28 July 2005

Happy Birthday, Blog

I missed my own blogoversary yesterday...My first post on (a)musings of a grad student was on July 27, 2002. Three years later I'm still going strong.

I only started the blog because I thought it would be neat and fun. Unlike other bloggers, I didn't have a specific purpose in mind. I just figured I would post when I read something or thought of something interesting. This is my 181st post, incidentally.

Most of the hits to this weblog come from people googling me by name (although they might be looking for other Rebecca Goetzes) and from people who are looking for squirrel repellent. People spend a lot of time reading this post. It's so good to know this blog is making a difference in the lives and deaths of rodents everywhere. Occasionally I get hits from people searching for bestiality, because I made this politically-minded anti-William Pryor post here.

I like blogging and I plan on sticking with it. In the coming year I'll be able to post a little bit about my job search. It seems I am on the job market; the history department has given me a job placement web page.

And, if I may also point out, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship in Religious and Ethical Values has posted a list of its 2005-2006 Fellows. There are six historians in the mix and all the projects sound interesting.

26 July 2005

I'm Cuba!


You're Cuba!

How bad can you really be? So many people have said so many
bad things about you, but you know they can't all be true. Not even most of them.
You went a little crazy for a while, but now you're just getting older and tired
of all the nasty stuff people think about you. You could use a little more money
and you really wish people wouldn't keep leaving you for richer people, but other than
that, things aren't so bad. You really like used military clothing

Take the Country Quiz.

I spent three weeks in Cuba in the spring of 1997. It was the most eye-opening trips I have ever taken. One thing I did learn (among many others) was that Cuban people are by and large proud to be Cuban. They recognize their problems, both political and economic, and are optimistic for future changes.

The worst part of the trip was coming back and being treated like traitors by the U.S. Customs. Officers tried to take away my copy of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which I had bought in Havana in a Spanish-language Cuban edition, with the justification that it was "subversive" material. They were not successful in getting it away from me, but the experience of attempted repression in my own occasionally self-righteous country was as instructive as my stay in Communist Cuba.

23 July 2005

Commemorating the Expulsion of the Acadians

In today's Boston Globe, Bill Fowler of the Massachusetts Historical Society gives a succinct description of the Massachusetts elites' role in the expulsion of French Acadians from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in the summer of 1755.

I also like Fowler's concluding thoughts on memorialization and commemoration.

Over the last 250 years descendants of those Acadians who either eluded Winslow's troops or managed to return to their homes at a later time, have kept alive a vibrant Acadian culture in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Determined to gain an acknowledgement of the injustice done to their ancestors these modern Acadians brought pressure on the Canadian government. In December 2003, the governor general of Canada, on behalf of the queen, issued a royal proclamation acknowledging this ''dark chapter" and declared that henceforth July 28, the day on which the expulsion was ordered be every year observed as ''A Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval," commencing on July 28, 2005."

This year marks the first commemoration in Canada. Perhaps on July 28 we, too, should take a moment to reflect on this dark chapter of our own history.

North America has a long, dark history of forcing individuals to move from one space to another in an effort to turn a profit and/or secure a strategic advantage. This instance is often overlooked but crucial, I think, to understanding how the English settled the land that became the United States and Canada.

18 July 2005

Best Description of Grad Student Life Ever

Why grad students are like the Seven Dwarves...via Helen at Classics, Etc.

16 July 2005

Blogger Troubles Resolved

I finally decided that perhaps dumping the old template might solve my blogger issues. It seems that it has!

Tribble’s Drivel, or, Why Universities Should WANT to Hire Bloggers

There’s been a lot of chatter in the academic blogosphere lately about the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble’s recent Chronicle column “Bloggers need not apply.”

I would have posted sooner on this topic, but alas, I have been unpacking and cleaning almost non-stop. But in any case, response has been overwhelmingly negative—probably because a group of people who tend to like blogging aren’t going to react well to someone who nastily skewered a group of blogging job candidates whose applications he reviewed. What Tribble seems incapable of understanding is that bloggers are interesting and interested folks whose blogs contribute to their efforts to become better scholars, better teachers, and better colleagues.

Bloggers, according to Tribble, put too much of themselves out there for consumption and scare away potential employers. They have thoughts and opinions that they share. This scares Tribble, who claimed that “[s]everal committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is not guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.” Uh huh. I suppose when Gutenberg first invented the printing press academic departments around Europe immediately feared potential colleagues who wanted to make use of the device, not to circulate ideas, but to...gossip about other academics.

The overall impression I got from reading Tribble’s drivel is that job candidates should be very, very afraid of seeming at all different from the herd at all stages of the job-seeking process. Those that have already have jobs wield power over those who don’t by spreading fear—hence Tribble’s subtitle: “Job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.” After reading Tribble’s column the only conclusion I could come to is that those “negatives” include anything that remotely resembles an interest outside of one’s dissertation. Even though Tribble practices a profession that supposedly espouses academic freedom, intellectual curiosity, and creative inquiry, it seems to me that he wishes to beat all these admirable qualities out of job candidates. The Tribbles of the world wish their future colleagues to be bland, boring clones who respond predictably to every question and ask predictable questions of their own.

Tribble’s nicknames for the job candidates he discusses—“Professor Turbo Geek, Professor Shrill, and Professor Bagged Cat”—were tasteless and needlessly cruel. Turbo Geek’s only sin was to have a blog that expressed an interest and expertise in technology that was separate, oh shock and horror, from his academic interests. Good grief. Job seekers, according to Tribble, regardless of whether or not they are bloggers, should be quiet and completely predictable so that they may break into the same hallowed halls he treads daily. (As an aside to the Chronicle: having pseudonymous columns can allow forthright discussion of problems in higher education—from the vagaries of the job market to the struggles of adjunct faculty. But it should never, ever be used to poke fun at people, even anonymously. This Tribble column was beyond the pale in that respect and the Chronicle editors should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to pass muster.)

Sadly, Tribble’s words of unwisdom for those who must brave the job market are not new. Well over a year ago Invisible Adjunct carried a thread about one (again, anonymous) MLA interviewer who commented, threateningly, on the fact that she googles job candidates regularly. I responded to that here, suggesting that googling is a two-way street. Interviewees can google just as effectively, learning things about departments and their members that can be useful. The web, far from being something to fear in the job process, is an asset to information-seekers on both sides of the interview table.

But mostly, it is a shame that Tribble and his colleagues could not see the advantages of having a blogging colleague. In his fear, Tribble both misunderstands what a blog is and what it can be.

According to Tribble, one can “imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum” although he apparently hasn’t read any blogs that fit this bill. For him, them, blogs are either a“ diary or confessional booth” or “a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution.”

We’ll deal with the diary allegation first. Blogs, by their very nature, resemble diaries, with their separate, dated entries. And bloggers, both the pseudonymous and the clearly identified, sometimes post the details of their days, in a diary fashion. We learn, therefore, about New Kid’s writing schedule or Cranky Professor’s recent illness. We also learn, in sometimes daily installments, about Another Damned Medievalist’s ongoing job search. I suppose Tribble’s reaction to this would be: it’s bad to publicize how you write, a committee might not like it, who cares if the Cranky Professor has been ill, and ADM, my goodness, if you’re on the market, DON'T SAY ANYTHING about it. My reaction to these entries: Go New Kid! Go! Develop that writing addiction! Cranky Professor, I hope you feel better soon. And good luck, ADM, I hope a Tribble-less job committee sees your stellar qualities.

Blogging the ins and outs of one’s daily life in academia is no transgression. Indeed, the decision to make daily life public has deep historical roots. The idea of the diary as a private document is largely a twentieth-century notion; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries diaries were documents written for public or at least for familial consumption. Blogging encourages a new form of professional and personal self-reflection, with myriad benefits for both the blogger and her colleagues, all of whom face the daily joys and vexations of the scholarly life. Perhaps our blogging diarists could be said to be reviving an old tradition of thoughtful communication about daily life—to the benefit of those who write and those who read

Now, to Tribble’s lament that blogs are not peer-reviewed and therefore illegitimate. This just proves that Tribble does not understand blogs or the blogosphere. While it is true that the author of a blog decides what she publishes on her blog, she does not blog in a vacuum. Other bloggers can (and do!) react to faulty logic or misinformation. Bloggers also write about research problems, research strategies, interpretive issues, writing difficulties (and triumphs!), teaching strategies, and the list goes on and on. I particularly enjoy reading Culture Cat, a rhetoric grad student who muses about how to (and how not to) teach writing (among other things). I bring my own research issues to my blog on occasion; I wrote a few weeks ago about a dilemma I was having about counting godparents in wills. I received emails from several people recounting their own counting experiences and offering helpful suggestions.

Moreover, this particular post was recognized on a History Carnival. I don’t think Tribble has ever encountered Carnivals, either of the History variety or other disciplines. I mention Carnivals because these are the fortnightly “journals” of the blogosphere. History Carnivals are open to all times and places and many methodologies. While bloggers can nominate their posts for inclusion, the dedicated hosts also strike out on their own to find appropriate posts. (I did not nominate To Count or Not to Count.) In short, academic bloggers who write about research and teaching are thinking very seriously about their vocation and they are engaging with their colleagues about how to do it right. Blogging provides a new forum for thoughtful scholarly exchange on works-in-progress without the stringent requirements of print journals. Historians who blog and carnival can perform thought experiments and try out ideas quickly without going through the conventional publications or conference process. They can also comment on areas outside their expertise or current research. In short, blogging makes historians’ work better. Professor Tribble, what’s not to like about that?

In this sense, having a blog also encourages writing. All the writing advice books say dissertators are supposed to write something everyday. Bloggers who write substantial posts several days a week are honing their writing skills as well as accomplishing that task that so many scholars have trouble with—generating text. I wonder, if one did a study, if bloggers would be statistically more likely give conference papers and publish articles than non-bloggers? They do, after all, write quite a bit.

I’m willing to bet that bloggers are more tech-savvy than their non-blogging counterparts. They are comfortable with technology in the classroom—both its virtues and its limits. While Professor Tribble thought this was a weakness in Professor Turbo Geek’s file, I’ll bet that Turbo Geek would have been able to find creative ways to teach an increasingly computer literate and computer-dependent student body. He might have even found a way to use blogging in the classroom. It’s too bad that Tribble couldn’t see those advantages either.

In short, far from being the delusional egomaniacs Tribble wants them to be, blogging job seekers are thoughtful, interesting people who are fascinating by the possibilities this new medium has for enhancing their personal and professional lives. They are engaged colleagues who are part of a large collection of cyberscholars who share ideas and appreciate the joys and difficulties of teaching. My advice to job committees: do not fear the blog; embrace the blog. You’ll be very glad you did.

13 July 2005

Take that, Santorum

Senator Kennedy on Santorum's (R-PA) hideous comments. No wonder Casey is ahead in the polls, over a year before the midterm elections. And I positively adore it when Republicans shoot themselves so obviously in the foot.

11 July 2005


Kitty Blog

This cute cat is Princess Nani Lani. Her name means "Beautiful Sky" in Hawaiian. Although you can't really tell from this picture, she has big blue eyes. In this picture though, she is just doing her favorite "come pay attention to me" cat pose--and of course she's leaving lots of creamy hair all over the rug!

Nani resides with my parents, and because of my landlords' (that would be the President and Fellows of Harvard College!) draconian no pets policy, she can never come for a visit.

I think graduate students should be allowed cats in University housing. Grad students, as readers of this blog are probably aware, are often stressed-out anxiety-ridden dissertators who simply need some feline-style relief. Not only does petting a cat lower blood pressure, but we could all learn from the laid back example of cats, who always make plenty of time for good food, good play, and of course, naps!

Big Dog, Little Dog

Slate reports that America's most popular dog is the Labrador retriever. Slate posits that the reason for this is likely that the average size of an American home is increasing, so therefore the size of the average American dog must also increase. In other words, if you supersize your house, you must therefore also supersize your dog.

I think I prefer James Herriot's view of people and their dogs. In his experience, wealthy people with enormous English country houses had tiny dogs. And cottagers living in tiny one room abodes had a large dog, often more than one. I like the incongruity of that scenario better.

03 July 2005

Only 44%?

I really do love this country, even if sometimes I want to defect to Canada. :)

You Are 44% American
America: You don't love it or want to leave it.
But you wouldn't mind giving it an extreme make over.
On the 4th of July, you'll fly a freak flag instead...
And give Uncle Sam a sucker punch!

02 July 2005


It's a Dog's Blog

Muffin and Panda sitting pretty for the camera--Muffin, as usual, with her attention elsewhere (a rabbit? a squirrel?) and Panda, as usual, with her attention on her people (who have leashes for walks and tennis balls for throwing!).

The one problem with my apartment (aside from its Soviet-style lack of charm) is that Harvard forbids pets in its affiliated housing. I could probably get away with some fish, but no border collies are allowed here!

01 July 2005

Blogger Part IV

I have received an email from Blogger Support indicating that a bug is causing the problem on my blog, and that the bug will be fixed as soon as possible.

This is something of a relief to me--since this is a Blogger bug I didn't do it. This is always reassuring to someone who doesn't "do" technology.

I will give Blogger until July 5 to sort it out.