The Long View

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.

One of the early signs of dementia is the loss of short-term memory, forgetting what you recentlydid or said.

So it is with great concern that I note the Republican leadership’s recent criticism of the Democratic majority in the Senate. Republican minority leadership has condemned Democrats’ procedural management of the Senate healthcare reform bill, including strict roll call deadlines and late-night filibuster cloture votes.

The Republicans apparently have forgotten their own machinations when they were in the majority earlier this decade. Coming to mind particularly was their extending a Medicare drug benefit, which entailed an express-train vote late at night (about which the Dems complained loudly).

The Republican leadership urgently needs a neurological evaluation before the condition worsens.

In an NY Times op-ed jeremiad about East Coast ignorance of the West Coast, Timothy Egan’s “Clueless in Costco” observes:

These are all minor annoyances, mind you, in a world with daily reminders that an embittered, small-hearted senator from Connecticut can hold up health care for millions, or some people would rather read a “book” by Hulk Hogan than a short story by Sherman Alexie.

The “small-hearted senator from Connecticut” is “independent” (he used to be a Democrat before he lost the Democratic primary [but won the general election] because of his single-minded support for Bush’s War in Iraq) Joe Lieberman.

Much speculation now concerning Lieberman’s flip-flopping on a public health care option, which he supported before he opposed it. The speculation is the subject of Gail Collins’s column in today’s Times, “Sorry, Senator Kerry.”

Collins observes:

I have decided to start a rumor that it all goes back to the 2004 presidential race, when Lieberman not only failed to win any primaries, but was also bitten by either a rabid muskrat or a vampire disguised as a moose. Other than that, my favorite explanation comes from Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, who theorized that Lieberman was able to go from Guy Who Wants to Expand Medicare to Guy Who Would Rather Kill Health Care Than Expand Medicare because he “isn’t actually all that smart.”

Perhaps, Collins suggests, it is a quality that I have observed in powerful men, the boundless capacity for holding a grudge. (Ask me some time about my encounter with former Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder.) As Collins relates:

I used to cover Lieberman when he was the majority leader of the State Senate in Connecticut. We got along very well, except for one interview, during which he talked about working for J.F.K., and how he kept a Mass card from Robert Kennedy’s funeral to remind him of the principles to which he had dedicated his career. Showing me the card, he remarked casually that he hadn’t looked at it for some time. I wrote an article using the neglected Kennedy card as a metaphor for Lieberman’s fall from his old ideals into the pragmatic politics of a party leader. He was outraged and wounded, and I believe I apologized. Taking back the apology now.

No Lieber lost there.

The Times announces that Comcast has purchased NBC Universal from General Electronic (”We Bring Good Things to Life” . . . including parts for nuclear bombs), thus  “Reshaping the TV Industry.”  Whatever that means.

Before G.E. could sell its controlling stake in the media company, it had to buy out the stake of Vivendi, the French media conglomerate.

It’s all part of the unraveling and reraveling of the failed business policies of media moguls (the myths of Growth Is Good; Go Global; King Content; and Cult of Convergence), which are ably exposed by Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwold, and Ava Seave in “Moguls’ New Clothes,” in the October 2009 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The returns on investment of Big Media have been dismal, but you wouldn’t learn that from the news media, which are now mostly an extension of the media conglomerates’ public relations departments.

In that same issue, Mark Bowden’s “The Story Behind the Story” examines how the evisceration of responsible journalism (wholesale layoffs of reporters in a declining economy) has created a vaccuum filled by fake reporting by political ideologues.

When NPR obsesses about the Tiger Woods car crash and cites the National Enquirer as a news source, you know it’s all over.

As any social scientist knows, the responses you receive from survey participants depend in part on how you phrase the question.

The New York Times now reports (“Does the Public Care About the Public Option?” by Katharine Q. Seelye) on several surveys indicating that a majority of Americans favor the provision of government supported health insurance for those citizens with no other option. That’s a “public option”; just don’t call it “public option.” The majority of Americans supports the concept but doesn’t want the “public option.” You can understand their confusion; significant numbers of congressional representatives and senators are similarly confused.

House Republican minority leader John Boehner has indicated that he has never met or heard from anyone supporting a “public option.” He needs to get out of the tanning booth and onto the streets.

According to the Times:

It is only when surveys ask about individual elements of the legislation that the public option receives high marks.

For example, a nationwide Quinnipiac poll conducted shortly after the House passed its bill asked: “Do you support or oppose giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan that would compete with private plans?” Fifty seven percent said they supported the option, while 35 were opposed.

CBS News found in August that if the word “Medicare” was part of the question — would respondents support a government-run plan “similar to Medicare, that people age 65 and older receive” — support jumped by 7 percent.

. . . 

Support soars if respondents are told that the plan would be limited mainly to those without insurance.

A mid-November poll by ABC News and The Washington Post found that 53 percent of people supported “having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans.” But support jumped to 72 percent when they were told that the public option would be limited to people who were not covered by their employers, Medicare or Medicaid.

. . . In early November, CBS News asked this question for a “60 Minutes”/Vanity Fair survey: “Could you confidently explain what exactly the public option is to someone who didn’t know?” Fully two-thirds of respondents said no. Only one-quarter said yes.

Two front-page articles in a recent edition of the Sunday New York Times (15 November 2009) caught my eye.

Robert Pear’s  ”In House Record, Many Spoke With One Voice: The Lobbyists” observes that, “In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies. E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbysits drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.”

Below the fold, Winnie Hu’s “Selling Lesson Plans Online, Teachers Raise Cash and Questions,” discloses that “thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for excercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.”

Appropriating the intellectual property of another is probably the second oldest professional practice. It is reassuring to learn that teachers are taking their intellectual property seriously; there would likely be fewer “questions” if the faculty published their intellectual property in a print medium, like a textbook or handbook for teachers. However, whether selling online one lesson plan at a time (like new-media iTunes) or selling one textbook at a time (like old-media Harcourt, the publisher of a textbook that I co-authored in the 1980s), it amounts to the same thing, with teachers realizing a greater margin of profit by taking it on line.

Disconcerting, however, is the notion that our Congressional hirelings lack sufficient curiosity and intelligence (no surprise there) or even lack staff (tomorrow’s cable news pundits) with sufficient curiosity and intelligence to write the representatives’ own speeches.

Welcome to the golden Age of Plagiarism.

One of early twentieth-century America’s literary critiques of capitalism (hard to believe nowadays, isn’t it, that serious authors and readers might critique our economic system), Frank Norris’s The Octopus, has as its ironic tag line, “whatever the traffic will bear.”

The invisible hand of the market, we are told with mind-numbing repetition and diminishing credibility, makes rational decisions about value.

Maybe.

Consider a recent print advert from Bauman Rare Books, which features these valuations of twentieth-century rare editions:

$3800-An American Life, by Ronald Reagan (1st ed, inscribed by the author)

$3600-Collected Poems, by Robert Frost (limited 1st ed, signed by the author)

$3500-Capitalism, by Ayn Rand (limited 1st ed, signed by the author)

So an autographed book by one of the more significant American poets of the century barely trumps a signed screed by a mind-numbing polemicist and turgic prose writer, and is trumped by the vapid narrative of a vacuous ex-president?

A prominent entertainment “industry” figure is blackmailed by a man with a film “treatment” that describes the prominent entertainment “industry” figure’s misdeeds.

Robert Joel Halderman’s “Letterman”?

Well, I had in mind Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, based on the book by Michael Tolkin (who also wrote the screenplay).

Halderman’s derivative plot (and considerably less serious misdeeds than in the Altman/Tolkin collaboration), however, did not end as neatly for both players.

The Obama Administration has announced the end of another  W. Bush-era boondoggle: A missile system that didn’t work, for a military threat that did not exist.

 The anti-missile-missile system to be deployed in Poland the Czech Republic didn’t work. (Think we could move the savings into healthcare?) The alleged threat was Iranian ICBMs . . . which don’t exist.

Before Right Wingnuts get their Spandex thongs in too much of a bunch, note that it was Pentagon generals that stepped up to put an end to this madness. According to the Washington Post:

Call it another revolt of the generals. More than 13 years ago, the nation’s military leaders told civilian defense officials they wanted to limit spending on missile defenses and to emphasize the protection of forces deployed overseas over defense of the American homeland against a long-range missile threat.

Last week, after a lengthy internal Pentagon review and against the backdrop of new limits on overall military spending, the generals again threw their weight behind a relative contraction of the effort to defend against long-range missile attacks. They cited needed budgetary savings and more immediate threats in demanding faster work to protect overseas forces and bases against shorter-range attack.

Maybe we could install a similar system in Wasilla, Alaska?

Pay no attention to the dismal (and rising) unemployment rate.

 Fed chair Ben Bernanke has announced that it is likely that the Great Recession has ended.

And now last Sunday’s New York Times Style Magazine (Men’s Fashion Fall 2009) has confirmed it.

Among the luxuries available to us:

Gotho-Edwardo-Victorian frock coats and top hats.

Sheer fabric shirting.

De luxe dog tags.

A duffle bag that can be customized with seven different stripe combinations (for a mere $1,495).

Tanning eye goggles for $450. (Does a free skin cancer screening come with that?)

There was this heartening news: The return of glen plaids!

Find a classic style, remain faithful to it, and the world will regularly return to you.

The Times recently reminded us of one of the timeless films from the 1070s, Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of 10, a representation of the macrocosm and microcosm. The film begins with a camera hovering over a couple’s picnic on the Chicago lakeside, a frame 1 meter wide (10 to the power of 0 meters), then zooming out incrementally by one power of 10, until the view finally reaches 100 million light years (10 to the power of 24 meters). The scene then zooms back until we see the couple, when the camera zooms in on the man’s hand then the microscopic level and, eventually, subatomic view until we are brought into the protons of the carbon nucleus of the man’s tissue cell, 0.000001 angstroms or 10 to the power of minus 16).

It does put things in perspective.

“Who is the liar . . .?” queries the First Epistle of John, which came to mind last night during President Obama’s speech to both houses of Congress and to the nation, when it was interrupted by at one point by House Republican from South Carolina, Joe Wilson, who shouted quite audibly, “You lie!”

Ah, South Carolina, the cradle of Republican mendacity. Segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond’s covering up his having fathered a child with an underage black domestic in the family home. Governor Mark Sanford’s covering up his international adultery (at taxpayer expense).

And South Carolina Republicans of the Rovian persuasion famously smeared the presidential primary campaign of straight-talking Senator John McCain by using push polling phone calls that suggested McCain had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman. (Sounds like the Strom Thurmond story.) If a South Carolina Republican won’t join a truth teller, he’s gotta beat him.

I once visited Columbia, South Carolina, to present a paper at a conference hosted by University of South Carolina, and partook of the local color by visiting Maurice Bessinger’s Piggie Park, the home of a tart mustard-based barbecue. Along the top of the building a large sign read, “Jesus Christ Savior of the World Make Him Yours Today.” What I later learned was that Bessinger is a professional racist (not just the amateur on-again, off-again variety) and defender of the morality of slavery. Bessinger also has views on constitutional matters: “As I am lowering the federal flag on my properties and raising the state flag I’m also raising the Confederate flag as a companion flag, but in a subordinate position. The state flag is the flag that represents our highest sovereignty. The Confederate flag is to both remind people that Southerners wrote the Constitution and that Southerners continue to be its most loyal defenders, plus the Confederate flag is recognized as the universal symbol of resistance to centralized tyranny.”

At any rate, Bessinger seems not to partake of South Carolina Republican mendacity; just good ole South Carolina self-righteousness.

Given that there have been so many lies perpetrated by the Republicans during the healthcare debate (one hardly knows where to begin) and such bad faith on their part throughout, I ask again: Who is the liar?

In this video, Canadian physicians and nurses describe the real Canadian healthcare system to Americans (not the cartoon Canadian health care portrayed some American media and public discourse).

American viewers, accustomed to American bombast, hyperbolic rhetoric, rants, and apocalyptic jeremiads will have to adjust their TV sets accordingly in order to view the modest understatements of Canadians.

All of the recent hoopla about the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival in 1969 (if everyone who claimed to have been there were actually there, it would have required the entire state of New York to accommodate them) had me thinking about where I was in the “Summer of Love.” I don’t remember, except that I do remember feeling sad when Judy Garland died that summer (and unbeknownst to me, Gay Liberation’s “Bunker Hill”–the Stonewall riots–followed within days). The only person whom I’ve ever known who was actually at Woodstock is Patty Gilbertson, my former opera buddy.

I was not at Woodstock. I was listening to jazz. I probably went to the Laurel Jazz Festival that summer with our neighbor Dan Gaither, the first black man that I knew who was not a janitor or domestic. (He once told my parents about a patronizing white person’s characterization of his and his wife Florence’s home: “It is so clean you could eat off the floors.” His commentary: “We don’t eat off the floor; we eat off dishes.”) He was proud to have been descended from slaves of the Gaithers of Gaithersburg, Maryland. He was a Republican when one could still be black and a member of the party of Lincoln. “Liberal Republican” was not yet utterly oxymoronic. I felt like the only white boy at the Laurel Jazz Festival, which was a salutary experience. That night, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis (utterly ignoring the audience), and Roberta Flack.

The summer before, on a trip to Massachusetts to visit my father’s sister and her family, I persuaded my father to take me to the Newport Jazz Festival. It was, I realize now, a ghost of its former glory (celebrated a decade before in the equally wraith-like musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, a confection called High Society, starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong).

Frankly, I don’t remember if we went to the Newport Jazz Festival on Friday afternoon (when, according to the printed program that I still have, we would have heard Rufus Harley, The Clark Terry Big Band, Elvin Jones Trio, Archie Shepp Quintet, Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, and Sadao Watanbe) or Saturday afternoon (featuring Duke Ellington, Benny Carter, Montego Joe Septet, Tal Farlow Quartet, Sonny Criss, and Vi Redd). Since I’d already seen Ellington and band in concert at home in DC at the old Watergate amphitheatre, it was probably Friday afternoon. I was at the time enamored of an album by Dizzy and Paul Quinichette, The New Continent, a complex orchestrally arranged suite for big band, composed by Lalo Schifrin, best known as the creator of the Mission Impossible theme, but whose jazz riffs on baroque music, the album The Dissection And Reconstruction Of Music From The Past As Performed By The Inmates Of Lalo Schifrin’s Demented Ensemble As A Tribute To The Memory Of The Marquis De Sade,  whetted my appetite for classical music.

I came to jazz through my parents, musically omnivorous, who took me to free concerts in DC, and by listening at night on my old Philco radio to the soothing voice of Felix Grant, the Album Sound ’til midnight.

“Bliss it was in that time to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” –William Wordsworth

He’s big. He’s obnoxious.  He’s Barney.

No, I’m not talking about the PBS children’s TV icon who sings, “I love you, you love me, we’re just one big family.”

I’m talking about the congressman from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, who, when confronted by a anti-healthcare-reform right-wingnut at a Dartmouth town hall meeting, gave better than he got.

The healthcare denialist characterized Democratic reform plans as “Nazi” health care and held aloft a poster of President Obama’s face featuring a Hitlerian moustache.

In response to her question from the floor, Barney replied that he would answer her question with a question, “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”

He described her characterization as “vile, contemptible nonsense. . . Ma’m trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to have a conversation with a dining room table.”

Straight talk from a gay congressman. Video below.