican exurbanites, many disparaging references to the ahistorical Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, whose recent proclamation of Confederate History Month conveniently forgot African American slaves (and by extension their descendants)

One of the things that I enjoy about attending scholarly conferences is hearing about scholars’ passions, their intellectual passions, that is.

So last night at a reception, I learned from S. J. Wolfe about the robust trade in linen mummy wrappings to feed America’s hunger for fine rag-content paper in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Apparently, Egyptian rag merchants were bringing out their dead, divesting them of their linen wrappings, and shipping the rags to the US, where fine paper (including that used in American currency) was made from them. (The mummies, in many instances, were converted into fertilizer, nourishing the roses of British monarchs.)

Wood pulp paper, developed in the 19th century, is acidic and not of fine quality (as anyone will remember from first grade when we wrote on paper, as Bill Cosby used to say, that still had big chunks of wood in it).

Wolfe, a cataloger at the American Antiquarian Society, is the author of Mummies in Nineteenth Century America: Ancient Egyptian as Artifacts (McFarland, 2009).

I’m at a scholarly conference at a small college with big pretensions, where Christian Lander could add to his list of Stuff White People Like: strip-mall neo-Colonial or convention hotel neo-Georgian architecture.

In this case, this college started out as a junior college extension of Oldest Southern College, declared its independence, got a makeover with a couple of master’s programs for “university” status (like putting a ribbon on a pig), and a subsequent reconstruction as a Public University with a Private Liberal Arts ethos (which is what I thought Oldest Southern College still is [it keeps "college" in its name, but is really a doctoral-granting university]).

So a mad building boom over the past ten years, and dorms, library (named after the president and his wife), and other buildings in Collegiate Colonial style (like Oldest Southern College). But the buildings have that bland inoffensiveness that one associates with banks, pretentious hotels, or evangelical churches: lots of pediments, oversize decorative columns, an absurdly tall cupola, creamy white walls. The library’s marbled foyer and grand staircase remind one of a hotel, but they may be because hotels are the only buildings that still try to be grand. Outside the new performing arts center, cigarette urns are Home Depot planters filled with sand. The windows appear to be vinyl-framed double-paned, ecological but like the brick facades flat and textureless.

When their children can’t get into Oldest Southern College, the exurban Republicans can feel comfortable about their children attending here. Inoffensive, textureless, lacking in detail or real history.

According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class . . . The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.

Well, so much for the bogus working-class, populist, grassroots movement. AstroTurf movement, is more like it.

Not surprisingly, they are against Big Government . . . except when they benefit from Big Government:

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

Big Government for me but not for thee.

Widely reported today, Good Friday among Christians, is the sermon delivered before Pope Benedict XVI (formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger) by Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, who holds the office of preacher of the papal household. Friar Cantalamessa likened recent criticism of the Pope’s inaction in a priest-pedophile abuse case (when Ratzinger was Archbishop of Munich, Germany) to the invective heaped upon Jews during two-millennia of anti-Semitism (some of it fomented by the Church).

The timing of this sermon was unusual in that for centuries the Catholic Good Friday liturgy blamed the “perfidious Jews” for the death of Christ.

Medical observers, however, expressed alarm, noting that the friar’s sermon and recent Vatican pronouncements indicate a serious, even life threatening pathophysiology requiring a surgical procedure.

The surgical procedure is a cranial-rectalectomy, the surgical removal of one’s head from one’s own or another’s rectum. Delay, according to medical authorities, only worsens the condition, which can become permanent, dimming the prognosis.

Well, Sarah, that “hopey, changey thing” is looking pretty good to me. Looking much better than that “nopey, dopey thing” that you, the Tea Baggers, the Tea Baggers’ punditry, and the Tea Baggers’ paramours, the Republican Party, have going on.

In one week (after a year’s work, of course): Health care reform (not perfect but the best we’ve had during my more than half century on earth), student financial aid reform (access to higher education was responsible for the unprecedented post-World War II social and economic expansion and may continue to work its magic), and a new nuclear arms limitation treaty with Russia (which may help in containing nuclear arms proliferation, as in Iran).

So, Sarah, while there are some in America who are dazzled by your manic pageant performance, and a desperate John McCain and the Tea Bag Nation turns its lonely eyes to you, I’ll stick with No-Drama Hopey Changey.

Time for the Democratic majority in Congress to govern. Now. Time for the Democratic Party to mobilize support for what most Americans want and need. Now. Time for the Democrats to discover, whatever the political price later, that atrophied muscle: courage. Now.

The Republican Party has made it clear that they are working to defeat health reform simply to defeat Barack Obama and the Democratic majority. They tart up their opposition in their usual garb of self-righteousness. Claiming, for example, that the Democrats in seeking a reconcialiation procedure are manipulating the democratic process, something that they would never, never, ever do. Except, as conservative thinker Norm Ornstein and others recently pointed out, since 1981, the Republicans in Congress have used the reconciliation process MORE OFTEN than Dems.

Paul Krugman (no fan of the health reform bill, for other reasons) reminds us:

Reuters published an investigative report this week that powerfully illustrates the vileness of our current system. The report concerns the insurer Fortis, now part of Assurant Health, which turns out to have had a systematic policy of revoking its clients’ policies when they got sick. In particular, according to the Reuters report, it targeted every single policyholder who contracted H.I.V., looking for any excuse, no matter how flimsy, for cancellation. In the case that brought all this to light, Assurant Health used an obviously misdated handwritten note by a nurse, who wrote “2001” instead of “2002,” to claim that the infection was a pre-existing condition that the client had failed to declare, and revoked his policy.

. . . But this is much more than a law enforcement issue. For one thing, it’s an example those who castigate President Obama for “demonizing” insurance companies should consider. The truth, widely documented, is that behavior like Assurant Health’s is widespread for a simple reason: it pays. A House committee estimated that Assurant made $150 million in profits between 2003 and 2007 by canceling coverage of people who thought they had insurance, a sum that dwarfs the fine the court imposed in this particular case. It’s not demonizing insurers to describe what they actually do.

. . . And one more thing: employment-based health insurance, which is already regulated in a way that mostly prevents this kind of abuse, is unraveling. Less than half of workers at small businesses were covered last year, down from 58 percent a decade ago. This means that in the absence of reform, an ever-growing number of Americans will be at the mercy of the likes of Assurant Health.

So what’s the answer? Americans overwhelmingly favor guaranteeing coverage to those with pre-existing conditions — but you can’t do that without pursuing broad-based reform. To make insurance affordable, you have to keep currently healthy people in the risk pool, which means requiring that everyone or almost everyone buy coverage. You can’t do that without financial aid to lower-income Americans so that they can pay the premiums. So you end up with a tripartite policy: elimination of medical discrimination, mandated coverage, and premium subsidies.

Or to put it another way, you end up with something like the health care plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts in 2006, and the very similar plan the House either will or won’t pass in the next few days. Comprehensive reform is the only way forward.

In 2008 I left the Commonwealth of Virginia (my ancestral home, where I had lived and worked for most of my adult life) to move to Connecticut. News from the Old Dominion (reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education) confirms my decision to leave:

Virginia’s attorney general says public colleges and universities in the state with policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation should revoke such policies because they lack the legal authority to name gay state employees as a protected class, The Washington Post reported. The attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, a Republican who took office in January, wrote in a letter to the colleges that only the state’s General Assembly can give legal protections to gay state employees. The legislature has repeatedly declined to take that step.

Connecticut, in contrast, recognizes same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex parents, prevents discrimination because of sexual orientation, and provides benefits for same-sex spouses. Since Griswold v Connecticut in 1965 (the Supreme Court decision, ruling on a law restricting access to birth control, that established a right to privacy), the “Land of Steady Habits” has moved steadily into modernity.

The Virginia AG office has historically been the springboard for those with gubernatorial ambitions, like Bob McDonnell, the recently elected governor whose campaign was successful in part because he was a Right Wing transvestite performing in Centrist drag, and whose 1989 Public Polic master’s degree and Law JD thesis from Pat Robertson’s Regent University (entitled “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family”) includes this gem: “. . . every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators. The cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer”  (p. 65).

I am the product of 20 years of Catholic education (grade school, prep school, college, seminary), of which I am proud and for which I am grateful. During the 1980s I was a Roman Catholic priest. Over 20 years ago, I left the priesthood and the Church. In the words of the Jewish Passover Seder hymn, Dayenu . . . “it would have been enough.”

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ collusion in shielding sexual abuser priests and preventing the victims from receiving their rightful pastoral care.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ intractable denial of a rightful place for women in ministry and in positions of leadership, more recently evidenced in the Vatican’s New Inquisition of orders of women religious.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the Church’s single-minded campaign against the social equality of gay and lesbian people.

Today’s news includes salt on that wound. After the Washington, DC, government decided to recognize same-sex unions as marriages (with all the rights, privileges and duties pertaining thereunto), which included the provision of health benefits for spouses, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, led by Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl (”Oh, her!” I could tell you stories that I’d heard about that girlfriend years ago), has decided that henceforth they will not offer spousal benefits to any new heterosexual employees or to any new spouses of current heterosexual employees, in order not to give even the appearance of condoning same-sex marriages.

The former chief operating officer of the archiocesan Catholic Charities, Tim Sawina, has called upon the archdiocese to change its position. According to a report in the Washington Post:

“Some, including the archbishop, have argued that by providing health care to a gay or lesbian spouse we are somehow legitimizing gay marriage,” said Sawina, a former priest. “Providing health care to a gay or lesbian partner — a basic human right, according to Church teaching — is an end in itself and no more legitimizes that marriage than giving communion to a divorced person legitimizes divorce, or giving food or shelter to an alcoholic legitimizes alcoholism.”

The sound you hear is my shaking the dust off my sandals . . . again.

Telehypocrite Pat Robertson has announced today that the Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment for Haitians’ making a pact with Satan 200 years ago when they struggled for liberation from the French. (I’m not making this up.) The following prayer is offered for the relief of Haitians and all humanity from this pestilent beast.

(To be prayed for nine days in a row)

Almighty and All Just God, who smites the proud and who protects the weak, hear us as we beseech Thee to deliver us from the pestilence of Pat Robertson. Raise Thy mighty arm and remove this affliction from our midst. May Thou bring him swiftly into Eternity where Thou shalt mete out justice and mercy. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, the soon-coming Just Judge of the quick and the dead. Amen.

(Disclosure: I conducted some research for my book AIDS and American Apocalypticism in the library of Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and was once threatened with arrest on the campus during direct action civil disobedience there to protest Robertson’s anti-gay on-air slanders.)

Google, the online data monopoly that drew ire of human rights activists when it decided several years ago to agree to filter Chinese searches in order to strike a deal with the government of the Republic of China (a totalitarian political system), has now threatened to withdraw from China after Google’s email systems were hacked by supposed agents of the Chinese government in an effort to read the emails of Chinese human rights activists.

While I’d like to think that Google (whose corporate value is Don’t Be Evil, or some such vaccuous nonesense) has discovered a muscle called “courage,” I suspect that the motives are more strategic.

Google sees its future in its cloud computing operations and as the provider of email services for large clients (like major universities that provide email accounts to their students).

The Chinese hacker attacks threaten Google’s credibility as a reliable and secure provider of cloud services. It isn’t personal and it isn’t ethics, it’s just business.

Since the Christmas Day airline terrorist attempt, much has been made about the failure of government authorities to “connect the dots”; all the data were known (the dots) but not all parties knew or interepreted the data (connecting).

In an attempt to encourage our guardians, I offer the following policy guidance videos.

Connecting the dots: It’s not just for kids any more.

The last day of MLA’s annual convention. The conference has appeared in local and national news media, as always at this time of year, though this year the headlines have seemed less preoccupied with presenters’ clever or controversial paper titles and more on the deleterious effects of the grim economy and the challenges of digital media.

Last night the panel that I organized, “Translation and Medicine” (which I originally called “Translational Medicine” until conference organizers prevailed upon me to change it) went well. We were exiled to the gulag of the conference: the last session time slot on the last night of the meeting. However, we had about a dozen and a half audience members. Rishi Goyal, MD, (”The Widening Gyre: Transcription and Translation in the Medical Sciences”) offered a rhetorical analysis of the tropes of codes, language, semiotics, reading, and writing that have been used in medical science over the past half century. Anne Bavier, PhD, RN (”Nursing: In a Language They Can Understand”) provided a historical analysis of the ways in which the nursing profession, nursing education, and nursing science have entailed a variety of forms of translation. Finally, Elizabeth Lee, PhD, RN, (”Challenges of Translation in Instrument Development”) described her research translating the Beck Postpartum Depression Screening Scale into Chinese.

The art and science of health care are fundamentally semiotic and hermeneutic activities. The healthcare practitioner reads the body’s signs, attends to and interprets the patient’s narrative of symptoms, and interprets visual representations via imaging technologies or quantitative data from empirical tests. In a reading of Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer in The Enigma of Health notes the congruence between rhetoric and health care: “Just as the apparently specific tasks of rhetoric must be integrated into the whole philosophical way of life, so too something similar is the case with all those means of treatment which medicine applies to the human body in the hope of restoring its health.”

And as the philosopher of science and the formulator of the concepts of “paradigm shifts” and “scientific revolution,” Thomas S. Kuhn, observed in his essay “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice,” even the supposedly common language of science entails interpretation: “Proponents of different theories are . . . like native speakers of different languages. Communication between them goes on by translation, and it raises all translation’s familiar difficulties.”

Afterward, I attended the reception hosted by Rosemary Feal, MLA’s executive director, held on the 31st floor of the Loews Hotel with spectacular views of the city. Hardly knew anyone there, but wandered around a bit to take in the vistas until I decided to stand with my cranberry juice (I avoid alcohol later in the evening) by the elevator. Standing in one place looking amused, serene, and mildly enigmatic is effective at parties where you don’t know anyone. In short order, Richard Kopley (Penn State), whom I’d seen and chatted with briefly the first day, stopped to chat and we ended up in a lengthy conversation. I first met Richard, who is co-editor of Resources for American Literary Study, several years ago at MLA when he complimented a paper that I’d presented to the Emily Dickinson Society on nineteenth-century verse manuscripts in friendship albums and manuscript anthologies. A scholar in the American Renaissance with a focus on Poet, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville, Richard exemplifies some of what is best about our profession: passion for his work, curiosity, willingness to encourage and promote the work of others. He has had a particularly productive year, after which he is looking forward to some new and very different creative endeavors.

Later this afternoon I will present my position paper (“In Media Res: Browsing, Grazing, and Googleizing Scholarly Knowledge”) at the final CELJ panel, “Ranks, Brands, and Editorial Process.”

Reunions

Many spontaneous reunions occur at MLA, some planned, most serendipitous. I bump into Bob and Sylvia Scholnick (College of William & Mary) on the train. Attending Bob’s session that night, I catch up with John Miller (Longwood University) whose dissertation director was Bob Scholnick. I stop to say “Hi” to Richard Dellamora outside the Loews Hotel (where I’m staying because I visited his room there a couple of years ago when we both had recently published chapters in a book and liked the setting). I catch up with former community college colleague Miles McCrimmon who chairs a panel (see below). Two longtime colleagues re-discover each other on a hotel elevator, one informing the other that she is preparing to retire. Old friends talk over breakfast, one lamenting that his post-retirement part-time position has been eliminated in cost-saving measures.

Genealogies

In Candide, Voltaire satirizes the pretensions of Europe aristocrats’ genealogies (including the bastard Candide’s noble but illegitimate descent) with their multiple heraldic quarterings, at one point providing a genealogy of Dr. Pangloss’s venereal disease. Higher education frequently appears as hierarchical and genealogical. If your PhD is from an Ivy League ranked institution, you studied with So-and-son. If your PhD is from a state flagship university, you studied with a student of So-and-so. If your PhD is from a lesser state university, you just studied.

Community Colleges

After making my second pass at the book publishers’ exhibits, I stopped in the far end of the exhibit hall where a food and beverage concession sustains (and robs: $3 for a bottle of tap water) scholars exhausted by words. I chatted with the cashier, a South Asian man whose son, I learned is at a Catholic high school and is now considering colleges and universities. “Why do colleges costs so much?” he asked me. “As much as $40,000 a year!” I explained that this conversation would take some time, but that only private colleges would be likely cost that much; if his son attended a public college or university it would cost much less, probably less than $40,000 for a full four years. And, I offered, if he attended a two-year community college, he would earn an associate’s degree and could transfer as a junior into a bachelor’s degree program at a university. “No, no one wants a community college student.”

The Rodney Dangerfield of higher education, community colleges offer affordable higher education, smaller class sizes, and learning support services. State supported community colleges offer transferable degrees permitting students to complete their general education requirements.

I sit in a session (“Intergenerational Teaching and Learning in Community Colleges”) sponsored by the MLA Committee on Community Colleges, a relatively new unit in professional organization top heavy with literary critics and scholars, including superstars of the cultural professoriate, a class that has, even at their most genial, not been quite sure what to do with general education of undergraduates, much less with the hoi polloi. The presider for the session is a former Virginia Community College System colleague, Miles McCrimmon (J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Richmond, Virginia). Maybe it’s the schedule (mid-afternoon, day three), but the attendance is disappointingly small (maybe about 30 people). Community college faculty are not likely to be members of the MLA; for the twenty years that I taught at a community college, I was the only MLA member in my department, and I knew only a few others at fellow Virginia community colleges. Community college English faculty members are more likely to be members of the National Council of Teachers of English (which includes language arts teachers in K-12) and the Council on College Composition and Communication.

Research and theoretical labor (like literary criticism) frequently trumps practice-based labor (like teaching composition). Teaching (the primary mission of the community college professor) is lower down the hierarchy among many of the denizens at MLA. Ask a professor here, “What are you working on these days?” (a guaranteed conversation starter at any gathering of university professors), and you will rarely hear, “Well, I’m teaching this course and that one, and this is what my students are up to.”

Ranks

A viral epidemic has been a frequent preoccupation of this year’s MLA meeting: The infection of humanities publishing with science-derived journal rankings and “impact factor” bibliometrics.

In addition to two panels of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Structure of the Annual Convention organized the session “Journal Ranking, Reviewing, and Promotion in the Age of New Media.” Journal rankings allegedly have accuracy but their lack of accountability (who is ranking, by what criteria, and with what opportunities for appeal?) is critical, particularly when ranking systems may be used for hiring, tenure and promotion decisions.

Questions posed to this panel: What challenges, opportunities and obstacles to scholarly journals in the age of digital media? What are the effects on journals in the Americas of the new externally performed European Reference Index in Humanities (ERIH)? What benchmarking guidelines might be employed? How are factors related to identity (race, &c) and international culture affected?

The varied panelists made divergent observations. Digital divides exist between northern and southern hemispheres, East and West, but also between scholars at large universities (which can afford to subscribe to digital aggregators) and at small colleges (which cannot afford aggregated digital subscriptions). The question of accessibility dovetails with demographics and culture. In a context of diminishing resources and raised expectations, how do we define (and document) faculty productivity? How do we evaluate quality and effect in the humanities?

Protection may be as important as access: Open access may undermine scholarly journals (which cost to review, edit and publish). Controlled access is necessary in order to continue to subsidize scholarly publication. Clone Web sites (that look like a scholarly journal) may be threaten the credibility of journal. Universities’ open access repositories (“scholarly commons” increasingly required by universities) undermine the economics of scholarly journals. Perhaps the iTunes model would work: You can preview the first page or two of the article but you have to pay $.99 to download the whole article. New media shrink the distance and time of scholarly communication.

A November 2008 report by the Association of Research Libraries and the Ithaka group, “Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication,” identifies eight forms of digital scholarly communication: e-journals in electronic format only; reviews of scholarly works; preprints and working papers; encyclopedias and annotated content; data resources; blogs; discussion forums like e-mail lists; and professional and scholarly Web hubs. Peer review and revision are time consuming, whether they are for a print or a digital journal. Faculty need to be trained to evaluate digital scholarship.

In European universities a faculty member’s funding level will depend on ERIH ratings, which are established without clearly identified evaluators or criteria; it is an administrator’s dream but a scholar’s nightmare. Moreover, metrics can be manipulated. Academic editors are unpaid and see themselves as serving scholarship, so editing could be distributed via digital media, but we have been outsourcing judgments about quality often without recognizing it. Members of tenure and promotion committees, for example, may not read all of the applicant’s publications, relying instead on external reviews. We don’t train people for peer review; a declining number of people seem willing to conduct peer review, which may be the last vestige of the old boy network, noblesse oblige. Journals will no longer exist as a product, but as a process: technologies of colloquy. It would be best if academia developed (and made available for free) the best technologies for us to do value peer review, value editing and value colloquy.

Council of Editors of Learned Journals Meetings

At the conclusion of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) awards ceremony today, outgoing (in both senses of that term) CELJ president, Bonnie Wheeler (editor of Arthuriana), addressed several recurring questions of journal editors in recent years, particularly related to ownership and credentialing.

What constitutes a “learned journal,” she noted is “ontologically perplexing” with varied periods of publication. Some journals are also published as books (with both ISSN and ISBN numbers). There are also diverse business models in learned journals: some are independently funded, others owned by universities or scholarly organizations, still others commercially published.

The much vaunted po-mo “death of the author” is only the first gambit in a game that may lead to the “death of the editor,” and with it the value of scholarly publishing. Not all scholarly journal editors are scholars. Editorial work is not credited as scholarly activity but only as a community service activity (whose presence won’t earn you tenure and whose absence won’t prevent your earning tenure). Scholarly editing is a distinct class of academic work.

In examining the two pressing matters of ownership and credentialing, Wheeler recommended Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, to be published in book form by NYU Press but available on line in an open access version through Media Commons Press.

Who owns the scholarship? Does the funder own the scholarship? The National Institutes of Health require open access for federally funded research. However, the briefer the interval between the acceptance for publication and its open access, the greater the erosion in library subscriptions to journals, a model that is likely to migrate from medical and nursing research to the humanities. Author ownership is also compromised. Increasingly squeezed financially university presses are selling their entire journal lists to digital aggregators in order to subsidize book publication (whose sales numbers are declining).  A rebirth of the author may mark the death of the editor.

Peer review, Wheeler noted, is the bedrock value-added of scholarly publishing. In sciences peer review begins at an initial stage (reviews of applications for research funding), but in humanities it occurs only after the scholarly article has been composed. In the humanities, peer reviewers are unpaid and often unacknowledged or professionally unrewarded (not contributing toward tenure or promotion, and indeed taking up time and effort that might be spent more profitably in advancing one’s own research and publication). As a result, there is an increasing unwillingness on the part of specialists to serve as peer reviewers.  It is also difficult to secure reviewers to write book reviews, despite the longstanding value that reviews add to scholarly conversations (not to mention, to scholars’ books’ sales).  Wheeler also suggested a generation gap: Junior scholars, whom we have shielded from unrewarded work while they develop their tenure portfolios, may now be less likely to accept these professional duties once they have been tenured.  Lost is a professionalism that transcends personal professional gain.

Wheeler concluded her address with several questions: How can we remake our systems to encourage the younger scholar to accept these responsibilities? If, as Fitzpatrick suggests, our current modes of peer review will hobble us, should we adopt post-publication review (the emerging model of the sciences)? And what about the significant scholarly work of reading, which is time consuming (and competes with other professional work)? Are we witnessing the disappearance of our scholarly capacity to read?

Following Wheeler’s address, a discussion with audience ensued that raised other questions and concerns. How can junior scholars learn to write if published articles are not peer reviewed exemplars of scholarly writing?  Might we institute as part of earning scholarly credentials in order to publish a requirement to participate in the peer review process?

The monetizing economy of the natural and applied sciences is now driving all institutional decisions about scholarship. To make matters worse, tenure committees often only read evaluations of the scholar’s work, not read the scholarship itself.

This discussion continued after the session during the annual business meeting of the CELJ. On the final day of the MLA meeting, CELJ will host a panel discussion on the related topic, Ranks, Brands and the Editorial Process, on which my contribution, “In Media Res: Browsing, Grazing, and Googleizing Scholarly Knowledge,” is available here.

Later this day . . .

No attendance at MLA is complete without a pilgrimage to the exhibit hall of book publishers. Alas, this year it is much diminished, held in the Marriott’s cozy exhibit hall instead of the Philadelphia Convention Center’s vast exhibition arena. Fewer publishers, perhaps, but also clearly smaller exhibit booths for even the major publishers, who typically in the past would have occupied considerable landscape. A reflection of the recession, perhaps, but also the erosion in scholarly publishing, and even trade publishing. While there I ran into the novelist Sarah Schulman, whose work I discussed in my 2005 book, AIDS and American Apocalypticism.

Later still . . .

I’m now attending another session, arranged by the MLA Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, entitled Book History Matters, whose three presenters (Meredith McGill, Rutgers; Patricia Crain, NYU; Martin Brückner, U Delaware) examined the material conditions of the production and use of the high tech medium of another century, the mass-produced book.

TheLongView began two years ago this week (thanks to my brother Jim Long’s birthday gift to me of the domain name and a  Christmas gift later in the year of the Web server and blog design and setup) with my blogging on the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago in 2007.

So like salmon we return annually to the intellectual spawning ground from around North America and other parts of the world.

Having visited my family in Maryland for the Christmas holiday, I traveled north today from DC to Philly via Amtrak. I was fortunate to find a seat and luggage space and a congenial seatmate, a retired lawyer from Connecticut’s Ernst & Young who has retired with his wife to Williamsburg, Virginia, but was taking the train to New Jersey to visit a son, who is a train engineer. His son’s childhood passion for trains never abated, so he is successful at something he loves to do. A very fortunate man.

Between Wilmington and Philadelphia, I spotted Dr. Robert Scholnick (founding director of American Studies, College of William & Mary) walking down the aisle, so we chatted for a while until he, his wife Sylvia and I got off in Philly. Bob and I share some mutual interests in medical humanities, and he has also been a mentor and career coach for me. Bob is presenting a paper later this evening at a session I will attend.

Got settled into my room at the Loews Hotel, a high camp art-deco lodging, whose structure began its life as a banking and financial services building.

Attended a session on using anthologies in American literature courses, which included my UConn colleague Sharon Harris, the new director of the Humanities Institute. Interesting for its discussion of using free on-line or other digital texts, the cultural politics of anthology selections, and the now exorbitant economics of paying for permission to use selections in anthologies. Met Paul Lauter, a hero to teachers in American studies, the lead editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature that I have used for many years. Lauter and colleagues at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) will be hosting a conference on anthologies later in the spring, where I will present a paper on nineteenth-century friendship albums as self-composed manuscript anthologies.

Took an early dinner. To warm the heart, a Crown Royal Manhattan. Main course of roasted half chicken, diced potatoes in cream sauce, roasted tomato, and asparagus, with a glass of champagne. (Governor Rell: I am paying for most of this conference out of pocket!) Finished off with a bracing cappuccino. Waitress asks how the meal is; I reply, Honey, if it were any better, I’d have to shoot myself. A stroll about the city hall square, the city hall bell sonorously tolling the hour.

Now off to a late evening session.

Later:

Attended the panel session on which Bob Scholnick spoke, Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Imperial Contexts, which also included papers by Victor Goldgel-Carballo and Sheshalatha Reddy. I was struck by echoes of early twenty-first century anxieties about digital textuality (particularly World-Wide Web and other on-line documents and discourses) with analogous new technologies of publication in the early twentieth and early nineteenth centuries.

Also attending the session was College of William & Mary PhD grad, John Miller (mentored by Bob Scholnick), who taught as an adjunct in the English Department at Thomas Nelson Community College when I was there and who is now at Longwood University.

As it is now nearly the eleventh hour . . . so to bed.

David Brooks invites us to turn off the TV (or turn off the iPhone, the Wii, the iPod, YouTube, &c.) in order to read a long-form published essay, in his annual Sidney Awards.

Among the topics healthcare leads the list, but also American (in)justice, local DC politics (in the person of Marion Barry) and Afghanistan.

(A paper to be presented at a panel of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, Modern Language Association Annual Convention, 30 December 2009)

As a professor of English appointed to a school of nursing and its Center for Nursing Scholarship, I wear several hats. A writing coach and editor, I support faculty members’ writing goals; I research the facilitators and inhibitors of faculty scholarly productivity; and I do work in medical humanities, cultural representations of the body. This talk could be subtitled, “Four Propositions in Search of a Thesis.”

Proposition Number 1. The medium is the message. The medium in question is the aptly named Web browser, a multimedia software that tends to efface the material differences among, a) the database and its abstract, b) the peer-reviewed article in the learned journal, c) the monograph or book, and d) the Web page embedded in a Web site. Frequently, when using a search engine like Google, the searcher lands in media res, in the middle of a Web page or a Google book or a journal issue. What is lost is context, continuum, connections, the carefully crafted thematic structure of a journal’s guest editor, the arc of an extended argument of a book, sometimes even the identity of the author. Not simply missing the forest for the trees, we may miss the forest for the leaves. If we download one tune at a time from iTunes, we can also download one article or one chapter at a time. While we can no longer be the polymaths of the past or the Anthony Grafton of today, a comprehensive view of the landscape is not any less important.

Number 2. The medium is the massage. Who of us has not experienced the cyber sublime, the Internet ecstasy in which sense of time is suspended, the dizzying accumulation of Web links and search results and RefWorks citations? However, this state of bliss, evidence perhaps of our insatiable Western hunger for distraction and acquisition, may sometimes impede scholarly productivity, or at least that is the hypothesis I derive from a 2001 study of nursing faculty, conducted by Barbara Schloman, finding that, for the group reporting a low level of computer-related experience, there was greater likelihood that the respondents published, and there was no correlation between high use of the World-Wide Web and publishing.

Number 3. Click. With a single click of the mouse, I can access data about data. I can learn how often my work has been cited by other scholars (but not necessarily accurately), how often my article has been viewed or downloaded (but not necessarily read), where my book ranks in sales. The back-office analytics of the Wordpress blog I edit for nurse writers and scholars tells me how many daily visitors come, what Web sites referred them to us, which posts they click on (and maybe read), which external links they click on, and which search terms they use. In this Golden Age of Bibliometrics, we still need to ask, what do the data mean and what is their value? What we need, with a tip of the hat to Rita Felski, is a more robust phenomenology of scholarly reading.

Finally, Proposition Number 4. The message is the metaphor. Historically we have framed our learned labor in figurative tropes, the majority of which for centuries have been related to eating. Like Peter Comestor, the twelfth-century theologian so nicknamed because he devoured books, we chew over a problem, ruminate, assimilate, consume, absorb, digest. Alimentary, my dear Watson. However, the Web browser encourages hasty nibbling, grazing. And it has appropriated a new metaphor: the rhizome, the creeping plants that send roots and shoots from their nodes. The Internet is rhizomatic with endlessly branching pathways, a funhouse of the mind. Its bookmarks, bookmarklets, and blogs mark the return of the commonplace book, the compilation, the florilegium. However, as Anthony Grafton suggests of the rhetorical commonplace book: “like a good sausage machine, it rendered all texts, however dissimilar in origin or style, into a uniform body of spicy links that could add flavor to any meal—and whose origins did not always bear thinking about when one consumed them.”

In conclusion, through these propositions I am not arguing that Google makes us stupid, but that networked information technologies may disrupt, sometimes in harmful ways, the valuable habitus involved in learned labor.

Works Consulted

Auletta, Ken. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Borgman, Christine L. From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

—. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

Borgman, Christine L., ed. Scholarly Communication and Bibliometrics. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990.

Bowker, Geoffrey C. Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.

Collini, Stefan. “Impact on Humanities: Researchers Must Take a Stand Now or Be Judged and Rewarded as Salesmen.” Times Literary Supplement, 13 Nov. 2009. 18-19.

Darnton, Robert. “Google and the New Digital Future.” New York Review of Books, 17 Dec. 2009,  82-84.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus. Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 3-25.

Felski, Rita. “Remember the Reader.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 Dec. 2008: B7.

Grafton, Anthony. What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

—. Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Hall, Gary. Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Hauptman, Robert. Documentation: A History and Critique of Attribution, Commentary, Glosses, Marginalia, Notes, Bibliographies, Works-Cited Lists, and Citation Indexing and Analysis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

“The Internet is Rhizomatic.” A-Website, 2002, http://www.a-website.org/mnemosyne/no_signposts/02rhizome.html

Lamont, Michèle. How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

McNeely, Ian F., and Lisa Wolverton. Reinventing Knowledge from Alexandria to the Internet. New York: Norton, 2008.

Novak, Marcos. “transArchitecture.” Telepolis, 9 Dec. 1996, http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/6/6069/1.html

Polastron, Lucien X. The Great Digitization and the Quest to Know Everything. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006.

Shrum, Wesley, Joel Genuth, and Ivan Chompalov. Structures of Scientific Collaboration. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.