Turducken

They kiss? Eeeeew ...

2012-02-13T00:40:00.001-05:00

I'm not necessarily surprised when people disagree about whether a book is good or not. Sometimes, I understand their objections (or its appeal) without agreeing. And then there are those times when I wonder if they even read the same book I did.

I just finished N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, a fantasy novel about a young woman who, after the death of her disinherited mother, is called to the capital to be named one of three heirs to the empire. It was, in my opinion, an engrossing book, novel more in its mythology than in the storyline or voice.

But plenty of reviewers disagreed. One complaint I saw reiterated was that it started off as a fine fantasy novel but then veered off and became, ugh, a romance. This is ridiculous on several levels. First, there is a kiss early on in the book. That should lead an attentive reader to expect more of that later. Second, it wasn't a romance in the girl+guy=happy coupledom. There is some nookie, yes. There is some love, yes - but remember that "love" doesn't just mean romantic love. It means loving your mom, loving your family, loving your God, even loving humankind. Let's just say the love in this book is of the more complicated kind. Third, for goodness sakes, if spec fic readers can handle Heinlein, they ought to be able to handle this. Does sex from the lady's angle have cooties or something?

The other baffling complaint I saw more than once was that this novel was written in a pretentious, confusing style. Based on this, I was expecting something like James Joyce. Instead, what I found was an almost completely straightforward first-person narrative. There is an occasional flashback, which shouldn't confound any reader over the age of 6. The only narrative device that was remotely non-khaki was a series of conversations that occasionally interrupt the main narrative. It's not entirely clear at first who the main character is talking to in these. Kuh-razy, I know, right? Not. Orson Scott Card did essentially the same thing in Ender's Game, and I don't recall anyone saying that book was treading in pretentious literary waters.

I could speculate on why the book drew some of this reaction, but I won't. Your takeaway: Some people are dumb. This is a pretty good book. That is all.

Beater down!

2012-02-03T19:41:00.001-05:00

Twisted, a photo by TheTurducken on Flickr.

i realized the brown sugar was slightly hard, but I didn't know it was THAT hard.

How are those goals coming?

2012-01-30T18:00:00.000-05:00

It's been something over a month since I posted a list of goals to achieve before 40 on here. Not surprisingly, I haven't achieved any of them yet. Am I working towards them?

Be able to walk across a slackline: I'm waiting for warmer weather on this one.
Do macaco: I told my mestre yesterday that I want to learn macaco, and he said we'd work on it. But I need to be doing more on backbends on my own, like dropbacks.
Be fluent in Portuguese: Listening to a conversation among native speakers the other day showed me how far from fluent I am. I can pick out a lot of words, but not follow the conversation.
Travel to Brazil: We're supposed to be doing that as a capoeira group this summer. I have the time and am working towards the money.
Have a novel published: Getting writing done.
Do the Annapurna Circuit: Nothing at all. I figure the Brazil expense is enough for this year, so it can wait.
Hold a handstand for a minute unaided: Still going to handstand class weekly, but making very slow progress. I'm not sure if it was heartening or disheartening when our teacher said the other day that it took her 7 years before she could tuck-up.
Successfully traverse the swing-a-ring: Another one I'm waiting for more cooperative weather on. I did go out and buy a chin-up bar, but, alas, my walls are too thick for me to mount it on the door. I should be doing more things like push-ups and dips.

Teh feminists got to me! Oh noes!

2012-01-21T10:02:00.002-05:00

After reading Nicola Griffith's Ammonite and Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, I'm totally ready to go join a fightin' lesbian commune.

Circumnavigating Central Park

2012-01-16T14:25:00.003-05:00

Walking her dog, a photo by TheTurducken on Flickr.

I've signed up to do a circumnavigation of Manhattan with a local hiking meetup in April. That's 32 miles, paved and mostly flat. While I'm in reasonable shape from doing other things, I've really only done two hikes since July, so I need to get back into hiking form.

Also, I figured I better practice circumnavigating things, just to be safe.

So on Sunday I decided to walk around the perimeter of Central Park. That's 6 miles, plus .5 each way to the park.

It's an interesting walk. Of course, you can see the park on one side, starting from the North Woods in my neighborhood, down past the reservoir, around past the zoo, back up to the Meer, and home. On the other side is mostly residences and a few nonprofits. There are very few businesses - nearly all on the north edge, which doesn't have the prestige of the other parkside properties, plus hot dog carts. The rest are expensive condos, museums, the Dwight School, and a few churches.

The advantage of urban "hiking" is that you don't really need a pack. Thirsty? Buy hot chocolate from a vendor. Tired? Use your metrocard to get home. But it's nearly impossible to find a bathroom on that route, especially in the winter. You can't exactly go behind a tree, even though there are plenty of those, unless you want to be arrested for indecent exposure.

Even in my weakened, debilitated state, 7 miles wasn't a challenge, although the 20-something temperatures were. It was too cold for my Five Fingers - not because of the thin soles, but I honestly think because of the toe separation. Only my toes got chilled; I assume it's the same reason gloves aren't as warm as mittens. But I don't own any tennis shoes or hiking boots at the moment.

So, next week, closer to 10 miles.

Loose threads

2012-01-15T23:12:00.002-05:00

On working toward your goals.

What are you looking forward to reading this year?

A great article about what it means to be categorized in a particular genre, which was obviously on my mind in my previous post. (Only point I might pick at: "If you enjoyed "Visit From the Good Squad," you might like to read more about the music scene in America in the 90s." Good lord, that's the last thing I want to read anything about.)

Typewriters and India.

Professors doing yoga.

Space needs women

2012-01-14T18:49:00.003-05:00

A batch of books on my hold list all came available at once: Cinder by Marissa Meyer, Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (the second Hunger Games Book), and Among Others by Jo Walton. The first two books are young adult (YA) and the third is about a young adult, although it is ostensibly aimed towards regular adults. A lot of the interesting stuff by women in the speculative fiction space these days is being done in YA, which is different from it was back when I was the target market. For example, there is sex now, and sex that isn't automatically used as a warning about teen pregnancy or Something Awful.

Still, there are YA books that don't really hold up to adult reading as well (I'd say Cinder belongs here) and those that do (the Harry Potter series). Then there are adult books about teenagers that can be enjoyably read by young adults (Sunshine) and those that probably shouldn't or can't (Hogg comes to mind).

Walton's book is an oddity, though. I should mention that her Farthing is quite brilliant, and I would recommend starting there. None of her books are YA, but as I read Among Others, I couldn't figure out why it wasn't marketed as such. It's the story of a 15-year-old girl who, after her twin sister dies and she runs away from her mother, ends up in a posh English boarding school. Our heroine - Welsh, bookish, and crippled by the event that killed her sister - is an outcast in a place where social success means adhering closely to conventional mores and the school's culture, which revolves around sports. Eventually (spoiler alert!) she makes friends with one sympathetic adult at the school and finds free-thinking friends outside of it, including a young man who becomes her boyfriend.

The book reminded me strongly of Madeleine L'Engle's And Both Were Young.* I highly doubt plagiarism has anything to do with it; it's more a matter of what a certain kind of school was (or is?) like for an bookish, aspiring writer. Unlike ABWY, where the heroine secretly develops a talent for skiing, Walton's protagonist was a sports aficionado before being injured, and her taste in books runs to SF.

There's an irony in both novels that the heroine, who is into books and doesn't whip out her compact the moment she leaves the campus grounds, who looks down upon her superficial peers for their boy-craziness, ends up finding true teen love - at least, a relationship that is still happily intact on the final page. Because I guess women need men? In some ways, Among Others has a strange tone of misogyny. Our heroine's boyfriend seems like a jerk to me, even after the "misunderstanding" that makes him an outsider has been cleared up to her satisfaction. I couldn't tell, based on the first-person narrative, if we were supposed to see through her rose-colored vision of him or whether the author intended for us to cheer them on.

The book reinforces, unintentionally I think, some gender cliches. Witches are female-only, and, whether they are trying to become evil queens or simply keep their conventional lives squarely conventional, their effects are bad. Non-witches are just conventional and uninteresting. Men are either misunderstood (her boyfriend) or oppressed by women (her dad). Fantasy is the province of women, and sci-fi that of men, and in the end, she chooses the latter. It's not quite as neat as all that: Fantasy aligns with women, but she loves (male) Tolkien, and we can see her nascent recognition of sexism at work in the SF book club she joins. Then there's the fact that her father attempts to sexually assault her at one point. This doesn't seem to affect her relationship with him - maybe after your mother has tried to kill you, it wouldn't seem like much - but it didn't encourage me to join Team Masculine.

The thing is, having read some of Walton's other books and many of her columns on Tor.com, I am quite certain Walton is not sexist or trying to prop up tired gender stereotypes. And when I did a brief survey of book reviews (one Google search-results page deep), I didn't see anyone else mentioning any of this. They focused on whether she nailed the voice of a teenager, whether not having read the SF novels she voraciously devours is a problem, and whether the plot falls a little flat. (My answers? Yes, probably, and yes again.) Which leaves me not knowing what to do with my observations. To what extent are we supposed to see more than the heroine does and reach different conclusions?** I am a reasonably observant reader, but hardly more perspicacious than WaPo reviewers or fans geeking out at the exhaustive sci-fi backcatalog listed in the book's pages.

[Insert something about Stanley Fish and reader-response theory here, just so you know I'm down like that.]

Seriously, though, the book left me confounded - not in intellectually pleasurable way of solving an author's puzzle, but unsure of whether the author was in control of her material.

*If you see the cover I linked to and have read the book, you'll probably be enraged. Why on earth do publishers put pictures of people that are clearly contemporary on novels that took place over 50 years ago? But notice what happens if you "Look Inside" at the cover.
**The only review I saw that delved into that vein at all only suggested that perhaps the "magic" was all in her imagination, since there was no proof anyone else could see it. This struck me as way off-base, since her boyfriend does see the fairies.

News from the MLA

2012-01-10T09:45:00.005-05:00

News flash: Faculty jobs are scarce in the humanities. If there's one thing a humanities PhD can't do, it's be picky about institutional type, location, etc. So, as in many fields, the bar is creeping up. Community colleges want you to have teaching experience. Universities want strong publications. But what the article doesn't explicitly point out is that, since you'll have to desperately grab any job you can, a doctoral student really needs to do both of these things to have a shot at a job.

Also discussed at the MLA was shortening the time to graduation, which in the humanities is currently nine years. While it's the kind of thing almost everyone claims to be in favor of, how, exactly, is that compatible with the job market requiring more from candidates?

The kind of PhD students I knew who got out in four-ish years with stellar research were smart, worked very hard, and were the kind of people who didn't mind slotting themselves exactly in to their advisors' ideas. Does that model even work in the humanities, where people work much more independently, and do we want to encourage creating clones? On the other hand, the kind of PhD students I knew who got out in four-ish years with extensive teaching experience … don't exist.

Something is going to have to change in the system of producing and hiring faculty, but what, exactly? Right now, it's not much different than the production of pro football players. There's a larger supply than demand. While we excoriate young people who gamble on an NFL future and laud doctoral candidates, frankly, I don't see much difference between the 18-year-old with no football career or other skills and the 30-year-old with no full-time academic career and $100,000 of debt. They're both stuck, one unlikely to find a job that will put food on the table, and the other to find a job that will enable her to pay off the debt before her own kids are college-age.

Readers and writers

2012-01-09T18:49:00.001-05:00

I'm reading A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, and it's one of those books that depresses me profoundly. This, I am quite certain, was not Egan's intention; or, at least, the causes of my anxiety are not the ones she was endeavoring to achieve.

In the novel, we get to see the main characters, who have grown up to be successful if troubled adults, as their younger selves. Bennie and his high school friends do things like join punk bands, dye their hair unnatural colors, smoke pot, and have tortured relationships. In other words, they are the kids that I thought were way cool back in my own high school days.

This was the early 1990s. I suppose I had part of the act down - a fine collection of KMFDM, a pair of 18-eye Doc Martens, the requisite black-and-white striped tights, and a copy of the Death Sandman comic. But my hair was its natural blond, I didn't smoke anything at all, and I certainly wasn't in any bands. Sometimes I thought about starting an underground school paper; instead, I edited the literary magazine. I do have, to my credit, a few copies left of the comic book three of us made, which featured a gender-balanced, multiracial cast, starring a pair of alternatively-styled friends on a hospital adventure. I'm sure it's quite the collector's item.

Yeah, I wanted to dye my hair blue, but my parents didn't allow it, so I didn't. Besides, I worked after school at the local newspaper. I had no desire to smoke anything at all. I only skipped class twice, and once was with my parents' permission - they were smart, I'll give them that: Let her skip school to buy Nirvana tickets, and she'll never ask for a nose ring … And the one time I wore my Docs on a hike, I conceded afterwards that they were inappropriate footwear. Real Goths Up Trees would never admit that. My friends were mostly other good students who participated in decidedly uncool activities like quiz bowl and math team. One was a cheerleader. Some of them even prayed together during class breaks.

No, I was never one of those cool kids. Not like Egan's characters, and (I assume by way of "write about what you know" plus jealous projection) presumably she was. Which is probably why she's a writer today, and I'm a management professor. Sure, China Mieville got a PhD, but it was in Marxist economics, and he proceeded to promptly not use it. It's a little-examined tenet of my worldview that writers necessarily have had interesting lives - you know, so-and-so "has worked as an emu wrangler, circus contortionist, food taster, seasonal park ranger, receptionist at a buggy whip factory, and ankle masseuse."

And what about those cool kids, the real ones I actually knew? Some of them grew up to be soccer moms. Some are community activists or professors (in non-applied disciplines). At least one is trying to be Charles Bukowski. A lot of them, I have no idea.

Me, I'm temporarily indisposed because I wasn't rebellious enough in high school but was always fundamentally square, well-liked without being popular, and now I don't have any of the major neuroses that either drive achievement or burn you out. Really, all you need to know about me is that, when it came time to pick a New York apartment, I opted for the Upper West Side over the Lower East. And my barometer of what's cool is still the LES, when today all the writers live in Brooklyn.

If only, revisited

2012-01-08T20:15:00.002-05:00

One of my cousins linked to this article on Facebook, and although I definitely am not a competitive runner, I thought it articulated nicely what it means to be into something.

If only I had a timeturner

2012-01-08T11:04:00.000-05:00

People into anything - yoga, ski jumping, competitive stamp collecting - will meet people from time to time who say something like, "Oh, I've always wanted to do that, but I don't have time." When this happens, I try to politely ignore the comment and move on, because I do believe that if you really wanted to do it, you'd find the time for it.

Now, I'm not going to take that to a ludicrous extreme. You may be undergoing chemotherapy, dealing with a 3-week-old infant, or in the middle of a stakeout. But for the average middle-class adult (i.e., you don't have to work 80 hours a week just to feed your family), there is slippage in your schedule. And if there isn't any this moment (say, during that stakeout), surely in the years up until now there was.

I don't mean you're sitting around twiddling your thumbs. Probably, to do it, you'd have to give up something else. Maybe overtime, maybe your kid's soccer game, maybe watching Family Guy. And you might say, "Seriously, you think I should be a worse parent? It's not worth it." OK, that's a fine decision, but what you're saying is that X rates below other things in your list of priorities. Nothing wrong with that, but it just goes to show that your "I really want to do X" isn't true. You reveal your priorities through your actions.

As an idle passing comment, it really isn't a big deal, though. If hyperbole was a capital offense, we'd all be dead. It's people who go around constantly telling people about how they really, really want to do X someday, but they don't have time now, nor are they working on a plan for how to make it happen in the future, that bother me. I'm sure you know That Guy.

Now, this is where, just as you think I'm being intolerant and superior, that I turn it around and reveal how capable of self-criticism I am. Isn't that an annoying writing technique?* It's like, "Geez, not only is she an impossible, perfectionist critic, she hates herself, too."

But the thing is, I've realized that I've been treating one of my goals in this way. I've been acting as if saying, "I want to do that," will magically git-r-dun. I don't mean, "I should really put 8 instead of 7 hours a week into honing my competitive stamp collecting skills." No, I mean, "Watching season 2 of Burn Notice while thinking, 'Yo, Turducken, you should probably be working on that other thing you haven't touched in two weeks,' is a colossal waste of time and reveals what your priorities are." It means that, apparently, I'd rather go to the grave as someone who watched the entire run of Burn Notice than be a world-class stamp collector.

I know there's plenty of research out there about how the brain and the body undermine the conscious self. This is the season of new year's resolutions, after all. Human beings are terrible at saving money, losing weight, getting in better shape, giving up addictions, or putting in the hours to become a concert-quality cellist. Willpower is pretty crappy. But I'm not a mind-body dualist. What your limbic system or your gonads want is what you want, as much as your conscious intentions are.

There's a quote, and I'm too lazy to Google who said it, that goes something like, "Do you want to be doing x, or do you want to have done x?" Which is basically what I need to ask myself, in about 500 words than I just used to get there.

*Still, it beats doing it in reverse - start out with the self-criticism and move on to saying, "But everybody does it." This just comes across as projection and excuses.

Yoga at LiM, not to be confused with LIM College

2012-01-06T20:53:00.003-05:00

I first heard about Life in Motion when I my broker showed me the apartment I ended up renting. The studio is actually closer than the nearest subway station, and she said it was pretty good. However, the Yelp reviews discouraged me from even trying it. It is owned by a traditional gym, and the reviewers complained about exercise bikes and dirty floors. (Unlike other studios owned by gyms, such as Pure Yoga, however, it doesn't require membership.) I dismissed LiM entirely. Then at the holidays I missed my flight home and was stuck in the city an extra day, literally the day after my Dharma Mittra pass expired. I figured I might as well take advantage of their $5 first-class price.

I'll start with the bad, right up front: The floors are dirty. I don't usually feel an urge to mop things, but LiM makes me feel like a housewife in a cleaning product commercial. You know, before she discovers the awesome new product.

Then there's the neutral: The website could use work; it is totally not up to date with profiles of the teachers, for example. The studio itself is focused on running a few types of classes, nothing exotic, with no stars and few workshops. Classes are back-to-back, so there's no lingering or chatting.

And the good? The space is decent, especially the larger of the two studios - lots of windows. (And not carpeted, yay!) The prices are extremely reasonable - $11/class with a class card (there are no monthly rates), which is cheap even for places outside of New York. Finally, the location is obviously swell for me - no 45-minute subway journeys, no hauling yoga clothes and mat to work.

The best part, though, is the teachers. I've only tried their open-level vinyasa classes, but all the teachers I've tried have led vigorous, flowing asana classes with plenty of corrections. I particularly like Magi's Wednesday night class.

In sum? This is a studio I can go to on a regular basis for my everyday yoga needs. There are still a couple of "star" studios in town I want to check out, like Katonah and Laughing Lotus (especially their Friday night class), but not having to spend as much time on the subway as I do in class is a serious enough bonus to make this my "home" studio.

Ways to categorize Olympic sports

2011-12-30T22:46:00.004-05:00

Individual vs. team
(Weightlifting vs. rowing)
Direct competition vs. parallel competition vs. non-simultaneous scoring
(Judo vs. track vs. ice skating)
Professional leagues vs. totally amateur
(Basketball vs. fencing)
Winter vs. summer
(Skiing vs. rowing)
Wide vs. narrow sponsorships
(Cycling vs. biathlon)
Spectated for artistry vs. spectated for outcome (vs. no spectators?)
(Gymnastics vs. triathlon)
Everyday familiarity vs. "If it's on it must be the Olympics"
(Golf vs. pentathlon)
Athletes earn money by doing sport vs. teaching sport vs. sponsorships vs. being heirs vs. working at Home Depot
(Football vs. judo vs. swimming vs. dressage vs. luge)
Sports Americans make fun of vs. those they don't
(Table tennis vs. ice hockey)
Sports that involve sitting vs. those that don't
(Bobsleigh vs. archery)
Ranged from least to most equipment
(Running to sailing)

The one time of year I wish I had a TV is when the Olympics are on. Which is obviously not right now, so never mind why I was thinking about them. Anyway, I started wondering, in which sport would a potential Olympic participant be competing with the most vs. least other aspirants?

I imagine running would have to be up there. It's popular all over the world; it's relatively affordable; and you can't make a living doing it any other way, so the Olympics are where every serious young runner is headed. Something like basketball is popular and almost as affordable, plus you can make a living at it, so it's popular - although the would-be players aren't in it for Olympic glory but for professional teams.

The thing about running, rather like golf or shooting or weightlifting, is that lots of people do these activities, but the vast majority do so without aspiring to Olympic heights. We can't consider 45-year-old 5k first-timers to be part of the would-be Olympic runner's competition. On the other hand, I bet most 8-year-old gymnasts have at least fleeting dreams of Olympic gold, and there aren't a lot of folks who take it up at my age.

I'm guessing something like pentathlon has fewer aspirants, because it requires mastery of several disparate, expensive sports. Other sports, like trampoline, are obscure. Then there are sports like the luge - does anyone who isn't in the Olympics do them? Are there a lot of weekend lugers out there, other than as a one-time experience when visiting Calgary?

Really, what I guess I am wondering is, if everyone on the planet started trying to excel at [any particular sport], how much would elite performance improve? I don't think there is a great well of untapped running talent out there, the way there probably is in badminton.

It's not a question that matters, nor do I think it means that running is somehow "better" than badminton. It's pure idle speculation. How would we even go about figuring this out in a rigorous way?

What I'm reading in 2012, part III

2011-12-26T15:32:00.004-05:00

I can see that I'm going to need some help.

Now, if you take a look at my Amazon wishlist, you'll see that there are enough books by women to get me well into 2012. The trouble is, they're on my Amazon wishlist and not on my bookshelf. What if I need a book right now?

I was in the Dallas airport the other day, worried (justifiably) I was going to finish Wizard of the Crow before I got home, so I took a spin around Simply Books. As airport bookstores go, it was reasonably sized, although no Powell's. It was the kind of bookstore devoted to the reader of bestsellers. Technically, I could have read any book I wanted, since it's still 2011, but I couldn't help but noticing the selection.

First off, everything in the "science fiction" (understood to include all speculative fiction) by women was straight-up urban fantasy. Vampires, werewolves, and demon-hunters, oh my! No, I know it's not all crap, but it's not generally my thing. Where were the Elizabeth Bears, Vonda McIntyres, and Joan D. Vinges? It turns out there was one Bear, on the "new fiction" shelf.

Second, all the books by African-Americans were in African-American fiction. Not in "classics" or "famous authors," where I would put Sapphire or Toni Morrison, but right next to the Hoodwives books. "Famous authors" is reserved for white guys writing thrillers and white women writing mysteries (plus Carl Hiassen and Ncholas Sparks). Hasn't this pissed enough people off yet?

Third, those people who argue that spec fic readers have an advantage over mundanes because they're comfortable exploring new ideas and worlds, and might therefore handle the apocalypse better, have clearly not looked at what's not the shelves lately: It's all the zillionth tale in the Dune or Wheel of Time or Star Trek sagas. Whatever their entertainment or literary value, these books are not going to make your head explode with novelty.

Clearly, most of what I'm looking for is out in the long tail, except for A Visit from the Goon Squad and romance novels. Literature, at least the most visible, is still gendered: Female authors have a strong showing in the mystery, romance, urban fantasy, young adult, and Moving Family Saga areas. Male authors have a strong showing in the science fiction, thrillers, westerns, horror, and Real Literature areas (with a respectable tally in mysteries).

So, are the books I want to read not being written by women, not being accepted by publishers, or not being mass marketed? Because, let's be entirely fair - 19 out of the 90 books I gave five stars to on Goodreads are written by men, even though my reading is about 50/50. Moi may be part of the problem.

My conclusion is that I need more ideas of what to read; going to Book Culture and judging books by their covers may actually be effective, but it is not efficient. Are there books I'm dismissing as Moving Family Sagas I might really like? Is Brian Sanderson actually the pen name of a woman? (That's a rhetorical question, folks.)

So what do you suggest? Keep in mind, I need books by women. Also, please don't suggest The Help or The Hunger Games. I don't live under a rock, and if a book is hyper-famous, I've probably already decided whether or not I want to read it.

Best novels I read in 2011

2011-12-25T22:59:00.005-05:00

The awkward title of this post refers to the fact that, as usual, this isn't a "best books published this year" list, just a "best stuff I read this year" list. Yeah, I'm behind on my reading, what can I say? Only one of these has a 2011 release date.

Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Do you like absurdist novels of communist dissent such as Master and Margarita or The Golden Calf? Read this. Interesting fact: The author did his own English translation.
The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle by Edgardo Vega Yunque. Do you like books with long titles about young men whose names start with O such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao? Read this. Interesting fact: I tripped across this book online when doing research about neighborhoods in Manhattan.
Pym by Mat Johnson: Do you like novels about academe or conspiracies? Read this. Interesting fact: You really don't have to read Poe's novel first.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Do you like smart YA literature or keeping up with the books everyone else is reading? Read this. Interesting fact: Suzanne Collins is not the same person as Jacqueline Suzanne or Jackie Collins.
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Do you like "The Yellow Wallpaper"? Read this. Interesting fact: Pairs well with Donna Haraway.
Blindsight by Peter Watts. Do you like nonfiction about how the brain works such as The User Illusion? Read this. Interesting fact: You know about Peter Watts getting knocked around by US border agents, right?

2011 in photos

2011-12-24T17:14:00.001-05:00

January:

February:

March:

April:

May:

June:

July:

August:

September:

October:

November:

December:

What I'm reading in 2012, part II

2011-12-21T18:54:00.002-05:00

There is a never-ending conversation in sci-fi circles about gender. A few months ago, it was flaring up again. Charlie Stross had asked his blog readers to name the best novels of the last decade; then in his next post, he asked for the best novels by women.

The number of people who said, "I haven't read anything by women lately," or, "It just happens that all the writers I like are men," was astounding.

The "just so happens" argument is pure bullshit. None of us "just happen" to like any art form. Our tastes are influenced by what we are familiar with, by what we are told is valuable, and by what we have learned enough about to appreciate. It's like that canard that, "I like all music except rap and country." Which means, "I want you to know I have an open mind, but not so open as to enjoy music associated with the lower classes." Also, "Randomly, I have the exact same taste as every other pseudo-intellectual white boy. What a weird coincidence!"

About ten years ago I stumbled across a list of ten books by African-Americans that everyone should have read (published, of course, for Black History Month). I took a look at my bookshelves and realized almost every book on them was by a white person. I had read maybe one book on the list, so I sat down and read the rest. (And in the process, discovered Samuel Delany, now one of favorite writers.)

About three years ago I read an article about how little translated fiction Americans read compared to the rest of the world. So I found Three Percent's short list of translated fiction for the year, and I tried to read it all. One book, I couldn't make it through. But it was through their lists that I discovered 2666 and Brandao.

Now before you throw your laptop across the room because I'm being insufferable,* I'd like to point out that a glance at what I read shows it's still mostly white people, mostly Americans with some Brits thrown in. It isn't representative of the demographics of America, and certainly not the world. I could be trying a lot harder. My point is, that if you go out of your way to start learning about something and to take it on its own terms, three-quarters of the time you'll develop some appreciation for it. (Because, contrary to what I said earlier, there is some "just so happens" at work. It's just much less than we like to believe.) I could make a concerted effort to start reading Westerns, for example - my experience pretty much begins and ends with Lonesome Dove - and I'd probably expand my horizons considerably.

Now, I'm not going to tell anyone else they can't just read what they're comfortable with. If all you like are cooking-themed mysteries, do what makes you happy. I just don't want to hear your long, involved explanation of how it's "natural" for you to like them best and go on with some long, highbrow-sounding defense of your taste. Admit you're remaining in your comfort zone, and, more importantly, that you actually have no idea whether or not you'd like the stuff you haven't touched. How could you possibly know?

So, how does this relate to what I'm reading next year? True, I read a lot of novels by women. But a lot of these are romance novels or other brain candy. (Yes, I know the romance can offer serious social critique or other digestive fiber. But does the average mass-market romance do this? No.) With the exception of Jennifer Crusie, my favorite novelists are all male. As a feminist who reads lots of women, I'm still undervaluing literature by women.

My hypothesis to be tested is that there are women out there writing things I would be crazy about. And it is falsifiable. (Eg.: The lover of spy thrillers would have a harder time finding great books by women that the lover of moving multigenerational sagas.) Because, in the end, merely reading books by women doesn't put me too far ahead of the "boys only" readers if I consider all those books second-rate.

*I mean, is showing off, ooh, ooh, I'm so multicultural, any more virtuous than being anti-country and -rap? The Stuff White People Like post virtually writes itself.

What I'm reading in 2012, part I

2011-12-20T15:38:00.001-05:00

It started when I read two books in a row that I like. One I enjoyed, one I really loved, which is why I'm not going to call them out by name. Both books featured mostly male casts of characters. In one, the only female character was the love interest. (Literally one other woman had any lines; her role was the equivalent of Clerk #3.) The other novel had three speaking roles - again the love interest, and the other two defined by their sexual relationships with male characters.

And I thought to myself, I'm tired of this.

I can't condemn any one book for failing the Bechdel test, or for being about Teh Menz. Sometimes you just want to write a book set in a monastery or a boys school. Sometimes I want to read those books.

The problem is, and this is the Cliff Notes version of Sociology 101, that individual choices are influenced by society, and when you add everything up, that finger-weight of pressure means a huge tilt in that direction. In the aggregate, fiction suffers from a serious case of The Smurfette Problem, aka the Princess Leia Problem, aka Trinity, aka Lt. Uhura ... you know, the there's a a bunch of dudes, and one dudette. Other times, there are lots of chicks - because all the main characters have love interests.

Of course, there are both men and women out there writing fiction with fantastic female characters. But there aren't enough of them (either writers or characters), and sometimes I find it a little wearying. I also wonder, how much of this is the authors I seek out? How much of it is the publishing industry? How much of it is society? How much of it is biology?

So, I wondered, what would it be like to read only female authors? How would the experience be different - how would gender be represented? What else would be different? Well, I thought I'd find out.

That's right: In 2012, I'm only going to read novels by women.

A few quick parameters: I do specify novels rather than "books" because my job requires me to keep up with academic literature regardless of the author's gender. And I haven't yet figured out if I'm going to be strict about short stories. I won't, for example, seek out a "year's best spy stories" anthology, but if Tor's free online story of the week is by a man, what then? I mean, hey, free!

In a way, this is just a stunt, no different from supersizing myself or living Biblically for a year, although not as likely to lead to a book deal. Reading all women doesn't necessarily mean feminist books (1970s-era bodice rippers, anyone?); better quality books; or even stronger, more realistic depictions of women. What will it mean? Stay tuned in 2012.

Dharma Mittra, final thoughts

2011-12-17T11:19:00.004-05:00

I've spent the last three months doing yoga at Dharma Mittra, which I gave a preliminary review to earlier. Now, after three months, I can give it a more final assessment.

Most of the studios I've practiced at have been fairly eclectic in approach. Because Dharma's studio is guru-driven, the other teachers don't have much in the way of individual styles. That's not to say they are interchangeable - there is one, for no good reason, that I find annoying, and some are more advanced in their own practice than others - but there isn't a noticeable difference in their sequencing, whether they like to chant or read inspirational quotes, or whether they demo or adjust.

The classes are very sequenced, although not as much as strict ashtanga. They do have a good mix of poses, generally held for a while, and I like that they encourage everyone to work on inversions such as headstand and scorpion, even in level II classes. (Classes are levels I-IV, but they offer a lot more at the lower two levels.) This sequencing means you can make real progress on poses if you're going regularly. Only a few weeks in, I got scorpion for the first time and was making huge progress on forearm balances. The downside is that some poses get left out; I haven't done eagle in three months.

Now, one thing you may know about me is that I'm not a very spiritual person. You know how people say they are "spiritual but not religious"? You could say I am religious but not spiritual. OK, I jest a little, but the studio is far more spiritual than I am. They unironically capitalize more Abstract Concepts than a smartass like myself can fully get behind. I am comfortable in studios that emphasize the mental and/or spiritual benefits of yoga, rather than just the physical, but Dharma Mittra believes things I don't, and they are important to embracing his practice fully, I think.

In other words, I already find myself challenged by the notion of having a capoeira "mestre"; having a guru is too much for me.

Ultimately, I think it's a good studio, and if, for example, you were going to visit New York for a yoga tour, you'd be remiss to leave it out. (I'd still like to try his two-hour master practice myself.) But it's not going to be my yoga home.

Half-bucket list

2011-12-10T00:00:00.007-05:00

The other day, I was googling something and came across the 30 Before 30 project and was kind of inspired.

Well, obviously it's a little late for me to accomplish anything before I turn 30. Also, the list of things I'd like to accomplish in the next few years isn't that long. 40 is a nice round number to get to, but I had no desire to make up random items just to check off.

What I came up with was The Half-Bucket List. That is, by the time I'm 40 I'll be statistically halfway (really, slightly past) to kicking said bucket, so what do I want to have accomplished by then? I've spent the last six years of my life getting a PhD and a real job ... so what now?

A couple of words about what's on the list. First, it isn't about career accomplishments. So you won't see Get Tenure or Get Published in the Journal of Higher Ed on the list. Second, I tried to avoid goals that require the cooperation of either another party - no Date George Clooney. (I violated this second rule slightly on one or two, as you will see.) Third, no goals that require a benevolent universe; all of these only require that that the apocalypse doesn't happen next week, that the universe is at least non-malevolent, but that is a gamble I am willing to take. But there's nothing on there like Win the Lottery.

Without further ado, by the time I am 40, I hope to have achieved all of the following:

Be able to walk across a slackline
Do macaco
Be fluent in Portuguese
Travel to Brazil
Have a novel published
Do the Annapurna Circuit
Hold a handstand for a minute unaided
Successfully traverse the swing-a-ring

These items will require different resources to accomplish. Brazil and Annapurna are really a matter of money. Others require practice, but I am totally confident that they are doable - I can improve my Portuguese substantially. Others are more of a challenge: Can I master macaco, which is essentially a backflip in capoeira? Sure I have five years, but I'll be getting older every day of them!

So stay tuned for the next five (really four and a half) years.

Ask again later

2011-12-08T21:15:00.001-05:00

Today and tomorrow is a short conference at The New School on "The Future of Higher Education." Tonight was part one, when four talking heads and a moderator shared their thought on what universities ought to look like in 20 to 30 years.

One of the pontificators was the chancellor of the CUNY system. Now I should mention that I know practically nothing about the current CUNY situation, other than that it has been particularly hard hit by the budget woes that all of public higher education has been facing. I say that not because I'm proud of my ignorance, but towards the point that I don't have a dog in this fight.

A group of (presumably) CUNY students had come out for the occasion ready for battle. When the chancellor was introduced, there was rise in the amount of sneezing and coughing that was statistically unlikely to be coincidental. They also did three or four "fact check" chants that interrupted proceedings. This was a little frustrating for those of us that weren't there for a referendum on CUNY.

They also undermined their own demands for answers (the Q&A session involved almost no actual Q) by asking, twice, why the panel had no women on it. It was a perfectly legitimate question; the entire conference is overwhelmingly male, even granted the demographics of America's Top Administrators. But when the conference organizer rose to answer the question, the protesters interrupted with a fact check that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. I, for one, would have like to hear her answer.

The upshot was that I don't think the CUNY crowd gained any new supporters. But before you feel too sorry for the poor beleaguered administrators, a couple of things struck me.

One, I came away with no idea of what they thought higher ed would look like in 20 or 30 years. There was more lamentation of current problems than proposed solutions. The solutions I did hear were things like "innovation." Okaaaaay … or as the kids used to say, back when I was one, "No shit, Sherlock." None of the presenters tried to operationalize that; none suggested anything concrete. No one said, "Here is what it ought to be like," or "Unfortunately, I expect this is what it will be like."

Two, the CUNY chancellor's answers were remarkably tone-deaf. The man has a tough job, I am sure; being a system head of a troubled system means everyone wants answers but you don't build personal relations with any of your constituents. But his answers never entirely addressed the questions, and they were in vague administrator-speak. (The exception to this was his answer to a "fact check" about faculty health insurance, which was specific and clear.) I have no idea if the man has helped or hurt CUNY during his tenure, or if anyone else would have done better or worse. But from a PR perspective, a leader for troubled times needs to be able to code-switch out of bureaucratese and talk frankly and straight (or seem to).

I very much came away with the sense that, whatever the future of higher ed was going to look like, these guys were not going to be its architects.

Holiday travels

2011-12-03T13:34:00.003-05:00

Greetings from Philadelphia, where I am hanging out for the weekend. I stayed in New York for Thanksgiving, although my parents came out to visit. Before that I was in Charlotte for the conference. And, yes, I'll be heading out to Oregon for some Christmas festivities.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T21:55:00.001-05:00

Whether you celebrate the holiday or not, whether you're with all your extended family or volunteering in a soup kitchen, whether there's a turkey or the table or not, I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving!

ASHE 2011

2011-11-20T11:31:00.002-05:00

Proof I was there, a photo by TheTurducken on Flickr.

So, it's time for the requisite post-conference wrap-up. ASHE was in Charlotte this year, but ASHE is pretty much the same no matter where it is. It's always nice to catch up with colleagues from all over the country and to take a break from the usual round of work (although I did bring some grading with me). I went to quite a few good sessions - there were none on philanthropy - and picked up a couple of books. It's always rather invigorating.

It was my first conference as a faculty member rather than a student. I hadn't thought about that making any difference before I attended, but it sure beat telling everyone, "Yeah, I'm looking for a job," and having to summarize my dissertation again and again.

Inwood Hill Park

2011-11-06T16:30:00.004-05:00

I did something today I bet you thought you wouldn't see here again - I went hiking. Yeah, hiking in Manhattan hasn't been easy, and I've only been "real" hiking once. Part of it is the haul - the only unpaved trails longer than a mile in the city are in Staten Island, and it takes two hours to get there on public transit. But today I - well, I kind of hiked.

See, my definition of a "hike" is that it is unpaved. I do recognize exceptions for the occasional paved wheelchair-accessible and boardwalk trails (heck, I spent time building one back in Nashville), so already it's not a hard-and-fast standard, but generally greenways != trails. But that was before I visited Inwood Hill Park.

Inwood is the northern tip of Manhattan, and nearly all the trails are paved. On the northeast corner, where the ballfields are, it could be any city park. But once you get up into the hills, suddenly you're in an actual forest. An actual forest with giant trees:

No matter what the surface was, it felt like hiking, so I'm calling it hiking.

The park has a network of trails. I guess there's a map, but ignore it. The trails are too complicated and unsigned. At the same time, it's impossible to get lost. Just remember, the ballfields are at the north, the Henry Hudson toll road is on the west, and if it's flat, you're on the eastern strip. The middle of the park is, as advertised, a big hill, one that's impossible to get a photo of. You can get photos from the top, however:

Like any New York park, there are random, delightful moments that make you glad to live in this place:

As I got there, a middle-aged white d00d was perorating tiresomely about how this was a "classic symptom of OCD." Or maybe it was just a creative soul making a site-specific installation with the materials available at hand - outside outsider art.

At one point, a man with his son asked me if this was "the way to the secret staircase," and I had to tell him I had no idea. I had seen several staircases, and I didn't know which one was supposed to be secret. It could have been this one:

As wild as the park feels, there are reminders that you are in the city. There's the occasional view of Marble Hill and the Bronx, as well as the noise from the highway on the western side. Then there are things like this:

It's also my understanding that it's not a great place to be after dark, and I can see why. I turned a corner and saw a fabulous lamppost that would have made a great photo, but loitering under it were six teenage boys smoking pot. I couldn't care less about the marijuana, but they were a bit too "friendly" - probably in part defensive about being caught. I didn't stick around for the photograph.

But the park has almost everything. Vertical elevation: check. Woods: check. Water: check. Surprises: check. Fire rings: check. Caves: check. Wildlife:

Check. OK, no waterfalls, but I guess a park can't have everything.

Batizado time

2011-10-23T23:15:00.002-04:00

Grupo Capoeria Angola Palmares, a photo by TheTurducken on Flickr.

This weekend Grupo Capoeira Angola Palmares (New York) had training, a batizado, and a graduation. We had a mestre from Florianopolis in town as well as a contra-mestre and instructor from London, and students from Nashville, Baton Rouge, Denver, and Portland.

Technically, it's only a "baptism" for your first cord, and a "graduation" for the rest. So we trained all week long, and then on Saturday we held the baptism/graduation. Seven of us adults were earning our first cord, which was actually the second cord -dark green. Other people were graduating to dark green/dark yellow and other higher cords. A few students received their capoeira apelidos, and so now I have to get used to calling them by new names.

We learned a few new sequences, which included a few twists on moves I hadn't seen before. It was both inspiring and frustrating to be in a class with so many advanced students!

I also managed to string my berimbau for the first time. Then, later, I also managed to string it tight enough. Later that evening, my first arame snapped, so now I need to learn how to replace it.

My friends have departed for their homes, so it's nice not to have four people sleeping on my floor, but it's also sad that the training is over.

Getting from signifier to signified

2011-10-16T00:25:00.003-04:00

It was a lesson I should have learned when my IT was giving me issues: The location of pain isn't necessarily the source of it.

And my first clue should have been my teachers telling me that I "ought" to be able to do things that I was finding impossible, like navasana or tucking up into handstand. I was strong enough, they said; it must be mind over matter.

No, the first clue was that my lower back starting hurting.

The second clue should have been that the recommended remedies, such as forward folds, didn't do anything for relief. Neither did "tucking my pelvis" to take the arch out of my back.

At least I picked up on one clue: My slouchy posture was indicative of … something.

It wasn't until I randomly did a side stretch one day and found it to be a near-miracle cure that I realized that my lower back wasn't actually the problem. Then there was "pull up in your chest," which did a lot more for my posture than any amount of tucking.

I still don't know their name. Is it my obliques? My intercostals? My lats? Does it matter? I just know that I'm retraining a set of muscles that have somehow gone to sleep on me.

They're improving. They still have a long way to go; I still can't tuck up into handstand. But the difference is amazing - even if the amount of muscle gained is small, knowing where to focus my efforts has improved my handstand notably. It's also helped with other things along the way. The other day, I managed to get into lotus while in tripod headstand. It wasn't elegant, but doing it without falling over should earn me a cookie anyway.

It's exciting to have a breakthrough like that, even though I think, "Why didn't I know this ages ago?" Also exciting: No back pain.

Yoga in NYC: On Dharma Mittra, preliminary

2011-10-08T23:31:00.004-04:00

It's only a month into my three-month trial, so I hesitate to draw any firm conclusions as to whether or not it's for me, but I can still tell you a little bit about the studio.

Dharma Mittra actually has two locations. The West location is newer and it's where Dharma himself teaches. However, it's almost all meditation and other mental classes; the physical classes are mostly over at the older East studio. The studio has a very comfortable feel. It's not modern or sleek; instead, it resembles someone's den, or a summer cabin that has never been interior decorated in the proper sense; things have simply accumulated over the years. (The place it's most like is Joao Grande's academy, but you likely haven't been there.)

The only thing I don't like about the space is that the practice area is carpeted. It's low-pile, but I've noticed it still affects my balance, as I'm used to hardwood.

The interpersonal dynamic at the studio is a little different. Most places, students chat before class (or at least an "in" clique does). Here, they actively encourage silence. The teachers don't even make a particular effort to introduce themselves to new students before class or ask about injuries. This doesn't prevent a community from forming, as Dharma's students seem to be very loyal. In only my second class, I recognized several folks from my first.

And one interesting thing about the students - when is the last time you went to a yoga class, particularly an advanced one, and didn't see any tattoos? It took me most of my first class to put my finger on what felt so strange, but there it was. This is not a hipster haven. What you will find is a lot of men - nearly half the students in many classes - which is an anomaly.

I haven't had the chance yet to take class with Dharma Mittra; the three-month membership includes three classes at Dharma West, which I definitely plan to take advantage of. And to file under "useless trivia" - he is Brazilian, making this the second of the three studios I've tried that have Brazilian owners.

Commute time

2011-09-29T00:20:00.004-04:00

Man, I spend a lot of time on the subway.

It's about a half hour to work in the morning - that's not bad. By comparison, it took me half that time to get to campus in Nashville, only because I went at off hours. During rush hour, it would have been close to a half hour.

But in Nashville, yoga was just a few blocks from campus, and capoeira was about 20 minutes away.

Here, it takes me about 20 minutes to get from work to get to yoga. That's not too outrageous. Getting to capoeira from work, though, is close to an hour, and so is getting to my handstand class. (I have to take four trains from Midtown to Brooklyn to get to handstands. Four!)

So here is a story problem for you: If it takes Turducken 30 minutes to get from home to work, and at least 45 minutes to get from work to capoeira, how long does it take her to get from capoeira back home? Does it change your answer if you know that, geometrically, the three points are the vertices of a right triangle, making the trip home the hypotenuse as the eagle flies? Does it further change your answer if you realize that she is not an eagle, and, because of where the subway lines run, she actually has to go farther out of her way to get home?

The answer: Home-work-capoeira is 75 minutes or so. Capoeira-home covers more miles and takes 45 minutes. This is why I always travel with a book.

Theoretically, I could move close to work. But dropping that commute wouldn't make up for living in Midtown. Or I could stop going to capoeira and handstands, but despite the diversity of the city, there are no perfect substitutes (in the economic sense of the term) for either.

I don't particularly mind the commute, since I can read, except for the handstand one - all that train changing is seriously annoying. However, people seem to be impressed. "You go all the way to Astoria for capoeira?" Seriously, I don't think they'd be any more impressed if I actually went down to Rio every Saturday. (You know, that would only take five hours via Concorde...)

The thing is, my commute time adds up to about two hours on days I go to work and capoeira. The people who are impressed live outside the city and spend an hour each way just going home-work. You do the math.

Small things

2011-09-24T00:04:00.001-04:00

I mentally map each city I live in to the places I have lived before. Here in New York, Manhattan’s Riverside Park is the equivalent of Nashville’s Shelby Park and Indianapolis’ Monon Trail: the close-to-home greenway. It’s more than a neighborhood playground, but not the city’s crown jewel, and to non-New Yorkers all that matters is that Riverside is Not Central Park and therefore irrelevant.

In my time in Nashville, I found that my neighbors treated Shelby Park like an outpost of a chain gym: a place good for exercise, if short on the finer amenities such as juice bars. Tired of walking on unshaded pavement, I sought out the spaces beyond the paved greenway and the baseball fields, looking for little gems that had disappeared from the maps and contributed little to the park’s efficiency. There was the short path that ran from the dog park past the roadside pagoda to the manmade grotto, a treasure in its own right, even if the water running from it was more often than not fetid. Another path of crumbling pavement was only ¼ mile in length and connected nothing to nothing else.

These were hard-fought discoveries, valuable because of their rarity, even if in truth they weren’t difficult to find. Not many were looking.

In Riverside Park, these prizes are everywhere, yet somehow no less thrilling for their ubiquity. Some of them are obvious – the hippopotami and dinosaurs on the playgrounds are known to every dog-walker and jogger. I love dinosaurs as much as the next six-year-old-at-heart, but my real weakness is for the abandoned and forbidden spots: the cordoned-off stairs leading down to a small patio with grass growing up between the flagstones, the glimpses of the Freedom Tunnel running under Riverside Avenue, or the cracks in Employee Only doors.

Best of all are the smallest of discoveries and the happy accidents. The way the light hits the ceiling of some of the tunnels between levels of the park, reflecting off the peeling paint or through the metal grate. The subtle differences in each iron fence and stone wall. And then, on a narrow dirt path running parallel to one of the park’s promenades, there is a brass arrow embedded in the ground like a physical map of pirate booty. Yet it points no place in particular, making it the treasure rather than the map, for anyone paying attention.

This density of discovery is what I love about New York. There are more interesting things in any modest east-west residential block in Manhattan than in a square mile in most cities, and that’s without looking at the, as the cliché has it, “colorful people.”

To say these are “discoveries” is not to suggest they were heretofore unknown; at best, I get to play Columbus, discovering a land the inhabitants knew was there all along. Certainly there are history buffs, explorers, and even keen-eyed children who know all of these places better than I; many of them have websites to document their finds. Looking at these sites overwhelms me, like trying to decide what to eat a dessert buffet, or flipping through a ludicrously expensive catalog. It’s not just that my eyes are bigger than my stomach; I see their photos and think, that’s not how I would have taken it. I’m no ace photographer, but no one else’s eyes see the world quite the same as your own do. When people encounter something for the first time, without having been taught how to see it before, they’ll bring to it a diversity of interpretations that is impossible at major tourist attractions. (Try taking a novel photo of the Statue of Liberty!)

No, these are discoveries only in that I found them on my own rather than reading about them in a guidebook first. It’s hard to see Grand Central Station except through the lens of a hundred movies. Perhaps the child who grows up passing through the station sees it with fresh eyes – at the cost of being too young to remember that wonder later on. These places that live in our collective imaginations feel familiar, and thus disappointing, but they allow us to agree on rough outlines of the world we inhabit. Everything else, we find on our own, and these personal maps are what make spaces meaningful to us.

Thus while my Riverside Park shares some names and coordinates of each other person’s Riverside Park, giving us a common universe, we are on very different journeys through it.

I get to pretend I’m the only one here, that this is an undiscovered country. I get to pretend that this city, the living creation of millions of people, is a natural phenomenon. It’s not used, “pre-owned,” or, Strunk and White forbid, “pre-loved.” I can pretend I have a right to it even though the wheels on my luggage have barely stopped spinning.

Om and om

2011-09-16T19:47:00.000-04:00

The second place I gave a shot was Om Factory - I was enticed by their $100 for a month of yoga deal. The location is also not inconvenient, as it's in the vicinity of Times Square, and thus easy to get to after work.

The space itself is very nice; they have three studios, one dedicated to aerial. The teachers are all highly competent, and I actually quite like the Forrest Yoga class. Long-term, though, it's not the studio for me.

First, they have a lot of fusion classes. Aerial yoga. Acroyoga. Fight Club (which is actually a mash-up, strictly speaking, and not fusion - you do some yoga, then you do some kickboxing, with no integration.*) These could be interesting, but they all seem to run at strictly a beginner level. I went to an open level aerial class and quickly realized my (limited) experience back in Nashville meant I should be in the intermediate class - which as of September they're no longer offering. The acro class doesn't build sequentially, which makes sense as there are few regular students. As a result, in all these fusion classes we spend as much time listening to instruction as doing. I don't want every class to be a workshop; I want to flow!

Second, most of the their vinyasa classes are only an hour. I found two that were an hour fifteen. One was Mike's Monday night class. While I was only able to make it once, I highly recommend it. The other class I tried, I felt as if we weren't getting enough adjustments.

Fact is, between the fusion classes and the one-hour classes, I'm simply not getting enough exercise at Om. It's not burning calories. And, more importantly, the lack of flow means I'm not mentally getting out of yoga what I need. Right now, I need all the sanity I can get.

So the next place I'm going to try comes highly recommended. They are offering special deals for either a month or three, and I need to decide if I want to commit to three months at a place I've never been before.

* This was a good class, but I quickly realized that going to it was confusing me the same way studying Portuguese is confusing my Spanish. One martial art at a time ...

Speaking the language

2011-09-15T21:55:00.003-04:00

Part of learning capoeira is learning Portuguese. One picks up some from classes, particularly the songs, but I've also had some quasi-formal instruction. That is, we had some lessons from a Spanish professor who is a friend of the Nashville group, and I've done some Pimsleur. The formal instruction is useful, of course. But it's hard for me to make myself study as consistently as a formal, graded course would. So most of what I know I've learned through informal interaction in the capoeira classroom and talking to other capoeristas.

Learning Portuguese through capoeira is not a bad way to do it; language immersion is an effective method, of course, and there are a lot of context clues. In that respect it's like learning Sanskrit from yoga (asana is "pose"; ardha is "half"), although instead of just getting nouns and adjectives you also get commands. And even when you're speaking with native speakers, they realize your command of the language is weak.

The songs are helpful because they give me a bigger vocabulary, and I can pick up new phrases. For example, I recently learned the words to "Marinheiro sou." (Marinheiro means "sailor," which I can remember thanks to the Spanish lyrics in "Louie Louie.") One line is "Quem te ensinou a nadar?" I'm not likely to need to ask anyone, "Who taught you how to swim?" specifically, but "Who taught you?" seems practical, and now I know the verb ensinar. After all, if I aprendo, someone must ensina me.

On the down side, a lot of the nouns you learn aren't particularly practical for modern life or tourism. I don't know how to ask where the train station is ("Onde fica … o choo-choo?") is or how to tell a waiter I'm a vegetarian. I can, however, point out the following to you at a zoo: Owls, ostriches, swallows, bulls, lizards, eagles, doves, shrimp, hawks, cheetahs, scorpions, and monkeys. Definitely words all native speakers would know, but it would be a lot more helpful if I could say "dog" or "cat."

I would like to make faster progress; I've thought about taking an extension class. One great thing about New York is, of course, that with so many universities you can find some place to study almost any language at an affordable price. Still, I don't have the time for it right now. So I just muddle along, picking up what I can.

I can haz furniture

2011-09-09T10:48:00.001-04:00

I just paid out some serious cash to the folks at Ikea. It's going to be a couple of weeks, but theoretically, this purchase will finally give the stuff in my remaining boxes a home. Woot.

2011-09-07T22:30:00.004-04:00

No, I haven't fallen off a cliff. Or been eaten by a pack of roving zombie zebras. Or been trapped underground by a little-known sect of fanatically religious dwarves.

No, I'm just your standard first-year professor trying to get all her work done. It's only the third week of class, and yet I found myself writing my first exam today. And I'm behind on grading for another class.

I might be a bit scarce in these parts in upcoming weeks. However, my plan is to ruin this weekend by having as little fun as possible, thereby giving myself a little breathing room. We'll see how that works.

The physical requirements of various sporting activities

2011-08-26T17:47:00.002-04:00

I went down to the swing-a-ring this morning to play on it, and I was as terrible as I expected to be. It looks like one needs three things:

Chalk. The advice on how to swing says you should chalk your hands, but I didn't have any. (Even when indoor climbing, I never used it.) I simply couldn't get a one-handed grip without chalk.
Arm strength. Many people who haven't rock climbed assume you need a lot of upper-body strength, but most of your power actually comes from your legs. Oh, sure, I wouldn't want to climb with both arms in casts, but it's less about the arms than you expect. Well. This is not rock climbing. Your legs are dangling in the air, practically no use at all; your entire body weight is hanging from one arm.
Core strength. Your arms are holding you up, but it's your abs on down that are swinging you. I probably have enough of this already, although it would likely take time to figure out how to channel it.

killer

On Forrest Yoga

2011-08-24T22:39:00.000-04:00

I hate Forrest Yoga.

Let's back up a minute. Recently one of my friends was trying to convince me that I should add Iyengar to my practice, and I told him no, I hated it. Too much fussing around with props - it's so slow and yet it's not meditative - and there's no reason you can't get alignment in a faster-paced class, like anusara. Still, I gave it another shot and found that I still didn't like Iyengar. At. All.

So when I signed up for a cheap month at Om Factory, I went to a Forrest class without knowing what I was getting into. I knew it was created by Ana Forrest and it went on a little bit too much about spirituality for my taste. If I had known more, I never would have bothered going. In fact, if I had read that people cried, I probably would have moved to Jersey just to be safe.

For a class that is slow-paced, doesn't contain a lot of advanced poses, and is more static than flowing, Forrest is incredibly hard. Iyengar bores me; in Forrest, I wonder when the suffering is going to end. (For the record, I've seen some descriptions of Forrest as "vinyasa-style," but that does not mesh at all with my experience. You don't flow between most poses, and you hold every pose for many breaths.) It's more meditative than Iyengar, too - at least, there's room for some oms between the ows.

Lately, I've been having some discomfort in my low-low back, around my sacrum. While it hasn't stopped me from doing anything, it has bothered me. After all, I've always been of the arrogant opinion that anyone with back issues either had been in some kind of accident or just didn't take care of themselves, and I haven't been in an accident. When I told Emilia, Om's Forrest teacher, that a pose was bothering my back, she poked and prodded at me and then had me modify it - not to make the pain go away, but to start fixing the problem - and not just in that pose, but for the rest of the class. I'm afraid to tell her that my right ankle bothers me at times for fear she'll fix that, too.

In short, a Forrest class is an hour and a half of pure suffering. It's comprised of nearly everything I'm not looking for in a yoga class. Go back to crescent pose instead of warrior I? Embarrassing. Not even begin to bend backwards in camel because I can't keep my pubic bone on the wall when I do? LAME. I'd rather be doing vinyasa. I'd rather be reading. Honestly, I'd rather be cleaning the bathroom. I'd rather be cleaning someone else's bathroom. And yet I went home after my first class and immediately signed up for that class every week for the duration of my trial period, because my back already felt like I was holding it differently.

I hate Forrest because it takes almost nothing for me to break a sweat. I hate it because it shatters my illusions about how advanced a yogi I am. I hate it because I can't get away with any kind of shortcut. I hate that I come out of it more sore than after an ashtanga class. I hate that it's exactly what I need.

On not doing ashtanga

2011-08-23T15:27:00.001-04:00

After the first ashtanga class I ever took, I went home and took a three-hour nap, and then my arms felt like useless t-rex arms for about a week. Or maybe two. But I like the discipline, as well as being able to compare your practice over time. Not that I could handle a strict diet of ashtanga, being one of those undisciplined Westerners used to having my monkey-mind catered to.

But here in Manhattan, what you get is a diet of strict ashtanga. Ashtanga studios are serious about it, and if you take ashtanga seriously there are a lot of rules to follow. All classes are mysore (that means, you better have memorized the sequence, and, uh, I have to admit I haven't. Not completely). They don't offer classes on moon days (look that one up yourself.) So maybe what I like is Gillian teaching ashtanga, which isn't quite the same thing as liking ashtanga.

Not that I'll be able to find out for sure. Literally every ashtanga studio in Manhattan, and there are a bunch, does it during the day. The morning classes run until past 8, and the very latest classes start before 5. Who is doing all this ashtanga? Is there another rule I didn't know about, one that requires you to be a bartender, student, or housewife? Even if I went to mysore at 6:30, and I am not a morning person, I might be done by 8, but then I'd still have to go home, shower, and go to work. That's not super-cool where I work, and I'm not even an accountant or something at a staid, 8-5, conservative firm.

It does seem that with half a dozen ashtanga studios in Manhattan alone, someone could cater to the 8-to-5 crowd. Maybe that's how I'll make my millions.

Linkdump

2011-08-18T23:59:00.002-04:00

Life on the academic job market.

What happens when boards don't oversee presidents.

"Making a show set in New Mexico without showing Latinos is like making a show set in Washington, D.C. without showing idiots": TV show stereotypes.

A terrific column about women and fighting.

Hilarious bad emails in online dating.

Lessons learned from partner dances .

NY Loves Yoga, but I just want to be friends

2011-08-16T21:47:00.002-04:00

Rant: What's with people on Yelp saying, "I've been doing yoga for six months, and only at this place, but I am confident it is the best yoga in the city"? Not that newbies can't have useful opinions ("The students were welcoming but their basics classes aren't basic enough"), but if you'd only ever eaten at one restaurant in your life, would you proclaim that it was the best ever?

Maybe you would. I saw a review for The Popover Cafe that complained that they'd never had a popover before, but the one they had there was far too eggy. Mayhaps they should have looked into what a popover was before trying one. End rant.

So, anyway, I'm looking for a studio here in Manhattan. My friends back in Nashville gave me some good recommendations, and of course there are about a million options here, so the task is a little daunting. (Especially if a studio has a ton of different teachers, "trying it" doesn't mean going to just one class.)

The first studio I tried was not mentioned to me by anyone, but it is conveniently located on the UWS. (It seems like all the suggested studios are downtown, which is a serious commute.) NY Loves Yoga is very new, although it rose from the ashes of another studio in the same location, which may be one reason its name didn't come up.

In its favor, the space is nice, and the studio isn't too crowded - none of the mat-to-mat stuff you hear about in the celebrity studios. In fact, the vibe and class size are similar to what you'd find back in Nashville. The owner is a really nice guy, too. Most of the teachers seem pretty good, making corrections, giving students individual attention, and acting like nice human beings.

The studio itself seems to have a heavy Iyengar influence - every class seems to ask you to grab several blankets, a couple of blocks, a strap, and maybe a bolster. Iyengar isn't really my thing, though. And I've found that most the classes are more beginner-oriented than I would like, even those labeled level 2-3 (out of 3 levels). I'm really a vinyasa girl, and most of their vinyasa classes are at lunch (which doesn't work with my teaching schedule) and only an hour long. What this means is that while I think this is a good studio, I don't think it's really my flavor; I like my yoga a little crazier. However, I would definitely recommend it to folks as a good studio that offers quality yoga without hassles.

Next up? A studio offering $100 for a month of all-you-can-eat yoga. I don't think they know yet what a fiscal disaster that's going to be for them.

Living in someone else's New York

2011-08-13T19:56:00.009-04:00

Those of us who didn't grow up in New York have had our images of it shaped by the media we consume: Friends. Seinfeld. Sex and the City. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. For me, my formative images of New York came from reading a lot of Madeleine L'Engle as a child. Much of her adult fiction and non-fiction is set in the city, primarily Morningside Heights and Greenwich Village, but the book I knew the best was The Young Unicorns. In the novel, the small-town Austin family moves to New York for a year and discovers the dangers of the city are very close to home. The book introduced me the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which I now find myself living very near.

In fact, I am wondering if my choice of Manhattan Valley for a neighborhood wasn't so much the result of a rational balance of choices (distance, cost) leavened by personal predilections for certain charms and amenities as much as was an instinctive gravitation to what my subconscious defines as "really New York." Human beings haven't evolved that far from baby ducks.

When I realized how close I was to the events of the book, I naturally did the nerdcore thing and mapped it out here. Some of the events occur at real places, such as the Cathedral. Others occur at renamed but real places, such as the childrens' school. Some appear not to actually exist but simply are plausible for the neighborhood, such as the home the Austins relocate to. (Alarmingly, the only buildings that it might actually be are frighteningly close to my apartment.) I am most disappointed that the synagogue, Adath Shomai-el, appears to be utterly fictional; I'd love to see someone prove me wrong on that.

Now, excuse me, I have to go walk my dog in Riverside Park, enjoying the fog and watching the lights of New Jersey.

We need to talk

2011-08-11T21:48:00.001-04:00

I'm not 100 percent moved in - the tough stuff to unpack is still in boxes on the floor - but I'm trying to plunge right in to my new life. I'm working, of course, and I've been going to yoga (more on that in a later post). I've also been going to capoeira.

Our group back in Nashville was rather small, so I got rather used to playing with the same few people. Sure, new people showed up occasionally, or we saw out-of-town friends once or twice a year at events, but in the general run of things, I knew what to anticipate from my friends in the roda. I had a sense of people's style, of who would be aggressive, of who would kick my ass (which is not the same as who could).

But most of the people I have played with here are new to me. Playing with strangers, even in your own school, is more challenging, since you never know what they're going to do. However, some people are more challenging than others.

The hardest, actually, are those who are brand-new. Not new like I am, but in their first month or two: They have little idea what they're doing and are thus almost dangerously unpredictable. Even if they're timid instead of aggressive, it is difficult to have a conversation with them in the roda. Someone who is really advanced, like a mestre, is easier in some ways; not that they won't utterly defeat you, but they are more likely to leave you feeling humiliated than injured. It often ends up being a conversation where you keep saying, "What? What?" over and over again as they repeat themselves with increasing impatience.

In the middle ground, though, I've noticed that some people are a lot easier to play with than others, and it's not necessarily about skill level. Some people are more attuned to the nature of capoeira as a dance or conversation; others seem to be out there to score points. Ironically, if they want to play it that way, it can be easier to "get" them in return - they're so focused on what they're doing that they can get blindsided. Or when we have small rodas after class, some students are much better at practicing the moves and sequences we just went over. You keep giving someone the opening move of a sequence your teacher asked to see, and they keep ignoring it.

But of course, it's important to play with everyone. You have to learn to deal with capoeristas who are unpredictable or hard to read, not just your friends who you screw around with all the time or even your teachers, who slowly but steadily challenge you. So it's a good thing for me to train with strangers, even if I miss my peeps back in Nashville.

Welcome to the neighborhood

2011-08-05T08:10:00.003-04:00

So, I'm in a neighborhood called Manhattan Valley, which is not some new designation made up by realtors, but no one has heard of it anyway. Technically, it's what is in-between the Upper West Side (ends at 96th St.) and Morningside Heights (starts at 110th). I can walk to almost anything you could imagine, including the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Hungarian Pastry Shop, or Tom's Diner. There are three parks within spitting distance - Riverside, Central, and a cute little triangular park for sitting in the shade. The laundromat is three doors down, and the local grocery store is half a block away.

(A word about the grocery store. It's smallish, but it makes Whole Foods look positively downscale. It has an olive bar, and three kinds of Rogue Creamery cheese. Also, butter costs $4.99 on sale. There are two more similarly upscale grocery shops within three blocks. It looks as if I'll have to go to Whole Foods when I want to save money.)

Within a block or two are a hardware store and a decent bagelry - that is, "bagels" that aren't just round squooshy pieces of bread. The subway is three blocks away, and the bus to LaGuardia is a block and a half. Indian food is perilously close, but so far I've resisted the siren song - I do have a budget, after all.

In other words, I'm basically living the dream. My neighborhood is terrific, New York is awesome, and I love my apartment. I'm writing this from my little tiny balcony, with a view of trees and other brownstones on a quiet side street (not to mention the cars of people foolish enough to drive in the city). I'm not quite naive enough to think everything is totally perfect - I can already see that finding a yoga studio is going to be a bigger challenge than I thought - and I recognize that all of this comes at a price, a quite literal monetary cost. But I'm lucky enough to have a job that allows me to afford it, if not opulently, so I am able to pay it.

The move

2011-08-03T09:19:00.001-04:00

Shooting a deer, a photo by TheTurducken on Flickr.

Saturday morning, two friends came over to help me load the truck. As we began, the skies opened up and a monsoon came down. It was the kind of rain that soaks you in seconds, so we just made the best of it. Naturally, it cleared up after we loaded!

Uncle Minion, my driving companion - or perhaps I should say "driver," since he drove all the way - and I set out east on I-40 after stopping for lunch. About an hour out, I realized I left some boxes in my back closet. I want to see my Christmas ornaments, sewing machine, and diploma again, so I called my landlord. I asked him to ship them to me, no hurry, and take it out of my deposit. Shipping on a sewing machine is going to be pricy, but it beat going back.

In the northeastern corner of Tennessee, we turned north up through Virginia. We spent the first night in Wyethville (which, the brochure informed us, was "more than just a stop on the interstate). We both turned up our noses at EconoLodge's pathetic "continental" breakfast - no continent would be willing to claim it - and headed out. We had a long haul in Virginia, and we made it longer by spending some time on the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Shenandoah Skyline. There we saw several deer up close, as well as a bear in the road. It ran off as we approached; it was the first time I've seen a bear run.

Then, in short succession, we made our way through West Virginia and Maryland, spending the night in North Plainfield, New Jersey, a rather unpleasant town with no left turns, either at lights or into commercial establishments. Our pace slowed considerably as we hit the Lincoln Tunnel, but our timing ended up being perfect; we got to my apartment just as parking was switching from the left to the right because of street sweeping, which meant we actually were able to park right in front of Chez Turducken. I got the keys and we unloaded - although Uncle Minion did a lot of the heavy lifting.

My apartment actually resembles habitability now, despite several boxes of stuff that I have nowhere else to put. I actually do have some available storage space, but I don't want to put socks in a cupboard! But I'll save the features of my apartment for another post.

Thanks for all the fish

2011-07-19T19:18:00.001-04:00

As I get closer to moving, I'm getting crankier, and for that, I apologize right now. Some of it may simply be the juggling of everything I need to get done before I leave, but that's not a very good excuse, since I've had a long time to prepare for the move. (Too long, actually; my friends have been trying to tell me goodbye for weeks.)

While I am very much looking forward to my new position, my new apartment, and my new city, I'm also conflicted about leaving Nashville. Some of this is natural healthy: Six years has been long enough to make me a part of a community, as I realized the other day when I was in the bank and I actually ran into someone I knew. I'm going to miss Steadfast and True Yoga (question: Does Gillian St. Clair and the Steadies sound like a band to anyone else?), Capoeira Angola Palmares Nashville and the local capoeira community, the Nashville Hiking Meetup, and my friends at Vanderbilt (not to mention the tremendous resources its endowment provides). Even if we remain in touch, it's not the same as being here with you.

But it's also a time for second-guessing the choices I've made, or, as to quote Barriss Mills,
Gone forever,
like the girls I never kissed,
and the places I never visited -
the lost lives I never lived.
The mistakes I've made, the chances I didn't take, the opportunities I walked by - these are all starting to show up in my rearview mirror. And my tendency is, as always, to assume that these things would have been fabulous if only I had done them. I recognize the dubiousness of that assumption, of course; I just don't feel it.

Unlike the mirrors on a car, though, these objects are farther than they appear. There is no going back. The only benefit to reconsidering them is to learn from my mistakes, but at a certain point it stops being useful and becomes poisonous regret. I am pretty sure I'm at that point.

So Nashville and Nashvillians, yes, I'll miss some of you, but I probably won't tell you that again. This is your last goodbye.

This is my apartment

2011-07-13T17:37:00.004-04:00

I've found a design inspiration for my apartment. My place is very similar in layout (well, it's a mirror image): Tall ceilings with a far wall of mostly windows, a fireplace on one side with room for a couple of shelves behind it, and a narrowish space. The biggest difference is that where they have a couch, I have to have more bookshelves.

It gives me a good idea, though, for use of space, and it has a similar period feel built-in. My decor is parametered by not only the unit's moldings and the rather impressive fireplace but also by the mix of woods (birch accessories from Ikea, oak floors, and a dark fireplace with gilt trim). I don't have the choice of minimalism (which, in Manhattan is a form of conspicuous consumption, as it signals that your laptop and your holiday decor and your suitcases are all stored somewhere else). The room shown manages to use a variety of colors and designs without looking busy, which is what I'm most worried about.

These are not the pillows you are looking for

2011-07-13T12:52:00.003-04:00

I need to decorate my new place, but a quick tour of Etsy didn't turn up what I was looking for. Instead I found:

I have a new apartment

2011-07-11T14:55:00.003-04:00

Last week was exhausting; I spent four days in New York, mostly apartment hunting. Walking all over the city in the middle of summer is not fun; by contrast, the morning I spent filling out HR paperwork was a breeze. But it was worth it, because after seeing several places I concluded would do okay, I found a place I really loved.

I knew it was likely I was going to have to make tradeoffs, and indeed I did. The big one is that there is no laundry in the building. The second is that the unit has less closet space than other apartments I was looking at. It has a fair number of cupboards, but not so many places to put, say, a box of Christmas ornaments.

It also ended up with a couple of features I wasn't keen on. One is a non-working fireplace, as it takes up valuable wall space, but this was definitely one of the nicest-looking ones I saw. The other is parquet flooring. Not a big fan in general, but this floor was very cool. (Besides, "no parquet" was really far down my list of wants.)

So what did it have? It is in the right neighborhood. It has a breakfast bar, nice kitchen, and sleeping loft. It was the only place I saw where the a/c wasn't in the window. It has a little tiny balcony, lots of light from the south, and high ceilings. It actually feels like a place to live, not a white shell. In fact, the walls are green, but they're going to be repainted cream.

Yes, I'm excited about this place.

Very Special Death March

2011-07-03T09:58:00.003-04:00

You are here, a photo by TheTurducken on Flickr.

Last weekend I led my last hike with Nashville Hiking Meetup, my final death march. The goal was to do as large a loop as possible at Frozen Head State Park. The plan was to go up the Cumberland Trail from the volleyball courts, join Bird Mountain, turn onto North Bird Mountain, follow it out to Coffin Springs, then head south to the lookout tower at the top of Frozen Head, and take Chimney Top down. I wasn't able to get a clear answer on the condition of North Bird Mountain, though, so I warned people to be flexible. Also, there would be several opportunities for people to change their minds if it proved too tough.

The first part of the hike was the toughest; we gained then lost 1000 feet before reaching the point indicated in the photo. Then the trail hauled back up another hill to the top of Jury Ridge. I should mention that the Bird Mountain trail was actually in worse shape than North Bird Mountain. NBM started off bad - waist-high weeds for at least half of mile - but then it opened up and was well-maintained. Still, after lunch we slowed down, and we elected to cut off a corner of the hike and head up to Frozen Head.

There's an intersection where some the trails up Frozen Head meet, and a good chunk of our group elected to head down to camp. We were left with 5 of our original 12. As we headed up to the top of Frozen Head, thunder started rumbling and a few isolated raindrops fell, but the storm passed us. Good thing, because we weren't going to climb the metal lookout tower in a thunderstorm!

After, we were pushing it on time, so we took South Old Mac, the shortest trail back to camp. When we came off the trail, we still had a mile roadwalk, but it was our lucky day - Ranger Mike was in the parking lot, and he gave us a lift back to camp.

All told, it was about 15 miles, with a ton of elevation change.

Disappearing middle class

2011-07-01T10:01:00.000-04:00

This: "We’re trying to generate a middle class for a country that no longer really wants one."

I have noticed a real strain of this in our discussions about work and life. Read any article of career advice online, and then read the comments. There will be a heavy dose of, "Well, if you don't like working 80 hours a week, you should't have gone into x. And if you aren't working 80 hours at it, you deserve to be fired." There's some merit to the base form of the argument (i.e, you should know that some fields require more of you than others.), but it gets applied to anything that's a Career rather than a Job. Are you a professor? Accountant? Graphic designer? Electrical engineer? Kindergarten teacher? You didn't expect putting food on the table would be easy, did you?

When someone confesses that, really, they went to college expecting to find a job they like moderately well, but more importantly can make a middle-class living at working 40 hours a week, they're jumped on like "welfare queens" of a previous political generation. You're lazy; your job deserves to be taken away by someone who works more; it's attitudes like yours that are going to make America lose to competition from hard-working Chinese.

Never mind that the reward for devoting everything may be a pitiful teacher's salary, or a pink slip from general downsizing, or a career that disappears in the face or technological and economic change; if you can't invest your entire self in it, go get a job at McDonald's and be poor. Go big or go home.

It's all very Ayn Randian, although I'm pretty sure most the general zeitgeist is being expressed by a lot of folks who haven't even read Atlas Shrugged. It also seems to be part of the anti-sociological thinking in this country. I don't mean that everyone should have read Talcott Parsons, but that the solution to any problem, even if it affects 95 percent of a population, is, "Individuals should work harder." There's no acknowledgement of structural forces shaping society. Attempts to changes the structure are met with cries of, "You're taking away people's freedom to choose," as if our choices aren't already shaped and constrained by our current structure. And failure and success are de facto proof that one deserved to succeed or fail, because, hey, you should have known the rules.

No, the middle class is for lazy folks, those who want a house and job security, who think that four years of college is enough, or if it isn't it's their company's responsibility to provide further training, who think maybe we should have unions and federal regulations intervening in the market, who want to have time to live some very modest version of the American dream after work and on the weekends. We don't need that here: This is America.

Looking for a neighborhood

2011-06-26T20:33:00.002-04:00

I've spent the last several months wrapping my head around the weird real estate world that is New York City. I've been learning the city's strange logistics (brokers for renting and the enormous amounts of cash you need up front) as well as trying to figure out what neighborhood I want to live in. Now, I think I've finally decided: I have one first-choice neighborhood and four back-up choices.

How did I narrow it down? First, I had two non-negotiable requirements:

I have to be able to afford an apartment, even if it's tiny (and they're all tiny); and
It has to be a commute of less than 30 minutes via subway to my job, which is in Midtown Manhattan.

So, for example, there is literally nothing in my price range in Tribeca or Soho. Brooklyn, Staten Island, large parts of Queens, the Bronx, and the northernmost parts of Manhattan (Inwood/Washington Heights) are all out due to distance. And I reluctantly discarded Morningside Heights for a special reason of its own: Trying to move into a college neighborhood for August 1 is destined to end in heartbreak.

That still leaves a lot of Manhattan and parts of Queens, so that's where a second tier of considerations came into play. One, it has to be reasonably safe. I'm not paranoid, but I am a single female. (That said, distinguishing reports of real crime issues from "I don't feel safe around black and brown people" kind of comments is more work than it should be in 2011.)

Two, I want Stuff in the neighborhood. Grocery shops, coffee shops, that kind of thing. In my job, I don't always have to work on campus, so I want to be able to pop down the street and look busy at my laptop while eavesdropping on conversations about Sartre. (Kidding. Not a fan of Sartre.)

Third, I wanted ethnic and racial diversity. I'm not moving to NYC to live in a 88 percent white neighborhood, for crying out loud. But as recent images show, Manhattan is extremely segregated. Of course, income still tracks far too strongly with race in this country, so the more expensive the neighborhood gets, the whiter it also tends to be. And neighborhoods that are primarily non-white aren't necessarily diverse - witness Chinatown.

And therein lies the Hipster Trap (not to be confused with the art installation that made the rounds of the Internet recently). You want to live somewhere affordable with diversity, local institutions, personality, charming old buildings … and up-to-date-appliances, ready access to a Whole Foods, and a subway line. That way lies gentrification, and the loudest complainers about it are the very ones causing it. Oh, sure, the folks who got displaced complain too, but they don't get column space in the NYT to write about it.*

Which is to say, I wasn't sure there was a neighborhood that could give me everything I want, because I want to live a hip, post-racial, slightly socialized fantasy.

The thing is - I think I've found it. The runners-up all came close: One isn't in Manhattan, one offers terrible value for the money, another doesn't have very many residents and closes up shop at night. But this neighborhood, I think, can give me everything I'm looking for.

I'm afraid to actually say here what it is, as if that'll jinx it. I will say it is not a neighborhood anyone has suggested to me, as much as I appreciated everyone's suggestions. (Some more on target than others, of course.)

Now, I just have to get up there and see apartments in real life and convince a landlord to let me in.

*To be sure, this isn't as bad as government attempts at gentrification, as have happened in parts of Harlem, where municipally-incentivized developers hope that "if you build it they will come." They come - and take taxis home in fear after nights out in hipper neighborhoods, while complaining about the poor people and lack of Whole Foods.

Creativity for academics

2011-06-23T13:38:00.001-04:00

Read an interesting article in the penultimate Review of Higher Education that links "absorptive capacity" to scholarly productivity. Absorptive capacity was not a concept I was familiar with, but it refers to the ability to absorb new ideas. It depends on a lot of things, one being subject knowledge (which, one hopes, all faculty have). Scholars have different levels of "potential absorptive capacity," which they defined as ideas for research. This comes from exposure to others' ideas, as in when I go to an academic conference and come away with at least one research idea generated by reflecting on someone else's research, as well as personal factors (creativity, hard work). Then, various factors affect what they called "realized absorptive capacity" - i.e., productivity, but a big factor is organizational support. No surprise there, either; research funding and teaching load affect how many of those ideas one can make use of.

I should note here that this article only sets up a model; it does not test it. It sets up a series of predictions, many of which are unsurprising, i.e., institutional policies affect output.

The problem I see is that, in my experience, creativity has nothing to do with research output.

Yup, nothing. Scholars who publish a lot are very smart, very hard-working, and usually have institutional and personal support - but their approach to research is iterative and formulaic. In other words, they have standard operating procedures; the negative connotations of "formulaic" are unintended here. They have one standard methodology and use it to "mine" an area until that approach is exhausted in that area, then move on.

Real-life examples: A scholar who finds datasets and applies a particular econometric technique to variables that have been ignored in the past. A scholar who has a system for being the synthesizer of findings; once he/she has written the book on it, well, that's the book. A scholar who has honed a particular survey and analysis methodology and applies it to a series of related questions.

To put it another way - I'm allowed to use management-speak now, right? - they are hedgehogs that know one thing well, not foxes. Scholars who move across methods or topics (even closely related ones) don't publish as much. A hedgehog's first idea may have been highly creative, certainly, but the subsequent applications aren't. Once we've come up with the idea of a blind taste-test to determine consumer preferences for brands of strawberry jam, it's not creative to do the same thing with raspberry jam. It's not creative even if you move on to grape jelly after hearing the world's top tastebud scholar talk about grape jelly.

Simply, not all idea generation is creative.

Quick, make a list of things one can do on a date. Creativity will play a big role in how many different ideas you can come up with. But I'm betting that the number of dates you go on (or - even second dates) has little to do with how creative they are. As long as you can think of, "OK, coffee, dinner and a movie, and, um, dinner and drinks," you're doing fine.

Ergo: Take two scholars at the same institution and department, rendering the institutional variables irrelevant. Both have supportive spouses and no children. They have the same IQ and graduated from the same PhD program; both work hard. All that differs is their ability to come up with new research questions. I argue the more creative one will not publish any more than his or her colleague - because idea generation occurs much, much faster than follow-up. The minimum level of creativity necessary is met by practically every professor; more than that is irrelevant …

… except, perhaps, that too much might hurt your productivity. Spend a lot of time exploring new ideas or questioning things, and you're butting into the time required to research efficiently publishable ideas. A little creativity goes a long way: Too much, and you end up being Thorstein Veblen or China Mieville.*

Overall, I thought the model was interesting and probably useful; I just don't think creativity belongs in it.

* Given the choice, I would recommend "successful novelist" over "unable to hold an academic job," but your mileage may vary.

Nothing much here

2011-06-17T20:51:00.004-04:00

Cummins Falls, a photo by TheTurducken on Flickr.

I've been busy this week with a lot of work. But here's a pretty photo of Cummins Falls from last weekend. Long in private hands, Cummins Falls was sold to a developer - but when the housing bubble popped, his loss was our gain. Nearly enough money has been raised to pay to make the property a new Tennessee state park - find out more here.

Not a linkdump

2011-06-11T09:19:00.002-04:00

"A.C. Grayling’s decision to open a private liberal-arts college in London reveals higher education as a strictly luxury good." Puh-lease. Consider the following sentences and then tell me whether it would have even been worth my time to follow the link the article:

"Percy Bongelmorton III's decision to open a mink-only fur store in New York reveals coats as a strictly luxury good."

"Tawny Rodriguez's decision to open a Lotus dealership in Hollywood reveals cars as a strictly luxury good."

"Pat Green's decision to open a Whole Foods in Peoria reveals food as a strictly luxury good."

Sorry, syllogism FAIL.

New look

2011-06-09T23:41:00.004-04:00

After a long wait, our capoeira uniforms are finally in. (Here I am cheesing it up on command.) Having a uniform at long last makes me feel somehow more official. On the other hand, the physical reality of is taking some getting used to.

The pants, for example, don't quite stay up on the hips; I'm working on getting the drawstring tight enough, but I'm afraid it will induce bruises if I pull any farther. What I really need is a cordao to hold it up. You don't just go out and buy one of those, though, and I suspect a nice leather belt would get me laughed out of class. The pants don't fit perfectly - then again, no pants really fit me, aside from the occasional yoga pants. How is it possible for apparel to grip the buttocks tightly enough to cause panty lines while simultaneously sliding down the hips? Mind you, the panty lines wouldn't be there if I hadn't put a few more pounds on just in time for bikini season.

They aren't sliding that far, though; we're not talking about sagging here. Once I hem the pants, it won't be an issue. And it's eminently reasonable for the pants to be longish, because hemming is easier than the reverse.

The t-shirt is slightly bigger than I usually wear - I have to thank my mestre for talking me out of a medium and into a small - and while this isn't exactly an existential crisis, I do need to get used to it falling down slightly and sticking to my lip balm when I'm upside down. That, or tuck it in. Tuck it in? Do people still do that?

But the part about feeling more official - mostly, I just feel more guilty for any deficiencies. My butt needs to be lower in meia lua de compasso? But I'm representing Mestre Gulliver and Capoeira Angola Palmares! It says so right here on my shirt! Mestre No is probably feeling anti-axe from my sloppy form all the way down in Brazil. Giving your mestre indigestion is undoubtedly the sort of thing that lands you in The Other Place after death.

Which means I have to practice, and to hem my pants.

Sequels that thankfully were never written

2011-06-07T15:45:00.003-04:00

For every amusing, high-quality sequel (think Gormeghast), there's a sequel the author should have backed slowly away from (think Little Men). On the bright side, it could be much worse - the following sequels could have been written. Thank goodness they weren't.

Paradise on Proteus: A Straightforward Heterotopia (Samuel R. Delany)
Nolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
The Yiddish Policeman's Union Scab (Michael Chabon)
Lonesome Duck (Larry McMurtry)
The Next Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
The Sit (Stephen King)
Anna Banana Fo Fanna (Leo Tolstoy)
The Pinkest Eye (Toni Morrison)
Tiffany of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
The Condo of the Spirits (Isabel Allende)
A Boxing Day Carol (Charles Dickens)
Hey I Found One More Mohican (James Fenimore Cooper)
To Revive a Mockingbid (Harper Lee)
Riddley Jogger (Russell Hoban)

Hiking up Table Rock

2011-06-07T00:40:00.002-04:00

Top of Table Rock a video by TheTurducken on Flickr.

As promised, here is the story of our hike up Table Rock.

Table Rock is a flat-topped mountain on the opposite side of the gorge where we were staying. There is only one bridge across the gorge; at some seasons, it's crossable in other places, but the water was still too high for us to try. That wasn't a big deal, though, as the bridge starts the Spence Ridge Trail, which affords relatively easy access to Table Rock.

We started off by packing up and moving camp less than a mile north. After setting up, we put our much lighter packs on and went further north on the Linville Gorge trail until we reached the bridge that starts Spence Ridge. The Linville Gorge trail, by the way, was by far the worst-maintained trail we encountered, even though it had been worked on only a few months ago. This didn't make going up and down along the shore any easier. By contrast, the Spence Ridge trail was wide and smooth - albeit seriously uphill.

We had to hike out of the gorge in order to reach Table Rock, some 1800 feet. Once we were close to the top, we would be faced with a choice; continue on Spence Ridge, hit the Mountains-to-Sea trail, and then access Table Rock via a final, short, access trail. Or we could take the much more challenging Little Table Rock trail to that same access trail. We did not plan to do the latter.

However, the terrible signage in the gorge proved to be our undoing. We reached a three-way junction where the only sign indicated the trail we had just come from was Spence Ridge (or "S Ridge," a poor abbreviation). We concluded therefore that the left fork would take us to the Chimneys, while the right would lead to Table Rock. We began to wonder what was going on when we reached first one junction and then a second that didn't seem to correspond to our maps - not that any of the three different ones we had agreed. There are an unfortunate number of "unofficial" trails in the area, and we had no way to tell what the trails we encountered were.

It became clear, finally, that we had ended up on the Little Table Rock trail, with all its unnecessary elevation gain and loss. We were beat by the time we reached the top of the mountain.

On the way down, we turned off the access trail onto the Mountains-to-Sea trail, which was clearly marked, and it dumped us out at the top of the Spence Ridge trail. We finally found where we had gone wrong. Remember the "S Ridge" sign? Spence Ridge actually continued as a left turn, while the right went to Little Table Rock. The sign is therefore only useful for folks coming from the top, not from those coming up.

Still, Table Rock was worth it, as you can see from the video.

Linville Gorge backpack

2011-06-01T21:18:00.003-04:00

Pinch-In Panorama
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

This past weekend I crossed two goals off my list - do a multiple-night backpack and see Linville Gorge. Maybe I shouldn't have tried to combine the two, especially when the summer heat finally decided to come out, but why aim low?

Friday night we camped at the rim of the gorge, around 3,600 feet. We kicked around and looked at the waterfall, "hiking" maybe a mile. The next day we packed up, left the car, and headed down the Pinch-In Trail to the bottom of the gorge, around 1,800 feet. The Pinch-In trail is steep, but I liked it because it had spectacular views most of the way down, something the Spence Ridge and Conley Cove trails lack. We wandered south on the Linville Gorge trail for a bit before heading north.

We set up camp (next to these guys).

On day two we headed up to Table Rock, which I think deserves its own post, after moving camp about a mile north. (We wanted to get past some yellowjackets and be closer to the trail we'd hike out with on day three.) Our new site had terrific swimming hole access, but more garbage than any wilderness area ought to. People, don't be pigs: Pack it in, pack it out.

On our last day, we headed up Conley Cove until we reached a choice: Head down the Rock Jock trail, which came out on the road fairly close to our car, or continue up a little ways and hike about three miles on the road. At that point, we were all suffering - or, rather, three of us were; our fourth is indefatigable - from carrying packs on steep terrain for three days plus, even more importantly, hiking in the heat and humidity. The body needs to acclimate to working in the heat, and mine sure hadn't. We unanimously elected to take the easier road hike. It was relatively pleasant for a road hike, as it was a dirt road with shade and little traffic, but the uphill still seemed endless. Seeing the jeep in the parking lot was a really exciting moment, but not quite as exciting as eating dinner in a restaurant, and that was not quite as exciting as getting to take a shower.

A final note: We ate at Famous Louise's in Linville Falls, and we didn't see what the fuss was about. I didn't expect (or find) many vegetarian options, but my omnivorous friends declared their food mediocre at best. Cute atmosphere, though.

Capoeira training weekend

2011-05-23T23:58:00.002-04:00

Training at Vanderbilt
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

Capoeira Angola Palmares Nashville held a training workshop this weekend. Some of our friends from Baton Rouge Capoeira Angola Palmares came up to participate, and it was great to catch up with them.

Four days of capoeira is pretty intense, and so by the end we were all a little tired. Heck, halfway through Saturday we were tired, so we asked Cojaqui if we could do some stretching. Here I am getting stretched out on the back of a Baton Rouge capoerista - a favor which I returned, of course.

Bledsoe Creek State Park

2011-05-19T15:29:00.002-04:00

Stone fence
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

Trying to fill in my hiking record with some local hikes I haven't done, today I went out to Bledsoe Creek State Park near Gallatin. The hike is short and (aside from one stiff climb) flat to moderate in elevation. The hike was a pleasant surprise, however, partially because I saw so much wildlife. Perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise, given that the first half is along a lakeshore, and given that I was hiking alone.

My first sighting was of a large white bird (my guess vacillated between loon and goose) foraging for lunch across a narrow part of the lake. Next I saw a duck family - mom, pops, and the kids - out for a training swim. Then along the water were three pairs of what I suppose were a species of duck. I didn't want to get too close, but they didn't seem alarmed by the fact that there were campers about 25 feet away on the other side of the trail.

Just before the trail turns away from the water for a stiff uphill, a loon took off right in front of me. And then there were the deer - I'm not sure if I saw the same group twice, or two different sets. There were, of course, a thousand cicadas and the usual insect suspects.

The trail, like many in the region, is along the shores of a dammed lake. Most of it is through middle Tennessee's signature cedar glade, although the ground was better aerated than usual thanks to emerged cicadas.

The hike would be great for families - there are enough changes of scenery to keep the kids amused - but the park doesn't really have any other hiking trails. I followed it up with a visit to Drake's Creek Greenway (you have to really love soccer fields) and a drive by the Rock Castle in Hendersonville. The sign always sounded promising, although a local assured me it wasn't that interesting. I found out that it was a stone house, not a natural feature. Whether or not it is interesting worth visiting I may never know, as I let my stomach get the better of me and lead me home.

Digital conversion

2011-05-19T09:17:00.003-04:00

As I prepare to move, one thing I'm doing is selling all of my CDs. I have the music on my computer, and it's backed up to a hard drive, so what do I have to lose besides cover art? (A valid concern - for someone way more "into" music than I).

I've heard it said that our wholesale conversion to MP3s foreshadows a similar shift in the book world, but I have my doubts for two reasons.

One, people read more slowly on screen than on paper. This study suggests 10% slower, but it's up to 25% slower in other studies. Do I want to read 10% fewer books in a year? No.

Two, the conversion of existing media to digital format is much more difficult. A CD can be downloaded in the background, and Gracenote can enter your track names. How about scanning a book? ... hey, come back! I can see all the former grad students in humanities and social sciences running away as fast as they can. You have to scan each page one at a time, and, as Google has discovered, you can't make a high-quality copy without tearing apart the original book. That means no resale. The difference, of course, is that a CD was already a digital format. Imagine if the consumer-oriented MP3 had been invented during the cassette era.

The upshot is that even if people start buying mostly in digital formats, they're going to continue to buy, keep, and resell physical books for a while. There won't be any overnight shift to e-books.

Old photos

2011-05-19T00:58:00.002-04:00

Greyrock Summit
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

I've been scanning in old photos from my pre-digital era. This photo is from summer of 2004, when I interned in Denver. My then-boyfriend came out and we did a one-night backpacking trip (my first!) in the Cache/LaPoudre wilderness in the Rockies. I'm not sure if this was going up or coming down.

Summer

2011-05-18T19:56:00.003-04:00

Although unprecedented prosperity will be mine in the near future, in the short term funds are tight. I don't want to spend any of my savings - in fact, I want to increase them, as moving to Manhattan is a pricy prospect - and my pay for the next couple of months will be low.

(There are a couple of potential things I could pick up this summer, but you surely know the proverb about counting chickens.)

So one thing I'm doing to save a bit of cash is trying to get to the end of the month without paying for any more yoga classes. That's two weeks, so it's about $40 I'd save, which maybe isn't much, but every bit counts, and anyway, I need an incentive to develop a home practice.

Today I kicked things off the easy way by going to a free class sponsored by Lululemon. It was at a studio I know with a teacher I didn't, and it wasn't as challenging as what I typically do, but that's typical for free classes. I'd like to see if I can practice every day, barring days I do serious hiking - no way I'm hiking 10 miles and then doing more than a stretch!

It's done

2011-05-16T23:24:00.004-04:00

Says my mom: "I see Turducken hasn't graduated yet."

Well, here it is: Graduation was last weekend, and I walked. The anxiety level was kicked up a notch because I had to not only walk but carry the graduate school banner, without tripping or impaling anyone. (Success!)

Big South Fork

2011-05-05T18:07:00.002-04:00

Hiking
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

Last weekend we camped at Big South Fork. The weather held until Sunday, when we packed in a hurry to beat the rain. On Saturday we did a hike of 10-ish miles. Part of the trail was a horse trail, with all that entails, and part was hiking-only. It was pretty, but nothing spectacular. In this photo, we are approaching the lunch spot.

Job, found

2011-05-04T02:00:00.002-04:00

This fall I will begin a position with LIM College in Midtown Manhattan as an assistant professor of management.

The public higher education funding model

2011-04-27T13:19:00.001-04:00

Are you Wyoming? If yes, double or triple your population before proceeding to step 2.
Create a set of colleges, N>1, within a state.
Arrange them hierarchically according to their selectivity, using the principal of a pyramid. A typical model would include one flagship, two doctoral-granting universities, at least three or four regional universities and an undergraduate-only college or two, and easily ten community colleges.
Correlate funding inversely with acceptance rate. In other words, the flagships should get the most money per student.
Notice that the bottom of the pyramid is having trouble doing more with less.
Exacerbate the funding inequality further to punish them. Call it "performance funding."

The five lamest capoeira t-shirts

2011-04-27T00:31:00.000-04:00

"I'm a capoeira dancer"? Too bad that's not the right term. (And, as a bonus, its cousin, the "Capoeira black belt" shirt. Too bad capoeira doesn't use belts.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

Maybe this is my personal problem, but I am really tired of activity shirts and bumper stickers that are just modified from other sports. "Eat, sleep, fish" might have been cute once upon a time, but now you can probably get, oh, I don't know, an "Eat, sleep, shuffleboard" shirt. The message on this shirt is that capoeira is like … basketball?

"This is my capoeira shirt" isn't exactly brilliantly original, but it's not offensive, either. But this version leaves me baffled.

It's not that I think capoeristas ought to smoke, but … wtf?

High water in the trail

2011-04-23T09:43:00.002-04:00

High water in the trail
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

Last weekend the Campfire Girls camped out at Rock Island. We had only been there in the summer before, when the Collins River is a gentle thing, and you can rock-hop through it to the falls.

But now the water was much higher. All the rocks were buried under an onslaught of rushing river, far too cold and fast for a nice swim. This video was taken near the old mill, where a short trail leads down to the water - although, as you will see, the trail is even shorter than usual, now.

AERA 2011

2011-04-13T10:08:00.005-04:00

I was dreadfully remiss on blogging during AERA, in part because I had mixed feelings about the conference. I went to sessions that should have been a draw (big names, topics people claim to be interested in) and the attendance was terrible, whereas my K-12 colleagues reported standing-room only at some of their sessions. On the other hand, the roundtables were far too crowded.

But nevertheless, there was some interesting stuff. That included a session on getting research funding that was helpful, a good session on "values, governance, and consumerism," a session of papers on "national organizations" that featured three good papers that really had nothing to do with each other, and a session on preparing to go up for tenure (planning ahead, that).

The coolest thing I saw was not related to my research at all, however. The Carnegie Museum of Natural History had one of their Discovery Domes set up. It is essentially an inflatable igloo with a projector inside, creating an immersive educational environment. Students can tour an archeological site, for example, by "driving" a vehicle and completing various tasks. As this was an educational conference, they weren't just showing the dome off - they were also presenting some research on how student learning compared with doing similar games on a computer. The biggest difference was (in non-technical terms) how "into" the task they got.

News flash

2011-03-31T11:28:00.002-04:00

Oh yes, it occurs to me that I should mention this: On Monday, I submitted my dissertation. That's it - I'm graduating in May.

Linkdump

2011-03-30T23:26:00.000-04:00

The mandatory every-so-often linkdump:

Worried about not getting that journal article accepted? Save yourself the worry by submitting it somewhere you know it won't get in - The Journal of Universal Rejection.

It seems like there are a million different kinds of soft drinks available, but in fact the vast majority are owned by a very few companies. (Via Tobias Bucknell.)

Uh, I've been collecting this set of links for a while, it seems … If someone bought me this, i would marry them. Like, right then and there. (Via the Fug Girls.)

In academia, people tend to beat themselves up for slacking, and then vow to be super duper productive to make up for it. That doesn't work. What works better: Sucking less. (Not that this is unique to academia, but few lines of work are as self-directed. The opportunity for slacking is greatly reduced on an assembly line.)

Yeah, it's a good song, but the video is what's really awesome. (Via Fall.)

Capoeira website

2011-03-19T10:04:00.001-04:00

A quick plug: Our capoeira group now has its own website.

Three random facts about me

2011-03-19T09:48:00.003-04:00

I almost always have a pedicure but not a manicure.
I like all of Joss Whedon's oeuvre except for Buffy.
I have never cleaned an oven.

On top of Frozen Head

2011-03-16T14:09:00.000-04:00

Amazing view
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

This photo is from Sunday's hike to the top of Frozen Head. We hiked up the North Mac trail and down the South Mac and Judge Branch trails. (All the Mac trails go up Old Mac Mountain, yet none of them go all the way to the top - the North Mac trail gives you a view of the peak as you pass by.)

Frozen Head is definitely my favorite state park in Tennessee. It's a real hiker's park, with lots of challenging trails, beautiful campsites, and not many other activities. There is some irony, certainly, in the top of the namesake mountain being this.

Depressing

2011-03-15T22:47:00.003-04:00

Latest OK Cupid Trends report.

No, not the report itself, at least not more so than anything else about dating. It's the comments:

White people trying to convince themselves they're not racists ("I 'just happen' to only be attracted to people of my own race").
"I don't want to stereotype, but ..."
A few white people willing to frontstage their racism with pride.
White people showing off their willingness to date other races, as long as they're races the media fetishes as appropriate for someone of their race and gender.
Total nonsense ("I don't see race, as a white girl who likes black men").
Minorities pointing out that when you're the only black kid at your high school, you date other races or nobody at all.

Come on, folks!

You know how people develop tastes for new kinds of foods? They're willing to try them with an open mind.
Then don't.
I recognize the ad hominem fallacy, but seriously? Check your spelling and grammar before telling me how you're awesome by virtue of your race.
Oh look, a white nerd who likes anime and Asian girls!
I liked "Twas brillig and the slithy toves" better, myself.
Fair enough.

Cumberland Mountain hike

2011-03-15T16:03:00.002-04:00

Mountain man
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

This past weekend I took a spring break moment and went camping out at Frozen Head. We did a short hike Friday and longer ones Saturday and Sunday. This photo is from our Saturday hike, a scout of the Cumberland Mountain segment of the Cumberland Trail. It's the northernmost segment and rather challenging; there are several steep climbs and rock scrambles. If you get an early start, you're probably OK, but we didn't, and of course if you're coming from Nashville, it's a long drive plus car shuttle to even get to the trailhead. We'll test it out again weekend when I lead a Meetup hike on it.

Stop talking to me

2011-03-03T18:15:00.000-05:00

It wasn't that long ago that our notion of computers of the future involved talking to them: "Print this document, Jeeves." I haven't heard as much about this in the last few years, perhaps because typing is becoming a fundamental part of literacy and doesn't seem as onerous as it once did.

Perhaps we've also realized that it would be really darn annoying. I just moved offices (one door down) and am now in a room that has five to eight people working in it at any given moment. It's never silent, but it would be a whole lot louder if we were all dictating our writing, telling Excel to do sums, and hollering at Word not to screw up mail merge.

The notion of speech-based interaction with computers hasn't entirely disappeared, but it tends to be relegated to science fiction where the computers have a personal relationship (not to mention a personality) with the protagonist - think Kevin Spacey as the computer in Moon. It's worth noting that in Moon there is no one else around to be annoyed by the chatter; in fact the computer is an important social support for the protagonist.

This is one of those cases where predictions about the future got it wrong not because the technology couldn't be developed but because the basic technology was too successful. Talking to computers makes sense when they are important but rare; in a world where the average iPod is more powerful than HAL, we can't have everyone going walking around and mumbling, "Play Maroon 5."

Personal goals at the moment

2011-03-02T00:15:00.004-05:00

Give up the using words "sweet" (except referring to sugar) and "lame" (except referring to Verbal Kint) immediately
Be able to au into a handstand and hold it by August
Turn in my dissertation by the March deadline
Get a job that pays better than being a graduate student by graduation
Be more fabulous on days ending in "y"
Learn how to say the Portuguese equivalent of "I have good news and bad news; which would you like first?"
Submit our book proposal by the end of the month
Finish my current writing project
Consume 100% less television on Netflix

Interior spaces

2011-02-23T08:07:00.005-05:00

We had just moved in, and most of our attention had been on the getting the living room, office, and bedroom set up. When I woke up I wondered that we were sharing a one-bedroom, even a spacious one carved out of a older house. The house was built as a series of rooms that opened into each other; the bedroom had no privacy in any case. My roommate Beth had gone out, and I went to explore the kitchen.

The door was set into a small closet off the kitchen we had not opened previously. A plastic plaque read "BASEMENT CHAPEL," and I tried the knob of the miniature door sure that it would not open. Our lease listed the extent of our apartment, and we would have noticed a chapel on there. But the door turned, and I hesitated, sure I was trespassing. Before crouching low and stepping in I propped the door with a pair of old rubber boots, having read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe enough times to know to never to lock myself into an unknown space, even a non-magical one.

The room I stepped into was spacious, with 12-foot ceilings and no windows in the three walls, although it was well-lit by a wall of windows in the office that stood on the fourth side. It was clearly not in a basement, not was it a chapel of the traditional sort. Floor-to-ceiling the walls were covered by black-and white photos taken and arranged by someone with a wonderful eye, many in round frames. One was of three young men sticking their heads through flanged iron collars mounted on a wall that was otherwise covered in doorknobs. Their haircuts suggested the 1940s and they had irrepressible grins. Next to it was a close-up of the flesh of a tomato scored with knotted ropes. Around the walls were what would be called knick-knacks in a lesser space; bushel baskets of some small ordinance from the world wars (the baskets each labeled "WWI" and "WWII"); an ancient relief silver figure of about six inches high, either Etruscan or Norse, of what looked like a pleasantly impish warrior.

The floor was taken up with two double-sized beds with crisp white sheets and olive wool blankets, simple and practical. They didn't catch the eye among everything else, but the sheets of one were tossed back. I assumed they had been thrown back one morning decades ago, an impression that grew stronger as I wandered into the office. It was equally busy, but clearly a working space, with the metal furniture of the 1950s, neat stacks of manila file folders and papers, and well-built pencil sharpeners and protractors.

I heard Beth in the kitchen behind me, calling my name. I didn't want her to share this space with me, but I knew she would find it.

"In here," I said.

She came in and glanced around.

"Huh. Interesting." She seemed to find it more of a curiosity than a wonderment.

The office led into another darker room, and I was about to look in when we heard the unmistakable sound of a key in a lock. We could not see a door, but it sounded as if it were coming from the very apartment we were in.

"Shit," Beth said, turning back to our own door.

I debated hiding under the bed briefly. Instead we scrambled back through the little door, shutting it behind us and in turn shutting the closet door.

Our friend Bobby was in the kitchen, starting some kind of soup at the stove, not registering our scrambling.

"Oh hi," he said. "How are you doing?"

Lower Cane Loop at Fall Creek Falls

2011-02-22T11:12:00.001-05:00

Rest break
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

On Saturday, I led a 12.4-mile hike at Fall Creek Falls. This particular hike is mostly flat, aside from a dip down into Cane Creek Gorge: At 3 miles, you go down 800 feet in a mile, and then back up 800 feet in the next mile. The photo is of Cane Creek at the bottom of the gorge.

Unfortunately, one of my friends sprained his ankle on the way up, and he had to hike about three more miles before we could get him out. He was a real trooper about it, though. This also meant we didn't get to spend as much time checking out waterfalls and overlooks, as getting everyone out safely became my first priority.

Last time I was at FCF, we were attacked by angry hornets and then waylaid by a copperhead. Maybe next time?

Choosing a college

2011-02-21T10:37:00.000-05:00

This article on "why students want to go to Harvard" is interesting, but the headline is misleading; the research contrasts the 71 schools characterized as "most competitive" by Barron's with those labeled "competitive." There are two levels in between, "very" and "highly" competitive." In other words, it's not why-Harvard-and-not-Duke; it's why-Centre-and-why-not-U-Tennessee.

I assume the author didn't write his own headline, of course. But this struck a chord with something I've been thinking about lately. I'm at Vanderbilt, which US News considers to be 17th in the nation. It's not even in contention to beat Harvard, but nevertheless it is an excellent university. My alma mater, by contrast, is now ranked #41. (Which is lower than when I was there, something no alumni want to see.)

Some of the differences between the school are superficial (more pearls and magnolias at Vanderbilt; it's the South, after all), and some are more significant but don't affect the quality of education (Vandy has a larger undergraduate student body). In fact, I dare say there aren't any significant differences in the quality of education at all. At that point in the university rankings, you have really bright students being taught by really bright profs with gobs of research money, and learning is going to occur.

There is one major difference between the two institutions, though, and that's the social and cultural capital in the student body. At Vandy, the students are constantly forming their own nonprofits, even their own for-profits. Later on the young alumni become entrepreneurs or get jobs in consulting or the fashion industry.

I don't see this at my alma mater. It's not just the time lag - undergrads everywhere are a lot more obsessed with internships now than they were over a dozen years ago - because the news I hear from alma mater isn't all that different from when I was there.

Students at both schools who go on to enter highly meritocratic (especially formally meritocratic) endeavors do equally well. That is, graduates who go into TFA, academia, or med school, for example, are generally successful. Students who want to do something where there isn't a formal plan, however, don't have the same kind of success. Oh, sure, alumni are living happy, productive lives and they are generally making a decent living, but they aren't able to tap into some of the same kinds of resources to propel themselves to stardom.

There is a huge cultural capital component to college, and we ignore this at our own peril. "Everyone" knows that going to college will get you a Good Job. The middle class knows that a Good College will get you a Better Life. The upper class knows that going to a Top College will let you do whatever you want to do. Why do more students want to go to Harvard today? Because more people are becoming aware of the advantages the elite schools confer, advantages that have nothing to do with their quality of education per se.

Snow, day 2

2011-02-12T00:10:00.004-05:00

After the long walk home Wednesday, I had to take the bus in Thursday. (That's not entirely true, I guess - I could have walked again.) While the temps were well below freezing, it was a sunny day, and the plowed roads dried out comparatively fast. The unplowed side roads, like the one I live on, were still packed with snow. This was not true at the other end of my commute, at Vanderbilt, which has a lot of money and a snow-removal plan. You can see the difference in these photos; the first shows the streets in my neighborhood - not arterials. The second shows a plowed and melting Shelby Avenue.

Winter hike

2011-02-09T20:16:00.003-05:00

Pedestrian Bridge
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

At 3:15 the snow started, with large and fast flakes, and I decided it was time to cancel class for the evening. Several students who live in outlying areas had already told me they weren’t going to be able to make it. It looked as if everyone else might be able to make it to class, only to find themselves trapped in a Hotel California type of situation.

I brushed off the car and headed for home – along with the rest of the Greater Nashville area. The roads were actually still eminently drivable, although “driving” is a word that could only loosely be applied to our endeavor: Traffic was at a standstill. After 25 minutes, I had made it from Peabody all the way to Demonbreun and Roy Acuff. I was afraid I’d get a repetitive strain injury in my clutch ankle at the rate we were going, so I decided to pack it in. If I was going to sit in traffic, at least I could do so in a bus.

After finding a terrific parking spot, I headed for the bus stop at 21st and Edgehill, where I realized that I wouldn’t be seeing a bus anytime soon. Cars were completely gridlocked. Forget the car, forget the bus – I know how to walk, even if I was wearing high-heeled boots – much more comfortable than you might think, by the way. I could always catch a bus if things cleared out. I grabbed my umbrella as a snow shield. Even though people look ridiculous carrying umbrellas in the snow, not looking ridiculous wasn’t close to the top of my to-do list at the moment.

I passed by my salon and ducked in to cancel my appointment for the next morning. My stylist half-joked that she might have to spend the night there. (I hope she made it out.)

At the corner where Broadway and West End split, a driver with a green light angrily honked at the cars blocking the intersection. They, of course, could not move, and getting apoplexy wasn’t going to help anyone, even if people shouldn’t be idiots and block intersections.

I passed over I-65, which wasn’t moving. I marveled at how few pedestrians were out. Two women who had been walking in my direction decided to get on a bus. It may have been warmer inside, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

As I went by the Frist, thinking I really should go see the Vishnu exhibit, I noticed a wallet lying on the sidewalk. Now I’m a good enough person not to rifle through it for cash, but I wasn’t feeling up to tracking down the rightful owner. Luckily, there is a post office right there, so I brought the wallet in and gave it to an employee. Hey, if you can’t trust a representative of the federal government, who can you trust? (Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.)

At the Convention Center I turned right to take the pedestrian bridge: I didn’t want some crazy driver tearing along at 3 mph to slide into me. Hilton employees were showing a reckless disregard for Southern folkways and shoveling their sidewalks.

I had been meaning to check out the pedestrian bridge for a while, as I hadn’t been there since the flood. Aside from a cyclist, sensibly not riding, I had it to myself. I was pleased to note traffic on the Shelby Bridge was actually moving faster than I was, and I entertained the possibility of taking the Shelby bus the rest of the way. Since I wasn’t sure of how often they ran, I didn’t want to wait at a stop, which turned out to be wise – I never did see one.

East Nashville is hilly, and cars were having trouble making it up the hill between 9th and 10th Streets. From there it was downhill again, and the roads were visibly bad. I didn’t see evidence of salt anywhere, aside from on the sidewalks outside a few civic-minded businesses, and the plows – I saw one – were as trapped in traffic as everyone else.

I turned down 14th because it has sidewalks, and passed a couple of teenagers not so much playing as being sullen. It still surprised me how few people were out, even granted that some folks have commutes far too long to walk. Surely some people lived within walking distance.

From there it was a few short blocks home. I had wondered in the past about the feasibility of walking to campus, and now I had empirical evidence it was doable. 4.3 miles took me 1 ½ hours. It would undoubtedly be faster in better shoes with less snow.

I don't feel like dancing

2011-02-06T23:56:00.002-05:00

The other weekend I was at a batizado in Knoxville for Fundo da Mata, a group under Mestre Acordeon, with fellow capoeristas from Capoeira Angola Palmares Nashville. On Saturday we were supposed to do a samba and maculele workshop; I was disappointed that there ended up not being time for the maculele portion.

Samba is danced in two ways. The first is in groups, like the parades of Carnival. It's a parade, of course, so the dancers are moving forward as they dance, and they are unpartnered. The second is in the samba de roda, which is where two dancers are in a circle, and others cut in. Our lesson was focused on the samba de roda.

There are basically three components to the samba. One is the arms, which are quite simple: If you're really stuck, you don't have to do anything with them, really. The second is the footwork, which starts off with a fairly simple step, although one can get much more complicated. The third is the hips, which move with each step, but always in the same way. That doesn't mean the hips are easy, though; it's sort of like bellydancing, where there is a certain knack to getting it.

I stuck with the class for about ten minutes before sitting it out to watch. The teacher was moving at a rather fast pace for me; when I stopped being able to see what it was I was supposed to do with my feet, there was no way I could reproduce it. Moreover, I couldn't get the hips at all.

I'm sure someone is thinking, "Just go with it. No one cares if you get it right away." That's the sort of thing naturally gifted dancers always say. Of course, half the group was talking about One Person's dancing after the class - "I was really surprised to see O.P. dancing - I was trying so hard not to laugh." That's the sort of thing lots of naturally gifted dancers also do, and then they wonder why we get discouraged!

But the truth is, I don't have any interest in mastering the samba. Samba de roda is the kind of thing that would give me nightmares, if I actually ever had them. It pretty much combines everything that makes me cringe inside: Being watched while dancing. Spontaneous physicality. Exaggerated flirting. If you watched the video above past the portion where the little kids are dancing, you can see what I mean.

It's not that I'm opposed to those things in a moral or objective way - they just are so, so, so not me. Consider the following tidbit from a description of my Meyers-Briggs type: "This can make personal relationships difficult, particularly romantic ones that require flirtation. Coyness and indirectness are not strong points for INTJs*, innocuous play is not at all meaningful and comes across as being stilted." Basically, I feel stupid, and feeling awkward and stupid strongly inhibits sambaing.

If I ever decided there was a reason I ought to samba, I would spend a damn long time in the privacy of my own home, not to mention getting private instruction, before I ever took it out for a twirl in the roda. Yet I doubt I would ever master the art of it, even if I got my hips to do the right thing. I have a hard enough time with the concept of malandragem in capoeira, which basically is a kind of trickery; why not just play straight-forwardly? Keeping your moves open until the last second, so your partner can't anticipate you, makes a kind of sense, but feinting and teasing - ugh.

This is clearly a limitation for me, but at this point in my game I am willing to let certain limitations lie, because there are so many other things to learn that are closer at hand.

* In point of fact, I'm right on the E/I border. Extrovert's "can't not lead" and I's are "socially clueless," neither of which quite describes me - like an Introvert, I will lead where there is a vacuum, but I'm not nearly as Asperger's as the description of INTJ sounds.

Crossing the stream

2011-02-02T00:07:00.001-05:00

Crossing
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

We took advantage of the beautiful weather Sunday to hike to Snow Falls for some light maintenance. The weather was truly amazing, and the hike was even more fun because half of the group had never been there before.

Near the end of the trail is a stream you have to cross. Last time I was there, it was summer, so the water was warm and a little bit lower; even so, the crossing is very slick. This time it was downright chilly. On the way to the falls, two folks fell in - yes, one of them was me. (No one was hurt.) One of the hikers did quite a spectacular pratfall without dropping the beagle in his arms!

Dissertation: Practitioner check

2011-02-01T23:51:00.004-05:00

I had lunch today with a professor who is a board member herself at an institution very similar to the ones I used in my case studies - a small, co-educational liberal arts college in the Southeast. She isn't in higher education research (although she is familiar with some of it) but was interested in my findings as a trustee.

Most of what I found was validated by her own experience. Most the things that weren't were idiosyncratic to the institutions I studied - for example, I did not expect that the college that required trustee attendance at a lot of campus events was typical.

It was a nice validity check to compare my results against someone who has an academic understanding of the field and practitioner experience.

Dissertation: Reset

2011-01-27T11:25:00.003-05:00

I have to admit, posting about my dissertation has been difficult, because my mind hasn't been in it. It's not that I'm not interested in, or thinking about, the topic; I'm working on revisions nearly every day. The trouble is, at the moment I'm revising the quantitative section, so that's where my head is at.

Because of that, I'm going to switch gears and write about what I'm actually working on.

The quantitative portion is based on a survey of presidents conducted in 2006 by the Council of Independent Colleges and Wes Willmer. Fundraising surveys often have bad response rates, as low as 20-something percent. In this case, 274 out of 555 responded. This is not bad, relatively speaking, but it's still quite possible that respondents are not typical of all CIC members. My assumption going in (and my committee's) was that responding schools would be those with more time and resources devoted to fundraising.

However, a comparison of these schools isn't bearing this out. So far I've only compared them in IPEDS, not in VSE, but the colleges are statistically similar on tuition and fees, revenues, the percent of revenues from fundraising and from endowment returns, total enrollment, and six-year graduation rate. The only variable they differ on is graduation rates.

This is unexpected good news, because I can generalize my findings to other CIC institutions. I am wondering what it means, though, that they are different only in graduation rates. Are they more selective? Do they offer a better education? And how does this impact my generalizability? Luckily, I can test how selective they are via IPEDS.

Links

2011-01-24T17:09:00.003-05:00

You might not want to breathe too deeply - I've been holding on to some of these links for so long, they might be getting moldy:

Penn State prof blogs on higher education.

Almost true tales of academia: "A friend from undergrad was in a program where she was the only female student to make it out alive and with a PhD in a decade. ('You’re making it sound worse than it is,' my husband tells me. 'Only one student actually died, and she was killed by a drunk driver.' 'Yes, but the drunk driver was the department chair.')"

Hitting very close to home: Dating as a 30-something female academic: "Most of the time, dating does not feel like fun. I mean, sure, it’s supposed to feel like fun, but really what it feels more like is a job interview, a job interview in which you are both the interviewer as well as the interviewee."

Universities as transmitters of social capital: "Once upon a time, the content of an elite education was much more closely mapped to the cultural capital of the elite: this is precisely what fed the resentment of ambitious outsiders like Richard Nixon for the Eastern Establishment."

And, nothing to do with academia at all: "Wild coyotes have settled in or around every major city in the United States, thriving as never before, and in New York they have taken to golf. I’m told the New Yorker coyotes spend a good deal of time near the tenth hole on the Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the Bronx." Yup, golfing coyotes.

One of the more interesting pieces on issues with the Kindle as "the future of books."

Upside down

2011-01-19T00:29:00.001-05:00

One thing I've been working on in both yoga and capoeira is handstands and related movements and poses. That includes aus (cartwheels) in capoeira and headstands in yoga.

A secret: Cartwheels are actually easier than balancing upside down. That's because in a cartwheel, your arms aren't really supporting much of your weight: Most of the work is coming from momentum. You could probably do a cartwheel, although it might not be pretty - the biggest obstacle is mental.

Just a few years ago in yoga, I was terrified of handstands. I wouldn't even try them against the wall. (Just ask Gillian, my yoga teacher.) Now I've gotten over that, but I still can't hold a freestanding handstand.

The problem isn't really arm and shoulder strength, although I could probably use more of that. It's balance, and that comes from the rest of the body, particularly the core. So I've been working on a few things that build up control in those muscles.

One move I've just recently gotten down is getting up into tripod headstand from a wide-legged standing position. (You can see what I mean in the first half of this video.) It's much easier to get up into tripod if your legs are together than if they are spread apart. And I was surprised to find out that the difficulty for me was in the outer thighs, rather than my arms or tummy.

Not surprisingly, though, various forms of handstands are the best practice. So is simply kicking up into handstand (as opposed to going down from standing), because you have to learn the right amount of force to use. Not enough, and you don't make it into a handstand. Too much and the momentum carries you beyond a handstand into landing on the other side, hopefully painlessly. This isn't a problem when you're practicing against the wall, but it is an issue when you're in the roda.

I'm not there yet. There's a feeling in an inversion where you know that you are balanced - not only are you not falling over, but you feel lighter. I know this sensation from headstands. Only recently have I begun to have those moments in handstands as well. While, alas, they don't last very long, they are very encouraging, because I can tell I'm getting better - even if no one else can see it.

So my long-term goal right now is something I can't do yet but hope to be able to do by August: Get into a handstand (and hold it) from a cartwheel. You're using momentum, yes, but you have to stop that momentum with entirely different muscles since you are falling sideways, not forward.

In the meantime, I'm working on balancing in handstand period; on kicking up with my right leg as reliably as my left, and doing au fechado, a cartwheel with the legs hugged into the body.

Dissertation: Evaluating and supportng the president

2011-01-18T16:11:00.002-05:00

All the literature stresses that board must simultaneously support and evaluate the president. At all three colleges, however, board members stressed supporting over evaluating. This was most notable at one college:

"I think it’s truly become [the president's] board at this point," one trustee said. Another said, “I truly believe a board is simply there to support its president or support its leader.” When asked what one should do if one couldn’t support the president, this trustee replied, “Get off the board.”

Weekend

2011-01-14T16:11:00.000-05:00

This weekend I am going backpacking. Yes, it will be cold. It builds character.

Dissertation: Trustees on campus

2011-01-13T18:02:00.004-05:00

Sorry for the hiatus: I've been traveling. I'm back in Nashville, the semester has started, and things should be more regular.

Last time, I was talking about the differences in trustee roles among the three campuses. At one campus, trustees were expected to be at many on-campus events:

We probably hit our [local] alums a little harder in terms of visibility and ambassadorship. We really expect them to be at as many functions that the college hosts or co-hosts as they possibly can. Not everyone can be at every sporting event, but at the big ones we hope people are there, as well as major events which are philanthropic by nature either directly or indirectly.

There was a downside to this, however:

Those of us in the area that see each other socially outside of college events, or at college events, we feel very close to one another. Some of the guys, one of the guys in Hawaii, he probably only makes two meetings a year, so those are the only two times I see him, so it’s hard to establish a relationship. … So those who aren’t at the college, who don’t see each other, don’t sit with each other at football games, it’s much harder. And having just completed our trustees’ review of the group that’s up for selection, that was a consistent theme among the out-of-town trustees.

Dissertation: Trustees on campus

2011-01-07T20:50:00.002-05:00

One thing I found fascinating during my research was how the duties of trustees varied among the three campuses. Unsurprisingly, trustees were expected to attend several annual meetings and serve on one or more committees at each college. Making donations was expected as well, although for at least one college this was new. But at one college, trustees were expected to attend as many on-campus events as possible, including home games in the two big sports on campus. (That this wasn't expected elsewhere was not a function of the trustees' distance from campus.) At another campus, the expectations for trustee giving were much more structured - they should give x and y to the campaign and z annually when they're not in a campaign.

Of course, the work of trustees varies slightly from campus to campus, depending on how large the student body is - not to mention whether it's public or private - and how strong its religious affiliation (if any) is. But within the small, private, denominational sphere, I was expecting more similarity. Trustees can only devote so much time to their role, generally: It was fascinating to see how colleges allocated that time differently.

Dissertation: Overview

2011-01-04T14:50:00.004-05:00

Someone suggested to me that I talk more about my dissertation on my blog - now that the majority of shoveling is done and I have results. So, taking that advice, I'm going to be trying to post twice a week with quotes from my interviews or analyses of my data.

Today, however, I'm simply starting off with a brief description of what my dissertation is. I am studying boards of trustees at small private (American) colleges. More specifically, I'm looking at how they are involved with fundraising. The actual analysis consists of two parts: The first uses data from a survey to attempt to predict how various board characteristics (like percent who are alumni of the college) influence total funds raised from donations. The second consists of data, mostly interviews, from three small colleges in the Southeast. Here, I am less interested in prediction than in the roles the trustees take on in relation to fundraising.

I found several things, some surprising, some known but not the subject of previous strategy, and some utterly unsurprising. I'll be talking about some of those in the weeks to come.

Favorite books of 2010

2010-12-31T12:28:00.001-05:00

These my favorite books I read in 2010. Most of them aren't from 2010; I'm not as up on things as all that.

The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad - Minister Faust: Two nerds save the world in Edmonton.
334 - Thomas M. Disch: Classic near-future dystopia.
Zero - Ignacio de Loyola Brandão: Another classic, translated from Portuguese. Think Pynchon or Barth.
The City and the City - China Mieville: After being disappointed by his last two books, I was excited to see a return to form.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz: The trials of a young Dominican nerd and his family.
Big Machine - Victor LaValle: Conspiracy, self-discovery, fine haberdashery.

And a nod to a couple of non-fiction books, because you know I'm in the academic line - neither of these are new, mind you:

Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom - Lisa D. Delpit
Racism WIthout Racists - Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.

Photo from NYC

2010-12-29T15:44:00.002-05:00

Sundial
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

The last update on the New York trip ... yes, I am a higher ed geek, and so I end up visiting colleges on vacation.

New York trip

2010-12-28T22:36:00.002-05:00

Bears in NYC?
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

Other museums I visited while in New York included the Museum of Transit and El Museo del Barrio. I also spent a lot of time just exploring the city; this statue is from Morningside Park. While I didn't eat expensively, I had a lot of great food. And I saw Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which was a good show.

Trip to New York

2010-12-26T11:19:00.002-05:00

Off into the sunset
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

Back from vacation! On my first day in New York, I started off by walking the High Line, a rails-to-trails project. Only part of it is open thus far, but it's a really fabulous space. They're doing a great job with it. This photo is of a tiny bit of rail they've preserved; most of the path is concrete.

I also went to the Rubin Museum, a Himalayan art museum. It was pretty nice (and only $2 student admission).

Celebration

2010-12-15T22:31:00.002-05:00

People have asked me, "So, are you celebrating your defense?" The answer is that I went out to lunch with friends after, which makes the next question, "Did you get drunk?" While I had beer, no. I had to go back to work after.

My real celebration will be next week, when I go to New York City for vacation. No, I don't have relatives there. No, I'm not staying with friends, although I will see some people while I'm there. Right now I have only the loosest of plans - other than a reservation at a hostel, which only a fool or a person with a lot of friends to stay with in the city could dispense with during the holidays. I'm neither of those. I want to see a Broadway show or two, take a couple of capoeira classes, maybe do some yoga, and go to a Christmas Eve service, but most of these plans aren't set in stone. This is probably a shocker to those who know me well, as I am a Type-A planner.

Today I went to Borders to pick up a travel guide and got quite lucky. I inquired at the information desk as to where the travel books were - that part of the store had been reorganized since I was last there - and the woman working informed me she had moved here from NYC two weeks ago. (For the music industry, of course.) She recommended the Time Out guides as the best, and it seemed like the wise course to trust her.

So, vacation.

Jobs

2010-12-13T11:50:00.000-05:00

Assistant Prof in Higher Ed, Old Dominion University.

Asst/Assoc Prof of Higher Ed, George Washington University.