the month of June

I haven’t done any work on the diss since May. I never finished blogging the Computers and Writing Conference. I’ve been avoiding this blog because it reminds me that I have a dissertation to write. I had forgotten the way that summer courses can swallow you whole.

This morning I sat on my front porch and read an OLD (Feb. 2008) copy of the Chronicle, because it had an article covering the Blackboard/Desire2Learn patent dispute. Even though I know the outcome, I am still interested in how it gets covered in publications of higher ed. I then began to peruse the latest CCC. In the midst of cramming in a survey of women’s literature and feminist criticism for my summer course, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy “my” field and “my” work, how much there is that I’m missing when I’m not looking outside the pages of a Norton Anthology.

Here’s hoping that I can continue to devote a bit of time here and there to my own scholarship, even while I’m really enjoying a return trip to Renaissance literature written by women (scarce as it is).

I finished reading Water for Elephants (or, as I call it in my head, Like Water for Elephants — its namesake clearly being Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate). I’ve mentioned that it was an odd reading experience for me because I felt like I was reading a draft of a piece of fiction written for an advanced creative writing class/workshop. The writing was inconsistent — at times a beautiful sentence peeks out, and I would get all excited by it, but that was always surrounded by a series of overly simplistic sentences. The characterization was odd. The character who was most believable to me was Walter/Kinko the midget with the Jack Russell Terrier, Daisy; however, even he seemed to be a caricature of a small person traveling with a circus. The protagonist was flat in his almost-too-good-to-be-true personality. When the book opens he is ninety or ninety-three (he’s never sure of his exact age), and the dialogue is trite. I found myself asking, is this really how an old man speaks, or is it just how we (and Gruen) think an old man is supposed tospeak? He just wasn’t believable. All my complaints about spotty writing and flat characterization aside, I loved the story and found myself excited to get back to reading it each night. I’m not sure if this is simply because I was so craving a story filled with the details of circus life, and this one gave me the nitty-gritty I was looking for, or it is because Gruen does manage to keep enough happening that an otherwise done-before romance becomes a page-turner. There were moments when I found myself wondering how or why the story was compelling. After all, it is mostly the story of two people in love who can’t be together because one of them is already taken. Nothing new here. Still, there are enough of the circus-driven antics and incidents to keep the story exciting. And the animals. It seems as though Gruen understands animals better than humans, because she was able to bring them to life in ways she just couldn’t with the human characters. Perhaps this is because animals don’t talk and Gruen struggles with dialogue, but whatever the case, the depictions of the animals add an element to the romance that I’ve certainly never encountered in other books I’ve read.

but the folks on the outside don’t know”

A couple of weeks ago, D and I along with a couple of friends, went to see Cirque du Soleil in Hartford. None of us had ever seen a live Cirque performance, and for the first time in my life I could actually afford to go (though barely, the ticket prices are outrageous), so why not? While watching the performers, I was in awe. I began thinking about how I know very little about the circus, because, after all, that is how it is intended to be — all illusion, all facade, all of the time. We’re not intended to think during the circus. What little I do/did know related to tales of freakshows and those not accepted by/into mainstream society escaping, running away, finding some realm of protection (although potentially not much); accusations of animal mistreatment; and Depression era escapism. Cirque de Soleil doesn’t use live animals, so I began wondering more about treatment of humans/workers than animals and assumed there must have been at one point clear hierarchies in circus life and maybe that still continues. I also wondered if the human body is intended to do some of the things these performers were doing. I was particularly struck by the girls with gymnasts-sized bodies who could twist and contort in ways that made them look as if a few ribs and/or vertebrae had been removed. Ultimately I decided I wanted to find out a lot more about all of this…and this realization struck just in time for summer reading! So, I have begun to compile a summer reading list with a circus/carnival/freakshow them. So far I have:

Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Under the Big top by Bruce Feiler

Josser: Secret Life of a Circus Girl by Nell Stroud

The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top by Janet Davis

Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination by Rachel Adams

I’ve considered reading Geek Love by Katherine Dunn but am a little wary of it after reading the reviews. I can’t tell whether I’m intrigued enough to read or if I’ll end up just plan horrified.

I’ve started reading and have almost completed Water for Elephants and will follow up with a review of that, as I’m pretty surprised by my intense interest in a book that is so poorly written.

I’m looking for more suggestions/ideas. The list so far is a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, academic and popular, and I’m open to any and all of these genres/perspectives. I’d also love recommendations for documentaries on this topic, as I haven’t explored that angle so much yet.

All of this, of course, has nothing to do with the diss and is, what a friend of mine calls, “productive procrastination.” I just thought I’d become a circus expert while productively procrastinating.

Additions to the list/reader recommendations:

The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes by Christopher Bram

Happy Birthday Karl Marx

Happy Cinco de Mayo

Happy me. I am s-l-o-w-l-y re-emerging at the end of a semester filled with illness. I won’t go into all the gory details, but after having the flu in February, I was diagnosed with mono in April. I was sick for most of March and am still not quite myself, but I’m getting there. There were times when I coudn’t sit up at the computer at all and times when I could work for short periods, but my regular online presence was definitely missing (though I’m not sure too many folks noticed). Anyway, I’m happy to be getting my life back, although I still have bad days. Last week I returned to my core conditioning class after a long absence. I’ve been to the gym once, and I’ve been walking.

Today I handed back my last set of portfolios with more than the usual relief. This semester has been a difficult one for me and my students. Still, I believe we emerged relatively unscathed, and now it is time to seize the one month I have between now and the start of my summer class to work on a number of projects — most importantly the ever-present and haunting dissertation.

It’s the start of week four, and I still feel like I have the semester within my control. It hasn’t slipped away from me yet, but apparently blogging has. It’s been over a week since I’ve attended to this blog, and I made a pact with myself that I had to blog at least as often as my students (once per week minimum; it’s only fair), so I’m overdue. I have one student who has clearly taken to the online writing forum that we know as a blog, and he has blogged nearly everyday since he started his blog two weeks ago. His writing is entertaining — smart and witty — fun to read. All in all, I’m super impressed with my students’ blogs. This semester they are doing themed blogs. The topics they’ve chosen range from social issues to celebrity gossip to sports to biochemistry. I’ve had a good time reading them so far.

Continuing with semester news: I was assigned to teach in a classroom that is slightly larger than my living room (I live in a bungalow in the middle of the city; my living room is NOT large). It is a classroom that is used for religious education for elementary school students (there is a bunch of kid produced artwork along the back wall that begins with “Blessed are the fourth graders…”). The space is clearly meant to hold small children, not a bunch of eighteen year olds and their writing teacher. The room is filled with rows of tables that can’t be moved at all because there simply isn’t enough space. I am accustomed to having students move into a circle/square/rectangle shape, and so was initially baffled by what to do with the space. Ultimately I found that I couldn’t do anything with it, but the space issue seems to be working to our advantage. For some reason it appears that the small (living room size) space has lent a living room type intimacy to the class community. Students seem more willing to participate in class and have shared joking comments with me and their peers about the challenges of the space (to play our ice breaker/name game students had to do a lot of swiveling to see the faces of their peers). I’ve been surprised by how well it has been working out, although I wouldn’t necessarily want to teach in such a cramped space again (not to mention the lack of technology — the neck cramp that results from trying to look at the large LG monitor that acts as both computer monitor and screen for the entire class to view).

I have a series of other blog entries that I’ve been carrying around in my head: adjunct labor, the Ani DiFranco show at the Palace, the dissertation work, seeing and reading Atonement, and recent thoughts about Facebook and Twitter. Coming soon….

Typically, Friday mornings begin with dissertation writing. Lately I’ve been trying not to get bogged down in all of the materials that I need to read more closely and integrate more carefully and thoroughly into my work (like all of the debates around assessment and accreditation as instigated by the Spellings Commission), and I’ve simply been trying to “slop” words onto the page. But today I got bogged and came to realize how much I need to develop and unpack what I mean by “open source.” And then there are all the groups, movements, and organizations working with open source concepts that are also doing work relevant to my own: the open educational resource (OER) community, the open source initiative (OSI) organization, and the schools like MIT who are working with open courseware, and it goes on and on — website after website, article after article, wikipedia entry after wikipedia entry…. How’s a girl supposed to keep all of this organized both in her head and on “paper”?

So instead of plugging away at creating chapter descriptions for my introduction, I wrote this blog entry — to moan a little and to try to see a bit more clearly the unruly monster of “open source” that I’m dealing with.

• Went to five movies: Juno, Charlie Wilson’s War, Sweeney Todd, No Country for Old Men, and The Great Debators
• So far I’ve written eleven pages of my 1st/introductory chapter (I still have writing time planned for tomorrow and the next day). It is certainly not as much as I had envisioned writing. I had hoped to have the entire chapter done in really, really rough form, but the writing has been painful. Yesterday I worked on the section on technology (in particular educational technology / instructional technology software) as ideological and connections between surveillance capabilities of propriety software with Foucault’s panopticon and Crowley’s argument in Composition and the University about the surveillance, gatekeeping, and subjectivizing functions of composition. I spent an hour and a half on that and didn’t get terribly far.
• I met with two friends who are in the process of writing and we workshopped the text we’d produced over break. This is something I’ve been *talking* about doing for a very long time but never follow through on (we’re all friends, so the intended meetings generally digress into lamenting the overwhelming nature of writing a dissertation and dissecting our respective relationships). But this time we actually read and commented and inspired each other to wake up the next morning, head to our desks, and keep writing!
• Started my paper/presentation for CCCC. I have only spent a day on this toward the beginning of break and have not gone back to look at it (scared). I did, however, finish reading Convergence Culture, which our proprosal was based on.
• Began watching new seasons of The Biggest Loser and the L Word (not a major accomplishment, but still…).
• Went cross-country skiing once (not nearly as much as I had hoped for and now all the snow has melted). Also, planned a Vermont cross-country ski getaway with D for later in the month.
• And, returned to blogging.

It might seem as though the titles of my blogs having nothing to do with education, writing, or research. And they don’t.

My first blog was titled “the most cake.” When I started the blog I was going through a (re)bonding experience with Hole. “Doll Parts” was probably stuck in my head at the time and wanting the most cake seemed to fit my life at the time. I wanted to have the academic career, the relationship, the sports and poker playing, the yoga, the TV watching, the social life, and I wanted to be good at all of it (especially the TV watching)!

Fast foward three years, and I’m in the process of starting a new blog, and I go to see the film, Juno. There is a short scene in the film where Juno is playing guitar with the potential future adoptive father of her baby, and it is a Hole song that they are playing. Juno, who in the film we learn was not named after an Alaskan town but rather after the Roman goddess and wife of Jupiter was such a fun character that she too got stuck in my head. In addition, the month of June was named after Juno, and being the month of my birth as well as the month during which I sometimes have enough time off to write (and garden), I decided to so name this blog.

I guess this is much more a free association than an etymology per se, but here it is — the half-wacky and not entirely clear thinking that is my (writing) life.

Welcome to my “new” blog, which is actually a continuation of a blog I kept for a little more than three years. This is my new year, new blog blog — all the clichés apply — turning over a…, a fresh…, a resolution that I’ll write more, find more balance, complete my dissertation, all of that. Aren’t those the promises we’re all making?

In fact, I could pretty much just borrow (steal?) Dr. B’s resolutions. Those pretty much cover what I want 2008 to be — minus the racquetball, and our date night consists of not leaving the house and watching Project Runway.

Anyhow, as are all new blogs (and old blogs for that matter), this one is a work in progress. The blogroll is unorganized. I haven’t played with every possible widget yet. The picture is probably just a stand-in for now (**coming up — an attempt at explaining why this blog is a blog about writing and not about summer gardening and cooking…or rather an attempt at explaining why the URL has cake in it and the title has June in it).