Do as I Read, Not as I Do

Many of my friends have just finished applications to grad school and more are planning to apply in the future. Therefore, today's special bonus recommendation is a whole slew (where slew = 4; I believe it's a metric unit) of books that I've found useful as a neophyte teacher/researcher and as a long-time student. Perhaps, because I have only completed a master's and a few semesters of my PhD, these recommendations are not that weighty, but they helped me, and that's where I am, so maybe they will help you. I make no promises, only recommendations.

Note that for the purposes of this blog post, I define grad school as the process of studying for advanced degrees that prepare one for an academic career, not degrees such as law or medicine; I simply know very little about those degrees and I believe that the professional expectations surrounding those fields are very differently inculcated in students. This belief is based only on my exhaustive questioning of law student friends and my exhaustive review of Grey's Anatomy reruns.

So! On with today's recommendations!

1. Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities by Gregory Colón Semenza. If you want to go to grad school in the humanities, you need to read this book. Period. There is simply no excuse not to. Too many grad school "advice" books rely on vagaries and statements about Really Wanting Something; they paint the experience as some kind of self-discovery where moxie and pluck alone can lead to success.

Semenza will give you an even-handed assessment of what you need to do to survive. Too many books critical of the academe engage in hand-wringing and scare tactics. Again, Semenza's book is even-handed and lacks the shrill, easily dismissible tone of those other books that simply shriek at the reader about how doooooomed the academe is. He lays out, from application to job search, what can be expected and provides an explication of the professional expectations put upon grad students. When you're studying for an advanced degree in the humanities, you leave all clear-cut answers behind. The nice thing about this book is that it is almost infuriatingly prescriptive, and while you will likely not want to hear much of the advice he dispenses, one gets a strong sense that success will follow if you listen to his advice. If you read no other book about grad school, make it this one. This is the book I recommend to acquaintances interested in applying. I tell them this over and over and over and over (my recommendations seem to fall on deaf ears).

2. Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener. Unfortunately this book is out of print, but used copies are fairly reasonable and it seems a new edition (ca. 2005, import) is available. It can also be borrowed from libraries. It is aimed at the person teaching English to adult speakers of other languages, but the basic teaching advice - from determining what "kind" of teacher one is, to diagrams showing how classroom dynamic is affected by desk arrangement, to suggestions for how to call on students with hand gestures other than pointing - is applicable to the young teaching assistant. For those who have never taught, this is an incredibly useful guide. It is straightforward, jargon-free, and accessible.

3. Ms. Mentor's New and Ever More Impeccable Advice for Women and Men in Academia Caveat: I have only read the earlier edition of this book, and I recommend it with liberal sprinklings of salt. I hate to say it, because I truly respect Ms. Mentor (a sob sister character invented by Emily Toth, whose column appears in The Chronicle of Higher Education) but the earlier edition of the book was grievously old-fashioned. Particularly infuriating was her recommendation that female academics (in 1997) refrain from riding bicycles. Really. However, Ms. Mentor is truly to be commended for building an academic career at a time when it was significantly more difficult for women to do so, and the book should be taken on its own terms; readers should understand that her struggles have necessarily informed her advice. And some of the tips are very valuable. She's at her best (at least in the older edition) when she's giving very specific tips such as on how to build a case for tenure and keep records. Certainly, at the very least this book gives remarkable and valuable insight into the experiences of the generation of academics likely to be teaching and advising incoming students, and that context alone is worth the price of admission (currently $11.54 for used copies on Amazon). Since the updated version deigns to include gentlemen as well, it may be even better; in fact, I bet it probably is. eta Ms. Mentor's channeler has informed me that the 2009 book is actually a completely new book, rather than a revision! I apologize to Ms. Mentor for this embarrassing mistake and implore readers to investigate this new offering.

4. What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and "Bias" by Michael Bérubé. This book is more of a meditation on teaching than a discussion of "classroom bias" (an issue I find so patently ridiculous I can't not put it in quotes; if you want to know why, read the book). Bérubé does an excellent job of dismantling and discrediting the more well-known cases of "bias" while still describing, with compassion, his teaching experiences that have involved contentious political issues. He describes the day to day lifestyle of teaching and, more valuably, provides narratives of his experiences teaching. At times his rhetoric is incendiary and possibly alienating to those who truly believe that higher education in the United States is inherently "biased" but I doubt those people would read this. If they do, power to them.

The book lays out a significant number of classroom situations and how Bérubé dealt with them. At times, the examples come across as slightly self-congratulatory, but I appreciated them nonetheless. In today's world, where students seldom accept or respect the credentials of college instructors, it's important to respond to thornier classroom issues meaningfully and authoritatively. The book, as the cover states, defends the value of the liberal arts for all thinking humans- something that can never be done enough in our brain-dead, earnings-obsessed, dying culture. This book is useful for gauging the current atmosphere of the university for professors. It's not as needlessly negative and hopeless as other books I have read. Rather than screeching about the inevitable demise of the academe, Bérubé offers actual models for strategies to negotiate the times. And isn't that what the liberal arts are supposed to be about anyway?




***
on a side note, thanks so much to all of you who've been reading since we launched this blog! I am excited for 2010 and am hoping to make this blog even bigger then. You know, like, bigger as in more than ten readers. But the point is, I love the ten readers we have. And if you love our blog, please tell some friends! My New Year's resolution is to update more! Maybe Thom's is to update at all! Happy New Year! And finally, if you have something you think I should recommend, send it my way! Maybe we can also work out guest posts!

suturing the gap

Today's recommendation is Tom Ford's first film A Single Man. I normally hate period pieces. I hate them because they are always about the time in which they were made (cf. Philip Rosen) and the details that are attenuated, or the characters, always scream LOOK! HERE WE ARE! JUST IN THE PAST! STANDING AROUND AND TALKING ABOUT MAJOR HISTORICAL EVENTS! LIKE WE DID! IN THE PAST! WHICH IS WHERE WE ARE BY THE WAY. BUT WITH PRESENT-DAY HAIRCUTS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

(Apologies to Philip Rosen, whose book Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory explains this far better than I ever could.

***
A major theme of A Single Man, as articulated by the characters, is letting go of the past, which works on a macro level because the film itself is an act of clinging to the past in its obsessive, beautiful rendering of a moment past. The shifting of the color palettes in the film, while unsubtle, drive home the point that at some moments the present becomes, well, presence (Cf. Lefebvre), and kept time and understood time align. The film follows a middle-aged English professor on the day he has decided to commit suicide, following the death of his lover some months prior.


Yet, as other reviewers have pointed out, this film is among the most thorough cinematic recreations of a time past. Does nostalgia color my perception here? Yes. I was not alive to see 1962, but I feel this has to be a more live and real depiction of life as it was lived than the glossy Mad Men, which constantly roots itself in its time by having the characters experience historical events and talk about them (caveat: I've only seen one episode; I didn't like it). Day to day life is often ignored in media depictions of the past. Everything is then-new and all characters in historic or period fiction seem to have a prescient understanding of what events define their era. One of the strengths of A Single Man is the ways in which the specificity of the time period is secondary; important world events are mere media background noise. The focus is on the person, in that moment, that just happened to be THAT moment, and the web of interactions he navigates on that day.

But other than theoretical blathering about this film, I'm recommending it for a slew of reasons. I haven't seen many films in the theater this year, but this is by far the best that I've seen.

* Everyone has already talked about Colin Firth's performance, so I'll put this on the list. All the performances in this film are superb.

* I personally found the depiction of 1960s academia engaging and hilarious. The office, the classroom, the students - it brought to life the halcyon days of Real Academic Freedom written about so often.

* Besides the incredible attention to detail, the film is beautiful - visually striking without the marketed, overbearing, slick appearance of mainstream Hollywood fare.

*As my friend Brandon Fibbs has pointed out, the score is beautiful.

* The story, obviously, is engaging on many levels. It's human and simple. It's really just about love and loss. But it also depicts the struggles of the GLBT minority in the 1960s in a way that relates to the ongoing fight for GLBT rights.

* The narrative structure - filled with analepses - fleshes out and makes complicated and humane the characters' struggle; in another format, George could have become fairly unlikable. That the narrative itself doesn't remained moored in the diegetic present further reinforces the message that we experience time fluidly. What to make of that message? Do we or do we not live in the past? Does mediating any feeling or idea effectively freeze it in a moment and create some kind of temporal disjunct between the Now and the Then?

Obviously, I have been writing way too many stuffy final papers lately. So I'll just say that you should go out and see this movie RIGHT NOW.

In today's awful, hyper-kinetic, dreadful world, the act of watching cinema itself seems an act of the past; cinema is so firmly and popularly rooted in the ~20th century and often I think the present (or presence) has eclipsed it. Therefore, I recommend that you defy this downward/forward progression and see A Single Man.

To find out if this film is playing near you, click here!

Rebuilding fragmentary histories

Today's recommendation is Ken Smith's book Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970.
I discovered Archive.org in late 2001, when I first started college. Looking at Prelinger's online archive, I felt I had discovered something nobody else had ever, ever heard of. I was wrong about that, but the un-selfconsciously obsolescent world of early Cold War "mental hygiene" films was fascinating to me. The damaged films, the cracked audio, the forgotten and insignificant images, the ideology of conformity. The lost and skipped frames.

A few months later, from Googling around, I realized there was a BOOK about these films. That book is Ken Smith's Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970.

Now, flash-forward the better part of a decade. I'm working on a PhD and my dissertation subject will likely be those films. Even now, I cite Ken Smith on most of the work I do. Why?

First, this is virtually the only book written about so-called mental hygiene films. Many other works tangentially mention this subgenre or type of film, which constituted tens of thousands of works. But this is the only one that focuses on it in depth. Second, for a non-academic, Smith has done some absolutely exhaustive, breathtaking research. The book contains capsule summaries of several hundred of the most popular mental hygiene films as well as contemporaneous quotes from sources like Educational Screen and producers of these films. Third, Smith situates the summaries in an excellent historical overview. Fourth, he's just a good writer. I prefer this book to any number of dry academic texts. Smith conveys information in an accessible, entertaining way.

Also, there are pictures.

Like it or not, an entire generation of American students was forced to watch these films. They are a significant part of our culture and history - which is why I study them. As much as I love pretentious art films, they have little connection to the lives of The People (Whatever that is).


This book is great for people who are interested in 20th century American history, ephemera, educational history and history of educational media, new media discousres, and film history or aesthetics. I'd also recommend this book for anyone trying to research independently (which I guess would be most adjunct faculty), because it's a great example of significant research that came into being without, necessarily, institutional validation.

Although this book is not exhaustive and there's still lots to be researched (Mr. Smith: Thanks. That means I can continue with whatever it is I do), it's a wonderful place to start if you are interested in any of the above topics, which is why it's today's recommendation. Ken Smith has also written Junk English , Raw Deal: Horrible and Ironic Stories of Forgotten Americans, Junk English 2 and Ken's Guide to the Bible


all likely to be future Recommendations.

Birth Stories, Social Histories, and Master Narratives

Today's recommendation is The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler.

I read this book for the first time a few years ago. I picked it up on impulse in the bookstore and sat and read half of it. I was never particularly interested in adoption but the arrangement of personal narratives and preservation of voice within the book is so compelling that I couldn't resist. Originally based on a video installation piece, Fessler's work weaves together individual narratives to paint something akin to a cultural study. Rather than providing dry historical or social explanations for the vast difference readers will feel while reading her work, Fessler lets the multiplicity of the individuals paint the historic and social picture with very little framing - a masterful feat.

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade is structured like a collection of birth stories. Everyone likes birth stories (Right? Maybe?) or at least understands them because they follow a roughly familiar plot that often ends happily ever after. But the stories in The Girls Who Went Away turn this "master narrative" on its head with wrenching and small differences. You could watch approximately the same story on TLC (dumbed significantly down, of course), but in this book the trajectories are different. I'm no expert - I don't have children and probably never will - but the compelling feature of birth stories, for me, is the inherently forward-looking impulse they have. Biologically, there are few features. The stories end joyfully in the same place. But the "birth stories" in this book begin from different places - disappointed or repressive parents, abusive high school boyfriends - a power differential. By and large, they continue in seclusion and end in grief and tragedy and longing. They are not forward looking; their narrative thrust ends in a vast unknown quantity of near infinitude. The only known quotient is the past. I guess it's this subversion of predicted narratives that interests me.

Even if it doesn't, The Girls Who Went Away is a sensitively and beautifully felt portrayal of a society that essentially no longer exists: A society in which it was acceptable and even preferred to send young girls away to give birth in seclusion rather than face single motherhood or let others know they were pregnant. We can't ignore that this society existed. Therefore, The Girls Who Went Away is an important book. And that is why it is today's recommendation.

ThanksKilling (2009)

Today's recommendation is the fabulous and hilarious 2009 horror movie parody ThanksKilling.

I was alerted to this piece of Cinematic Art by my friend Andrew, to whom I will forever be grateful. I don't even know how to describe ThanksKilling. It's about a group of caricatures of college students on their way home for Thanksgiving, a silly legend, and a foul-mouthed turkey puppet that kills people including, coincidentally, aforementioned college caricatures.

THANKSKILLING reminds me of early Bergman.

It's the best movie ever filmed in Heath, Ohio.
It's the best movie I've ever seen that featured terrible Jon Benet Ramsey jokes.
It's the best movie with a turkey-rape scene that I have watched recently.
Its metacommentary rivals that of some of the most theoretical stuff I have read recently.
It's the best horror movie with John Waters references that I've seen recently.

it is 66 minutes of pure hilarity, of yelling WTF at your TV (or computer or iPhone), of topless Pilgrims,


And that is why today's recommendation is Thankskilling. It is available on Amazon and you can also watch it streaming online through Netflix if you have Netflix.

Start a new Thanksgiving tradition! By that I don't mean turn into undead turkeys and kill people, but watch this movie every year.

if life seems jolly rotten, there's something you've forgotten!

Today's recommendation is Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
. I believe this is the thinking person's book of the year.

My whole life, people have derided me for being "negative" and "pessimistic." Things that happened were dismissed as products of my "negative attitude." This ipso facto logic didn't run my life, but other people's explanation of it dominated it in a fairly upsetting way. Setbacks and tragedies were dismissed by others as mere results of my "negativity." Therefore, I was really interested in Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright Sided.

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America is a brilliant exploration of this new Calvinism, the entrenched and uniquely American ideology that explains bad things - like, say, cancer and job loss- away as the results of negative thinking. Ehrenreich, who holds a doctorate in cell biology, turned away from science to work in a career that helps the public; her work, in my opinion, serves this purpose.


I think this is one of the most important books you can read this year, to be honest. I'm not saying this because I'm a pessimist, I'm saying this because this is a well-researched, well-written, intelligent book that explores a unique cultural phenomenon and rationally argues about why it's so dangerous.

Ehrenreich examines several instances wherein the positive thinking fascism has caused dangerous, magical thinking. These examples range from the ridiculous and fairly tangential, like life coaches, to disturbing and upsetting, like the cancer patient online communities that ostracized Ehrenreich for her statement that she felt angry and helpless. While some of the examples seem cherry-picked and I wish she had gone into more detail with some of her more salient observations - such as the infantilizing of breast cancer patients - this book is one of the most important you can read. It expands what has become a useless dichotomy (positive vs. negative thinking) into a disturbing gradient of grays and asks not for despair, but for rational evaluation, and makes the compelling case that the culture of positive thinking has, ironically, extremely negative repercussions that affect all of us.


Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book. Obviously, this blog is becoming very popular. Also! If you want me to review and possibly recommend other things, why, I would be delighted! Email me!

unnatural causes

Today's recommendation is the California Newsreel documentary Unnatural Causes, an important documentary that examines how social and economic inequality contributes to the declining life expectancy in the United States, to the decaying social fabric of our society, and many other things. It examines the interrelation of many factors: stress, biology, income, and rather than screeching banshees pointing fingers, the DVD takes a rationalist, biological point of view.

It is a disturbing, upsetting documentary, full of truths you probably don't want to face (or have wanted to avoid thinking about). However, it's one you need to see. It's one you are morally obligated to watch. It's one that examines the few choices we still have, although it may be too late.

The sad truth is, inequality IS making us sick. America is not tenable in its current, apocalyptic, amoral cancerous state of capitalism at all costs. If you don't believe me, watch this masterful 4 hour documentary, and then we'll talk.


The DVD is available only from their site, but here are some
unnatural causes products on amazon

YO HERTA MÜLLER I'MA LET YOU FINISH BUT FIRST LET ME SAY ATWOOD HAD THE GREATEST NOVELS OF ALL TIME

I am very happy that a woman (Herta Müller) won the Nobel Prize for Literature; however, I must admit that my favorite for some years has been Margaret Atwood. I would really like to see her win this award in her lifetime. Far too many people dismiss her books as soft-sci-fi or dark "chick lit." Those people have obviously never read her work.

When I was fourteen, I read The Handmaid's Tale and I spent almost a decade avoiding her books because I imagined they would not, could not possibly live up and I did not want to deal with that disappointment. When I was in Germany, I wanted to surround myself in English in my free time. To bathe in it. I tried to read German books but I longed for English. Is that weird? So I overcame my reluctance and read almost everything Atwood ever wrote. I hate overwrought food / eating consumption metaphors, but I really did "devour" them. Oryx and Crake, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Cat's Eye... I mean, I read them as fast as Deutsche Post could get them to me. I eventually had to sell them all back at the English bookshop in Berlin to keep my belongings light enough for the airline. The rounded characters, vaguely magical situations and deft, yet unpretentious language really struck a chord with me.

I hadn't been thinking about Atwood much lately, because all of my brain is supposed to be devoted to GRAD SCHOOL. But I was really pulling for her to win a Nobel and recently, I found myself in Borders. Being desperately poor and constantly swamped with stuff to get done, I rarely go into stores - they just make me feel bad - but I saw that she had written a new novel. One about a society in which evil corporations dominate society and own the government, poison citizens, and engineer violence.

No, wait! Actually it's fiction! A novel! About the not-too-distant future!

Although it's probably academic and professional suicide, I bought it and have been reading it. Shh. Don't tell.

Atwood's new book, The Year of the Flood is what I am recommending to you today. Speculative fiction is nearly always about the present, and while there's potential for The Year of the Flood to be heavy-handed and didactic, it's neither of those things. It's about a group of religious vegans (!) who anticipate a corporate-engineered plague.

It reads as engrossingly as any other engaging book about an unsettlingly similar setting, but what's drawing me in (I'm about halfway through) is its detailed ritual and the perfectly-imagined, yet flawed religion created in the Gardeners (who first appeared in Oryx & Crake). I am fascinated by religious culture (not so much by religion itself) and the heteroglossic narration adds dimension, criticism, and comfort to the Gardeners as the backstories are constructed: backstories upon backstories, nuanced and detailed, until the looming apocalypse seems like an after thought.

Like I said. I haven't finished reading it yet, but I recommend The Year of the Flood to you whole heartedly.

magical thinking

Today's recommendation is not alienating your copyeditor enough such that they ruin your product launch, assuming you have one (a copyeditor) to begin with.

This week, the Red Cross is holding a book/media sale in my town. Because i have SO MUCH time to read things that are not assigned, I made a point to go out there. Support the Red Cross, right? I was mostly looking for ephemeral media.

I was not disappointed. While Thom was seriously looking at serious books, I frolicked over to the PLEASE TAKE THESE DVDs OFF OUR HANDS THEY ARE AN EMBARRASSMENT section and found myself face to face with this.



Look very carefully, dear readers. It says what you think it says.

Yep. that's right! "Kid's Walk" is egregious enough, but that tag line up there? With that charming, homemade attempt at copy editing? Someone actually thought this was a good idea. It is, in and of itself. Teach kids (or: "kid's")...how to walk! And inspire them! With a message telling them...



naturally, I had to purchase it. I have barely been able to keep my hands off it. I can't wait to watch it today and see what it tells me. CAN I DO IT?



Update soon!




Other home fitness products by this woman. Everyone has to make a living. especially me!

1946-1992

As we live out our daily lives in what may be the last gasps of the American empire, I am increasingly interested in East Germany, not just because I used to live there (briefly). This semester I am doing an independent study on East German documentaries: What does it mean to make a film about truth in a state where the state regulates truth (and how does that compare to our lives, where capitalism and the market regulate truth?) ? What does it mean to film and have a national film and television identity and suddenly have your identity canceled out by a few swift marks of the pen and a televised tearing down of a wall? I am peripherally familiar with the cultural and linguistic peculiarities of East Germany and Ostalgie and a country that no longer exists, but what of its visual rhetoric?

You may not realize it or even care but East Germany is so marginalized, both within Germany itself and within history. The way Americans understand it is the wall came down, happily ever after. The way most Germans understood it when I was there depended on what side of the scar of the wall you were on.

German film is marginalized to begin with. Even within Germany few people (that I met, anyway) had heard of Herzog, Fassbinder, etc. DEFA - that's East German state studio - film is even more marginalized. Stautde, Wolf, Carow, the names only serious Germanists or Eurocentric film scholars know.

So I was delighted that this book, edited by Sean Allen (whose name has an accent I'm too lazy to reproduced, apologies!) and John Sandford, like, totally exists. I got it because my friend's neighbor in Brooklyn threw it out. Seriously.

Defa: East German Cinema, 1946-1992

The book is not without flaws, but if you want to act like you know anything about DEFA film at cocktail parties, it is definitely Recommended. Therefore, it is today's recommendation.