Monthly Archives: January 2007

Who is the Political Genius Behind This Idea?

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I had to read this twice in order to believe Bush would be so stupid. I’m grateful to Charlie Rangle for his clear, direct & apposit response, quoted in this bit from the Times:

The basic concept is that employer-provided health insurance, now treated as a fringe benefit exempt from taxation, would no longer be entirely tax-free. Workers could be taxed if their coverage exceeded limits set by the government. But the government would also offer a new tax deduction for people buying health insurance on their own.

“I will propose a tax reform designed to help make basic private insurance more affordable,” Mr. Bush said in his weekly radio address on Saturday, “whether you get it through your job or on your own.” He did not offer specifics, but an administration official provided details of the plan.

The proposed plan is a startling move for a president who has repeatedly vowed not to raise taxes. And it is certain to run into opposition from business groups, labor unions and, most of all, the Democrats who now run Capitol Hill.

“It’s a bad policy,” Representative Charles B. Rangel, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House committee that writes tax legislation, said in an interview Friday night. “We are trying to bring tax relief to the middle class. The president is trying to increase their tax liability. This proposal is inconsistent with what the majority is seeking in the House and the Senate.”

The really weird thing is that this seems both politically and economically stupid. Really, who is the genius who came up with this? Man, these guys are profoundly out of touch. See also: Alan Schussman’s link here.

What is Poetry?

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That’s what I asked my Intro to Lit students on Wednesday. They had read the Norton Introduction to Literature‘s exposition of the subject, but the five or six students who have replied so far haven’t taken much cognizance of what the Norton’s editors say. Instead, they seem to be channeling some kind of cultural knowledge.

Note: The link goes to a student weblog & comments from non-students won’t be approved, but I’d be interested in reactions from readers of this weblog here in this space. Here is a post from earlier this week dealing with, among other things, some of the problems raised by blogging with students. [Note within note: I've just discovered that the way I've got things set up, comments here show up as trackbacks on the student blog. Not sure how I feel about that. Of course, I don't have to let them through. I think I'll ask my students Monday what they think, but I lean toward keeping the student weblog for students. Later: Comments here will stay here & will not show up on the student blog. They have enough to think about without getting involved in meta-conversations right now.]

Big Snow

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Sometimes things just work out. It’s been a tough couple of weeks in which the world has just seemed to jump up & bite me in various small ways. Last night when we were driving home in my car, Carole said, “What is that vibration, it’s making me seasick!” Well, I had been noticing a little pulsation in the steering wheel, but the thing with the all-wheel drive in my Subaru is that even with bad tires the handling deteriorates slowly. But I had to admit, when it was pointed out to me, that it felt as if someone had duct-taped a tennis ball to my front left tire. So this morning I took it in to have the tires looked at. Actually, it was so bad I thought there might be something wrong with the suspension & halfway to the mechanic’s I heard a couple of strange noises, pulled over, got out my phone & called AAA. I mean, that’s why I pay for it, right? The truck came & pulled my little ten-year-old Legacy up onto its platform, I climbed in beside the driver & off we went. It took about 40 minutes from freak out to garage bay. The tires were awful, but nothing else was broken. Ibought four new tires, then went off to a department meeting. When I came out of the meeting, it was snowing like crazy. We’ve had very little snow this winter, but this was the real deal. It’s fourteen miles from school to home & the road was completely covered. I drove between 25 & 30 mph through occasional near-white-out conditions. But I had new tires on the car. I was positively mellow.

My (So-Called) On-Line Life

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I’m not exactly sure how it has come about, but I seem to be participating it two on-line communities, one old school & one very cutting edge. The old school is the Poetryetc email list I’m now co-managing, the cutting edge is the NewsTrust journalism filter, where I have been posting pretty much daily. That’s in addition to trying to keep up a reasonably regular pattern of posts to this site. And considering taking up not dead yet Philosophical Investigations again with my colleague Chris Robinson.

Oh, & that’s not counting the two Blackboard sites WordPress blogs for courses I’m teaching this semester. As for Blackboard, all I can say is that it looks & feels like it was designed with an ugly stick. As I was going to sleep the night before last, it occurred to me that I had adopted Bb for spurious reasons. It’s true that I will have to use the program for my completely on-line version of Understanding Vietnam this summer; there is much less reason, especially given its recalcitrance, to use it for my classes in the brick & mortar classes. I was originally going to use Bb for Intro to Lit & The Lit of American Popular Music as a way of getting to know the program and in the case of the latter course because I could legally upload copyrighted material behind its password protected barrier. My revelation came in three phases:

  1. I spent part of the afternoon last Friday in my office with our Bb consultant Nancy trying to figure out the best way to upload sound files. You can embed them, you can attach them, hell, you can probably tie them to a kite & hang them over the student union. But everything we tried seemed like a workaround. In fact, that’s my beef with Bb — it forces me to create workarounds in order to teach the way I want to teach. I told Nancy that whereas I conceived of a course — any course — as a conversation, Blackboard conceives of a course as the delivery of a certain number of discreet units of information. Nancy, in the meantime, went off to sit at her computer in order to come up with a solution that would work for me, but by the time I came home I was suffering from ontological overload.
  2. I had a beer. That usually quiets the angst. I decided to work on some unrelated things that evening & come back at the Bb problem the next morning. Mostly, I just did some background reading of the Pop Lit course. Sometimes it’s better if I just put a problem out of my mind for a while. And as I was falling asleep Friday night, it came to me that I didn’t need to use Bb for the Intro to Lit course. I could do everything I needed with a blog from Edublogs, whose service has gotten a good deal more robust over the last few months. I fell asleep with a sense of relief that at least I’d only have on Bb site to build & manage, the one for the Lit of American Popular Music.
  3. When I sat down at the computer yesterday morning, I logged into Edublogs & created a blog for the Into course & in doing so I realized something consciously that I had known peripherally all along: I can password protect individual posts in WordPress. That means I can legally post copyrighted material for students in my classes as long as the pages are restricted to those students. And that meant I could also use Edublogs & WordPress for the Lit Pop course. I spent most of Saturday & part of Sunday putting that blog together.

As of today, the Thursday following the above madness with Bb & Edublogs, both my class blogs are up & functioning. I am beginning to get comments from students & I amn content with my decision to go this route. Once I have a little more content & I’m sure that the blogs are secure, I’ll post links here. This will be an ongoing experiment, so I will be interested in people’s reactions & suggestions. I’ve tried to use blogs with students in the past, but one thing has become clear to me this time around: the teacher who wants students to blog for class really has to start in the first week & then keep selling the idea every class meeting. In the past, I have created course blogs, announced them, and hoped students would be so interested they would flock to the site. Obviously, I needed to get real with myself. I had been imagining a kind of utopian learning community in which everybody is as interested in my subject as I am. This semester, I’m just flat-out requiring that my students post to the course blogs. They’re getting graded.

Grading, of course, produces one kind of (instrumental) motivation; it’s not what I would want in an ideal world, but it’s what I have in this world. And the problem is not unique to blogs, though blogging’s idealistic origins highlight the issue — giving writing assignments, whether for essays or blog comments, involves an element of coercion. I’ve talked about this with students pretty regularly over the years, pointing out the inherent contradiction of what I’m asking them to do. I talk explicitlly about how we are all embedded in an institution & the fact that institutions have their uses, but also their requirements. Sort of a reprise of the first two chapters of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, basically. I’m asking students to write in order to discover & express their own views of the world, albeit in relation to the things we’re reading & talking about, but that writing inevitably becomes a product to be graded. Blog comments are very informal, of course, and unless a student is completely incoherent, I’ll accept quantity while encouraging quality. In both my classes this semester, students are writing essays, but I have replaced exams with a blogging requirement. And I’ve made the bargain explicit: we talked about it on the first day of class & I repeated it on the second day. Ultimately, the success or failure of the bargain will be determined by how much students take away from the course. And that is a very mysterious quantity, a kind of pedagogical dark energy, to draw a metaphor from cosmology.

Note: I began this post several days ago — if it’s temporally incoherent, that’s why. Note also: I think I was using the therm instrumentalism incorrectly. Here’s a quick & dirty web definition. I think Dewey was mostly right about ideas; I was using the term more pejoratively to mean something like coercive.

Salmon Red Flannel Hash

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I’m reduced to writing about what I cook for dinner because if I think about the profound & ongoing crisis in American society & politics, I just want to cry. For the moment, at least, I still like to eat. Red flannel hash is hash with beats in it. Last night I made salmon cakes: You take a 15 ounce can of pink salmon, dump it in a bowl, add a cup or so of Panko breadcrumbs, a teaspoon of papirika, several grinds of black pepper, a half cup of finely chopped onions, & two eggs. Form into cakes about three inches across by 3/4 of an inch thick (I use a big spoon to shape them), then fry in butter. Serve on a bed of chopped lettuce drizzled with vinaigrette. But back to the hash. The recipe for salmon cakes makes about eight cakes; we ate four last night. Carole has been agitating for red flannel hash of late, which is traditionally made with beef (I think). When I’ve made hash in the past it has usually been with left over turkey since we don’t eat a lot of beef except for steaks in the summer. (I’ve never made has out of an entire country like George W. Bush, either.) Right, back to the hash. I had four left over salmon cakes & Carole has mentiuoned red flannel hash, oh, I don’t know, probably twenty times in our twenty years together. I’m certain that is above the national average, or the statistical norm or whatever. She really likes beets, which I’m not so hot on. Bring on the beets, I said. I make hash browns — or home fries — all the time, so I just treated the beets like potatoes: diced them & put them in the microwave for about five minutes, then into a hot frying pan with a bit of olive oil, add the onions, some diced potato, also nuked for about five or six minutes, several grinds of black pepper, then cooked on medium heat until everything is browned & the beets & potatoes are completely cooked. Then I broke the salmon cakes into the mixture, stirred & cooked until heated through. We at the hash with a fried egg each (over medium) & some toast from bread I made last weekend. Big, thick slices. I wish I could write about politics as well as Juan Cole or about food as well as M.F.K. Fisher, but I can’t. I don’t have the depth of knowledge or the skill with language. But in these times I can hold up the pleasures of the kitchen against the encroaching insanity of my country. But even writing that last sentence forces me to imagine the bloody hell that our insanity has visited upon Iraqis. I’m afraid that the pleasures of the kitchen won’t do them much fucking good at the moment. While I was teaching at my university today, blood ran on the street outside Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. I have no idea what that would be like. When you peel beets & wash them off, it looks like blood in the sink, except not so thick.