Scholarly Panic: Thoughts about Teaching and the notion of "Originality"

One of the hardest things that scholarly writers face is the pressure to be original.  For graduate students, who may be making their first attempts at original work, this demand for original ideas, interpretations or discoveries can be especially anxiety producing. I’ve heard stories of graduate students hiding certain library books in the fear that others will stumble upon the same ideas. I’ve speculated about and heard others speculate about plagiarism when publications come out that seem to replicate conclusions and sources that were in unpublished manuscripts that had been sent out for review. Even for more seasoned scholars, the fear is there that we don’t know what we’re doing and that our work will be replicating something else.  Given the amount of scholarly production, it seems almost impossible to imagine that we can do original work unless it’s on a subject that’s so obscure no one else knows (or cares) about it.

I’m writing this little reflective story as a way to think about how to teach students what we mean by originality and how to reduce the anxiety associated with a seemingly impossible goal.

This morning I was reading news on Facebook and followed a link to this article by Kristoffer Smemo, a  graduate student at UC Santa Barbara who’s writing his dissertation on liberal Republicans:  

I was thrilled by his analysis of the band Black Flag’s conservative ideology, because he had so clearly articulated and formulated thoughts about the U.S. hardcore punk scene, about which I had been reading as part of my research for a chapter of my book on anti-fascism.  After my initial thrilled and excited reaction to reading this sharp analysis, I had the panicked reaction of “oh no, he figured it out first!  And now… all my work on this subject up to now is just superfluous. ”

My “oh no!” reaction while understandable given the competitive aspects of academic culture is also kind of ridiculous for a number of reasons.

The reason for this reaction is based in an understanding of scholarship as a competitive endeavor in which only one person can be “the smartest” or “the first” to the finish line.  Given the fact that it’s hard to be original perceiving scholarship this way can make the experience of research anxiety producing, miserable and alienating.  If we instead think of scholarship as a collaborative human enterprise in which people working in the same area can be helpfully viewed as friends or comrades, what originality means, and how we get there becomes much less lonely and other people’s work becomes less threatening.

Here is a set of things I might say to students in order to reduce the anxiety about what it means to be original and to take some of the competitive energy out of the research and writing process.

1) Someone else will almost always have already had the same idea as you, or an even better one that you haven’t thought of yet, but that when you read it, will cause you to think:  “yes, that’s exactly right.” And, then perhaps, “Damn it, why didn’t’ I think of that?”

 It’s almost impossible to have an idea that no one else has. We’re all living in the same historical moment, and many of us are trying to figure out answers to the same problems, reading many of the same books, and swimming in the same cultural soup. So, of course we’re going to think similar things.  It would be more shocking if no one had the same idea you did than if they didn’t. It’s often the case that someone else has come to a particular question before you did. To look at this from another perspective, isn’t it nice to know that there is someone else who has thought this thing or thought it better than you? Isn’t it in fact nice that someone is interested in the same subject as you?  You are not alone and you are not crazy.   In fact, it means you are addressing a subject that matters to other people. Now, you can see evidence in the fact of this other person’s work that your work is relevant.

2)  Even if this other person has thought the same thing, or figured out this problem in a better way than you, and has even been working on this problem or question a lot longer than you have, it’s unlikely that he or she is working on all of the exact same questions that you are and about the exact same texts, historical period, or topics.  You can carry on with your work.  If it is the case that this person’s research has done exactly what you were planning to do and essentially “got there before you” that is why we do literature reviews when we embark on new scholarly projects. Aren’t you glad you found this book/article/dissertation now instead of a year from now?

3)  You have a new comrade and helper. Discovering that someone else has already answered the question you started your project with does not mean abandoning your research on a particular subject or casting that person’s work as an enemy that has to be defeated in order to prove your own originality or superiority, or hoping that no one will notice and failing to cite a highly relevant work.  The fact that this other person had already started this work before, and has thought about it so intelligently means that their work is going to be tremendously helpful and will save you  from having to do the work that they have already done.

4)  Now that this intellectual comrade has answered the question you started with, you can learn from his or her work, acknowledge this other scholar's significant contribution,  and think about moving to a question that the work raises but does not answer. There will pretty much always be at least one. No work on a subject can say everything about it, and any really good piece of work will be applicable in other ways.   There are all kinds of ways to take inspiration from another work on your subject:  whether that means looking at how an idea or fact can be seen in a different context, applying an idea to a new subject, going broader and making comparisons, going into more depth about a single detail, getting into some unexplored, but possibly related area that the other author wasn’t interested in, and in fact, continuing to treat that person as a scholarly “friend” – someone who shares your passion and engagement, and with whom you are working to build new knowledge in related areas. It makes scholarship much less lonely. This is quite different from thinking about the goal of scholarship as being to come up with an original finding in which you are pitted competitively with everyone else who is working on the same subject.

5) This is different from being so indebted to someone else’s work that you are unable to think of different questions from the ones that they have already answered and just want to repeat their insights and preach about them to others, or even that you cannot be critical of works that they have done. The only reason to write anything is because you still think something is missing from what's out there. Benjamin puts it this way,  Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”  

  Maybe another day I'll write about the value of  enemies or adversaries - they have a role too. As Orwell's famous essay on writing describes it, writing is an ordeal. Why bother if you are already satisfied with what had already been written?  So, while the quest for originality can be anxiety producing when the purpose of your research is all about proving that you’re smarter than other people, that pressure comes off if you remain driven by your passion for the subject and experience some kind of fellowship with others who share that passion and are writing and thinking in the same area, while recognizing that each of us has limited capacities. No one work will say all that is there is to be said, and part of being “original” is actually about engaging productively with other scholars’ work, even when the initial experience of reading it can induce a momentary panic.

Usable Pasts and Historians' Fights

  I just finished reading the edited collection, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler: Original Documents of the Historikerstreit and, with some irony, my friend J and I spent part of the morning commute comparing the conservative German historians' similarity to other conservative nationalists seeking to retain national pride in the face of horrific national histories in Japan and the United States.
    If you're not familiar with the Historikerstreit, it erupted over two significant events in the mid-1980s:  one the visit of Ronald Reagan to the Bitburg cemetery and two, the publication of an article by Ernst Nolte which said, among other things, that Chaim Weitzman's declaration in 1939 that the Jews of Palestine would fight on the side of England in a war against Hitler meant that Hitler was rational in targeting Jews as political enemies and putting them in camps. Jurgen Habermas made the bold move of connecting the Nolte article to several other recent publications by conservative Germans and all of these to the rightward shift in German politics, known as the Wende, and the indignant responses came next. Richard J. Evans, (who was more recently an expert witness against David Irving at his libel trial), wrote an excellent brief summary of the arguments that places them in the context of German post-war politics and the historiography of fascism. Particularly in reading Evans' summary of the work of Andreas Hillgruber on the German army on the Eastern front, my mind again ran to comparison.
    Evans points out the problems with Hillgruber's representation of the German army on the Eastern front, drawing on the work of Omer Bartov on the German invasion of Russia, which indicates that rather than behaving as simple patriots defending their country from fearsome Russian hordes, or acting with "realistic moral responsibility"(with greater realism than the members of the military who attempted to assassinate Hitler in the July Plot of 1944) as Hillgruber argued, that the German army in the East behaved "with extreme brutality and barbarism to the Red Army...also laid waste whole areas of territory...and massacred or otherwise caused the deaths of millions of civilians as a matter of policy." (Evans, 60)
  It was hard to read the conservative historians dubbing Hitler's aggressive war as a "preemptive attack" on Russia, without thinking of the rationalizations presented for the U.S.'s 2003 invasion of Iraq, in the name of preemption, complete with its own fascist terminology of "shock and awe." Reading about Germany's efforts to come to terms with its past, I began to wonder how history a hundred years from now will judge America and how my generation will fair, as we forwarded emails and updated our statuses on Facebook, but easily returned the focus to our personal lives or careers while our country went on committing horrors in in our names. Will the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan become, like the war in Vietnam, remembered as strategic blunders with American victims, rather than as shocking, horrific examples of military aggression and war crimes? Will any criticism of the war be diverted by a mythology of the anti-war movement's betrayal of the troops? Today, our award-winning films concentrate on the experiences of American troops, and try to show gritty realism, but often wind up justifying aggression and even war crimes, and fail, as Nick Turse points out, to show the other side of the U.S. war machine - the point of view of people whose countries are under attack. He writes,

Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war.  Real war.  War that seeks you out.  War that arrives on your doorstep -- not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.  The ever-present fear that just when you’re at the furthest point in your fields, just when you’re most exposed, most alone, most vulnerable, it will come roaring into your world.

Those Americans who have gone to war since the 1870s -- soldiers or civilians -- have been mostly combat tourists, even those who spent many tours under arms or with pen (or computer) in hand reporting from war zones.  The troops among them, even the draftees or not-so-volunteers of past wars, always had a choice -- be it fleeing the country or going to prison.  They never had to contemplate living out a significant part of their life in a basement bomb shelter or worry about scrambling out of it before a foreign soldier tossed in a grenade.  They never had to go through the daily dance with doom, the sense of fear and powerlessness that comes when foreign troops and foreign technology hold the power of life and death over your village, your home, each and every day.

The ordinary people whom U.S. troops have exposed to decades of war and occupation, death and destruction, uncertainty, fear, and suffering -- in places like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan -- have had no such choice.  They had no place else to go and no way to get there, unless as exiles and refugees in their own land or neighboring ones.  They have instead been forced to live with the ever-present uncertainty that comes from having culturally strange, oddly attired, heavily armed American teenagers roaming their country, killing their countrymen, invading their homes, arresting their sons, and shouting incomprehensible commands laced with the word “fuck” or derivations thereof.

 So perhaps U.S. patriots are not so far from Hillgruber in insisting on national identification with the average soldiers at the front regardless of their actions. I do not write this to say that the U.S. troops behaved like the German forces on the Eastern Front; of course there are significant differences. My point has to do with the nationalist impulse that insists on justifying or rationalizing the history of war in the name of preserving pride in one's national identity. As those on the left in the Historikerstreit argued, the very fact of resistance even within the military itself indicates that there was more than one "German" point of view. Similarly in the U.S., soldiers and veterans continue to resist despite the cost to themselves. Rather than following the post-war Germans'call to rehabilitate the military's reputation and expunge national shame, it is long past time that we heed another German, Erich Fromm, who repudiated imperialist nationalism as an affliction crippling human consciousness:

The average man today obtains his sense of identity from his belonging to a nation rather than his being a 'son of man'. His objectivity, his reason is warped by this fixation. He judges a stranger with different crieteria than the members of his own clan....Nationalism...is our idolatry, is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult....that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity....Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have found a new, human form of rootedness, will he have transformed his world into a truly human home (from The Sane Society, 59-60)

Our Times and Contemporary Literature

   Being an academic has made me less inclined to read serious literary fiction. After hours of poring through microfilm reels in search of the occasional relevant fact, stumbling through a work of difficult theory with pen in hand, or doing a mandatory 6 hour stint in a library with two recent books in my field fact-checking over and over again, it's hard to want to come home, as I tried to do my first year in graduate school to Fielding's Tom Jones. In the age of VHS, I followed the advice of one dear friend and finished off each day of prelim-exam reading by watching a movie and drinking a glass of wine.  I did something similar when revising my book on a tight deadline one summer, knocking off at the end of the day with DVDs of Homicide.
  Before that, I was what was recently called a book girl. I always read promiscuously:  conspicuously carrying Kafka's essays with me to punk rock shows at fifteen but delighting equally in Agatha Christie mysteries read one after another during winter and summer vacations. I also recall the greatly satisfying experiences of reading what I knew was serious literature:  Pride and Prejudice and Catcher in the Rye both read during the summer in Texas; one summer in college, working in a university library and dragging home piles of things from the PQ section...Latin American and French literature in translation by the backpack load.  One year in college, when the wealthier students took off from the private New England school I went to for their expensive spring-break holidays, I decided to stay on campus reading novels (A Hundred Years of Solitude at the time)  rather than going home or to New York to visit family. "Novels?" an ex-boyfriend said, "YOU read novels?" Not a pleasure-reader, he thought I meant Jackie Collins, which is what his mother and her friends read. (No, I have never enjoyed that particular swath of bad books)
    Now, I feel very nostalgic about my pre-professional days, in high school, before graduate school, and some points in my adjunct days of riding trains between Brighton Beach and NYU, before I was working on a book and could read without being strategic about the use of my time. I often think back fondly to that 6 month period when I worked in the Hamptons, made regular trips to Canio's bookstore and read Toni Morrison, Phillip Roth, Herman Melville, and Umberto Eco either before or after going off to work in a restaurant, and those months after finishing my dissertation involving weeks spent with Heinrich Boll, Katherine Anne Porter,  Robert Graves, and William Faulkner. If I were to read this way today, however, I would need an excuse of "reading it for my book" or I would always feel like I should be using that valuable time to read some half-baked Deluezian meditation or a highly specialized book about this topic of mine. My anxiety mounts with each inch added to the "to-read" pile. By contrast, there is always time to read a detective novel, especially if it's an audiobook that can be listened to on an elliptical trainer, while driving, or doing chores around the house. These novels are absorbing and can be settled into, some deliberately cozy, but all like a familiar favorite meal, and they are not without insight into human character or social problems, and are not always so inattentive to language as you might expect.
     I'm thinking about this now having just finished reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and then reading some of the good and bad reviews. I could not deny that I liked it. I read it quickly and enjoyed it, but it didn't seem to me as weighty or deeply insightful or as linguistically delightful as what I think of when I say something is "great literature."  But what is that quality?  Is it just about the use of language?  That's what Francine Prose's negative review suggests. She attacks the prose at the sentence level and faults the sentimental ending, generalizes it to the larger problem, "Doesn't anyone care how something is written anymore?"  Similarly, Jonah Seigel wonders, if the cliche-ridden but gripping Goldfinch is a literary novel, then what makes any novel literary?  Has this category become just another genre, he wonders - "quality fiction?"  I agree that there is a problem for serious literature. I know this from friends who are writers - it's difficult to sell difficult books and find readers unless you are a star. Will Self 's  recent essay bemoaning the hostility to difficult novels and complacent philistinism traces the problem to the distracted minds called away from reading by the internet.  But before highspeed internet, changes in publishing and bookselling, as well as the middle-brow reviewing industries (Oprah, NPR) were problems as well. Too many of the criticisms of this middlebrow reading, which often come from rightly frustrated writers, attack the good-book-starved readers who have eschewed difficult literature for the ease and entertainment of the high-middle brow or the unapologetically "low" zones of commercial fiction.
     Judging from my own limited experience - of mostly American academics, who read difficult and serious work constantly, but unless they are literature professors, rarely read serious fiction - the problem is that the members of the social class for whom such difficult novels are generally written no longer feel that they have the time  to invest in reading them.
  

Heroes of Psychoanalysis

While reading Daniel Pick's The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind I was amazed to read about the experience of psychoanalyst, Walter Langer, who was a patient of Anna Freud in Vienna in 1938 and helped the Freud family escape the city following Hitler's annexation of Austria.
  "On one occasion," Pick writes, "the Freud family's maid Paula, told him that his analyst had been taken by the Gestapo for questioning, but the analysis resumed the next day, 'as if nothing had happened.' " (Gifford interview with Langer, cited in Pick, Pursuit, p. 40).  You can read the relevant section of Peter Gay's Freud biography describing how she managed to get released and the impact of this event on her father  here

 To me, it's a heroic example of dedication to one's work and a testament to the significance of strong relationships between analysts and patients. One could certainly understand if Dr. Freud had decided to cancel or perhaps reschedule, after departing from town.  I wonder what the impact was on Langer that he had this sense of priority in his analyst's life. Or perhaps I am being overly dramatic, ahistorically imagining a consciousness of Nazi brutality in 1938 Vienna, reflected by present-day knowledge of the Holocaust. After all, her father, Sigmund Freud did not want to leave his home at all - until this incident finally convinced him that it was time to go. Gay's bio does say that Anna Freud suspected that she might be "casually deported or shot" simply if she was waiting in the hallway at the end of the day instead of being interrogated.

This story, showing the seriousness with which good therapists take their work and how committed someone can be to a patient, is a good corrective to stereotypes of therapists we often see in popular culture. 

Anxiety Index: New Edition

Thanks to a colleague at the City University Of New York for letting me know about the  chemical plant fire in Marietta which she read about yesterday in The Guardian.

Yesterday's Atlanta Journal Constitution notes that this was not the first fire in this particular warehouse
According to the local police an EPA investigation found that the smoke from the fire was not toxic.....but there may be some concern about run-off from the water hosed all over the place while it burned for ten hours, as reported by WSB:

Water was pumped on the building for 18 hours, which could have environmental implications. Because of that, the EPA arrived on scene Saturday to investigate.
“There's been a substantial amount of runoff. All the chemicals have run off into sewer rivers and lakes monitoring that as we speak," Ingram said.

On that note, here's a link to Tom Lehrer singing for the anxiety index way back in the day.

Reading Challenged

It's summer, so why not start blogging again? Like most other academics, I've made a somewhat ambitious summer plan. I'm reading for my book-in-progress the cultural history of anti-fascism (on left and right). I'm also updating the syllabus for my fall class on American Studies theory which I'll be co-teaching with a newly minted English PhD, who's awesome and much hipper to current theory than I am. I'm doing an 8 minute talk on representations of prison in pop-culture, which will involve a lot of TV watching with a note-pad. For fun, I've decided to participate in this book challenge set up by blogger, Megan Troup.
  So here's the start of my summer reading list for research, teaching and play.

Book project related :
Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris & Nemesis; Bob Altemeyer, Enemies of Freedom, Eric Fromm,Escape from Freedom; Daniel Pick, Pursuit of the Nazi Mind,  Ron Hansen, Hitler's Niece, and other stuff too, including whatever's related to my drafted chapter on the New Left and 1970s-1990s anti-fascism, which brings us to things like Mark Rudd, Underground, stuff about Wilhelm Reich, and even punk rock; as well as some pieces about right-wing anti-fascism including perhaps by and about the dreaded Ayn Rand whose Social Darwinism, romantic ideology, and love for monumental architecture leads to some interesting parallels with you-know-who. But there's only so much one can read in one three month period.

Teaching related:  Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Anne Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings; Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human; Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire; Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness; Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics; Sender, The Makeover, HoSang et al, Racial Formation in the 21st Century

and then there's list for the Semi-Charmed Kind of Life Summer Book Challenge (which is at least backdated to May 1, so I can count stuff I already read).  I am drawing from my existing work-related lists as much as possible while trying to include some fun reading in there.

5 points: Freebie! Read any book that is at least 200 pages long.
Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace (Armand Gamache #2) (just finished)
10 points: Read a book that was written before you were born.
Fromm, Escape from Freedom
10 points: Finish reading a book you couldn't finish the first time around. (You must have at least 150 pages left in the book to use it for this category.)
Blush, American Hardcore (just finished)
 10 points: Read a book from the children’s section of the library or bookstore.
Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy
15 points: Read a book that is on The New York Times' Best Sellers List when you begin reading it.
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
15 points: Read a historical fiction book that does not take place in Europe.
Susan Choi, American Woman
15 points: Read a book another blogger has already read for the challenge. (Yes, you will have to wait until the first check-in to choose this book! So no one will be able to finish this challenge in only one month; sorry!)
20 points: Read a book with “son(s),” “daughter(s)” or “child(ren)” in the title. No other words will count—including kids, offspring, etc.—so please don’t ask. :)
 I could read Becker's Hitler's Children which I will need to read eventually, but I don't know if this summer is the time for it.
20 points: Read a book that was/will be adapted to film in 2014. (Here are 16 ideas to get you started, but I know there are plenty more options.) 
Ron Rash, Serena (for fun) or in keeping with last chapter of the book, Veronica Roth, Divergent
25 points: Read a book written by a blogger. (Submitted by Jessica of The Tangerine.)
  ????? (I"ve already read Corey Robin's excellent The Reactionary Mind)  perhaps Jeff Sharlet, The Family or Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide
25 points: Read a biography, autobiography or memoir.
Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris
30 points: Read a pair of books with antonyms in the titles.
Goodlad et al, Mad Men, Mad World (finished)  paired with Erich Fromm, The Sane Society OR Dean Spade, Normal Life


My question to you, random people on the internet, is - do you know of a blogger who writes about fascism, animal studies or affect theory so I can double-dip? Like dude, when is this guy's book coming out?

Live, Park, Drive - Or Why ATL Redevelopment Plans Still Don't Work

     Recently, various sections of Atlanta have been threatened with massive Walmarts.. Buckhead just fought off a proposed store at Lindbergh/Piedmont. Decatur is still in a fight with developers over a proposed super-store, and now Glenwood Park, a very expensive new-urbanist planned community is threatened with a Walmart based shopping center at its backdoor.
   Good news: the same developer was recently defeated in Denver. Since I live in Reynoldstown now and was thinking about moving to the area near Glenwood Park, the possibility of that Walmart has become a burning issue to me. Currently, Glenwood Avenue, where the Walmart proposed, is a two-lane road with ample sidewalks and bike paths in both directions. It connects the funky East Atlanta Village to Grant Park, so it's a useful pedestrian or bike pathway. The major shopping center being proposed there would likely turn it into a choked and noisy thoroughfare. While I would oppose Walmart in any situation because of its labor policies, I also am opposed to the overall plan of development for this neighborhood - no matter what thing they put in that space. I'm not alone. When one commenter on Creative Loafing's recent discussion of the plan suggested a Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Publix, or a movie theater instead of Walmart, I initially thought "yes, a grocery store! Perfect."
      Then, another person pointed out that anything on that scale would bring more traffic to the neighborhood. One of the major features of the proposed development is 75,000 square feet of surface parking. The plan could be tweaked by creating a storied parking garage instead, but still....there would have to be more cars coming into the neighborhood to make that work - and where would they come in and go out? The Beltline is supposed to come into the neighborhood via an expanded Bill Kennedy Way and extended Chester Ave, but even if the Beltline proposal were to happen and some kind of bike lane appeared, without public transit, the whole thing is still a bust.
    Look at Glenwood Park. it's a beautiful area with great housing and retail, including some less expensive rental housing. But - it looks a bit like ghost town. I read somewhere on the web people comparing it to a movie set - right, because the streets are empty. In the meantime, some neighbors in Inman Park are exorcised about a development plan for Elizabeth Street near N. Highland that would add rental housing & retail space to the already bustling and walkable three-block area.  That particular region of in-town Atlanta is one that I like, because it is walkable. Still, you have to drive to get there, and park when you do. This is what the neighbors don't like; urban density in this area has increased the traffic.
     All this hubbub points to the major problem that is holding Atlanta back. Despite the claims to the contrary as far as I can tell Atlanta's new urbanists, including the Beltline Inc and its supporters are focused on two things - bike trails/green spaces and retail/ upscale housing development. The Glenwood Park area, Inman Park and Atlantic Station to a lesser extent, all suffer from the same problem. All these places are islands that people have to drive to. For people living in these areas, new urbanism = more traffic, not less. 
     When Jane Jacobs was writing about the West Village, she wasn't just advocating bike paths and parks; she was fighting freeways and living in a city that had a long history of major mass transit. While it's a lovely idea that people will bike to work, it's extremely unlikely that they will bike to a grocery store. I did that in Minneapolis, but I was shopping mostly for one person. In ATL, it's still unlikely that people would even bike to and from the movie theater. Why? There aren't enough places in Atlanta where people are on the streets to make the streets feel safe at night. And the reason for this is the absence of adequate mass transit. Mass transit and pedestrian culture go together just like cars and parking lots.
   This city's transit hubs are not well connected enough, and often are not themselves pedestrian friendly. A new MARTA CEO has just arrived in town, and, like a principal in a troubled public school, he'll be saddled with the responsibility for structural problems beyond the scope of the institution he manages. For those who don't know, MARTA is the only major public transit agency for a metropolitan area of this size that doesn't receive state funding. As the article linked above indicates, it - and our city's growth have been hobbled by racist suburban politics. The other big problem with MARTA is that it still is not designed for pedestrian safety or convenience. The most striking example of the problem is the tragic case of Raquel Nelson.
  I've experienced less dramatic consequences from the unwalkable distances between transit hubs. Recently, I had a coupon for a discount hair salon near Buckhead; I was told by the salon staff that I could get there by walking from the Lindbergh Center MARTA station along Piedmont. It was an uneasy and hot trek along a heavily trafficked street, but I didn't turn around and give up (and took a cab that cost $10) until I hit the unprotected freeway entrance and saw the long walk under the dark underpass immediately after it.Sorry, but if you have to run across the freeway entrance, that's not walkable.
    Other MARTA stations are similarly positioned. Another problem is that the stations are massive and rarely staffed, making them dangerous at night. (I recognize that this is not MARTA's fault, given budget & financing problems) . I look at the size of the MLK center station and imagine walking through it alone at night and think "forget it." All you need is one small corner not visible from the street and you're in the proverbial dark alley.  The same is true for the station that serves my current neighborhood. The station includes a huge bridge to the neighborhood from which there is no exit if someone is following you. It abuts a dead end street with boarded up houses on one side and a residential neighborhood with little foot traffic on the other. It's a considerable walk to the retail district that most people would take it to get to. The MLK MARTA station is only accessible for pedestrians coming from one side of the area via another dark underpass.
     MARTA doesn't have enough regular passengers to guarantee a crowd for safety in numbers at various times of day. For that reason, I decided that taking the bus downtown would make more sense than the train, even though it would take longer. I agree with the Metro-Atlantan Transportation Equity Group (MATEC) that wants the new MARTA CEO to meet regularly with MARTA riders. The biggest obstacle to using MARTA, and then producing the critical mass of pedestrians needed for a feeling of safety is making the areas around the stations and bus-stops safer, more accessible, and more logically positioned relative to housing and other destinations. Until then, the dream of new urbanists will fail and fail again. If you build it, they will come...by car.

Would You Buy a Used Essay From?....

Every time I promise to start writing regularly again, I always fail. So this time, I'm not starting with a promise. Here, though, is something amusing. Today I got this spam comment on an old blog entry:

At 5:01 PM, XXXX said... In inflict to support you with the highest stage of delivery in essay activity, ProfEssays.com employs only skilful pedantic writers to business on your distribution. narrative essay writing help

Inflict is right! Are these pendantic writers skillful parodists seeking to capture lazy students in the act? essay-writing bots? Please inflict your comments now.

Fact of the Day, File Under Punk Rockers

A 1991 study by Christine Hansen and Ranald Hansen found that "fans of punk rock ...were more likely to reject authority than were those of heavy metal."

cited in Lauraine LeBlanc's Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture (Rutgers University Press, 2005)

Politics and Friendship and Using the Telephone

I haven't thought about blogging in years but the other day, for reasons I'll explain in a minute, I was re-reading old emails from an old friend and he mentioned reading my blog (and even commented on it once in a very funny way).
I have been thinking a lot about politics lately, and about this particular friend.
Since I moved to ATL I've had a hard time getting reconnected to politics, despite a few lame attempts. I'd say the main obstacles have been 1) my failure to learn to drive in city lacking not only adequate public transportation, but sidewalks, 2) being exhausted by work 3) not knowing people in the ATL political scene and 4) wanting to enjoy lazy weekends at home with my husband, who works out of town during the week. Just a couple of weeks ago, I finally got past the second hurdle. I finished some writing projects and the pressure in the administrative side of my new job has gone down as I've learned how to do it better. That's given me a sense of freedom about trying again to get re-involved in political activism. It also gave me the head space to start reconnecting with my old friend, who had asked me to read a draft of some of his new manuscript about 8 months ago when I was still overwhelmed and freaked out by work, and who I'd communicated with in February about something I was writing that involved a political theorist I thought he might know something about. This friend was someone who I'd just missed seeing because of both of our busy schedules and complicated lives several times since 2008 when I last saw him at an American Studies conference. Now, unfortunately, and for reasons that make no sense, it's just too late and there is no "later" when we'll catch up.
He's someone who I knew through politics when I "used to be an anarchist" (that's the expression he teased me about above). He stayed true to that tradition, and was active in anarchist politics and political theory. Of the people in Love & Rage, he was the person with whom I most often agreed politically; actually, in an email exchange we talked about having put edits in that afore-linked L&R Wikipedia page. In the 1990s, we talked and talked about debates that were going on in the organization, both on the phone and in person. I feel like we wrote things together, at least when we were on the coordinating committee of LnR together in MPLS. Years later, he wrote the most hilarious comments in the organization's Discussion Bulletin when he edited it in Phoenix. I hope someone has collected those. It included our intense position papers and proposals about our org's relation to the "race traitor" strategy, how to organize locals, cadre etc., interspersed with Joel's top ten lists of heavy metal songs for the Revolution, and how to keep cool in the Arizona heat. I learned so much from him, and he always talked to me as if he really appreciated my ideas. He also was a true friend; I used to go the movies with him and his wife, and they always supported me as I dealt with the fallout of a number of terrible decisions in my efforts at romantic relationships. He once took me out for a pitcher of malt liquor in our neighborhood bar and offered his shoulder to cry on after I was rejected by one of his own best friends. The malt liquor turned out to be a bad idea, but the shoulder to cry on was kind and the support was always there. When I told him I was getting married he said in an email, "That is wonderful! Do I know the lucky guy?" And I heard from another friend that he and his wife had toasted my happiness along with some other folks from L&R when he was visiting NYC after I had moved to Georgia.
In that later that's now not coming, we had a lot of promised conversations that would have been really great.
During the last ten years, he'd become really, creatively active in immigrant rights, from a revolutionary and radically democratic position. I am full of admiration for the work he did in Arizona. He's also written some of the best most critical writing on anarchism from within the anarchist tradition that I know.
Losing him is just terrible. I can't separate the Joel as a "human" from Joel as a political activist. He loved life and pursued his political vision with both passion and compassion. He was generous to friends, and as so many of my friends have commented in our conversations over the last few days, he was one person who could get along with people on all sides of big arguments in various groups, never making the political disagreements into personal grudge-matches. As a friend, he could accept people's limitations and appreciate what was best about them. If you read the linked obituary statements you'll see that was a very devoted husband and father, and if you feel so moved, please make a contribution to his wife and three children.
* * *
This experience brings me to two points beyond the fact that Joel Olson was a extraordinary person whose loss is inexplicable, shocking and heart-breaking to the people who were so lucky to know him. These two things are ONE - that friendships connected to doing serious political work are very special, and that it says something about what that political work does that is different from the routines that usually alienating capitalist daily-life puts us in - that's the concept of political miracles that my friend referred to in his piece on the Arizona Repeal Coalition's weekly meetings
TWO: If you can't afford time/money to travel to see them, call your damn friends on the phone! (and to those of you who I've been planning to call, expect a call from me for real this time.)
Facebook and email give us this illusion of being connected and of the connection always ready to be revived when we get around to it. Maybe that illusion's not true for everyone; maybe that says something more about me. There are emails of his that I enjoyed getting just because they were from him, but I often put off reading his longer pieces unless he had specifically asked me for feedback on them. Some of his mass emailed political articles were still "unread" when I saw them in my mail folder yesterday.
It's hard to live as if every day might be your last, or your friend's and I think that focusing on what I didn't do to see or talk to Joel in the last two years is, as one friend told me the other day, just a means of trying to take control of an out-of-control reality. And with that, I just miss my friend, and even miss the notion that one of these days, really soon, we're going to get in touch and really talk about all these things we've mentioned talking about later in real depth. The last email he sent me was one such promise - "I'd love to read it" he said about the thing I was writing that I'd asked his advice on. Even though I had a draft done a few weeks ago, I didn't send it to him, thinking he was busy with his own stuff and that I could send it to him when it came out this summer, but that I needed to remind him to send me that ms he was working on. Ah well.

Tribeca Film Festival - Moloch Tropical

So, I didn't really redeem myself as a blogger with this year's festival by keeping a daily blog of what I saw. It all started - or didn't start - because I was undecided about what to say with the very first movie on my list, Raoul Peck's film Moloch Tropical. I went to see it because I liked Peck's films Lumumba and Sometimes in April. He has also made the documentary, Profit and Nothing But! and is currently making a film titled Karl Marx. In other words, he is a left film-maker and he makes beautiful films.
Moloch Tropical was without a doubt, beautifully made - full of pathos, horror, and even humor. However, it justifies the overthrow of Aristide in 2004, and to use his story to portray the nature of the "universal dictator." At the Q&A, Peck discussed it as not specifically about one person, but about the nature of power and the meaning of democracy. However, this is a cop-out. It is obviously about Aristide - references to him as a former priest loved by the poor are made throughout the film, and the necklacing of a former friend and ally, of which Aristide was accused in 2004, is central to the narrative. What I find particulary problematic in this merging of the "universal" and the historically specific examination of a dictatorship is the portrayal of this Aristide-like dictator as a repulsive sexual predator.
I hadn't realized before I'd seen this, but during the U.S. coup, Peck wrote an anti-Aristide editorial in Newsday, and has been one of the Haitian intellectuals who are most disenchanted with his presidency.
In contrast, the film Aristide and the Endless Revolution shows multiple views on the 2004 coup, but is sympathetic to Aristide. The left in the U.S. is divided on the issue.
Having received most of my information about the events of 2004 as they were occurring through the coverage of it on the very pro-Aristide Democracy Now, I was shocked by this film and thought, if this is an accurate representation of Aristide in Haiti, it's devastating. To figure out what the deal is, I now plan to read Alex Dupuy's The Prophet and Power.
Ultimately, my critique of the film is that in merging "Moloch" story with a perhaps justifiable critique of Aristide, Peck has created an excuse for doing what one blogger describes as turning priest into a cannibal.

Back to the Tribeca Film Fest

I really started this blog in earnest back in the Spring of 2005 when I first went to the Tribeca Film Fest. Five years later, I've had very little time or energy for such focused procrastination, but perhaps this year I will blog about every movie I see at TFF and thus redeem myself. Today, I'm seeing Raul Peck's new film Moloch Tropical and later on, My Queen Karo.

Back-To-School Politics - the Politics of Composition

One of my friends posted Stanley Fish's NYT article on college composition courses on facebook today. There are lots of well-informed comments from different perspectives on the NYT page.
Since I taught writing in the kind of composition department that Fish decribes,I feel qualified to school the bemused Professor Fish.

Part of Fish's assessment of trends in the teaching of college composition courses fits my experience. I taught college-level composition for six years - first as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and then during my first two years working as an adjunct at CUNY, where I also read and evaluated ACT exams. I share some of Fish's frustration with college comp classes; I often felt I was doing something more "old-fashioned" than what others did because I did teach grammar and sentence structure, and because I insisted that the course material could not consist of watching movies, but had to engage the written word. I was, as Fish is, appalled to find that some of my colleagues did not give their student any reading assignments at all.
The reason that people did this wasn't really political; it was a strategy for dealing with the existing skills of the students they met in their classrooms. The majority of people teaching college writing courses today are graduate students who do not want to alienate their students, and want them to enjoy their classes. Confronting students with difficult reading assignments and practice with grammar is not an obvious route to teacher-popularity.

Some of these courses my colleagues taught involved lots of direct instruction in writing; one model course that was very popular with teachers involved students critiquing each others' writing as a group while the instructor marked up essays on an overhead projector. Those teachers couldn't be faulted for not teaching writing; there was no content in those courses at all. However, I never used this approach because I thought that exposing students to really good writing was key to improving students' work. If the students aren't that familiar with written language, they aren't equipped to teach each other how to write. Their criticisms of their peers might not be anymore valid than their criticism of Joan Didion; (my advanced journalism major students claimed that her book Miami was full of "run-on sentences" because she wrote in long -grammatically correct- sentences.

In his article, Fish blames bad composition teaching for the tragically bad writing of American university students. However, the real problem is that as television has replaced print as the medium of news and entertainment, the majority of our students are not literate in "print culture." It is more common now to encounter college students who simply do not read - not newspapers, not magazines, not books. Those who do read don't often read models of what college classes ask them to produce. At the beginning of the semester in my history class, I ask students what the most difficult book they read recently was. Almost all of them listed works of Shakespeare which they had read (and had not understood) in their English classes, and a few named Harry Potter books. Very few of them read anything for pleasure - unless they were reading internet news or sports articles.

The problem that writing instructors face is not the result of bad schooling. If people do not read, they will not be good writers. If they are not familiar with written language, which is not like spoken language, they will not be able to produce elegant prose.

Why don't people try to familiarize their students with this more difficult writing that would be a model of what they want their students to achieve? Is it because of a multi-cultural agenda? no.
One group that seriously objects to teaching essay-writing by assigning essays to read are the English literature faculty who want to teach their students the great works of literature. They are on the canonical mission for which Fish criticizes ACTA. Those lit people are holding back the teaching of writing just as much as those who teach the smarmier versions of comp-rhet.
They're not teaching writing either; they're teaching the appreciation of literature - and the students be damned who don't appreciate it. In order to engage students at all, many of these literature teachers ask their students to respond with an experience they once had which was similar to something in the book that they just read - but teaching students how to write autobiographical narratives does not help them write better essays in their college courses - although it may help them "relate" to literature.

One of the comments on Fish's article comes from a student who just couldn't relate; he's not interested in literature, but who says he would learn to write better if he could write about something that interested him:

I have always found it difficult to write about writing or literature, but easy to write about things that exit in the physical universe.
So it appears to me that rhetoric and grammar should be taught incidentally as students consider other things. After all, people who are actually interested in grammar are destined to become English professors.
Or to put it another way, I always want to learn to write better, but please spare me from writing about, or even thinking about Moby Dick.

That's an example of a larger general truth; I recall reading about a shocking study that revealed that students' writing improved when they wrote about subjects that were interesting to them. Maybe it's tragic that everyone isn't interested in Moby Dick, but being so shouldn't be a pre-requisite for learning how to write a decent college paper. Comp/rhet scholars who do the "writing across the curriculum" and writing-intensive courses that ACTA finds disdainful agree. They say the goal should be to teach students how to write argumentative essays that will help them in college courses in many disciplines, and to assign readings that help them learn about argument.

Following this notion, I assigned reading to students in composition classes that were models of what I wanted them to write. I did not assign Moby Dick because I wasn't teaching them to write literature. I assigned essays - on the topics that Fish thinks are standing in for what should be the real content of the course.
One semester, I used sports writing as a focus to try to engage students' interest. Another semester, I had students do research on ongoing debates about their own university, reading the school newspaper and documents in the university archives. I taught "composition with a cultural diversity" focus that got students to write about racism, class, gender, and media bias - all using great essays - James Baldwin, Cherrie Moraga, Noam Chomsky. I taught them about the value of evidence and logical fallacies by assigning Pierre Vidal-Naquet's work on Holocaust Denial for a couple of semesters. I used some excellent composition anthologies and some newergrammar books.
My favorite grammar book of all time was Scott Rice's Right Words, Right PlacesR, which used sentences from canonical works of literature to teach sentence structure and style.
That book, now out of print, brings me to the last point: Grammar.
Everyone talks about how bad it is, and yet no one really wants to teach it. Grading students' papers one grammatical-error at a time is not teaching, it is editing. I met countless students whose main lesson from high school had been that they "couldn't write" and "didn't know grammar". They were actually traumatized by people's attempts to teach them grammar; they avoided writing at all costs, finding classes with no papers required. They didn't think of grammar as something creative or interesting, but only as a something that they would "mess up" without knowing it. They learned that they were "bad writers" and they believed that "good writers" were superior people who were born, not made.
Meeting those students is what causes writing teachers to avoid doing much about grammar; they don't want to compound the problem. If they can just get the students to engage a little with writing in a positive way, they hope, grammar correction can come later. This doesn't work either.
But how do you teach grammar - at a college level? If I stand up and give a lecture about parallelism, it is unlikely to result in improvement in students' writing. The best method is all the "active-learning" and "critical thinking" stuff that the ACTA people Fish cites would probably hate, especially in college. My approach to teaching grammar was to stress to students that written grammar was a set of rules that they weren't comfortable with, that "good writing" wasn't a natural talent, and that they would not improve without practice, much as if they were learning to play tennis, or the guitar. I used grammar books that had creative exercises or got my students into games involving sentence structure so that instead of focusing on error, students could engage with grammar as a tool that they could use to express themselves more clearly. These grammar lessons were quite lively - but they took a lot of their methodology from creative writing courses that I had taken in the past. The comp/rhet people probably thought that was old-fashioned of me; and the ACTA people probably thought that if the students still needed that work in college, they just shouldn't be there in the first place. After all, the thing that Fish really doesn't mention is that the teaching of these important skills is done by graduate students and now adjuncts, because the "real professors" think that teaching grammar is beneath them, along with the students who don't know it.

What to Do, What to DO?

A number of third-party enthusiasts are gleefully pointing out all the ways that Obama has failed to live up to people's expectations of him. For an example, note the comments after Dave Lindorff's recent piece exhorting people on the left to get active for Single-Payer at the Town Halls. I don't think that this "I told you so" glee directed at Obama voters is any better than the "I told you so" finger-shaking I got from Dems following the election of George Bush in 2000 (I had voted for Nader.) The answer is still to put pressure on whoever is in power through grass-roots action for single payer all the while knowing that in the end, we will probably not get it.

I agree with Lindorff in general about the need for the left to out-organize the right at the health-care reform town-halls. In fact,I have read that single-payer advocates have been visible at every town-hall meeting so far, but the media is rarely reporting the story (note the previous blog entry). However I'm a bit puzzled by his recent comment on counterpunch that "obstruction" is the only viable option at the town-hall meetings. He goes on to say,

Instead of opposing the right-wing hecklers at these events, progressives should be making common cause with them. Instead of calling them fascists, we should be working to turn them, by showing them that the enemy is not the left; it is the corporations that own both Democrats and Republicans alike.
The only proper approach to the wretched health care legislation currently working its way through Congress at this point is to kill it and start over. At these "town meeting" staged events, Obama and the Democrats need to hear, in no uncertain terms, that we don't want no stinkin' ObamaCare. We want Medicare for all.

Given that one of the biggest fears of this group is that "Obamacare" is actually a "Trojan Horse" for single-payer (which is how Dems have tried to sell the plan to the left) this strategy seems unrealistic to me. Just as the media won't report the single-payer advocates already questioning the corporate Dem plan, the wisdom on the street (and on the Hill) if Obama's plan is defeated (or further watered down) is that America is not ready for a public-option, let alone single-payer.

My sense, based on what I've seen and read about right-wing protesters (beyond the anti-choicers and other religious fear mongerers)
is that
- They don't want "illegal aliens" to be insured and they believe that these illegal aliens will be covered by "Obamacare".

-They fear that if medicare is extended "for all" that it will go bankrupt or the U.S. as a whole will go bankrupt - and their coverage will be reduced - this is why seniors are prominent protesters at the Town Halls. This is not then, an irrational "keep your government hands off my medicare," it is a rational (but misinformed) argument: "I can't afford to share my medicare" (probably with them illegal aliens). Glenn Beck has recently been stoking these fears by suggesting that the health care plan, added to the bank bailout will send the US into an inflationary spin that will lead the government to the solutions offered by Nazi Germany, including euthanasia. One of pieces of meat he tossed out to the far-right base was the notion that the Federal Reserve will just "print money" in order to pay for the health care plan.
and that brings me to the third group:

- They are tea-partying libertarians who think that EVERYTHING is done better in the private sector (note: Ron Paul) and want to eliminate public schools, etc. The powers behind this movement are neo-cons, but the frothing at the mouth base are angry white men who think that the government is helping less deserving others instead of them.
If you want to understand these white anti-government types read Leonard Zeskind's book about them, or follow his articles on the tea-party movement. Don't believe me? - note the guy in confederate t-shirt pictured here, holding the sign reading "Abolish Federal Government."

It's hard to imagine how single-payer advocates are going to make common cause with this crowd.

Town Halls - Angry Mobs? Astro-Turfers? and What About Single-Payer?

If you look at most media coverage of this month's health-reform town hall meetings you would think that crowds are divided between people who support Obama's plan and the conservative opposition. This presentation, which Democrats also encourage, lends credibility to the notion that Obama is proposing the only universal-health coverage plan on the table. What that doesn't tell you, is that the most organized presence at the Town-Hall meeting are real grass-roots single-payer advocates, who don't support Obama's plan because it subsidizes private insurance companies.
Now that Pelosi has finally agreed to actually let the house debate and vote on single-payer plan, it seems even more reasonable that the discussion of Single-Payer at Town Hall meetings should be heard, or at least reported.
Despite the tea-partyish, anti-tax radicals' complaints, it does seem that people other than vetted plants are able to speak at these events (unlike the Bush meetings where people were kept out/expelled for wearing t-shirts or having a bumper-sticker on their car) but it's a shame that a bunch of wing-nuts are dominating the media coverage.

The Republicans and Democrats are both confusing the issue. On the hand, Republicans are arguing that the Obama health plan is a "trojan horse" for single-payer, which, according to most opinion polls, is actually what most people want. On the other hand, Democrats argue that single-payer is politically impossible because of American public opinion, while simultaneously arguing that the "angry mobs" currently disrupting health-care town-halls are a bunch of corporate interests in disguise. The sad fact is that the health-care corporations are likely to win either way. IF ONLY "Obamacare" were the Trojan Horse that the Republicans fear.
Once again, Democrats are in a bind because their corporate ties leave them incapable of defending themselves against right-wing "populists" or supporting the truly populist movement for meaningful U.S. health care reform.

***
For those who are uninformed, "single payer" means replacing private insurance companies with national insurance that would cover everyone. It is not the same thing as "socialized medicine" because doctors and hospitals are still private businesses, not publicly owned in this model. It is what they have in Canada and France. "Socialized medicine," where doctors are paid by the state is what they sort of have in England. (privatization has been slowly destroying the NHS)

** Just added: Paul Krugman's column has a good analysis of both the mobs and the anti-mob commentary here.

Hollyhocks - Planted Two Years Ago and Worth the Wait

 

best street art project this year!

 

If only you could smell it

 

The gardenia has burst into bloom this week.

Fanciful Plant

 

I think of this flower as a "Dr. Seuss Plant." Does anyone know what it's really called?

Columbine and Azaleas

This columbine is close to four feet tall. What a surprise - it was puny last year.