Tired and sleepless

Last night I was tired and sleepless. Even after I went to bed, around 12:30, I lay there. I had some palpitation last night and again this morning, 60/minute, weak pulse, could feel it in my sternum. Why?

I think I am feeling stressed and that I am not handling the stress well.

In the short term, I need to have some coffee, have a morning nap, revise my lecture, and get through the day.

In the slightly longer term, I need to cut back on the coffee and get myself to bed earlier.

And, for the morning non-sequitor, I worry that many of my longer blog posts below are too long. Not in absolute length, but in having too many words for the ideas. Blog entries, for me, are a rough draft of an idea. Like a think piece, they are often what I write to figure out what I really believe. My rough drafts are always long and rambling.

Speaking of rough drafts, make a note to bug the kids - their Uncle Tom's Cabin papers are due a week from today.

And so to have a day.

Grey and cloudy

I feel grey and cloudy today.

Class went fairly well. It was not great - rambling, poorly focused. I need to work up something better to do with this slot next semester. We talked about Bowery B'hoys, minstrel shows, working class culture, immigration, anti-catholicism, Bible riots, telegraphs, railroads, the commodification of agricultural products, and why people cared about slavery in the Western territories.

I am tired still, and mazy, and, well, grey and cloudy.

Factoid of the day, from The Mediterranean Passion atmospheric pollution was so bad in late Victorian England that many houses had soot screens outside the windows - thin screens that caught the larger particles of atmospheric pollution before they could land on the glass. The skies were often yellow during the day, black at night, and the gas lights which burned constantly were never enough to light the way. Pemble does not mention the poor design of the British gas lights - they did not have a proper vent for the smoke from the burning gas, and so the light sooted up its own globe within a few hours after being lit. American gas lights had chimneys, and were brighter.

Thursday I get to kill the Whig party. That class will be much more focused.

Surveys while sleepy

Via En Banc I see that Political Compass has a new political survey.

Not suprisingly, I came out to the left. I was a little surprised to see that I was a mild pragmatist and not an idealist.

Axis Position
1 left/right -3.7275 (-0.2244)
2 pragmatism +1.1684 (+0.0703)

On their earlier survey I consistently come out strongly libertarian, mild lefty.

HTML is your friend.

It appears that blogrolling.com has been hacked. I use them for my private blogroll but, in order to get my links sorted and alphabetized, I write my blogroll on the left in straight html.

I am reminded of the old rule of thumb about web authoring tools like Dreamweaver: they are convenient, they are fast, they are powerful. They are also not perfect. When I was teaching professors how to put up web pages for their classes, I always made sure that they knew the basics of html. Even if someone else was doing the initial coding for them, even if they were using a Dreamweaver, they had to know enough to go in and make basic patches to buggy code.

Sometimes it is cool to be square. Most of the time it just takes more time.

Sebastian and I have

Sebastian and I have about run dry in the earlier debate. Actually, we ran dry several exchanges ago, but argument and inertia do keep things going. And, as Annie pointed out, we were debating oughts and not actuals.

I want to start a tangent based on the last couple of exchanges, and a tangent gets its own toplevel post.

While Sebastian and I have surprisingly different policy goals, mine by preference and his as a compromise, our approach to the debate was shaped by a surprising similarity. He, a conservative, and I, a liberal, both approached major policy questions from the perspective of beleaguered minorities. And, as beleaguered minorities, we were suspicious of outside policy proposals. Similarly, Annie was feeling left out because we were not engaging her posts, she too felt like a silenced minority.

But why was everyone feeling like a minority? Is there no mainstream any more?

Personally, I look at national policy debates from, well, a national perspective. I see Team Texas in the White House, a Republican majority in Congress that goes out of its way to ignore and marginalize the Democratic minority, and state-level Republican parties, especially in Texas, who are willing to break the code of customary respect in order to gain political advantage (I am thinking of the redistricting proposal). If you know that John Ashcroft will be in charge of executing the laws, you just assume that those laws are going to be executed in a partisan fashion. (1) On the national level, the Republican party is currently dominant, that party is dominated by its conservative wing, and that wing is dominated by the Texas crowd. You don't have to buy into the whole Kevin Drum Texas conspiracy theory to distrust these guys.

So, I fear giving them any advantage because I do not trust them to use their power wisely. Those are harsh words, but there you have it. Emotions can be harsh.

Holsclaw seems to feel that the current legal system is largely to completely to the liberal side. He made those statements when talking about abortion policy. Expanding that insight to other conservatives, Randy Barnett of Volokh worries about speech laws and civil liberties. Many conservatives appear convinced that popular culture and the media are against them and that they have to struggle to get their moral messages through a society dominated by music and images glorifying self-indulgence and cheap populism. I have to admit, when I see Hollywood movies turning again and again to cheap ripoffs of populism in order to rally the audience against "the man", I feel like reaching for God and Man at Yale for a counter-injection of conservativism. I do not yet have Emperor Misha's vitriol at being surrounded by "liberal idiots" - but if you have the stomach to read him go flip through a couple of pages and notice that he writes with the voice of a beleaguered minority; he sees idiots everywhere.(2)

Annie, meanwhile, is cranky at the male-dominated tone of our argument. We were phrasing things in terms of natural law morality and abstract legal justice. We were not using data, or looking at outcomes, or conveying any empathy for women. Women have historically been silenced in political discourse. Contra Kim Du Toit they are still under-represented and under-voiced. There may be more women than men, but they do not have a public voice comparable to their numbers. This might be the mommy track taking people off the grind to high office and high corporate positions, it might be subtle sex discrimination, it might be that the schematic strict father / nurturing mother does indeed describe how we want our politics; if enough voters want an authority figure in office and respond to men who project authority, then women will indeed have trouble gaining office and trouble gaining the bully pulpit.

If everyone feels like a minority, and everyone is defensive about it, how can we raise the tone of political discourse?

The first, something I failed in my original rant about lies, is to be very sure that we understand our opponents before we criticize them. I have been struck this week by how good Eugene Volokh has been at making sure he understands the things he comments on. Other pundits should take lessons from him. To the extent that I opine, I include myself in that category.

Following that, we need, all of us, to ask people if they have made their point in the most constructive way. The challenge is to do this both to the people you agree with (at the cost of appearing to rhetorically disarm) and to people you disagree with (without appearing to be chaining the subject or ducking their points.) dueling rants are counterproductive. I already vote against Republican demagogues; I currently support Clark over Dean largely because Clark can make his points without going over the top with his style and without giving in on the substance.

Beyond that, add my name to the growing list of people who are concerned about the long-term consequences of our current districting system for the health of our polity. While there have always been locations that are strong for one party or another, more and more we are moving to a system of rotten boroughs and safe districts. Too many candidates run unpacked or effectively unopposed. This means that, as in the early 19th century, the real elections are the statehouse elections before the decennial census. One reason that the Texas redistricting hack bothers me so much is that De Lay and his Texas buddies are setting a precedent where once any party gains enough of the statehouse they can redistrict the state, right then, so that they will not lose another election.

That sort of politics kills a two party system. Go re-read Michael Holt's Political Crisis of the 1850s. In the past single party politics in the United States has produced politics of personality and of personal character assassination within the parties or, in the late 1850s, purely sectional politics to the point where people who lost a national election could not imagine life as a minority and seceded rather than be destroyed. One-party politics have been unstable in the past. And while two-party politics has its faults, I would like to think that if we drop two-party politics we do so after serious consideration.

Is there a better way to handle redistricting while still keeping geographic electoral districts and first-past-the-post election laws? Gerrymandering is a fine political tradition, just ask Elbridge Gerry at the start of the 19th century. Redistricting has traditionally protected most minority party members who are currently in the legislature while giving an overall benefit to the majority party. I don't want to turn districting over to a judge, we might turn districting over to a commission but those are not stable solutions. What I want, but can not imagine, is some form of the old cake-cutting solution: I cut the cake, you have first choice of pieces, so I have an incentive to cut the slices evenly.

With luck this would resolve the "waah, we are all minorities" problem. There is a big difference between turning to lawsuits, extra legal pressures, or dropping politics altogether and the fine political tradition of "wait until next election." If we always feel that we will have a chance in the next election, then any loss is only temporary. And, if we know that we can always lose the next election, any victory will not be exploited because, to do so, would be to set a precedent for when the other party has power.

I am not sanguine about electoral reform. If half of what I fear about the Diebold machines is true, then things are getting worse. (Oddly, I have encountered conservatives worrying about what those Democrats are trying to do with the push-button machines. Paranoia runs deep.)

That means that the only way that districts are likely to be shaken up is if we see a new political alignment. Some of the signs of such an alignment are in the air - the small l libertarians are forming their own wing to try to turn libertarianism from men in tinfoil hats to a viable alternative to Texas Republicanism. Dean, despite his terrible phrasing, wants to challenge the current ethnocultural focus of many Southern voters. 2004 is going to be an interesting election. I suspect that women voters are going to be the big surprise here. I have been struck by how many women operate political blogs - in cyberspace no one hears the pitch of your voice - and how powerful their words have been. While women generally vote class, religion, and race before they vote gender, that can change, especially if we see more groups of women working to get women the early funding and name recognition they need to get through primaries and state and local level party committees.

(1) It is not true that I despise all Republicans. I despise Ashcroft, DeLay, and Rove. They are partisan hacks who are perfectly willing to sell out the democratic process in search of temporary advantage. I dislike Bush 43: he has a systematic disconnect between his rhetoric and his policies, and lies are my hot-button issue, but the man appears to be trapped within his world view while the others are aggressively malicious. Cheney and Rumsfield, while I disagree with many of their policies I approve of the men themselves. Both are smart, do appear willing to re-think their assumptions, and can (usually) tell the difference between a political disagreement and a bonfire. Powell is not part of the inner circle, I generally like him. I don't know enough about Rice to have an opinion.

(2) For the record, I think that anyone who seriously believes in a "political correctness" movement is an idiot. And, if you parse Misha and remove the emotion and ranting, he ends up saying very little indeed.

Tired

I am tired. I have been tired all day. It made it hard to concentrate and slow to work.

I pushed very hard last week, then spent the weekend doing house things rather than resting.

The good news is that the rewritten chapter 3 just went out the email door to my advisor. It is much better. I hope it is enough better.

The bad news is that I tend to work in sprints and drifts, sprints and drifts. I just finished sprinting, but I do not have free time to drift.

Time to get some job apps into envelopes and some more of that TOO MUCH back grading done. Did I mention that I have only a rough outline for tomorrow's class?

I just want to eat pastry and drink coffee and read fiction and nap in my comfy chair.

Ah well.

And so to walk the hound.

Emotional Weather

I spent most of yesterday writing, with a break to go plant bulbs. I was, as I am this morning, somewhat alone with my work while J and baby did other things in the house. I had a good morning, revising chapter three again and printing it out again. I should be able to send it to my advisor on Monday.

Later today J and I are going to sit down and work up a menu for Thanksgiving and then send out an email to friends and family telling them what to bring. We are doing a semi-pot-luck Thanksgiving for 11, including both sets of parents, both brothers, some extended family, but not my sister from Albequerque. We will cook the turkey, other people will bring side dishes. It will be a lot of fun. It will also be a hassle, especially because J's father and his wife are coming early and camping out on our sleep sofa.

Reading other blogs, I see that I am not the only one thinking about the holidays. DW is feeling insecure about an emotional attachment and is sad because she has no one to go to parties with. Sarah Hatter is broken up because she is not going home for Thanksgiving. I like reading what DW and Sarah write; they are both wonderful writers and, like me, they both have a strong loner tendency.

The holidays are hard. They are a time for family and festivity, and yet family is stressful. They are a time when the ambient media clutter turns to tunes of joy and saccharine love, and yet at the same time the days are growing shorter, the leaves are dropping from the trees, and the skies are turning grey. November, for me, is a bare tree with its branches against a sky of moving grey clouds, black against pearl-grey, with undertones of brown. Those are not happy colors.

As I was reading Sarah and DW I was reminded of some lyrics by Jimmy Dale Gilmour, the operatic cowboy tenor.

You've got to go to sleep alone
even if you're lying with somebody you really love
you've still got to go to sleep alone.

The holidays jolt us out of our autumnal pattern. We fall into one set of habits as the leaves fall and the weather turns and we begin to move indoors for the winter. Just as we check the roof and fix the weatherstripping on our houses, we also adjust our temperaments as we prepare for our winter retreat. Thanksgiving and the solstice break that pattern: they draw us out when the earlier pattern had been for us to turn within. This is one of the many reasons why we like them, and it is one of the many reasons why the holidays are so stressful.

I take my moods from the weather. I like to walk outdoors, and I like to look at the sky as I do. My walks are my time to attune myself to the season, whether it be the resurrection of green in the spring or the gentle melancholy of the autumn. One thing I have noticed is that, even walking the same route around the local lake, the walk is very different if I take it alone, with the hound, with baby and hound, or with the whole family. I move at different paces; I look at different things; I go from an internal train of thought to a monologue with hound and baby to a chattering discussion with J. All are fun, yet all are different. The way I experience the sky changes depending on who I am with, and my emotions change as well.

I started writing this while partway through this read-through of chapter three. I have finished the read-through and printed the chapter. Now I will let that piece of work sit for a while so that it will be fresh to me when I go back to it. I use time to distance myself from my work so that I can more effectively edit my own words. Time and distance shape our interactions with other people as well. We distance ourselves, and then we rediscover one another. What does this mean?

We still have to go to sleep alone, but we can cuddle first. And cuddling is very good indeed.

Bright Day

The winds have settled down, and while we might have overnight rain, this morning is crisp, cool, and wonderful.

The weather makes a good metaphor for my emotions today. I was in bed for a good long time, 10:30 to 7:00, and while I had broken sleep I also had much needed rest. Six nights in a row of six hours of sleep had begun to wear on me.

So today I will be reading the draft of chapter three, and grading homework (still badly behind), and - hopefully - playing in the yard, and going to Home Depot, and being, well, academic in the morning and suburban in the afternoon.

I let a lot of house projects slide this week while writing. I will be letting more slide later this month. I feel bad about it; I suspect that my strange dream last night relates to my guilt about not getting enough done, but I do have to prioritize.

What this means for you, dear readers, is that this weekend I will again be putting my A-level writing energy into my real work. Any blog entries will be short, self-absorbed, and hopefully funny.

I still don't know how I am going to combine Walt Whitman, the Compromise of 1850, and the Wilmot Proviso into a lecture that matches the title "Railroads, Telegraphs, and Riots." I can see several short sections, but I am having trouble figuring out how to tie it all together. My earlier thought, to use workingmen's culture as the glue, falls down on the Compromise. Talking about sectionalism falls down on riots (anti-Catholicism) and really falls down on Whitman.

It is not quite like solving a jigsaw puzzle, because in a puzzle you know that the pieces do fit together and you just have to figure out how. It is more a problem of how to take a pile of legos and make a cool car that looks like a house and uses all the blue and yellow blocks. It is a fun problem, but it will take some thinking time to solve it. Then again, this sort of problem solving is part of the real fun of teaching.

And so to read chapter 3.

Lyrics Quiz

I only scored 37.5 points on this 80s lyrics quiz that Greyduck posted. I guess I did not listen to enough radio back then. And, although I thought I watched too much MTV, I must have been wrong.

Good lyrics can be hard to write. I know I wrote some real loser lyrics when I played in the comedy-heavy metal college band - we were not good but we were very entertaining. The highlight of the show was the juggling vocalist, that and Dock of the Bay with a punk break halfway through. The other guys came up with those - I penned the lyrics for the generic acid song and the generic war song.

Feh, now I can't remember the only good part of the generic drug song - I had a modulation in a four chord four bar bridge that, I think, walked the circle of fifths to go from G major to A minor.

I played bass, and I can half hear the walk of descending triplets (7,5,3?) as we walked through those chords: long short short, long short short, long short short, long short short. My bass was stolen years ago, the guitar is untuned and sitting in a closet, and the notebooks are long buried in boxes. I guess I won't try to re-create that run - but it was the only thing I wrote that got the crowd to yell. It was brilliantly unstable, and it worked at that point in the song.

The rest of the song was a little boring and repetitive. I found it fascinating because I played a little with the rhythm every few bars, and that made each few bars sound new and exciting to me. Whether from synthesisia or from being mildly weird, to me notes of varying lenghts have a distinct and varying quality. And this quality gets confused with the quality of pitch. So if I play the same note twice in a row, but as a whole and then as a quarter note, it will sound distinct and different.

My confusion between duration and pitch drives J crazy when I try to sing something I do not know very well, for I will get the rhythm of the notes about right and assume that this means that I also have the pitch right - it feels right to me so it must sound good to everyone around me ... right?

Music is one of those things that sounds so easy when talented people do it that we tell ourselves we could do better. Mediocre music is pretty easy; good stuff is most amazingly difficult.

Domain Names

Redted.com is taken. So are redted.net and redted.org. I am not having luck buying redted.com, so, I need either a new identifying tag or a new suffic. I have been Red Ted for years, I don't want to give that up. And, I like the semi-anonymity of not using my last name for some of my internet presence. (You could probably figure out my name from this blog, but if you google my name you won't find the blog.)

So, redted.cc or redted.nu or redted.us - I am not wild about any of them. I will probably go with the .us for consistency, although a lot of people are using .nu for personal pages. If I want a separate domain for this blog, I can be rtdiary.com . Hmm, domain names are cheap these days ...

And where to host? I use yahoo for my free email, I have some friends who run a web server and have offered me space for free, or I could dig around for more.

But, I should be writing or grading or gardening, not musing about domain names. Back to the next transition. Transitions are hard - I ended up cribbing the compound sentence from the previous entry as a placeholder for the last transition.

And back to work.

Hard Day

It was a good day of hard writing.

I think I only got down a few hundred words, about five paragraphs. But they were all transition paragraphs (well, except for the two sentences, with Greek and Hebrew examples, explaining the difference between translation and transferral in Biblical translation) and transition paragraphs are hard.

I think I made my argument. Tomorrow I get to read the printout and see if I made it well enough.

With any luck I will get to bed at a reasonable time tonight. I have been just a little stressed this week.

Writing and Grading

Today will be a day of writing and grading. The wind is still blowing outside, though not as hard, and it is a bright sunny day out there. Perhaps, if I do well, I will give myself a break and go finish planting those bulbs.

But, the main focus will be on working on the chapter. I need to do a better job of tying some of my discrete moments into my larger narrative. Briefly, the current section explains how mainstream American clergy tried to combine three sincerely held beliefs: the nation is subject to Providential rewards and punishments based on the religious beliefs of its leaders; religious opinion is personal and inviolate; religious establishments and religious tests, and anything that even appears to be re-creating the former imperial establishment of the Church of England, are all completely impermissible.

So how did they square national providence and religious freedom? I am arguing that they softened the Providential connection between beliefs and rewards. I think I can make that argument, but I do need to make that argument.

Gone to Texas

No, not me. The class is going to Texas today.

As part of the revision of this year's syllabus I changed many of the lecture titles to something a little catchier. This will be my discussion of why John Tyler caused the American Civil War.

Well, he did have help. I am going to remind the students of the concepts of contingency, path dependency, change over time, and agency that I mentioned briefly at the start of class, have used since then, and will be using a lot as we discuss the sectional crisis.

I worry that I have too many elections and individuals planned, and that I will bog down in the early 1840s. I guess I will have to be a little sharper and leave out many of the fun details.

I am using Michael Holt's argument about political parties managing sectional tensions, but unlike Holt I am not devoting my lectures to a summary of political history. Instead I am giving a broader picture and then trying to work the political history into the mix. I need to work on conveying information quickly, smoothly, and coherently. Tuesday's material was a little garbled; I could have presented my points in a better order. With luck this will go more coherently, if only because I have taught John Tyler before while Tuesday was the first time I had done a lecture showing how feminism grew out of Great Awakening and enlightenment changes in our understanding of God.

Out of Context

Looking back at my blog, I find that I made a glorious wonderful typo. I will fix it below, but not until after I have copied it here:

I must be the wind - wonderful gusting blowing wind that makes the house shake

If I were a singer-songwriter, I would make that into a rhyming couplet. But I am not. I do sometimes write mediocre fiction, and that feels like an opening line for a piece that will straddle the purple line between really cool prose and "It was a dark and stormy night".

Sleepiness, Writing, and Politeness

I am once again sleepy. I did not get to sleep until after midnight last night. Despite sleeping in I ran about six and a half hours of sleep. I have trouble writing well when sleepy, I have trouble reading well when sleepy, and I get testy when I am sleepy. Last night I think I broke a rule about not blogging while both tired and angry. For that I apologize. I will leave the offending post up, if only as a reminder to myself to be kinder.

Chapter Three revisions seemed to go fairly well last night. After the baby finishes falling asleep tonight, I will stand up, do the dishes, and then either write some more, grade my ever-growing backlog of papers, or sit on the couch and bleeble.(1) I will probably end up staring at Paschal Strong and the 1823 Yellow Fever epidemic, especially if I can clear my mind while doing boring housework.

It must be the wind - wonderful gusting blowing wind that makes the house shake - for today was a day with not a lot of students in the class room and quite a lot of bad drivers on the roads. Normally when I see a lot of bad drivers around me, I am sleepy and am somehow provoking them by giving unclear defensive driving signals. Today there were bad, aggressive drivers all over the place. They were cutting and weaving far in advance, passing on the right while going 70 in a 45 zone, running red lights, gridlocking intersections, and in the case of one lad in a black pickup truck, flailing arms out the window in frustration at a person who dared to drive the speed limit in the right hand lane while coming up on an exit. Mr black pickup truck then swerved into the far right lane and was last seen heading to the left when the road split - I suspect that if there had been an open shoulder he would have passed on it.

I checked the Jersey driving guides when we first moved here, and I could not find the bit that says that when given a choice and a fairly open road you should always pass on the right. It must be there; almost everyone does it.

Perhaps they are sleepy also?

(1)Bleeble: Push your lips out, blow gently, flap a finger in front of the lips and make a blithering, bleebling, burbling sound.

Whigs and Democrats

I feel strange about today's class. For one thing, I finished my entire outline in class. That rarely happens. For another thing, I am caught up on political history. That too rarely happens. By referring to the events of Jackson's presidency but never explaining the events in Jackson's presidency I was able to: lay out the sectional crisis; lay out and discuss basic historical theories of contingency, path dependency, agency and change over time; review the rise of the Whig party; begin to show contrasts between Whigs and Democrats (showing change over time along the way); blame the American Civil War on John Tyler of Virginia; and fight the Mexican-American War.

In both sections David Wilmot and the Wilmot Proviso appeared two or three minutes before the end of class and served as a teaser. Students don't retain the beginning and end of class well, but I will review Wilmot on Tuesday. I have two classes next week and the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to get from 1847 to 1861; that is a luxurious amount of time to devote to political history. But, I will need that time.

Tuesday of next week the class is called something like: Railroads, Telegraphs and Riots. We are reading excerpts from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass - selections from "Song of Myself", all of "Song of the Broad-Axe" and "I Hear America Singing."

The problem is, I do not remember what I had originally planned to cover this class. I vaguely remember making sure it was in the syllabus so I would have a fill class in case I got behind on the political history. So I ask you: talk for 80 minutes - the rough equivalent of 5000 words or a 2-page skeleton outline - on Railroads, Telegraphs and Riots. Make sure that you discuss Leaves of Grass and the politics of the 1840s. What story can I tell?

After re-reading my selections I notice that what I picked from Whitman was, for lack of a better description, pastoral poetry about industrial work. The mention of Railroads and Telegraphs tells me that I had intended to talk about national institutions. The mention of Riots in the context of the 1840s means anti-Catholic riots. I will put together a narrative of closer ties across the country and increasing tensions within the country. I will need to review Wilmot, cover the Compromise of 1850, introduce anti-Catholicism, discuss the way that rapid transmission of information speeds up political arguments between the sections, describe the increasing flow of immigration and urbanization in the North, and talk about poetry. I can do that - already the pieces of the narrative are coming together for me.

Thanks blog, you help me think.

A Strange Day

It has been a strange day. The cat is sick (perhaps because I fell behind on dosing her with all three varieties of laxative), the baby is sick (simple eye-throat bug), and J is sleepy.

I had the baby this morning, then dropped him at daycare and tried to work. I got some things done: a job letter out, prepped class, wrote a few paragraphs on the current chapter revision, a load of laundry, a quick run to the county library. But I still felt tired, cranky, and behind for most of the day.

That might be why I jumped on Sebastian. As Sheila O'Malley reminds us today, sometimes you should just put the keyboard away and go to sleep. I will re-read my bit on Holsclaw tomorrow and see. He sez I am not being fair to his question, and I say he has framed his question so poorly that it is unanswerable: change the frame and the question resolves itself.

I am tired, eyes hurt, and not sleepy. I do hope that the work I wrote earlier tonight is any good. Right now I am revising the middle, the weak part, of my dissertation, and making every sub-section tie into my overall argument. Transitions are hard. My first drafts are always bad. And I am writing a series of new paragraphs to serve as transitions. This is going to need more editing, yep.

And so to take the hound out.

Oh, at least I cooked an adequate gravy for dinner. It has been a week for meat in red sauce, and for junk food.

Class of Women

Some semesters I have more men, others more women.

Traditionally, history classes have been disproportionately male. Over the last couple of decades this balance has shifted so that, across the discipline, we have about equal numbers of male and female history majors. Some classes, women's history and civil war history in particular, have strong gender biases in the classrooms.

Normally when I teach the survey I have classes that are about evenly divided, often with a few more men than women even though there are more women than men enrolled in colleges these days.

Not this semester. This semester I am about 3/4 women in both sections. This is a good thing in many ways - there are enough women that the women are not being afraid to talk and to challenge me. It is also an odd thing - we do a lot of political and economic history, I like to use students to demonstrate economic and political transactions, and by and large I grab women to play these roles. 18th and especially 19th-century society had strong gender roles, strong gender identities, and people defined their daily lives in gendered terms. It always leads to a moment of cognitive dissonence when I talk about [female name] looking for a wife or raising sons to follow after her or displaying her "manliness" by standing up and voting.

I do prefer to teach women. I do not know why. I started to speculate about the why, re-read my words, and deleted them as specious drivel.

Class Write up - Reforming Women

This was a little free-form, but it worked fairly well. It ran better in the afternoon than in the morning - better turnout, more interested students, more people had done the reading. The afternoon section is just plain better than the morning section. I do not know why - at the start of the semester I thought the morning kids would be better.

This is a long writeup. I followed my notes for the introduction and conclusion. I changed the middle on the fly. The below is what I did and how I could have done it better.

I told them at the top that last week we saw women and society from an economic and social perspective, and this time we were going to cover the same ground from an intellectual and cultural perspective. I like what we covered, but I might re-arrange the presentation. The other way I framed the discussion was by pointing out that gender roles are always changing and that people are always nervous about changing gender roles. What I did not say, but could have, is that people tend to appeal to the past to justify or legitimate their goal for the future. I used a simple clothing example to make the point. Who wears tights now, men or women? Who wore tights in the 13th century, men or women? The class smiled as soon as I gave the second half of it, but it made the point that at one time men showed their legs and were judged by their legs.

We started by discussing the Beecher-Grimke debate. As expected, the kids liked Grimke. I put the two on the board and we summarized what they argued, their points, and their assumptions. That went well.

Then I did a basic history of women and society.

I started with Benjamin Rush, Republican Motherhood, and the idea that the best way to control the horde of young people in the EAR was to educate them in republican values, that women were the only people who could provide that education, and that women thus had to educate themselves in order to educate their children.

I proved this by drawing on Nancy Cott's (I think) evidence on writing styles. Colonial women who wrote letters, even letters to other women, always apologized for writing. They referred to themselves as a "female" correspondent, they apologized in advance for the errors of the letter, their entire style was self-conscious and showed that these women, while writing letters, were very aware that they were encroaching onto "male" behavior. By the 1820s, women stopped referring to themselves as "female correspondents," stopped apologizing, and not only did their writing get better, they were no longer being self-conscious about the process of writing itself. I argued that writing had gone from a male to either a female or an everyone activity; gender roles had changed.

I then quickly summarized the Second Great Awakening, showed that women were more likely to join churches during this awakening, and that this reinforced the notion that women were more religious than men.

From there I moved to a talk about the sentimental culture. This transition was the weak part in the class. Next time I might want to foreground the role of Jonathan Edwards and the Religious Affections. I used him in the second section but not in the first.

I once again set up two columns on the board; this time they were the 17th and the 19th centuries.

I explained that the 17th century people read their Bibles from the assumption that God was King. They focused on hierarchy, glory, and control. Puritans emphasized original sin and argued that everyone was born evil: we are born evil, family government and social laws and punishments are there to restrain the evils in all of us, and only religion can remove that evil. If you die before getting that religion, you are bound to Hell. Puritans were consistent, and many held to infant depravity - if a baby is born and dies immediately, does its soul go to Heaven or to Hell. Logically, based on Original Sin, the soul goes to Hell. Many Puritans believed this (I did not cite Nathaniel Emmons who elaborated this approach in the 18th century).

Furthermore, most 17th century people agreed with a body of thought dating back to the 13th century holding that women were more easily swayed by evil. Eve had tempted Adam, it was through woman that evil had entered the world, and women were obviously moral inferiors to men. I referred to the Salem Witch Trials to set this up, asking the class if more men or women were accused of witchcraft, and why?

In contrast, as we had discussed earlier, 19th century people assumed that women were more religious than men. There was a change in gender, morality and religion.

I continued with the 19th century position that, because God is Good, God could not condemn an innocent infant to eternal damnation. Dead infants must go to heaven. If so, then we must be born in a state of goodness. But, conversion religion requires that we recognize that we are evil so that we can reject that evil and be saved. So where does the evil come in? Hopkins argued that evil comes with the ability to choose, and that evil consists of knowing two alternatives and choosing the worse of the two. Thus children become evil at the time that they learn to make moral judgements.

This approach to the problem of evil then had two consequences. People who taught themselves that sin consisted of making the wrong choice, flocked to the decision theology of the Wesleyan and Finneyite revivals. Ministers asked their audience to make an immediate choice between heaven and hell. Afterwards people were told that they had to immediately renounce sin whenever they encountered it, and Hopkinsian immediatism led to benevolent reform movements including abolition.

The other consequence was less obvious. Catherine Beecher shows the problem: she never thought of herself as evil. She was the daughter of a minister, she was raised up religiously, she took care of her younger siblings after her mother died, and all her life she devoted herself to doing what she thought was the right thing. According to her biographer Katherine Kish Sklar, Beecher was never able to experience a conversion because she was never able to convince herself that she was utterly evil and worthless. Instead, CB joined the Episcopal Church which did not require a conversion experience and was perfectly willing to believe that people were either morally good or morally neutral from the moment of their baptsm. Later on, Horace Bushnell would formalize Cbs position in his arguments about Christian nurture, and the mainline Protestant churches would continue their movement from conversion to nurture, decision to practice.

The weakness here is that I did not prepare a story for the change. The story I want to tell is Jonathan Edwards who, in his Surprising Narrative and his Religious Affections emphasized emotion. For Edwards, religion without emotion was not really religion. But, critics charged, emotions can come from either God or the Devil. How do you tell if your emotional experience was a good or a bad thing? Edwards responded with standard orthodoxy: the proof of a sincere religious experience comes from the change in our behavior afterwards. While some would say emotion only, others would say practice only, Edwards insisted that you had to have both or you had less than nothing. If I had handled this in a different order, with Edwards in the middle, it would have made a better story.

Instead of a story, I prepared a compare and contrast. I showed them cultural differences between the 17th and 19th centuries. I talked about graveyard decorations, from skulls and demons to angels and cherubs. Death was no longer something scary that came unexpectedly - no one posed for paintings while holding a skull after about 1750. Death in the 19th century was a time to think not of Hell but of Heaven. 19th century cemeteries tried to celebrate the afterlife. In this they were much like popular music, which talked about the afterlife as a time when families would be reunited. (I cited but did not sing verses from "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" and "Circle be Unbroken". None of the kids would admit to knowing Wayfaring Stranger. I might add music lyrics to the reader next time.) Finally I talked about deathbed scenes like those of Little Eva in UTC. People learned of these scenes through literature and religious periodicals; they tried to re-enact them in their own lives. By the 1830s people on their deathbed were often badgered by well meaning relatives who were hoping for a "good death" where the person dies while praising God for the glory that they see. It was a culture shift, it was a turn to sentimental culture.

Finally I ran through a fairly traditional narrative of immediatism to abolitionism to women's rights. I explained the difference between equal rights feminism and separate spheres feminism, typefied by Grimke and Beecher respectively. I told them briefly about Seneca Falls in 1848 and read a little of the Seneca Falls declaration. I closed with the narrative of women getting the vote: local votes in school boards and local option elections, gained because women had responsibility over children and the home. Votes for political office in some Western states, gained through a mixture of equal rights and separate spheres arguments.

Then women lobbyied for the vote on equal rights terms during WWI, comparing Wilson to the Kaiser for both denied democracy to the people they ruled. They got the vote, the crucial swing votes, on separate spheres grounds by arguing that women would reform the voting public. Women activists assured their followers that once women had the vote they would vote in all of the items on the women's platform. Everyone was convinced that women would vote differently, that they would change politics. I was low on time so I did not review the Progressive argument that only educated smart (i.e. white middle class) people should take part in politics, so lets enfranchise white women while disfranchising poor, illiterate, and underclass people.

The irony, of course, is that while women got the vote on separate spheres grounds, once they got the vote they voted like people and not like women. Women voted much like men did - on class, region, and ethnocultural lines rather than on strict gender lines. The equal rights feminists were right, women really were just like other people.

Bad Pundit, Bad

Sebastian Holsclaw just voted himself off my blogroll with this post.

Edit - see comments. I retract my aspersions of malice. I still think Holdsclaw needs to work on presenting other people's positions fairly and completely rather than making up ideal types about them. Ted K.

I keep two blogrolls, one public and one private. The public blogroll on the left there is for people I read regularly and who, even when I disagree with them, make me think and leave me smarter than I was before I clicked the link. The public blogroll is a vote of confidence. The private blogroll is where I store sites that I want to look at but am not yet sure that I will praise. About half the sites on the private blogroll go public, half get deleted within the week.

What is so wrong with Sebastian's little rant. It is not that he and I disagree on abortion politics. I disagree with many people on abortion politics. What bothers me is the sheer and total intellectual dishonesty of the piece. He posits a perfect set of ideal types, either abortion always and everywhere or abortion never and nowhere. He assumes that all people who are for any form of abortion rights must therefore be for all forms of abortion rights - because you can see some situations in which abortion is a good alternative then you must be a heartless monster in all situations. Holsclaw, in other words, is acting within the modern norms of hyper-political and hyper competitive politics. He is arguing from extremes, painting his opponent into a corner, and - just like George Will - he is doing it by pretending that he does not know what he is doing.

In some ways Holsclaw is arguing like an adolescent: there are no shades of grey, there is only absolute truth, you must be on the side of the angels or the side of the devils. My response to this is, I fear, equally adolescent: by framing the argument in those terms you have either proved that you are too ignorant of the world around you for you to be trusted or you have proved that you would rather willfully misrepresent your opponents than challenge their arguments. Either you are a fool or you are a liar.

Now, that was satisfying but not very useful. I must confess that falsely disingenuous rhetoric will always push my buttons.

What I think Holsclaw is missing here, and what many people who debate abortion are missing, is that rather than abortion being a case where there is a clear and simple choice between two absolute and over-ruling rights, it is a case where two sets of rights conflict. And, to make it difficult, the two sets of rights conflict in a way that is always crucial to the life of one party and sometimes crucial to the life of the other.

We do not legislate other situations where medicine must make us choose between the lives of two people - there are no laws forbidding doctors to separate conjoined twins because the operation may kill one or both. Instead it is handled on a case by case basis, and people make those decisions very seriously because they know that lives do depend on their choices.

The gut sense used in English and American social practice and common law for centuries is the same rough approximation upheld in the original Roe decision. The old rule was that a fetus does not gain rights or protection until quickening - that moment at about the end of the first trimester when the mother can feel motion. Roe codified that, ruling in effect that the competing rights of mother and child should be presumed towards the mother in the first trimester, the child in the third trimester, and roughly equally in the second trimester. We only ended up with fully legal abortion up to the moment the baby is born as a reaction to laws limiting this right. When the decision was politicized, we ended up with law that tastes bad.

Furthermore, while some abortion rights activists take the hardline position that Holsclaw ascribes to all of them, most of them, like most Americans, feel that abortion is a bad thing that is sometimes the best decision. Rather than feigning surprise when people who generally support pro-life positions worry about technology that will lead to more abortions to select for more perfect babies, he needs to realize that even the people who provide abortions see the procedure as the last, worst choice. It is not in the least bit inconsistent to be pro abortion rights and at the same time pursue social and cultural policies that will reduce the demand for abortion.

I guess what bothers me enough that I am writing this and not working on chapter three, is that Holsclaw has taken a policy position and wrapped it in a lie. And lies are contagious. Because he lied, he encourages other people to assume that everyone lies. If we assume that everyone lies, then we spend our time looking at motives and not words. If we look at motives and not words, we project our fears onto our opponents and reduce the chance to create a meaningful compromise. It is because of rhetoric like Holsclaw's that abortion rights advocates are presuming that there is an organized conspiracy to use the recent abortion law as a prybar to take apart the current structure of abortion rights and make the procedure illegal everywhere and at all stages of pregnancy.

I am jumping on Holsclaw because I am chewing on another rant about the politics of lies. It makes me sensitive to lies, and he was there. But he still goes off the blogroll.

Carnival

The Carnival is up at Deadends. Looks like another good one. Max used a Georgetown theme this time.

I did indeed get Red Poppies in under the deadline. It is down towards the bottom with the other unsortable entries.

Books!

Via Halley Suitt, I see yet another list of 100 greatest novels, this one from the Observer newspaper.

I have only read 29 of them, am listening to another as my current book on tape, and have put about four of them down unread. Like Halley, most of the novels I marked off were books that had been assigned in class. I stopped reading serious novels after college, at least as a regular part of my reading diet. Since I started doing History, my brain-smart reading has been reading for work, and really good fiction rarely makes brain-dead reading.

This change in reading patterns probably explains why most of the novels I checked off date from before 1950 - I just have not been keeping up with the modern stuff.

Making lists can be a lot of fun. I know I once wrote my own canonical list of things that every well-educated person should have read. I followed that with a list of things that were simply highly recommended reads. Both lists had more history, philosophy, and social science than they had fiction. I might update those lists and blog them.

...

I just dug up the old list. Yep, they need updating before I post them. I had originally made a list of essential reading, a list of things to be read, and a list of out-takes. I have read some of the items on the middle list, changed my mind about some of the items on the first and third lists, and done some more reading on my own.

What amuses me is that I recorded the list of essential reading in the order in which the books came to mind. The top of the list is Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Is that essential reading? I am not sure. I do know that I decided last time I taught the second half of the US survey, that the next time I teach US 2 I will assign the Autobiography of Malcom X to the kids.

And so to grade homework.

Red Poppies

Today is Armistice Day.

I did not discuss it in class. I perhaps should have, or at least worn a red poppy, but I was busy thinking about what to teach, how to keep up with my syllabus, and whether the baby was sick or not.

The day has been widened to be a day on which we respect all veterans, and people around the blogging world and around the real world have been respecting veterans today. We should respect all veterans; we should especially respect them today. We respect them for what they all did in their times of service, and we respect them with the rituals and memories that we learned after the Great War.

I am going to share with you a story that I learned from my mother and that I share with my students.

Grandpa Louie was short, just over 5'2". He was also a medical doctor. When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, Grandpa Louie went down to the recruiting office to sign up that same day. He was a doctor, and he knew that the army would need doctors.

They turned him down - he was too short. You had to be a certain height to join the army: I want to say 5'3" but I am not sure. In any case, he was off by just enough. He asked the recruiting office how he might appeal, and they told him that there were no procedures for appealing a height decision.

So, Grandpa Louie got on the overnight train from Jacksonville, Florida to Washington, DC. He then went to the War Department and asked to speak to the Secretary of War. He was told that the Secretary was busy, and that he would have to wait. "Fine," he said, "I'll wait." And so he did. He sat down on a chair in the outer office and waited. Near closing time, the receptionist asked him what he wanted to see the Secretary about. Grandpa Louie explained that he was a medical doctor, that the army needed doctors, and that he was being kept out because he was too short. The word went up the chain, and a senior official (I want to say the Undersecretary for Recruitment, but it could have been anyone) came down and signed a special exemption so that Grandpa Louie could join the Army.

Doctors were officers, so they made Grandpa Louie an officer. Most of the time, he just did the same sort of doctor things that he had been doing in private practice. Officers also had to take part in some of the ceremonies and rituals of Army service, including parades. And, as part of parades, officers rode horses.

Army horses are, well, very very large. Ordinary sized people often use a mounting step to climb up onto them. Grandpa Louie needed extra help over and above that in order to get up onto his horse. But he used a doubled mounting box, or had his orderly hand him up, and he participated in parades and performed his army duty.

That was the funny story, now we get to the sad story.

Grandpa Louie went overseas soon after he joined the army; doctors did not need a lot of training. He worked in the field hospitals in tents behind the lines in 1918. The worst thing he saw, however, came on the voyage home.

He sailed home on a ship full of young recruits. The winter of 1918-19 was the winter of the Spanish influenza. The troop ship they were riding across the Atlantic was one of the ships where the influenza went pandemic. The ship was full of brave, active, healthy and energetic young men. They were the flower of their generation. They got sick with the flu; many of them died. Grandpa Louie did what he could, but in the era before antibiotics there was not a lot he could do but try to keep fluids in them, keep them comfortable, and sign the death certificate when they died. All through that voyage, flag-draped corpses went over the side. Grandpa always cried when he told this part of the story. I am crying as I type it up now. I often break down when I tell the story of the Great War in class.

Despite the terrible losses among a few military units, either on the battle front or from the flu, the United States came off fairly easily from the Great War. Elsewhere, the war really did kill and maim a generation of young men. England raised its military units regionally, and many towns and communities saw every family lose a son over the course of a single battle. The Morris Dancing tradition in England only continued because women took up the male ritual. In France, which suffered the worst per-capita casualties, about one man in five was killed or wounded during the war. One in five! Germany had more total military losses, Russia more civilian losses, the war was a charnel house for everyone in Europe. The flu epidemic that followed the war was even deadlier.

The war killed a generation of young men. It killed the hope of science; it killed the idea of progress; it marks the change from the optimistic nineteenth century to the pessimistic twentieth century. The history of the last eighty-odd years has been the history of the Great War. We are still, indirectly, living with the consequences of that war.

Armistice Day is our collective memory of the Great War. It is why we wear red poppies on our lapels. We remember, because we must remember.

Dancing At Whitsun

* (Trad / Austin John Marshall)

It's fifty long springtimes since she was a bride
But still you may see her at each Whitsuntide
In a dress of white linen and ribbons of green
As green as her memories of loving

The feet that were nimble tread carefully now
As gentle a measure as age do allow
Through groves of white blossom by fields of young corn
Where once she was pledged to her true love

The fields they stand empty, the hedges grow free
No young men to tend them or pastures go see
They have gone where the forests of oak trees before
Have gone to be wasted in battle

Down from the green farmlands and from their loved ones
Marched husbands and brothers and fathers and sons
There's a fine roll of honour where the maypole once stood
And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun

There's a straight row of houses in these latter days
Are covering the downs where the sheep used to graze
There's a field of red poppies, a wreath from the Queen
But the ladies remember at Whitsun

And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun

Carnival Submitted

The Carnival is being hosted at Dead Ends this week. I sent them my piece on I do not have to beat my wife, she does it for me from October 12. It is older, but I did not write anything really good in my blog this week, and so I mined the archives.

EDIT - I emailed asking them to run the piece on Red Poppies just above this. If I had known I was going to write the above, I would not have sent in the mild funny. But then I saw invisible adjunct's picture of red poppies, and I had to write.

Chest Hair

I think I might want to shave my chest hair.

Why?

Lets just say that this message is sponsored by the Society of Babies with Small Grasping, Clutching, Pulling Hands and leave it at that.

Whining

I have been pretty whiny this weekend. I look over the previous few entries and I want to kick myself in the butt.

It is easy to get depressed when things do not go well. It is also easy to get mad at someone for not picking up the pieces and getting on with things. I appear to have been doing both, and now it is time to move to the second part. I am prone to seasonal depression, and to depression when things do not go well for me. I can also manufacture energy and get things done.

Well, now is the time to get things done: I have an edit plan; I have started working on it; I have dropped an email to my advisor explaining my plan and its strengths and weaknesses. Get it DONE

On the way, I also get to prep class, grade homework, write job letters, pick readings for next semester, order books for next semester, work on the house, and cook dinner.

If only I did not have a strong urge to curl up with a lot of fatty sugar snacks, a novel, and a reading light.

A Good Day

After a lot of whining early on, I have had a good writing day. I feel much better about the changes to chapter three. I was able to tighten the first third without garbling the chronology - mostly because I took a section that was already out of chronological order and moved it earlier in the chapter. I know what I am going to do to tighten the rest of the chapter, and while I still have to do it I now feel confident that I will be able to do it. Confidence is half the battle.

I was also able to prep class for tomorrow. The kids are reading parts of the Beecher-Grimke debate and writing a softball homework: "Who did you find more compelling, Beecher or Grimke?"

We will discuss that, then I have a prepared lecture on sentimental culture, abolitionism, the antebellum women's movement, and the Seneca Falls convention. If we have time I will go over some details of Jackson's Presidency and discuss Richard John's argument that Richard Mentor Johnson's response to Sabbatarians pushed religious reformers into the anti-Jackson camp. From there I will be able to introduce the Whig party in time for us to do a political history lecture on Thursday.

As I was reviewing for class I was amused to note that Catherine Beecher was arguing in 1837 for a vision of gender roles much like the one that Kim and Connie Du Toit visibly regret. The difference is that in 1837 Beecher was articulating a new understanding of a traditional division of labor, changing the meaning of the division while continuing the form. In 2003 the Du Toits seem to want to continue the meaning while changing the forms. Beecher, you see, argued that while men engaged in active political debate and worldly deeds, women should abstain, not because they were weak but so that they could gain moral force over men by exerting the soft compulsion of love. The Du Toits are arguing, in part, that while women should engage in active political debate and pursue (almost) any job field they desire, women retain an inherent civilizing and nurturing function which must remain distinct from male roles.

However, all of this work came at the expense of writing job letters, grading homework, or planting bulbs in the garden. Ah well, if I had everything, where would I put it?

Jobs and chapters

I need to get some job letters written. I need to get this chapter revised. And I have been having a crisis of confidence - as anyone who reads the whining below should be able to figure out.

There are interesting jobs with a deadline in a couple of days, I need to get the paperwork out. I am having trouble selling myself on my qualifications, and this makes it very hard for me to sell other people on my qualifications. Some people are good at faking it; I am good at convincing myself to be enthusiastic and then letting my enthusiasm carry the day.

Still, I need to get the letters out.

Wanted: 19th century women

If I go with:

• Textbook, $75
  
• Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, $12

• Paine, Rights of Man$5
  
• Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Fron $7
  
• Marx, Communist Manifesto $6 as is, $15 with other readings in 19th century socialism.
  

Decisions decisions.

And, because I am an intellectual exhibitionist, you have the fun of watching me distract myself from writing and class prep by agonizing over what books to assign. I hope someone is enjoying this workplace blog into the life of an academic.

Random Questions

If you like looking at eye candy (cute people of the appropriate gender, for ogling purposes only), do you have a reciprocal responsibility to provide eye candy in return?

Should you have to buff up before you admire the sweet thangs who walk around showing [whatever body part inspires you]?

Can you fulfill this responsibility by sharing virtual eye candy? i.e. by posting pictures on a web page, taking photographs and sharing them, or encouraging someone to work out?

I ask because I am feeling fat and lazy this week, and yet the undergraduates continue to, well, be built like undergraduates.

I think the answer is that, while it would be a good thing if most of us buffed up or dieted down, the free rider effect means that there is no absolute responsibility to provide eye candy to others while admiring it yourself.

Perhaps if we could inculcate this sort of mutual obligation we could counteract the fattening of America. Alas, I fear we have tried it, and all we have gotten is an overweight nation, bulemic teenage girls, body-obsessed young women, folks ranting about Barbie, and lots of boring dirty pictures on the internet. Oh, and of course a growing worship of celebrities - who provide eye candy so that we don't have to.

I rather like that last thought. I have long wondered why we seem so obsessed with celebrities and, especially for folks who have access to the Internet, read People Magazine, or look at the various paparazzi rags, why we keep looking at pictures of these celebrities. Perhaps what we have is some level of transference: we can not provide eye candy for others in our own bodies, but we can swarm after a celebrity, make our little paper shrines to their appearance, perform the cadenced rituals of scandal and exposure, and by caring about them we make them our own. Sharing a picture or a story about a celebrity can then stand in for sharing a picture or a story about ourselves.

This is a wonderful theory. I have no intention of proving it. I do not even know how we might prove it. But, posting in a blog is the solitary electronic version of coming up with nonsense while drinking beer with your friends in the corner pub. I don't have to prove it, I just have to amuse my audience.

I do hope you were amused.

ps, The notion of reciprocal obligations as sex objects is something I first stumbled across in Anton & Wilson Illuminati Trilogy. The notion of fat people posting pictures of skinny people came up as I was surfing about the web and found some sites where folks had both an image of themselves and images of skinny people. Notice that I do not have an image up on this page - but it is also semi-anonymous.

Picking books

I am thinking about books for next semester. So far the only classes I know I will be teaching are two sections of Western Civ part 2 at Local Suburban University. The history department there are nice folks. This will be my first semester at Local; I should expect students whose reading skills and work loads are comparable to students at Urban Research University; and they insist that I use primary documents as part of the syllabus. I was glad when I heard that during my interview.

I have picked a textbook. The textbook I chose has a couple of short documents in every chapter, which means that I could get away without a reader if I wanted to. I am going with Tom Noble et al Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment. from Houghton-Mifflin. While I know two of the authors, and am friendly with one of the authors, I am picking this book over the alternative because it has better pictures.

You laugh, but images and art are an important part of Western Civilization and I thought that these images did a better job of matching the material. I also decided that having several short documents interspersed in the narrative would work better than having one long primary document at the end of each chapter. I was interested in some of the Prentice-Hall offerings, but their review copies never appeared. It is too late now, but I will bug them for next semester.

I have not picked readings. Or, rather, I have not finished picking readings. I know we are reading Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. It is an unwritten rule of Western Civ that you have to read Remarque, even though many people also read it in high school. I know we are reading something from the French Revolution. I am currently leaning toward Tom Paine's Rights of Man although I might also add some Edmund Burke. Hmm, perhaps Burke's speech where he makes the points that will later be elaborated into his response to Paine?

What I have not decided is whether I will stick with those two primary documents, if I will add a monograph of some sort, or if I will go with a reader. I want them to have something that shows the ancien regime, I want them to have a monograph, but my historiography is weak on Western Civ and I can not pick a book off the top of my head. I need about 200 pages of easy reading about Georgian or Victorian England, preferably talking about class and social structure; that would be about perfect.

Looking on my shelves of unread books - the read books are all in boxes in storage - I see three candidates: John Pemble The Meditarranean Passion about Victorians and Edwardians on vacation, Ina Taylor Victorian Sisters, about four English sisters who married across class lines; Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle, about eighteenth-century British politics, or Robert Darnton The Great Cat Massacre about eighteenth century French society and culture. Darnton is the most influential of all these books; he is also the only one I have read for myself. I guess I need to gut a few books this week. I might even have to go to the storage unit and shift boxes. Ugh.

Writing this has been useful. I will add a monograph of some sort, if only to expose them to the ways in which historians think. Darnton is my null choice. I will look for something I like better but if I can not find anything better, he will do very well indeed. So what if it was written in the 1960s; it is still good work and it inspired a generation of historians. If I use a reader, I will add some Burke.

Now if only my Russian history was more up to date.

Not So Bad

After another email exchange with my advisor I do not feel so bad. I can keep the structure, I just need to work on introductions and conclusions, making my points at the top of the paragraph or sub-heading rather than in the middle. I can do that.

I still will cut down on John Henry Hobart of New York City, which is a shame because he is a fun guy. Well, fun in a very smart-very busy-very argumentative-very high church kind of a way.

I might paste some of the deleted paragraphs here. My academic voice is verysomewhat unlike either of my blogging voices.

And back to work.

TMI

Sometimes you want to share something that others might find to be Too Much Information.

I don't run moveable type, so the TMI goes in the comment box.

Bulb HO

I spent some time this weekend playing in the dirt.

We bought a lot of bulbs to decorate the house with, mostly from Brecks. So far this weekend I have spaded up and bulbed four small beds around the outside of the house. I have one more bed to plant, and then I can naturalize daffodils, tulips, and crocuses around the house.

I think we ordered almost 300 bulbs. So far I have planted over half of them. That is a lot of spring flowers. I hope it will look OK when they come up.

A Writing Plan

After thinking about it for a day and a half, I have a plan for how to fix chapter three. I think I can get away with one moment where I break chronology. I will break chonology when I talk about Christian Unity, and put that discussion earlier in the chapter even though my money quotes are from Tocqueville in the 1830s. I will cut out my discussion of John Henry Hobart in 1808, putting a short version of those four pages into a single paragraph footnote when I talk about the era after the War of 1812.

That was cryptic, sorry. Look up or down for a more accesibile post.

It is odd. I am generally a very logical person: I look for logic and argument in other people's writing, I max out aptitude tests involving logic, I kicked but on the GRE on logic; and yet I can not write a coherent argument. I struggle with my arguments, with how to present information. I get bogged down describing things when I should be arguing about them, or arguing irrelevancies and ignoring the central question. This weakness is what makes me wonder if I am on the best career path.

Vent

I am going back EIGHT drafts. My advisor suggests that I sharpen the argument by re-arranging my sections. This would be fine, except that I have spent the last two and a half YEARS trying to get the argument to make sense while I present my material in strict chronological order. Why? Because back then he complained that he had lost track of the order of events.

I am very frustrated right now.

I am going to take a shower, calm down, and see if I can figure out a way to sharpen the argument within my original chronology OR to re-arrange my chronology without losing track of time and space.

Interfaith Marriages

From Philocrites: Interfaith marriages.

Here's the first Philocrites discussion topic for Unitarian Universalists, suggested by John B. (Thanks, John!) Is your spouse or partner Roman Catholic? What works and what doesn't work in your interfaith marriage? What resources have helped? What resources would you love to find? And what about the kids: How are you raising — or how do you plan to raise — your children? Click the "Comments" link below and share your stories and insights.

If you have another sort of interfaith marriage, feel free to join the conversation — but we'll probably come back to this topic for UU-Protestant, UU-Jewish, and other sorts of interfaith marriages later.

I am in an interfaith marriage that, so far, has worked well. The keys for us have been that, despite coming from very different religious traditions we have fairly similar religious world-views and that, we are both able to talk about our religion. J was raised Reform Jewish, prefers the worship practices of Conservative Jews, but lives a theology and level of kashrut that is closer to Reform. I was raised Roman Catholic, drifted away from the dogmatism, and seriously contemplated conversion to Reform Jewish before settling down in the "Courtyard of the temple." On those tests of religious constellations, I come down as Reform Jewish or liberal Christian; for my work I read 19th century evangelical Christians.

The odd thing is that two of J's cousins married a pair of Catholic brothers, and all three households have their own solution to the intermarriage. J and I agreed to raise the kids Jewish; we are handling the Christmas problem by having no Christmas tree in the house until the youngest is 7 - at that point they should be old enough to understand the differences. Christmas is a holiday that happens at Grandpa's house.

Our marriage ceremony was interesting. Both Rabbis in the town we lived in at the time would have been glad to supervise a conversion but would not, as a matter of principle, conduct an interfaith marriage. A Catholic marriage was out of the question; neither of us could have made those promises. We looked into having a Virginia lay officiant marry us; we looked into having our of our friends licensed as a lay officiant; we ended up going to the local U-U church and working with them. The minister was on sabbatical that month, so our marriage was performed by a very nice U-U divinity student. We designed the ceremony, and the celebrant was the legal figure as we stood up before God, family and friends: Protestant ceremony structure, all readings from the Hebrew Bible, vows tweaked for equality.

What works and does not work? You really have to pre-plan. It does not matter how you handle the interfaith question. What matters is that both partners have an honest discussion, in detail, about how they intend to approach it. You can not put the hard questions aside for "later" - you have to figure them out before you tie the knot.

Our intermarriage has made congregation-shopping difficult. Some reform temples trumpeted their interfaith accommodations so loudly that we wondered if they had a Jewish quorum. Others gave us the cold shoulder once they heard about the interfaith marriage. Where we currently live we found a Conservative temple that accepted us, but J worries that I do not have ritual space available to me. If we are still here when our son becomes Bar Mitsvah, I will not be allowed to come up and bless him, and that bothers J a lot.

But, odds are we will have moved by then. That is one decision we will defer. Or rather, we know that while J prefers the worship practice at most Conservative temples, before eldest son starts Hebrew school we will have to go congregation shopping again and will most likely change to a Reform temple.

This is longer than I thought it would be.
Ted K.

What to do

I looked over chapter three, I looked over my advisor's comments, and sure enough, I have indeed been playing writers whack-a-mole. While I fixed two problems in the October series of edits, I made a third problem worse. So, now I get to go fix this third problem and try not to break anything else. Two steps forward, one step back.

It does not help that I have a complicated 8-step argument, that I am trying to deduce widespread opinions from a data set dominated by the public statements of elite leaders, and that I am trying to explain a complex social phenomenon at the same time that I am making a complicated argument about the effects of one portion of that phenomenon.

I am once again doubting my ability to actually perform in an academic career. That is not a good feeling.

And so to write.

Oof Dah

Yes, I know I just had an Oof Dah yesterday. I am having another one today.

Chapter four is done being edited and has been packed away in mulch until I finish working on chapter two. Then four will get tweaked a final time and sent off to my readers.

Chapter two is 79 pages long and underdocumented. I don't have the energy to dig into it right now - will eat lunch and plant bulbs in the garden instead. But, now that I know where I am going, I should be able to take the metaphorical chainsaw to chapter two and carve it down into a good lead-in to the meatier chapters. My core argument is in three and four; one and two just set the scene.

TMI

Chapter done, now I can shower. (today's shower - I shower as a break after my morning work period.)

/TMI

Ugh, and I am behind on grading homework. Well, I can work on that in lots of little stints.

Grammar Checkers

I have a problem with comma splices. It is my current most common grammar error.

The grammar checker built into Wordperfect 9 (a very good word processor) catches comma splices. So, I run the checker as I finish editing a chapter.

The grammar checker also always treats a word as its most common part of speech, even when the same word can be a noun, verb, or adjective depending on usage. People is a verb according to grammatic; I use it as a noun. This means that I spend a LOT of time grammar checking because it stops frequently and gives me false negatives. And, if I do rewrite a sentance, sometimes the grammar checker chokes and I get to restart from the beginning. It is boring and tedious, but I have to do it.

The good news is that chapter four is as good as it will get this pass. I am going to finish the grammer run and then put it aside.

Crappy Porn? or gender roles?

I see via Carly at Pornblogography (NWS) that this is Protection from Crappy Porn Week.

And what is crappy porn? Let me quote Hanne Blank whose idea this seems to have been:

What do I mean by "crappy"? Well, basically, I mean pornography that doesn't affirm what sexuality really should be all about -- or what being a human being really should be all about.

To my way of thinking, CRAPPY PORN is sexually-explicit material that:

* is not produced in and/or does not affirm the principle of informed and revocable consent
* perpetuates damaging stereotypes about sex and the people who engage in sex
* economically and socially exploits any living being, particularly women, children, and members of sexual and ethnic minorities

She goes on to give examples: choking, grabbing, dehumanizing. In the language I like to use, I would say that she likes erotica in various media but dislikes pornography.

To phrase it differently, we can imagine a difference between feminist and misogynist erotica; the first treats sexuality as an exploration between equals, the second treats sexuality as a contest where you should trick, cheat, abuse, and dehumanize the object of your desire. The first is a good thing, although as always I would distinguish between imagination and practice and warn against "sex without love." The second is, well, just plain ugly. It worries me that people like it. And yet, someone must like it or pr0n would not be a multi-million dollar business despite produce products that are chock full of misogynist bullshit.

And back to work.

Friday Five

This week's Friday Five is better than last week's.

1. What food do you like that most people hate?

Anchovie and onion pizza. I learned to like it in college, where if you ordered a pie to the common room people would try to sniv a bite. Almost no one borrowed from this one, especially if I could get the hot pepper flakes onto it before the lovely lady who liked anchovies pizza but not hot food could ask for a slice. Sometimes I am selfish.

2. What food do you hate that most people love?

I have a hard time thinking of foods I hate: all I can come up with are grits, fried okra, tripe, strongly flavored slimy food. And I can't think of many people who love these, other than grits which are regionally popular.

3. What famous person, whom many people may find attractive, is most unappealing to you?

John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The man had good political instincts, he made a productive life for himself despite living in terrible pain through most of his adulthood, and yet he was also far too willing to take credit for other people's work, polish his image at the expense of others, and indulge himself at the expense of doing his duty. His wife was not much better.

4. What famous person, whom many people may find unappealing, do you find
attractive?

Whittaker Chambers. There is something, if not attractive, then fascinating about a person whose mind works entirely in modes of pure good and pure evil, and who has the literary skills to express that mind. His hatchet-job review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is one of the modern classics of reviewing.

5. What popular trend baffles you?

Let me make a list. At the moment, the trend that baffles me the most is the self-reinforcing nature of celebritihood. People talk about them, show pictures of them, they appear on magazines, and I just do not know who they are. Nor do I care who they are. I am not quite as out of touch with popular culture as William F. Buckley, who famously confessed to not knowing the name of "that black woman who is alternately fat and thin," but I get close.

Grumble

Chapter 3 comments came back. I have not made a clear and coherent argument, I do not carry my argument between sections. So, I get to work over it yet again.

I am getting sick of chapter 3.

Chapter Four

I finished scribbling over the latest draft of chapter four last night. Today I get to type in my changes. The chapter now looks pretty tight, but I will leave it lay while I work on chapter two. After it has composted for a couple of weeks I will dig it up and see if it still makes sense. Then I will send it to my advisor and second reader.

Why am I telling you this? Because typing days are also blogging days - expect a lot of short entries today.

Morning updates

Looking over my blog posts from the last few days, I see a few places to update and remedy.

Kim and Connie Du Toit spell their last name Du Toit and not du Toit. Apologies for the mistake.

In my discussion of fires, I appear to have confused suburban sprawl into canyons and fire zones, my primary target, with Gary Jones' discussion of rural forests. Gary Jones sets me straight.

On the 6th I wrote that Sheila O'Malley is on fire today. Looking again, I see that she wrote her really good piece about talking acting with a French exchange student on the 5th - I just read it on the 6th. Details do matter.

After further review, I do not intend to make any further direct comments on Kim Du Toit's piece on gender roles. I have been covering gender roles in class this week, my next project will involve gender roles, and I expect that I will continue to think about and discuss gender roles - I might even refer to his piece, but I decided it was not a good use of my writing time or your reading time for me to fisk his rant.

And so I go

Cows with Guns

Courtesy of LeeAnn at The Cheese Stands Alone, I give you:

Cows with Guns.

What is it with LeeAnn and music? Half the time when I read her site I wander away singing "The Farmer in the Dell" to myself.

Manliness?

Edit - the du Toit link works now. I wrote the below from my memory of reading his rant earlier this week. After re-reading du Toit I see that I should have written the below a little differently. Du Toit is very good at pushing buttons, he got mine. I just have to decide if it is worth writing a paragraph or three in response to every sentance in his rant, if I summarize him, or if I let him go as an unrepentant patriarch who prefers ideology to evidence.

Via Meryl Yourish I learn that Michelle of A Small Victory has been arguing with Mr. and Mrs. Kim Du Toit about gender roles. (the Du Toit's like the old-style terms of address and formal gender roles.) The Du Toit's web server is down at the moment, but the whole thing started when Kim Du Toit posted a rant about gender roles in which he blamed violence against women on a society where "political correctness" deprived men of the chance to experience "real" manhood.

I started this post three times, and deleted it each time. My problem is that I have too much to talk about.

Do I go after the Du Toit's simple hunter-gatherer model of social interaction where men hunt, women nurture, and neither must ever cross into the other's realm? That would be tedious to do at length, and it would boil down to: yes dear, but once we invented agriculture we changed our roles. And besides not only are gender traits are overlapping bell curves, any particular behavior you want to describe is found among men, women, "real" men and the various types of "fake" men you use as negative referent groups.

Do I go after the whole conservative bugaboo about political correctness? I have yet to see a rant about political correctness that did not boil down to someone who was resentful because an authority figure either was risk-averse or was trying to enforce politeness. No, I take that back. Some of the cases of "political correctness" involve an administrator who tried to use regulatory power to prevent people from taking advantage of interpersonal power imbalances.

Do I give a history of some of the negative referent groups that the Du Toit talks about, demolishing their entire casual argument that political correctness led to the "pussification" of men and that this then led to metrosexuals engaging in rampant date-rape while singing rap music? Here is a hint, dandies, bullies, and macho men all pre-date the 1960s experiment in consciousness raising, often by several centuries. Once you lose the causal argument, the du Toits' argument turns into a simple rant in favor of rural over urban cultural styles.

Do I go off on gender roles, lambasting du Toit for his intentionally provocative use of the word "pussification" to emphasize the idea that women are inherently weak, non-confrontational, and subordinate, and that any woman who does not fit that description is somehow "un-natural". It is easy to go after people who take culturally defined sets of values and behaviors, assert that they are universal, and then invoke "nature" to support their position. Unfortunately, it is also hard to change their minds.

Do I jump on one of the commentators on Michelle's site who tried to take the old Albion college rules for sexual encounters and argue that this completely opposite the way an encounter should run. If you don't remember, Albion posted rules of behaviors that required that the horny party (they may even have simply said man, ignoring sub-dom and same-sex interactions) ask verbally and receive verbal consent before each increase in intimacy. This can lead to a very cool scene in a mild D/S kind of way. "May I touch you ... here?" "yes" "And here?" "yes" "and where should I touch you next?" "HERE". It, like most of the so-called political correctness, is just a ham-handed way to regulate manners. Sex is like dancing, one partner leads and the other partner follows. A lead is just strong enough to convey a desire: just as when dancing you pull her hand towards you and up to indicate a spin, during an intimate encounter the outward pressure of two fingers between her thighs is enough to signal that you want to place your hand between them. If, at any point (exception, safe-word play) you use a level of force, intimidation, or strength that you would not use on a public dance floor, you have just stepped into the very slippery very dangerous world of using power imbalances to exert sexual favors.

Du Toit has a point, people should not be afraid to indicate their desires, and people should respect the desires of others. He wraps that point in a batch of real man braggadocio, straps guns to its back, sends it out hunting, and feeds it red meat when it returns, but the core point is still there. Take responsibility for your actions; respect the desires of others. At that level, stripped of all the bullshit, Du Toit is pointing out that adults should act like, well, adults. That good underlying point gives the rest of the bullshit some heft, it is the rock in the snowball.

What amuses me is the link between du Toit on manliness and Jones on the environment: both focus on looking in the long term, thinking about consequences, and taking responsibility for our actions. But this common core is wrapped in some very different baggage.

You Go Girl

Sheila O'Mally is on fire today. She has written a lot of words since I last checked her page yesterday, and they are good words. She writes well, she makes me think, she jump-starts my brain for the day.

We like redheads, yes we do.

This random shout-out brought to you by the Society for Admiring Smart Red-headed Women.

Forests and Trees

Gary Jones at Muck and Mystery has a very good article about forest conservation and a followup about the Salton Sea. His immediate target is poorly informed, highly emotional environmentalists. His secondary target, and what he sees as the underlying cause of poor environmental decision making, is that people are being insulated from the consequences of their actions.

Jones argues that Eastern and Western forests have different trees and growth cycles, that national fire and forest management strategies were developed and sold for Eastern forests, and that these policies are widely destructive when applied to Western forests. Using California as his example, he praises state-level forest management that tries to reduce ground litter, thin trees, and prevent conditions from leading to over-growth and fireboxes while condemning federal forest management that kills fires while letting forests choke and kill themselves. Jones blames the poor choice of federal policy on several things: the myth of forest destruction shown by Bambi and Smokey Bear, the prevalence of Eastern attitudes in national policy making, and a ferocious yet uninformed campaign of vilification by ultra-conservationists who refuse to see any policy that might look like foresting.

Jones argues this at greater length and with more eloquence than I can summarize here. His point, something he continues in today's post about the Salton Sea, is that environmental management decisions need to be made from the perspective of the hundred-year cycle, not the twenty year cycle or the one year cycle. In the short term, it makes a lot of sense to build a house in the foothills, try to refill a temporary lake in the Salton basin.

I want to move beyond his post and look at some of the barriers to better decision making. Jones focuses his ire in the forest article on environmentalists who respond with knee-jerk vitriol any time a forest products company gets near a forest. He argues that this vitriol makes it impossible to build a sustainable plan. He does not look at where the vitriol comes from.

For many years we have been told, correctly to the best of my knowledge, that American forest management has been a federally subsidized boondoggle for the firms with national connections who pull wood from the forests for below cost, break up ecosystems, and clear-cut every chance they get. From the environmentalist perspective, forest service companies have shown that they can not be trusted. They respond with vitriol to the State level practices that Jones admires because these practices are based on partnerships between state regulatory agencies and what they see as untrustworthy companies. These partnerships are necessary because forest management is expensive, and if a tree has to be culled it makes more sense to sell it than to cut it and let it rot.

There is a second problem with forests and fires. People keep moving into fire zones and building houses. Stereotypically these are new luxury houses, McMansions, and they are inhabited by people who tend to vote against all taxation and for a smaller state. These people then move into unstable terrain and, when fire comes, demand expensive state protection for their private property.

There is a potential way to link these two problems. It is a political problem, perhaps an insurmountable political problem. Most people, it is my gut sense, are very willing to pay for something if they think they are getting a good value for their money. They do not like to pay taxes, in many cases, because they feel that they are not getting that value. This is generally a poor perception, but it is a politically powerful perception.

Basic principles of fairness suggest that people who live in fire zones should pay the costs of protecting their property. Normally we let the insurance system handle those costs - earthquake insurance is cheap in Boston, expensive in San Francisco. In certain situations any event that would lead to one claim would lead to thousands of claims, defeating the insurance purpose of spreading losses around, and the government steps in. It is my understanding that people who live in California canyons have trouble getting fire assistance.

In economic terms, these people are being free riders on the state. Their choice of where to settle adds significant costs to fire regulation and fire fighting, costs over and above the usual infrastructure costs associated with sprawl. These costs are currently being covered through state emergency appropriations. In other words, all of us taxpayers are subsidizing millionaires in California.

The trick would be to somehow use market pricing to reflect the total social costs of having people settle in fire zones. Imagine, if you will, the fire zone tax - a special property tax levied on all construction, old and new, in high-risk fire regions. The proceeds of that tax would then be earmarked for forest management - clearing dead wood, trimming overly dense trees, building firebreaks and then holding contained burns, and insuring against the statistical certainty that some of those controlled burns will get out of control.

The way to sell it is that folks who live in fire zones get extra ordinary fire protection services, and they should pay for what they get. No welfare millionaires! (1)

It will be a hard sell. Somehow we have come to think of money gone in taxes as money lost forever. It is taken from us and we imagine that we have no control over what happens to it - it just vanishes into the black hole marked Government. And yet, at the same time, we think of money and services received through governmental channels as free money. It comes from nowhere, or from a black box, we want as much of it as we can get. Alabama's governor, a Republican, just tried to make the more taxes for more services argument, and saw his proposals go down in a referendum.

Many Democrats are looking for a platform. Most Americans agree with appeals to fairness and equity. We want to do the right thing, we just have trouble telling what the right thing is through our haze of self-interest and the obscuring clouds of spin-laden dust thrown off by the political system. Much environmental policy is based on the simple notion that when a person engages in an activity where they can shift the costs to everyone else, that activity will be more profitable for them but bad for society. Externalities are crucial. The trick is to use regulation to capture and work with those externalities in a way that is: 1, Fair 2, Will not crush individual or corporate initiative, 3, Based on long-term environmental science rather than short term sound bites.

Despite my own inherent democratic (small d) bias, the answer I am coming to here is very Progressive. The answer seems to be to depoliticize some of these decisions and turn them over to a board of experts. The trick is to choose experts who will achieve the policy goals, maintain public trust, and preserve accountability. For the details of that, I will have to turn to the historians of the modern political process.

(1). This is a sample slogan. It would inevitably be met with stories about working people living out a bit, just getting by, and being made homeless by the new taxes. Any new taxation is a form of taking, it lowers the value of the property for any subsequent purchaser. One of the implementation tricks will be to impose the new taxes in a way that does not cause sudden shifts in property values.

Andrew Jackson

Last week's homework assignment was "Should Andrew Jackson be honored by being on the United States Currency."

I expected this one to be controversial: Jackson was controversial in his life; people argued about the man and his policies, and historians continue to clash over Jackson today. I got the idea for the question, which I have also used as an exam question, when I read that a group was lobbying the treasury department to take AJ off the $20 as part of the recent redesign of the money.

I had hoped to have the kids give a balanced argument. Most did not, but simply argued one side or the other. The in-class polls came out about 3-1 in favor of removing Jackson, mostly because of Jackson's role in Indian removal. The numbers were about the same before and after we laid out why Jackson should be honored and why he should be condemned. So, why do we like AJ and why do we hate him?

We like Jackson because he:

• Personified the democratic (small d) political movement arguing that politics and government should not be the exclusive provenance of an educated elite. Almost everyone with a basic education ought to be able to hold government office.
  
• Acted on those principles by bringing in rotation in office
  
• Held the nation together during Nullification
  
• Provided the basis and background for Unionism, Abraham Lincoln in 1861 simply rephrased Andrew Jackson. If there was no Andrew Jackson, there would likely not be a United States today.
  
• Won the Battle of New Orleans
  
• Intimidated Spain into giving up Florida
  
• Focused American politics on dangerous concentrations of power and corruption, including the Second Bank of the United States.
  
• Was always willing to do the right thing, even if it was not necessarily the legal or even the constitutional thing.
  

We dislike Jackson because he:

• Presided over Indian removal. While Indian removal was a land grab and "ethnic cleansing" not a full-fledged act of genocide, the forced movement of the Southeast tribes was a land grab, an abuse of state and federal power, and so badly managed that about a third of the Cherokees died during the movement. Jackson may not have intended to starve, expose, and otherwise kill thousands of Indians during the move, but he was chief executive, he authorized the movement, he supported the states against the Supreme court, and he is in the end morally liable for all actions taken under his administration.

  Several of the kids insisted that Indian removal was genocide - I save the term for cases where there is an intent to destroy a people or society. The Holocaust was a genocide, the Rwandan civil war was a genocide. Neither Indian Removal nor the Great Hunger in Ireland qualifies - the one because the intent was to expel the other because the massive deaths came as an unintended consequence of poorly chosen ideology. Of the two tragedies, the Great Hunger comes closer to a genocide. But I digress.
  

• Murdered men. Jackson killed men in duels, he hanged militia men, he performed judicial murder on two British citizens in Spanish Florida during the 1818-1819 incursion.
  
• Trashed the American economy during the Bank War. Jackson destroyed the central bank; he pursued pro-cyclical economic policies; he made an unstable boom bigger and the ensuing crash deeper.
  
• Violated the Constitution and the separation of powers. During the Bank War he moved Federal money around against Congressional legislation, during Indian Removal he refused to enforce Court orders. These were a particular instance of
  
• Placed his own interpretation of what was right above law and constitution, turning the American government into a rule of men and not a rule of law.

• Turned government employment into a partisan perk, sacrificing efficiency in return for loyalty. This would not be fixed until Civil Service reform at the end of the 19th century, and the reform ended up producing what some call a stratified and ossified Federal bureaucracy.
  
• Owned slaves. Most rich Southerners owned slaves, Jackson owned a lot of them.
  
• Invaded Spanish Florida without orders or authorization, provoking an international crisis. (it turned out well for the U.S., but he still disobeyed orders and conducted policy on his own.)
  

Then there are quirks about Jackson that describe him but are less subject to praise or condemnation.

• Jackson broke up Rachel Donelson's marriage. He did so in order to protect her from an abusive husband, and while Andrew and Rachel Jackson's first marriage was bigamous (and they probably knew it) it was also a mitzvah. Jackson broke the law but did a good deed.
  
• Jackson had a ferocious temper. He lost it seriously at times, he also faked rages at times. He regularly lost his temper for real when Rachel's honor was challenged, especially involving that bigamous marriage.
  
• Jackson drank, especially when he was a young man. But then, so did many people, especially when we were young.
  
• Jackson despised paper money, so why put him on a paper dollar?

• Jackson adopted twice, the second was a Creek Indian baby whose parents and family had all just been killed by Jackson's militia during the War of 1812. Jackson, an orphan himself, took the child in when no one else would and raised Lyncoya as a son.
  
• Jackson was emaciated, 6 feet tall and 145 pounds. He was thin by nature, the two pistol balls in his body from duels and the lifelong digestive and bowel difficulties from his repeated dysentary and typhoid during the war of 1812 left him skeletal.
  
• Jackson was in constant physical pain from 1803 onwards from dueling wounds, constant emotional pain from 1828 onward from Rachel Jackson's death. Pain made him angry. For most of his political career Jackson was "Ol mean ol man ol Jackson" or "Angry old Jackson;" he was even meaner and angrier as President.
  

edit - added last few items to third bullet list. Forgot them earlier.

Grey day

It is a grey, grey day. And my knees hurt. I was up too late, first finishing Harry Potter, then working on classes, and finally just rattling, and even when I got to bed I did not sleep easily. Then, at 3:00, the baby got cold and woke up. Morning was awfully early today.

I am mazy and slow this morning. I still have to finish prepping for the class on slavery. I have a chapter in dire need of editing, and I will have to be sharp for that. Some days I feel like I am swimming in peanut butter. This is one of those days.

Carnival

Carnival of the Vanities number 59 is up at wizbang.

Carnivals keep getting bigger and bigger. My entry is buried down at the bottom this time, underneath a great long list of pretty cool titles and subjects. I suspect that I will not get as many readers for 19th century drinking games as I got for Meatloaf Lyrics and the Politics of Lies. Politics and punditry seem to be the bread and butter of blog readers; most bloggers write personal diaries but most people who read blogs like to read punditry.

Birds and Class Prep

I had two thoughts on today's walk, and because I had them near each other they must be connected. Right?

The first was that we saw some new birds in our lake today. There are always ducks and geese, and often seagulls. There are herons - both blue and great blue - and great white egrets stalking the edges regularly. Today we saw something new - a loon was swimming and diving by the near bridge. When you consider that 12 or 15 years ago that lake was completely unsafe, it is remarkable that there are enough fish to support that many fishing birds.

On our way back around the lake, we got an added bonus. One of the blue herons decided to flap over to a log in the water next to the trail. We stopped and the baby got to admire a heron. He has seen them before, but only from a distance. I like the wading birds; they have a gawky elegance.

The second morning thought was that this is election day. I did not stop and vote during the morning walk - dogs still don't have the franchise and I had the hound with me. I will vote in a few minutes - the voting station is at the end of our block. What I was reminded to do was to describe 1840s voting to the students today in class. I will ask them how many of the men rose early to vote? How many of the women chose to praise men for having voted? How many of them felt the need to stand around the voting place afterwards to watch to make sure that no unregistered voters came to pack the box, and to watch to make sure that the box did not get vanished? I will ask how many got together with friends to go vote, and how many went alone.

Voting technology has been in the news a lot lately with the push to electronic voting machines and the lack of a paper trail from those machines. If Diebold's critics are right, the new voting machines are an invitation to electoral fraud. Voter fraud is nothing new, many of the voting rituals I just described were intended to give citizens a chance to act vigilantly to preserve liberty against electoral fraud. Every time we have changed our voting technology we have changed our electoral rituals and, often, we have changed the way we distribute the franchise. The technology shapes the action: viva voce voting, paper ballots, written ballots, punch cards, levers, and now touch screens. Of them all, paper ballots were the most democratic. But, they are also a bother to count, and these days we want instant results from our elections.

And so to vote.

Type type type

"Another great long book, eh Mr. Gibbon. Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, eh Mr. Gibbon"

I am not quite that long winded, but I did finish scribbling on chapter four and am now ready to type in the changes. After scribbling it is much tighter, I cut out a lot of stuff. The thoughts I blogged last night helped a lot. Now to type in the changes, and read it again.

It is just that I have patterned myself. I can not sit down at the computer without blogging. I tell myself that by starting to write, anything, I get myself flowing with my writing. Getting started is the hard part. Once I get started, it goes well.

And so to work.

ps, I enabled titles and commented out the old comments - part of my puttering with the template.

Monday, Monday

Monday looks like it might be a good day. The weather is nice, I got enough sleep, and I have some good ideas for my work.

Today I need to prepare class for tomorrow, do some grading, and finish hashing through the scribbles on chapter four. With luck I should be typing them up by lunchtime.

Today the handy neighbor and I might also be running the cable-modem wire so that I can put the cable modem in my office and not in the master bedroom. It will be good to no longer have ethernet cable snaking around the upstairs hall.

We have been in the house since July. It is finally starting to get uncluttered and be nice to live in. This is a good thing, as we will be having about ten people over for dinner in three and a half weeks. By then we will have pictures on the walls, the last picture boxes out of the living room, and a pleasant space to live in. We went through a period of slacking off a month or so ago, we had gotten most of the house ready and then we did other work and let clutter pile up. J. got into a cleaning kick - it might be nesting instinct kicking in early, it might just be that she got tired of clutter. She has been reading the FlyLady stuff, and while she is not buying the whole message she is stealing some of their techniques for organizing her time and getting more done.

It is amazing how much better I feel in a clean house. And, according to J, it is amazing how much of the housework I do compared to some of the husbands of the women on her email lists. I am thinking about housework because one of the things I will be lecturing on tomorrow is the invention of housework in the 19th century and the shift of domestic responsibilities in and out of the market economy during the 19th century.

I intend to blame housework on Catherine Beecher. She did not invent it, but she did do a lot to popularize it and we are using the Beecher family as our window into the past this semester. The invention of housework was a two-part story. The first part saw commercial production move out of the house and into separate buildings. No longer did the master live above the shop, the servants and apprentices in the attic, and everyone worked on the ground floor together. People began to separate house and work, at least in cities and villages. The master lived away from the shop, the workers no longer lived under family government but were in boarding houses and other ersatz families. As men worked more out of the house, women, whose work had traditionally been more closely associated with the house and not the fields, saw three countervailing patterns.

The first, the Catherine Beecher pattern, was for middle-class women to get dropped from the productive economy and move over to the consumption economy. No longer making butter, storing food, or managing apprentices, middle class urban women had large houses and not much to do. So, Beecher turned care of the house from a chore, one of many and less important than working the dairy, to a duty. Women were to spend their time entertaining and presenting themselves and their spaces, your gentility was measured by your living space, and so keeping a clean living space became a moral duty.

The second, the middle states farmwife pattern, was for women to turn to from household production to commercial production. This pattern was most common in rural areas. Women had always run the dairy as part of the gendered division of labor. By the early 19th century many American farms had become butter factories. Rather than putting up some butter for family use or local exchange, women were maintaining large herds, hiring women to work for them, and spending all day milking, skimming, churning butter, making cheese, and tending the cheese as it cured. Dairying was the most notable of these rural factories run by women, but women were also involved in broom manufacturing, out-work, and other tasks where they took traditional female jobs and brought them so much farther into market production that the nature of the task changed.

The final pattern was most noticeable among young women, immigrant women, and black women. That was a turn to wage labor outside of the house. The biggest employment was domestic service, helping those middle class women in the first category dust, clean, cook, and present a refined appearance. The second biggest wage employment was factory work, a new category, but factory workers were a mere fraction of all women in the wage economy. Here the common pattern early was for young unmarried women to work in factories for a few years before getting married and setting up housekeeping. For a single women, especially from New England or the Middle States, there were not a lot of choices of what to do before marriage. Many young men headed west to prepare land, coming back to marry their beau's or court a new lady, and the age of marriage was creeping upwards. Meanwhile women could stay at home as part of their parent's household, they could work as dairymaids or productive farm workers in other commercial farms, they could take up domestic service, or they could go down to the factories and use machines to spin thread and weave cloth.

There is a fourth category, one I need to remember to show the kids tomorrow. Slave women continued to do field work. Only a few slave owners had the big plantations and the house servants. These are, of course, what visitors remembered and they are the core of the Moonlight and Magnolias romantic view of the South. But for every gracious mansion on the James or the Mississippi, there were twenty ramshackle shacks in the middle of the cotton belt, buildings thrown up quickly to last a few years before master and slaves moved farther west to better lands. I think I will mention slave women Tuesday but will save the full discussion until Thursday.

Not all 19th-century women bought into the notion that housework was a duty. Housework was most common among middle class women who had dropped out of the productive economy. These were the same women who embraced the theory of separate spheres, the notion that women were more moral, more religious, and had a duty to nurture and educate children. Separate spheres grew out of republican motherhood, the notion that women had the duty to educate themselves so that they could educate a rising generation of good republican men, but separate spheres soon added "evangelical" religion to the earlier scheme. (I use the quotes because evangelical did not become an identity until the 1840s and modern evangelicalism is a twentieth-century phenomenon.)

Catherine Beecher performed a sort of moral jujitsu with separate spheres. She believed that women were naturally gifted with nurturing, religious, and moral natures. She believed that they had a Divine duty to stay out of politics, a men's realm, and focus on domestic concerns. But, in the service of those domestic concerns, women could and should influence society. Early Catherine Beecher, the women we will be studying tomorrow, focused on teaching as a job field for middle class women, giving them a way to earn money and support themselves, without the need for a man, while remaining within the feminine sphere. Towards the end of her life her focus on women's duty to spread domestic values gave birth to the political wing of the temperance and education movements. A few women voted right after the American Revolution before being disfranchised in the early 19th century, women next voted in the late 19th century in school board elections and local referendums on temperance laws.

Enlightenment guarantees of natural rights were not proof against a social climate that assumed a "natural" difference between men and women. Counter-enlightenment appeals to morality and religion did bring women back into public affairs.

Housework is political. As the 20th century feminists reminded us, everything is political. The politics of housework ran in odd and unexpected directions.

That was useful, I just prepped a fifth of my class for tomorrow. And, I have a better understanding for why it makes me happy that I will be working in a clean house today.

Oof Dah

I finished typing in the edits to chapter 4. It has been a very good work day. The new version of the chapter is 11 pages shorter and, I hope, much more tighly argued.

Now I have a printout to take to office hours with me tomorrow.

And so to go grade homework

Strange Search Terms

I check to see how folks find my blog. Most of my references come from places like the Carnival of the Vanities or the folks who have blogrolled my little diary. A few people come through google. Over the last couple of days I have seen a surge of searches focusing on: Ann Coulter Pictures Adam's Apple Transgender. It appears that my little piece on the Politics of Personal Appearance has gotten into the search bots, and that people are indeed concerned with this sort of triviality.

Then again, we live in a culture that celebrates "celebrity" - which as near as I can tell consists of being famous because you are famous. Celebrity this, celebrity that. ABC is flogging a night of celebrities to celebrate its 75th anniversary of television broadcasting. The murky corners of the web are full of pictures celebrities with and without their clothes.

I guess that I do not watch enough TV and do not listen to enough modern music. I hear about these celebrities, and all I can think of is "who dat?"

I wonder how many folks in the 19th century had the same response when Charles Dickens went on tour through the United States? I know that many people flocked to see Jenny Lind sing, and she too was famous largely for being famous - and for singing well and letting P.T. Barnum package her well. Can we trace modern celebrity culture back to P.T. Barnum and, perhaps, the sunset tour of the United States by the Marquis de Lafayette in the 1830s? If so then perhaps instead of being grumpy about celebrityhood and praising myself for not knowing these people, I should condemn myself for failing to take part in a fine American tradition.

But I still do not know who most of these people are.

Gender and blogs

My current study break is to read blogs. I click, I click, I click, and I read. It is like having an entire universe of op-ed pages, academic side notes, and personal revelations.

One of the things that I have noticed about this is just how female the blogosphere is. I went down my blogroll on the left, and while it is about 60/40 male it is not typical. Based on my impressions while surfing, especially on the blogsnob randomizer at the bottom of my blogroll, there are a lot of men with policy and punditry blogs and there are a lot of women with personal diary blogs. As with most gender generalizations, this is of course a question of overlapping bell curves - there are some seriously punditoid (it is a word now) women, and some guys who like to record their emotions and daily life.

I remember when the internet first started to go mainstream - Yahoo had just opened - and the net was a heavily male realm, as were computer games. Women have been moving in, and at the risk of talking out of my ass I would say that women seem interested in using the net to share themselves, while men often use the net to distance themselves from others. I don't know if that distinction will hold up if tested - certainly there are anonymous men and women all over the blogosphere - but it will work as a null hypothesis for me to test in my future browsing.

Women have a long history in information technology. My mom worked for IBM's New York City office installing mainframes the 1950s. Back in those days most of the customer service reps were women. Mom had to go to client offices wearing a hat and white gloves. She is a short woman, about 5'2". She kept a screwdriver in her purse so she could open up the machines and fix what was wrong with them. She still had her Southern accent, she cursed like a longshoreman, and I gather that the overall effect produced cognitive dissonance in the people she worked with.

But, information technology, like most of the engineering-based professions, was a mostly male realm for a very long time. It is only as the web has taken computer use out of the engineering world and into the household world that we have seen these gender changes.

In part this is because the blogosphere, like the larger online society, is itself a part of larger American society. And, as many people have noted, some aspects of the feminist revolution have succeeded to the point where people who deny that they are feminists have internalized the core values of feminism. The college women I work with genuinely can not comprehend the world their grandmothers grew up in, where certain fields and certain life expectations were defined by gender. Male jobs, female jobs - those ideas have to be explained to them. If you tell a modern college woman that she can not be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer because she has the wrong plumbing, she will think you are crazy. And yet, the same woman will deny being a feminist.

We still continue to debate nature and nurture. We still notice gendered patterns in human behavior. And so while women can and do take up any job field and can and do write about anything they want to, I still see a preponderance of women among the personal blogs and a preponderance of men among the pundit blogs.

Perhaps I am following the wrong link circles and looking at the wrong corner of the blogosphere.

(this seems to be gender day - two posts on gender issues already!)

Slow Coffee

One more random thought before bed. I got new coffee today - I seem to be going through about a pound a week of half-caff. I am drinking it so fast that I added my current coffee blend to the blog template.

As usual when I need coffee, I went to the coffee shop with the good roaster and the slow wait staff. This time the counter girl found a new way to make us wait: there was no line, she was right there to take my order, she had no trouble ringing up two pounds of coffee to be paid by personal check. Nope, she simply spent five to ten minutes flirting with the cook while standing around not measuring out my coffee. Meanwhile the little man was playing with the glass counter before the desserts, so at least we were entertained.

In many ways I am too mild of a person. My father in law, who is a bit of a jerk, would have yelled at her and told her to work faster. I try not to act like a jerk. I know that I get taken advantage of from time to time because I am not assertive in trivial situations. I stay quiet because I have a truly terrible temper. When I lose my temper I shout, I stamp, I slam my fist into things, and then I seethe and seethe. I learned long ago that I could either be mad and miserable all the time, or I could take things a easy and let the little irritations of daily life slide off me.

I am much happier this way, but I do have to wait for my coffee.

And so to bed.

Writing and Gardening Today

Writing and Gardening

Today was an odd day. I spent the morning writing - finished an edit pass on chapter four and started on the third read before typing up my changes. I spent the middle of the day playing in the dirt. We are planting bulbs at the front of the house. I put in about 50 bulbs, although after I got the yellow emporer tulips in J told me she thought they were going someplace completely different. I might dig them up and move them. I spent the late afternoon running errands with the little man - for some reason the discount store was much emptier in the middle of the Eagles game than it is on a Sunday morning before the game starts.

My thought for the day was one of simple curiousity. J and I both do our weekly work seven days a week. She brings things home and gets a few hours done to cover the time she spends on child-stuff, choir stuff, and exercise stuff during the week. I write on the weekends because I write when I feel sharp, regardless of what day it is. Sometimes I wonder about going back to the square world, working in an office every day, and having evenings and weekends to myself. It would be nice to have evenings and weekends, it would be nice to have time to get back into gaming, or to take up a hobby. But then I remember how much I HATED working in an office, and how important it is to me that I am able to take a nap, walk around the block, or otherwise work when I feel productive and not when I happen to be in the building. Of course, I still need to get it done.

Chapter four is not as terrible as I thought it was yesterday. Most of the problems can be fixed with cutting, trimming, moving side points to the footnotes, and re-arranging my points so that they make logical sense. There is a lot of blue ink on the pages (grading in blue this week), but the second read-through was pretty smooth everywhere except my discussion of ultra-temperance. I still need to do a better job of connecting ultra-temperance and ultra-abolition to my larger argument about evangelicalism appearing as a self-conscious identity among American Protestants only after 1845.

Earlier I argue that the continuing nature of controversies meant that religious controversies served as constant reminders about the norms of civil religion. I might be able to bring the idea of repetition into that discussion, and argue that the repeated nature of disputes about ultraism succeeded in destabilizing denominational alignments without re-coalescing around ultra principles. I say that already, but I could say it better if I bring in the repetition meme.

That was a note to me, sorry if it is confusing to you.

And so to drink a glass of milk before bed.

Domain Names? I have

Domain Names?

I have a domain name that I really want. I thought about buying it 10 years ago, and 8 years ago, but did not want to spend the money at the time. That was a bad decision. Since then it has been owned first by a small British company, then by a Hong-Kong based search engine and name-squatter.

The name expires today. If the squatter does not renew, the name will become available in 75 days. I could count the days and mark my calendar, I could pay one of the hosting services to put the name on their watch list and automatically request it when it becomes available. Or, I could use a variation on my preferred name. Or, if the current squatter renews it, I could make them an offer for the name.

The .us and .cc suffixes are available now. I think I would rather have the .com, but my preference for that version of my name is low. So, I think I will count the days and keep checking the .whois databases to see if the squatter renews. If they do, I will make them an offer. If they charge too much, then it is off to two-letter land.

As of right now I prefer .cc, one of the caribbean suffixes but used worldwide for personal sites, rather than the .us suffix.

Vanity, thy name is Ted

Writing is hard I

Writing is hard

I have spent the last couple of days reviewing my draft of chapter four. This, like three, is a chapter that has a good ending but where I have had trouble setting up my conclusion. The current version of chapter four, after the August rewrite, is three sections of about twenty pages each. The first sets up the situation at the end of the 1830s, lays out the historiography, and argues that continuous controversies shaped the way that religious groups understood one another and they way that they understood civil religion. The second section argues that popular interpretive schemes that people used to categorize religious groups fell apart during the late 1830s and 1840s: temperance and abolition together managed to split the largest denominations even as ultra-ism imploded as a credible intellectual scheme. The final section argues that the crucial new understanding of how to handle the problem of the one and the many grew as a response to anti-Catholicism in the Presbyterian church. This new understanding provided a groundwork for people to imagine a new sort of unity, as "evangelicals" rather than as "Christians" by the end of the 1840s.

That was a muddy and opaque paragraph. It matches the muddiness and opacity of a lot of the stuff I have been editing today. I have a lot of trouble articulating some of my ideas - either I get too subtle or I miss my point and have to beat around the bush. I use a lot of shotgun prose - fire a lot of sentences at an idea and maybe one of them will phrase it correctly.

I need to chop chapter four down to about 50 pages, I need to lose the silly parts of my argument, I need to make sure I can justify everything I am claiming, and I need to say it clearly and forcefully.

So, that is what I am doing rather than starting National Novel Writing Month. This blog is a workplace blog, it lets me explain what I do, vent my frustrations, and get some ideas for what to do next. It is unlike most other workplace blogs in that I work alone. Sometimes as I sit at the dining room table editing manuscript I am reminded of the very sweet, very sad movie "Tout Les Matins des Jours" One of the characters there, a widower, spends the second half of his life rising, eating breakfast, going to a separate shed with his viol de gamba, and playing music all day. As he plays, his late wife's image appears before him, and she keeps him company and gazes at him for as long as the music continues. Late at night, he stops playing and comes back to the house to sleep. Towards the end of the movie he comments to his daughter that he has led a very passionate life. She just looks at him, confused as to why this musical hermit could make such a claim. But we, the audience, know his secret and are touched.

I am not that bad, or that maudlin, but I do find that I have a very busy day behind my eyes even as I sit at my table looking over sheets of paper.

I should be ready to type up my edits by Monday. It is going faster than some chapters, if only because it is now NOVEMBER and I am feeling time pressure.

Book List I am

Book List

I am adding a book list to the right. Pardon all the publish statements.

Pants. There is something

Pants.

There is something about pants that is just plain funny. Maybe it is the sound of the word, maybe it is the body parts that they cover, but they are funny. Spongebob Squarepants is funny because of his last name, at least to me. I just tested this - say the word "pants" out loud three times. Pants Pants Pants. By the third time I was smiling. Were you?

There is also something about pants that is just plain annoying. For such a simple garment, they are hard to find in the correct size and shape. Buttocks and thighs are funny shapes and hard to cover well, we are self-conscious about our crotches, that is part of it. But still, how hard can it be to cut two tubes of fabric and connect them at the top? It must be harder than it looks.

Women's pants are sized according to the old standard sizes, first standardized during World War Two. Men's pants are sized according to two standard measures, waist and inseam. If you know how round you are in the middle and how far it takes to reach the ground, you should be able to buy pants. Right?

Those standard sizes only describe two of the three measurements. There is a third, the rise, or the distance between the crotch seam and the waistband. Some people wear their pants high, other low. Some people like the crotch of their pants high, others low. The current trend is for low waist, low crotch, pants for men, and low waist, high crotch, low rise pants for women - hip huggers.

I buy my chinos from LL Bean - they are solid, they wear well, the price is right, and I would rather surf the web for 10 minutes than take half an hour and drive to a store. The problem is that you can not try them on, you have to guess at size and shape. Fat as I am, I still wear their thin cut pants - the mail order catalogs really do cater to pear-shaped desk warriors. I also have to guess about the rise, something that varies from pant to pant, from manufacturer to manufacturer, and from shipment to shipment.

Why am I ranting about this? I am about to order more pants, and I was baffled for a while as to why I could pick between a 35 waist and 29 inseam, 34 waist and 30 inseam, and in dress pants, a 34 waist and 27 1/2 inseam. The different inseam measurements are largely a by-product of the different rise in the various cuts. Two and a half inches difference in an inseam is a LOT; no wonder their dress pants chafe the middle of my thighs. I seem to be replicating all the fun of women's clothing and their "standardized" sizes - these run big, those run small, I am a this size in these cloths and a that size in those clothes, and so on.

It could be worse: a couple of years ago I ordered some fat-ass-cut (natural cut?) pants from one or another catalogue company, and they were so freaking BIG that I tried to get both of my legs into a single pants leg, and almost succeeded.

The current trend towards computerized custom clothing helps a bit. The first iteration of those was not so good. The new generation, especially Lands End's new custom shirt software, is pretty good. They still do not know how to cut a shirt for someone with big traps and scrawny arms, but there are not all that many unathletic mesomorphs out there.

Standard sizes, whether the women's scale of even numbers or the men's scale of inches and dimensions, are a sign of the tail end of the second industrial revolution. They are an attempt to adjust standardized goods for semi-standardized human shapes. The third industrial revolution, the moment that some people call the post-industrial economy, is about using information technology to provide custom results from mass production machinery. That Lands End automatic boutique is the third industrial revolution's answer to the problem of how to get custom tailoring (first industrial revolution - machine cloth and hand sewing) with mass production standard sizes (second industrial revolution).

This is not an original thought, several other people have commented on boutique manufacturing over the last few years. I suppose my final thought will be the mandatory navel-gazing. Blogs are the op-ed pages of the internet. Between blogs, newsfeeds, and the ability to use portals to sort and file news stories, can we produce a custom newspaper/news feed for ourselves? If so, is this the future of information?

George W. Bush recently got a lot of flack for disclosing that he does not watch television news. It was unclear if he reads newspapers. Instead he depends on his staffers to filter and summarize the day's news for him. This can be a good thing - no one needs to get caught up in the pack journalism and media phrenzies of the crisis of the moment. It can also be a bad thing if his news filters are doing a poor job of it. This is the hand-tailored version of a newspaper.

Perhaps instead of getting my news from many different sources I should try to use information technology to create a news filter for myself. I currently read the Philadelphia Inquirer in paper form, the Washington Post and New York Times on line, and about half a dozen political blogs (see the blogroll on the left) for extra commentary and op ed. I do not watch much television and I never watch television news. If I was better about my time management, I would set up a news portal.

But, I am easily distracted and I like to read the news.

Parents and children Da

Parents and children

Da Goddess tells about taking a drive through San Diego with her 7-year old son, Little Dude, and talking. The recent fires upset him a lot. She was very good about waiting for him to bring things up, then explaining them. What was striking about her story was the way that mom and son are, in addition to everything else, friends. It is not all that common for parents and children to be friends, either that or the storms of adolescence tend to bury that friendship, but it happens.

I hope that I can be a similar high quality low-key parent for our kids. Tip o' the hat to Da Goddess.

Template Change I like

Template Change

I like the Garamond font. I was using it for my heading while the rest of the page was in Ariel, but I did not like the mix of Serif and Sans-Serif fonts. So, I went to Garamond-Times New Roman-Times for everything.

I will use this for a day or so and then see if I still like it. Please let me know which was easier to read, the old or the new.

EDIT - as of right now I am getting ready to go back to sans-serif fonts for the web page. Is there a sans-serif font that has the lightness and ease of Garamond?

Edit again, 9:00 pm, going back to Blogger standard fonts. They are just easier to read.

Well, I edited up

Well, I edited up the thing on toasting and sent it to the forthcoming Carnival of the Vanities.

All of my posts are wonderful, I don't think I have any real stinkers to send to the bonfire of the vanities. I am so vain that I expunge the bad posts once I identify them.

Speaking of which, this post is feeling nervous.

Homework answer. Last week

Homework answer.

Last week I asked for comments on a paraphrase of some things that Jefferson wrote.

I told the kids that it was a Jefferson paraphrase from the start of the War of 1812, and then asked them to write 200 words responding to: "A free people in arms, fighting in defense of their liberty, are superior to any army in Europe."

I was looking for some recognition that the militia, a free people in arms, broke and ran when they faced professional soldiers (except at New Orleans, where the militia had been in the field with Jackson for over a year and were far more frightened by and inspired by Jackson than they were scared by a few thousand men in red uniforms.)

I was looking for some discussion about the role that Valley Forge played in turning American farmers into soldiers who could stand up to the professionals. 18th century warfare was a matter of nerve, discipline, training and practice. I thought I had blogged about it, but I can not find it in my search history. Perhaps I will do a cameo on it, as I did with drinking toasts down below.

I was hoping for some discussion of the current American debate on guns and gun culture, or some references to Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Chechnya.

I do not like what I got. I have graded about a third of them so far. Most of the students mailed it in. I got a lot of pro-forma "free men in arms always win." Those got C at best. A few people talked about the ideology of a nation of arms, either directly or by turning the discussion to the hollywood myth. One so far has quoted Braveheart. Those got B. A few people have talked about Jefferson and placed the thought into the context of the Republican military build-down. Some of those got an A.

I will not use this homework next semester. I will find something real, not made up. I might give them Montlezun's line about "The United States are the great warehouse of the democratic virus. All the widths of the seas are insufficient against these pestiferous influences." It sounds better in French: "Les Etats Unis sont le grand depot de le virus democratique. Tout les espances des mers sont insufficient contres ses influences pestiferees."

Either that or I just like to say "influences pestiferees."

Karl Marx Interview Now

Karl Marx Interview

Now this is good fun: via Crooked Timber I learn that Prospect Magazine conducts a posthumous interview with Karl Marx.

The most interesting, certainly the most memorable, of my undergraduate classes was an upper-level reading class on Marx, Melville and Thoreau, team taught by a historian who studied Thoreau's world and a very good deconstructuralist literary critic ( but of the literate variety, not one of the folks who does the postmodern drone). We met in an octagonal room on the ground floor of the old college observatory and sat at a large round table. We read Walden, we read 18th Brumiare (good stuff that), we read short stories. We tried to read Melville's Pierre, I think some of us even finished it. I did not. Marx loved Sir Walter Scott, so we read Waverly and then we talked and talked about them. Some of us started calling the class "talking about talking about."

Maybe I will assign some Melville short stories next semester. I miss talking about them.

Both Melville and Marx are actually fun stylists, in a perverse and Romantic kind of a way. "Hegel remarks someplace, that all history, as it were, repeats itself. He neglects to mention, however, that it does so twice: the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce." (from memory - not sure if I quoted it correctly.)

And, as we learned that semester, Marx mis-quoted. The bit about History repeating itself comes from Heine, not Hegel. So when Marx quoted, or repeated, these words, he got them wrong. How farcical!

I need a new

I need a new comment software.

The one I am using, by blogextra, is limited to 400 characters and loads very slowly.

Any suggestions?

EDIT - Thanks for the suggestion, trying Halo Scan. It should be the comment tool on the Left.

EDIT 2 - Halo scan works, but not at the same time as blog extra. Commenting out blogextra to try Halo scan. Hope I don't lose my comments.

Edit 3 - adding some carriage returns to the template seems to have fixed it. I hate voodoo html. Now I get to figure out how to transfer my comments.

Andrew Jackson Day Today

Andrew Jackson Day

Today is the class on Andrew Jackson. I think I have a solid class put together. We did not get to the Market Revolution on Tuesday so I am folding that into my discussion of 1819 and the 1830s Bank War for today. I intend to stick with my previous narratives showing Jackson as an angry old man. Some people will tell you "Don't be a hater!" Andrew Jackson was a hater.

I know that I have not yet discussed last week's homework question, but I want to introduce this week's question now. I asked the kids if Andrew Jackson should be honored by being shown on the American currency? In the past this question has led to some pretty good discussions, I hope I get a good one today. Jackson was a controversial figure in his own time, he should remain controversial.

And so to finish class prep

Either I can not

Either I can not read, or a lot of other people can not read. I am not sure which scares me more.

Greg Easterbrook has tried once again to be controversial. This time he has tried to frame the American intervention in Iraq in such a way as to force the Bush 43 administration to either change their actions or change their rhetoric. It is a false premise - the misplaced rhetoric about the presence of WMD and an active WMD program was important but not everything during the run-up to war. Or, to be more precise, the causus belli was Saddam Hussein's refusal to comply with the monitoring process. Evidence of WMD was presented to suggest that Hussein was hiding something when he refused to cooperate. Easterbrook, like many anti-war commentators, has merged the extra evidence with the causis belli. By doing so he loses the opportunity to make more valuable criticisms of the Bush adminstration's earlier decision to force a confrontation over WMD. Invading Iraq was probably a good thing to do, but was it the best way to advance the war on terror?

Back on topic (it is tired and I am late), Easterbrook argues that if the invasion was really about WMD, and we have not found any WMD, then we should leave. If the invasion was not really about WMD we can stay, but the Bush administration has to come clean about its "real" reasons for starting the war. He is attempting to use the threat of withdrawal as a bludgeon to force the Bush administration to confess to its ulterior motives. It is a clumsy bit of rhetoric.

Even clumsier are the editorial decisions made by Glenn Reynolds, Eugene Volokh and some other pretty smart guys who read Easterbook as calling for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Iraq. They then condemn that option.

Rhetorically, they are calling Easterbook's bluff. As they do so, they are missing the point he was trying to make. As I read Easterbrook, he was assuming that withdrawal was not an option, and thus that the only logical response if you did not want to withdraw is to 'fess up. It was a re-iteration of the "Bush lies" theme. By simply saying that withdrawal is a bad idea, Reynolds, Volokh and the cast of thousands are ignoring Easterbrook's real point. That might be good stump tactics, but it is a heck of a bad way to engage the issues.

Between this and the whole Kill Bill goof, I wonder if Easterbrook might want to get copy editing from the folks who do the Dick and Jane readers for kids. His ideas are better than his ability to express them, and now that he has stumbled a couple of times he has sharks circling every time he goes to post.

Ted K.

Thoughts on yesterday's class.

Thoughts on yesterday's class.

Class went pretty well, but I made one bad decision while planning it.

The story of the class was the story of the second generation of Americans, the people who came of age after the Constitution and, in Joyce Appleby's phrase, inherited the republic. I tried to set this up with political history, which let me lay out the first party system and national republicanism. This was not a bad decision. I then tried to use the Hamilton-Burr duel as the hook for the class. This was a bad decision. It ate a lot of time and was a poor proxy for the generational change. I ran out of time and only got partway through my intended outline. Ah well, at least when I tell of Jackson's duelling they will have some context.

After telling the duel, Joanne Freeman style, I laid out the First party system using an ideal type of republican (small r) and democratic (small d) political theory. I traced splits from patriots to madisonian federalists to the 2nd party system to the national republicans. Thursday I get to create the Democrats.

I took a few minutes to introduce Clay, Calhoun, and Webster.

I put most of the focus of the class on demographics, the sheer volume of young people in the Early Republic, and on the problems that a young society faced. I emphasized alcohol, working backwards from the standard Rorabaugh figure of 6 gallons of hard alcohol per adult per year, to show that the average man took about 8 drinks a day.

I then talked about westward expansion into the Northwest and Louisiana territories. This was pretty quick.

I laid out the counter-enlightenment. I was not happy with my explanation. I gave it as English anti-French revolution invoke revelation and cry down reason, arguing that enlightenment reason leads to deism and the guillotine. This is true, but I don't know what the kids understood of it. I then laid out American revival religion with capsule biographies of Lyman Beecher and Peter Cartwright.

Finally, in the last ten minutes or so, I argued that the Revlutionary movement towards emancipation was reversed by the dual forces of the counter-enlightenment, which discredited theories of inalienable human rights, and economic advantage, following on the cotton gin in 1793. People stopped manumitting and started selling slaves. I once again fumbled the details of the PA and NY gradual emancipation laws. Before I next cover this era I need to grab the full texts of those laws and also to review the narrative of Anglo-American Quaker lobbying against slavery and the slave trade at the end of the eighteenth century.

I had really wanted to lay out the early market revolution, including Rhode Island thread spinning, the Lancaster Pike, the Erie Canal, and the rise of the seaport cities. I never got there. I had also wanted to lay out Republican Motherhood, which I intended to position as an attempt to govern and control the horde of young people by educating them in republican and moral values.

All in all this was a lot of background and biographies and not a lot of narrative or analysis. Thursday is Andrew Jackson day. I know I want to work up Jackson's personality, the creation of the two party system, nullification, and herrenvolk democracy. I should be able to get the market revolution in as part of a discussion of the bank war. That will mean cutting back on Indian removal. I do not know how to get Republican motherhood in, unless I do a riff on Jackson's mother. I might do that, place her in the context of republican motherhood. That will swing my focus early again.

I like the fun of adjusting the classes to what we have just covered during the semester, but it adds a different sort of stress to my week.

And so to lunch.

Carnival of the Vanities

Carnival of the Vanities is up at bloggerrabbit. It is a long one, with some good stuff.

I submitted my thing on Meatloaf lyrics and compulsive honesty. I liked Blogger Rabbit's own little funny on dogs.

Next week it will be at Wizbang. I wonder if I will write anything I will want to brag on.

My "Why am I

My "Why am I not sleepy?" thought

I am done working for the night, done reading and discarding weeks of old magazines, done puttering around on blogs, it is late, I am tired, and yet I am still not sleepy.

So, I will add one brief thought and then go lie down and see if I will sleep or if I will have palpitations.(1)

Looking over my blog and comparing it to other blogs, I noticed that many of my posts are quite long. The thing I sent to the Carnival of the Vanities was three pages single spaced, a little over 1500 words. It took me about an hour to write and edit, in part because I had been chewing on some of the ideas for a while and I wrote it up quickly. 1500 words is a magazine article.

If I were shorter, would people read more?

If I am going to put time into crafting that many words, should I try to shop some of these pieces around? In-flight magazines pay a dollar a word for interesting popular history and book reviews.

And so to bed.

(1) These palpitations are not dangerous. I take a niacin variant for my cholesterol. Sometimes I can feel my heart beat, especially if I am lying down and tired but not sleepy. That is all a palpitation is, feeling your heart beat. I am out of shape these days, so the bumps are about once a second and not too strong. When I was running a lot my resting heartrate was 40/minute, very strong, and if I got palpitations I could feel my whole body pulse and lift off the sheets every second and a half. That was not so good, but that does not happen any more.

I miss things when

I miss things when I am tired.

Just below you can find me fisking Greg Easterbrook, Eugene Volokh, and Glen Reynolds for systematically mis-communicationg with each other. On further review, what I may be seeing there is a case where underlying assumptions lead two people to read the same document to two very different effects. If, as Easterbrook seems to, you believe that the whole business about WMD was a lie and a smokescreen, then Easterbrook's blog is an attempt to bluster away the smokescreen. If, as Volokh and Reynolds seem to believe, the WMD business was a good faith depiction of our knowledge of Iraq, then Easterbrook's blog is a call for unconditional withdrawal from Iraq.

If I had thought of this last night, while tiredly waiting for the loaf of bread to finish baking so I could go to sleep, I would have written something very different.

In personal news, I just finished revising chapter three, it looks very good, and I will use it as my writing sample in the job applications that are going out later this afternoon.

I want to blog about the Boykin speeches, extending an argument I started with Brian at Junkyardblog, but that is chapter two stuff and I want to bash through chapter four one more time before I go back to church and state in the Early Republic.

And so to fine tune job letters.

I'll Drink to That!

I'll Drink to That!

As part of my discussion about alcohol in the Early American Republic I explained toasting and dram drinking. My students had encountered dram taking before; Ben Franklin condemns the practice in his Autobiography. They had encountered toasting as we discussed the American Revolution; I mentioned it briefly in class and the textbook commented on it as well. What was different in the EAR was that the toasts and drams were whiskey and not beer or cider.

I call toasting the drinking game of the nineteenth century. It started in the eighteenth century and continued to be popular into the early twentieth century, but it was mostly an antebellum practice. It started as a political ritual, but it quickly became a celebration of masculinity. If you ever watch the movie Sergeant York, you will see Alvin York and his buddies toasting during their three-day bender.

Basically, toasting involves going around the table, having each person propose a toast, and everyone drinking agreement to the sentiment. You fill the glasses. The first person proclaims a toast: "The Union, may it ever be preserved!" All drink. The glasses are refilled. The second person proclaims a toast: "The ladies, may they ever be beautiful!" All drink. The glasses are refilled. And so it goes, around the table or around the room. That first example is a Jackson quote, the second is something you might hear in a tavern.

If you wanted to get drunk, you tossed off a full drink for each toast. If you were pacing yourself, as for example when Patriot assemblies gathered to drink 92 toasts in memory the Massachusetts Legislature's 92-14 vote not to take back its circular letter condemning the trade acts, you probably wanted to barely sip at each one. For important events, say the Philadelphia reception for Citizen Genet, the toasts were written out ahead of time. If people were just sitting around, the toasts were more impromptu.

Toasting made a good nineteenth-century drinking game because every person had a moment in which they could speak in public, display their manliness, and express themselves in words. The toasts had to be original, or at least original to the evening. Casual drinkers made them up as they went along. Proposing a toast was a risky moment - you try standing up and phrasing a strong sentiment while drunk - but that made it a rewarding moment as well. More, a "man" controlled his alcohol, and it could be hard to give a good toast after a few rounds had gone by. Similarly, "To Anacreon in Heaven" - the drinking song whose tune was stolen for the "Star Spangled Banner" - was a good drinking song because it was so hard to sing.

Toasting also produced a high level of peer pressure. If you refused to toast with someone you were repudiating the sentiments of their toast. Toasting first grew popular as a political ritual, and many toasts were patriotic in nature. If the bar starts toasting to "America, home of the free," you will feel some pressure to drink with them. Having once joined in the toasting, it was hard to stop. For this reason toasting was a particular target of temperance advocates. As they saw it, toasting bastardized patriotism and turned it into drunken debauchery.

Of course, the same folks who liked to toast were the same folks who liked to have noisy parades and shoot off cannon on the 4th of July while the Temperance folks were all sitting in church listening to sermons. Popular culture was contested in the Early American Republic, and toasting was an important ritual of social manliness.

edit - grammar and clarity.

Non-Bush approaches to the

Non-Bush approaches to the War on Terror.

Sebastian Holsclaw asks for suggestions for a Democratic party policy towards the war on Terror. I got into the comment discussion there and wanted to copy my main points over here for my own reference. Off the top of my head, this is what I suggested.

The United States should shift from its current binary notion of terror=bad, non-terro= good to a policy based on human rights, the rule of law, and national self-interest. The current administration's approach forces us to either choose between ideological purity coupled with some foul policy partners or a more practical and humane set of allies and enemies at the cost of creating a clear division between national rhetoric and national policy. Opening up a gap between claimed ideals and practical actions is always a bad idea.

As it is I worry that the Bush administration has encouraged Iran and North Korea to speed up their nuclear weapons research, has forfeited our authority to comment on the civil war in Chechnya, and is otherwise pursuing a worldwide foreign policy based entirely on clever sound bites designed for domestic consumption.

Instead what would a foreign policy look like if we based it on:
1, human rights
2, rule of law
3, continue Bush's notion of extending the idea of active pursuit to include using military means to attack harbors and safe havens for international terrorists
4, do a better job with intelligence gathering.

In effect this would be a realist/liberal foreign policy approach. Off the top of my head this would lead to the following policy suggestions:

I, follow through in Iraq. this means 1, making sure we do not _look_ like an imperial power; 2, helping Iraq transition from a rule of cronyism to a rule of law; 3, quickly bringing Iraqis back into basic governance - police, military, etc.; 4, giving up some measure of control over this process to international agencies (even if they are less effective at 2 and 3) so as to avoid creating an imperial image.

II. Stop trying to fund foreign policy through unfunded debt. That was Johnson's mistake in Vietnam and it hurts to see Bush repeating most of Johnson's follies.

III, Resume the search for Bin Laden. If this means getting troops out of Iraq to do the work, then either increase the US military or turn over control in Iraq to other countries (but not Turkey - see I.1)

IV, Remember to do some basic cost-benefit analysis in anti-terrorism prevention. Don't spend billions to reduce a low-risk threat before spending millions to reduce a high-risk threat. Don't be afraid to educate rather than just scaring people.

V, Continue the process of encouraging democratic politics, free speech, and economic activity in the Middle East and the rest of the Third World. Do this not with sabre-rattling rhetoric or military intervention but with cultural tools such as Radio Free Iran (or whatever they call it), the paunch corps, and the outreach efforts made over the last couple of years by the American muslim community.

VI, Focus this cultural effort on the schwerpunkt (spelling) of the middle east - Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in that order. Any change that does not effect the most populous and richest nations is bound to be epiphenomenal. Wolfowitz et al are trying to reach these countries via the domino effect and contagious liberty. The Iraq strategy might work, but I would use the cultural press described in V instead.

VII, As part of the full court press, adjust American farm policy, American policy towards Kyoto-style environmental talks, and American influence over international lenders to improve the basic economies of the developing world, especially the muslim parts of the developing world.

VIII, Try to reduce tensions in Israel. I would suggest 1, supporting the Israeli protective fence; 2, insisting that the fence run along the minimal border enclosing the 1967 line plus the densely populated suburbs; 3, insisting that Israel repudiate and abandon the aggressive settlements on the West bank, including putting up the money to buy out relocate all West Bank settlers outside the protective fence; 4, pressing the Palestinian authority to move to greater democracy and open-ness; 5, extending economic aid to Palestine, through small business loans administered outside the Palestinian authority if need be; 6, insisting that both Israel and Palestine commit themselves to full adherance to human rights and the rule of law, preventing Israel from continuing on their current path toward apartheid.

And so to do the dishes.

What is he worth?

What is he worth?

Baron de Montlezun, Voyage fait dans les annees 1816 et 1817, (Paris: Gid Fils, 1818) p 8

"Dans ce pays plus qu'en aucun autre, l'estime se mesure sur la fortune. Le talent est foulé aux pieds. Combien vaut ce homme? dit-on: How much is he worth?". The italics and English are his.

Translated, he says "In this country more than in any other, status comes from wealth. Talent is trampled underfoot, `How much is he worth?' they ask instead." Montelzun inserted these words in his travel narrative while describing his first arrival in the United States; he landed at Norfolk, Virginia in 1816.

I am using these words as the opening phrase for today's class on the early nineteenth century. It will be a strange class - on Thursday as I went to put the class together I realized that I had no memory of what I had originally intended to do today. I had to make up a new class based on that quote from the class reader, on the textbook chapter I had assigned for today, and on the things we had left out of our discussion on the Early Republic.

I will be focusing on the second generation, and will touch on Hamilton's duel, the cotton gin, the Erie Canal, Cane Ridge, mobile populations, and the mental situation of the people who grew up in a republic. Joyce Appleby did an interesting prosopography of this generation a few years ago; I doubt that I will lean on it much.

Improvisatory teaching is a lot of fun, I just hope I can make it worthwhile for the kids. (I do have 2 pages of notes, I just don't have a good narrative for the day yet.)

And so to prep

Scriptural Literalism Allen Brill

Scriptural Literalism

Allen Brill has another very good essay in Open Source politics about the history of Scriptural Interpretation and why it matters to the world today.

He has elsewhere commented on the process of proof-texting, which in its most outrageous forms assumes that the Bible is a single, coherent whole. If it is, if every verse is equally Divinely inspired, the we can use any verse anywhere to interpret any other verse anywhere, and if we can find any verse or verse snippet anywhere that supports our position of the moment, we can claim Biblical sanction for our opinions.

I think this approach is nonsense. I am a historicist, which is odd because my current research is on the ancestors of today's evangelicals. Speaking of which, I need to get back to editing.

Cable 2 Ted 0

Cable 2 Ted 0

I dug farther into my walls over the weekend. The good news is that the fish tape was caught on something in the middle of the living room wall. The bad news is that even with a larger hole to work with I could not get either a fish tape or the cable itself to feed through the gap in a sill, through the space between the lathe and the exterior boards, and then through the gap in the sill at the other end of the wall cavity. We are not a true balloon frame, and so running cable is not as easy as I want it to be.

I now have a half-removed baseboard in the office and we still have ethernet cable running all over the upstairs. I convinced J that it was best to call it quits. We are either going to call in the cable company and have them do it or, and we will try this first, we will hire the handy neighbor to do it for us. Those who can, do. Those who can not, hire it done.

I feel like a yuppie, only poorer and not as well dressed.

The Knee Test. I

The Knee Test.

I refer to the "knee test" in my rant on the politics of personal appearance but do not define the term.

People come in all shapes and sizes. Some shapes and sizes are unhealthy for the wearerl; the most common unhealthy shapes are obese and emaciated. The knee test measures for emaciation. Physical appearance is linked to self-esteem, and some people believe that you can never be too thin. Many college women obsess about their appearance and some people (I almost said some women, but a few men have similar body issues) try to control their body shape as a proxy for controlling the rest of their lives. Whenever I have a skinny student, male or female, I try to give them the "knee test." Quite simply, your knees and elbows should be SMALLER than your arms and legs. If someone's limbs go out as they move from muscle to bone, calf to knee to thigh, then they are skinny enough that I will talk to them and see if I need to call University health services on their behalf.

In this picture of Ann Coulter you can clearly see that her knee is wider than her calf or lower thigh. This is a warning sign. It is possible to be that thin and still be mentally and physically healthy - look at the top marathoners like Tegla Laroupe - but it is also possible to be that thin because of an eating disorder or a medical crisis.

For contrast, see this picture of Twiddlybits modeling her "assalicious pants." Her knees are just a little narrower than her calves and thighs. And, may I add, the pants look good on her.

Edit, added the contrast pictures, edited text for clarity.

Now this rocks !

Now this rocks !

I stumbled across Bloggus Caesari, a web log written by Julius Caesar (as channeled through an amateur historian in LA.)

I have no idea which of my little categories to put this one in. I dropped it in with the academics for the moment since I do not have a set of war blogs on the left.

And so to bed.

Accidental Roses I am

Accidental Roses

I am often amused at the way that unexpected items become important to us. For example, consider the roses around our house. Before July I rarely thought about roses, and when I did I generally did not care for them. They had their place - we knew a nice rosarian in Virginia and for a while I grew a miniature yellow rose on our kitchen window sill, but roses were something that other people grew.

The new house has rose bushes around it. There are five of them, two red and three in shades of pink and peach. There are also some gaps in the front landscaping where azaleas once stood. I have become obsessed with finding the right two roses to add to that spot. Just a few months of caring for roses, reading about roses, and talking to rose people has gotten me hooked on a new gardening bug. Now that we have a house that has roses, I will continue to add roses to the house. (Current thoughts are to add a Dream Yellow and a Dream Red to the front of the porch and grow an Iceberg up the side railing of the porch. If I could fit yellow miniature roses into the garden, I would. I might still put a tiny rose in a pot on the porch.)

The story of the roses illustrates two of the core concepts behind the history discipline, concepts that Annie from The Same River Twice commented on in an email: Contingency and Path Dependency. She had previously encountered path dependency in the Matrix movies, movies that I have still not yet watched. These are important ideas and should be more widely spread and more clearly spread. While I have not seen the Matrix movies, I do read Eric Flint's science fiction, and one of the reasons I like his work is that he is very aware of contingency, path dependency, and change over time. Of course, he was trained as a historian before following his ideals and going into labor organizing, which he did for years before switching to writing science fiction full time.

I want to blog on the core historical concepts, if only to get the ideas clearly phrased so that I can add them to my syllabus for next semester. I will briefly explain Contingency, Path Dependency, Change over Time, and Agency.

Contingency is one of those simple ideas that we never think about. It is a philosophical truism that at any moment we could do one of many things. You could stand up and start singing the Marseilles, or you could keep reading this, or you could move away. One of these is highly unlikely, two are fairly likely. Historians try to find contingent moments, moments where either influential individuals or society as a whole had two very different choices, both of which were fairly likely, and picked one of them. By looking at that decision moment we learn more about the universal human condition as we decide, more about the particular people and culture who were making that decision, and we gain insights into nuances and details of that particular decision.

Thus Eric Foner argues that Reconstruction, that period between 1865 and 1877 when the United States was trying to bring seceded states back into the union, white southerners into political society, and freed blacks into citizenship, was a contingent moment when the nation might have created a biracial society based on equal rights and citizenship. We failed, but the promises of reconstruction resonated down the years and shaped both the turn of the century movement towards legalized segregation and the long-continued black movement against legal and social repression.

Path Dependency is another simple idea. Once we start doing one activity or set of activities, it can be hard to change to doing another set. We use path dependency any time we pick one design element or one scheduling element and then work around it. So, once I made the contingent decision to keep the roses, I went onto a path that was dependent on landscaping around roses. For a less banal example, consider the British Navy's decision to switch from coal to oil at the start of the twentieth century. From then on they had less need for convenient coaling stations located all around the world, a need that had caused all the European naval powers to colonize or seize bits of land; they had a large need for continued secure access to oil fields and immediately maintained a much larger presence in Persia (now Iran). Once started down the oil path, their foreign policy needs, ship design requirements, staffing requirements and, operational philosophies all had to adjust to the new technology.

Contingent moments and path dependency combine to create Change over Time, the third of the big ideas. People change, institutions change, the physical world changes, the ways we understand the world change. Changes come from human decisions, often multiple human decisions, often in feedback loops where one person's contingent moment creates a path that shapes the choices available to another person. For convenience we sometimes refer to waves of similar decisions as movements, trends, or revolutions. The Industrial Revolution was the result of a few people coming up with technological innovations (remember that organizing a work force is itself a technology, just like a clever machine is a technology), innovations spurring innovations, the new systems and new machines altering other people's conception of time, labor, and self-worth. The whole process can be described on a macro level with big words like industrialization, proletarianization, and embourgeoisment. It can also be described on a micro level through case studies, individual narratives, or the glimpses into workers lives afforded by Parliamentary commissions.

This brings us to the final big idea, an idea that many undergraduates struggle with: agency. Agency is historians' jargon for who makes the decisions that the historian will be studying. We can tell the tale of industrialization from the perspective of Arkwright and the factory owners, emphasizing their contingent decisions and telling the tale of the way that industrialists responded to and shaped their society. We can cover the same years from the perspectives of the workers, emphasizing their decision to move from field to factory labor, their attempt to control their work time and work place, the communities they built in factory villages, and so on. Here the workers have agency; we look at their contingent decisions. Agency is in part a narrative decision, in part an evaluation of what "really mattered" in a particular time and moment. As a demonstrative exercise I sometimes go through a simple event, usually a child being born, and show the students how many possible narratives might include that event as crucial evidence: the mother's biography, the father's biography, the child's biography, the story of medical care, the story of demographic trends, the story of migration and settlement, and so on.

To return to my story about the roses in front of my house, I give myself agency as I tell the story - I am the person discovering the plants, learning how to care for them, and making the decision to buy more. I do not have total control over these decisions, I had to negotiate all of them with J, but as I told the story at the top of this long rambling rant the narrative was about my adapting to my new surroundings. For change over time, well the front of the house has already changed dramatically over the last five years as the old owner died, the house went through estate, the previous owner bought it and landscaped the front, and I then bought it and started making my own changes. The porch remains much the same, but the decorations have changed and the uses we find for the space have changed.

But maybe I want different roses. There are not a lot of 3 to 4 foot tall yellow roses.

And so it goes.

John Lewis writes a

John Lewis writes a strong editorial for the Boston Globe: Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Editorial / Opinion / Op-ed / At a crossroads on gay unions.

Lewis makes two good points: that there is a distinction between the religious liberty to conduct or refuse to conduct a marriage ritual for two individuals and the human right to get married, a civil right. He places this conflict within the context of the civil rights movement, comparing current laws against gay marriage with earlier laws against interracial marriage. "But our rights as Americans do not depend on the approval of others. Our rights depend on us being Americans."

Strong stuff, and he seems to be joining in a Democratic/Liberal attempt to turn Republican/social conservative gay bashing into a debate about human rights, civil rights, and the meaning of citizenship. See, for example, what Counterspin has been saying.

It is hard to defend abstract rights against cheap shot slurs. Consider the way that people have used flag burning to frame politicians as anti-American when they defended free speech rights. I remember a few years back John Warner of Virginia was cheap shotted as anti-patriotic for refusing to vote for some silly flag-icon law. He responded with a wonderful essay explaining the nature of basic liberties and tying his defense of those liberties to his service as a Marine in Vietnam. He was still chickenhawked, although he did win that election.

John Lewis is very aware that it takes time to convince people that abstract rights are more important than inherited prejudices. I hope that Counterspin et al are able to turn the debate to free speech and the nature of American citizenship. We are overdue for a debate on that. I just dearly hope that the debate comes to the right conclusions.

Happy Birthday to J

Happy Birthday to J

Happy Birthday to J
Happy Birthdya to J
Happy Birthday on Yesterday
Happy Birthday to J

Yesterday was J's birthday. To celebrate we went out to dinner at a French restaurant near us. It was fun, despite the noise, and we held hands throughout dinner. I want to make a couple of notes about the food, because it gave me ideas for my cooking.

J had roast venison and duck sausages in a port wine sauce. The venison was good, the sauce was good, the sausages were spectacular. I have no idea what was in them or how they got that intense combination of flavors, but they rocked. I had a tuna steak au poivre. I have previously used tuna for recipes that call for rare beefsteak and gotten some good results. I had not thought to try tuna with a poivre sauce, but the two went together well, and even better when you added a bit of the watercress garnish to the bite. I like food where the bits together taste better than bites of all the separate bits. This restaurant had the knack of combining flavors so that the end result was ver' ver' nice.

For dessert I had an apple tart - I make a better pie crust, they had a nice filling and some very nice burnt sugar ice cream. Here having a full bite of ice cream and a full bite of tart let the burnt sugar taste dominate the mouth. But, a bite of apple tart with just a little of the ice cream, or a bite of ice cream followed by a bite of tarte flavored with the recent memory of the ice cream, that was spectacular. J had their chocolate sampler - a little pecan chocolate tarte, a chocolate mousse tort, and some very rich ice cream. Hers was too rich for me, especially the ice cream, but I liked the melted French chocolate in the tarte.

I have been teased in the past for "praying while I eat." If I take a bite of something really good I close my eyes so that I can pay attention to the food - much like many people close their eyes when they kiss. I spent a lot of dinner with my eyes closed.

Of course, between this dinner, wednesday's dinner, and a couple of my lunches this week I am well over my fat budget. I need to eat lean for several days and let my body recover. But it was worth it. J had a good birthday.

And back to typing in comments.

Updated Blogroll I updated

Updated Blogroll

I updated my blogroll. So far I have found a couple of automated programs to take care of blogrolls for me, especially blogmatrix and blogrolling. I do not care for either of them. Blogmatrix is clunky - I use it to read blogs but do not want to imbed it. Blogrolling is pretty spiffy, and if I ever shell out the $20 for the full version I will use it. But, I like to sort my links and their free version jumbles it all together.

I made a new link category, Academical Villagers, for blogs that have a more academic background and focus. Several of the Law, Politics and Punditry blogs are also written by professors - I decided which went where based on whether they tended to write about the concerns of their discipline and teaching, or about contemporary politics and culture. We all write about our jobs, about the larger world, and about our private lives - I am simply sorting by what, based on what I read, they spend more of their time on.

I also messed with style sheets to try to make the blogsnob link look more like the rest of the page. I have not used them before. I might see if I can get the site to show in Garamond, my preferred font, for those folks who have the font installed.

Was it a fair

Was it a fair paraphrase?

Source for the Jefferson paraphrase: "A free people in arms, fighting in defense of their liberty, are superior to any army in Europe."

Some of the students asked about this yesterday, and last night when I could not sleep (got to bed at 1:30 or so) I went and finally dug it up. It was not in a Jefferson letter, which is why I could not find it earlier. Instead it appears that I had conflated sections of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Jefferson's First and Eighth Annual Messages, and the letters. The relevant bits are:

"That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided , as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power." VA Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776, Article 13.

"No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands]" - Draft Constitution for Virginia, June 1776.

After explaining why he is cutting the standing army, "For defence against invasion [the regular army] is as nothing; nor is it conceived needful or safe that a standing army should be kept up in time of peace for that purpose. Uncertain as we must ever be of the particular point in our circumference where an enemy may choose to invade us, the only force which can be ready at every point and competent to oppose them, is the body of neighboring citizens as formed into a militia. On these, collected from the parts most convenient, in numbers proportioned to the invading foe, it is best to rely, not only to meet the first attack, but if it threatens to be permanent, to maintain the defence until regulars may be engaged to relieve them." Jefferson, First Annual Message, Dec 8, 1801.

"Considering the extraordinary character of the times in which we live, our attention should unremittingly be fixed on the safety of our country. For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security. It is, therefore, incumbent on us, at every meeting, to revise the condition of the militia, and to ask ourselves if it is prepared to repel a powerful enemy at every point of our territories exposed to invasion. Some of the States have paid a laudable attention to this object; but every degree of neglect is to be found among others." 8th Annual Message, Nov 8, 1808.

"Our present enemy will have the sea to herself, while we shall be equally predominant on land, and shall strip her of all her possessions on this continent. ... The partisans of England here have endeavored much to goad us into the folly of choosing the ocean instead of the land, for the theatre of war. That would be to meet their strength with our weakness, instead of their weakness with our strength. ... Some have apprehended that we shall be overwhelmed by the new improvements of war, which have not yet reached us. But the British possess them very imperfectly, ... We have nothing to fear from their armies." TJ to Thaddeus Kosciusko, June 28, 1812

"We shall indeed survive the conflict. Breeders enough will remain to carry on population. We shall retain or country, and rapid advances in the art of war will soon enable us to beat our enemy, and probably drive him from the continent. We have men enough, and I am in hopes the present session of Congress will provide the means of commanding their services. ... But although we feel, we hsall not flinch. We must consider now, as in the revolutionary war, that although the evils of resistance are great, those of submission would be greater." TJ to William Short, Nov 28, 1814

You decide

Twenty Movies in ten

Twenty Movies in ten minutes.

Via Begging to Differ I find that many people are following Roger Simon's dare and are making lists of twenty movies. Simon's list excluded the last 20 years, the others are filling in at the end.

A quick list of great movies I have seen.

Birth of a Nation - not a nice movie, but they do not have to be nice to be great.
Triumph of the Will
Mishima
Seven Samurai
Ran - yes, that is two from Kurosawa.

Razor's Edge - oddly enough I liked Bill Murray's version better than the smoother more accurate Tyrone Power version.
Breaking Away
The Apostle
Last Orders
City Lights

Star Wars: A New Hope (original print, no having Greedo shoot first) - camp but influential and fun.
The Best Years of our Lives
From Here to Eternity

and here I run dry. It appears that I am not much of a movie person. I certainly can not come up with twenty movies from the last twenty years that I would praise, even if I go back to the beginning it is hard.

The Friday Five is

The Friday Five is on hiatus this week.

So, I will ask a Friday Five myself. Someone has to step up, it might as well be me. I spent the morning working on the house.

1, What sort of a structure do you live in? If it is an apartment, describe the apartment building.

2, When was the building constructed?

3, What have you done to make the space suit you?

4, How long have you been living there?

5, How long do you intend to keep living there?

My comments are short, so I suggest answering on your own blog and simply commenting this with a link to your blog.

Cable 1, Ted 0

Cable 1, Ted 0

We have cable for cable TV and cable modems in two of the three bedrooms, but not in the bedroom that we use as the office.

When the cable guy came to the house in August I could have gotten him to run the cable, he would have charged about $35 and although he would have wanted to come in through the outside wall I might have been able to get him to pull it up an interior wall. But I was cheap, and did not realize until too late that he would have pulled interior cabling.

I decided to do it myself.

Earlier today, I finally tried to do it. I had previously figured out which of the wall cavities to use, gotten a fish tape, and otherwise prepared myself.

I decided that I would rather get the fish tape through the broad gap between the ground floor floorboards and the basement wall than through the right spot in the upstairs plaster, drilled a hole in the bedroom wall, and started feeding the fish tape.

Maybe it got down, maybe it did not. I was alone and could not tell. I do know I fed a lot of tape into the wall and could not snag it at the bottom. So, I tried turning the tape over so it would coil towards the outside of the house and perhaps hit the basement gap correctly. Nope, no dice. I went to pull it out again to see how far I had gotten it, and it has snagged.

I have the very bad feeling that the tape is caught on the power line that runs around the baseboards in the office. I stopped messing with it tonight. I will grab my handyman neighbor tomorrow and ask for help, call my brother the theatrical electricion (works in a theater, not overly emotional), flip the appropriate circuit breaker, and pull the baseboard off. Feh. This was supposed to be easy.

Mr. Madison's War. Teaching

Mr. Madison's War.

Teaching Recap.

I stuck pretty much to the notes, but the weight of the class was once again swung towards the early part of the outline.

I did indeed set up the class as the United States struggling to retain sovereignty in a world at war, emphasized the total war between England and France, and argued that the law of nations says that a nation must do whatever it needs to do in order to survive, and for Britain and France this meant that they had to make their foreign policy decisions about neutral countries on purely pragmatic grounds involving self interest and the war.

From there I gave them a standard diplomatic/political history - we have not had diplomatic history before. We got the Jay Treaty, the election of 1796, the French privateers, XYZ, (forgot if the navy was mobilized before or after XYZ), Quasi-War with France, Hamilton gets caught by Adams, Adams and the theory of balance between rich and poor, Adams makes peace, Hamilton splits Federalists, Election of 1800, Hamilton pick Jefferson over Burr, Peace of Amiens, Louisiana Purchase, War again, Orders in Council of 1805 ending broken voyages, Impressment again, Embargo, end of Embargo.

That took about 50 minutes, leaving me half an hour for the rest. We spent a chunk of that time talking about the homework provocation. The morning class was pretty dead. The afternoon class was livelier, if only because a couple of the kids had gotten curious and tried to find the quote. They could not find it - it was my paraphrase of a Jefferson line.

Both classes brought forward the ideas that a free people are more likely to go to arms, that the American Revolution had only been won by professional soldiers, French and American, that there is a difference between fighting and continuing a resistance.

I then brought it forward, and asked what the founders' opinion of the current gun control debate might be. They had little to say, so I tried to provoke them. I made the point, loosely in the morning and explicitly in the afternoon, that the founders would have been willing to accept a law that urged people to own assault rifles and banned all hand guns. That got the afternoon folks going, and they quickly pointed out that the state militias evolved into the national guard, and that the state militias had all used armories rather than expecting everyone to show up with a Brown Bess. (I have not refreshed myself on the early national militia, as I recall from the militia laws of VA and PA, sometimes the law said show up with your gun, sometimes the law said that the state would provide guns for the militia, and as time passed the second approach was more and more common.) Brown Bess was the assault rifle of the eighteenth century: optimized for rapid fire military use of up to three shots per minute, equipped with a bayonet, and heavy so you could use it as a hand-to-hand weapon. I made a stronger provocation in the afternoon than in the morning, in both I urged them to use their knowledge of the Revolution and the War of 1812 to parse and test any modern argument made about gun laws, gun restrictions and the like. I had intended to bring up Chechnya and perhaps Afghanistan in class, but forgot to.

An aside, I may actually be more pro-gun than many of my kids. And I do not want one in the house. What I do intend, J permitting, is once the kids are old enough to know what they are doing we will take the NRA or equivalent gun safety class and the kids will learn how to shoot rifles at targets. I agree with the folks who argue that the way to keep kids safe around guns is to let them know what they are, how to use them, and how not to use them.

We took the last few minutes to hit the War of 1812 very quickly. I gave them John Stagg's interpretation about Madison and Canada. I covered the war in four minutes: Canada invasion repelled, US navy at sea, New York militia refusing to fight, Naval forces on the lakes preventing invasion, Militia running in front of Washington and the capital burned, Militia under Harrison fighting Indians in the Northwest, Militia under Jackson fighting Indians in the Southwest, Militia under Jackson being more scared of AJ than they were of the British and winning a victory. I told them they would get more Jackson next week, which they will. I like my Jackson lecture.

I think this class went fairly well. I will have to chase down that TJ letter and check the original quote. As I recall, he hinted at the sentiment that I put forward clearly.

Out, OUT damn thought

Out, OUT damn thought

I need to write this down to get it out of my head. Inspired by last night's performances, if I am ever in a situation to affect a core curriculum decision I will argue for the addition of "personal performance." Just as many cores have a "writing across the curricculuum" requirement where students must take a writing intensive course, preferably within their own discipline, in order to perfect their written communication skills, I would also require that they take a course on non-written communication.

This is something that would work best as a Chinese menu item, like a diversity requirement. You could take acting, any acting class, or musical performance, or public speaking, or we could put together an interdisciplinary class on personal communication where students would learn how to make, and how not to make, a Powerpoint presentation, how to speak to an audience, how to trim and edit a spoken presentation, how to use body language to convey interest and emotion, and so on. I would have students read poems, read speeches, create presentations, perform skits and otherwise get good at presenting ideas without mumbling or rambling.

Phew, it is gone. Now I can get back to work. I will come back to this idea.

Follow up on public

Follow up on public speaking

I checked with the morning section to see how many of them had ever done public speaking or personal performance. About a third of them had. Several had taken public speaking in high school, one was taking it this semester, many had been in plays or in small group musical performances.

When writing the syllabus I had thought about assigning Daniel Webster's Second Reply to Hayne and spending a class to have the students read it out loud. I decided it was a bad use of time, and that Webster was a little long-winded. Instead I gave them something else for the 1830s and some Abraham Lincoln speeches to read.

What I will do, when we get to Lincoln, is require them to read at least one of the speeches out loud, preferably Gettysburg or the Second Inaugural. They can talk to their room-mates, their cat, their dog, or the picture on the wall, but they will have to read it out loud and in a projecting voice. I find that when I read the Gettysburg Address out loud it hits me hard; I often choke up. When I read it silently, not even moving my lips, it is just words.

Trust me. Hit the link and read it out loud. The folks in the next cubicle won't mind much.

Free Ships make Free

Free Ships make Free Goods

Free Ships make Free Goods? Or Jefferson, Worms, and Embargo?

Today I am wrapping up the early republic, and I am a little behind. I know that I have to get through the War of 1812 by the end of the class, and I know I want to talk about the trade troubles, and I know I need to cover the late 1790s because that is where interposition/nullification first gets articulated. But, I am still not entirely sure how I will get there.

Following Elkins & McKitrick I will organize class around the way that the US was not taken seriously by European powers and had to constantly struggle to keep from having its sovereignty ignored by the participants in the world war of 1791-1814.

And I will do this while tired. Last night we went to a my brother-in-law's gig. He had gotten a travelling fellowship for last summer, and last night he went out to dinner with the sponsors, thirty of their closes friends, selected deans and professors, his girlfriend, and us. After a nice (but overly rich) dinner the other fellowship person talked for 50 minutes (using the word "articulated" incorrectly over 23 times - I counted) BiL talked for about 12 minutes about industrial spaces along the seafront of the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. It was good stuff - but we did not get home till after 10:00, to sleep until near 11:00, and the alarm went off at 6:00 as usual.

BiL is a good photographer. I liked a lot of his images, especially images showing the way that space was shared - shipyards, fishing boats, and people playing in the surf all within a quarter mile of seafront. European space is heavily layered, the other guy talked about walls as palimpests where one use is scraped off and another use made, but with traces of the former use still left behind. Just as you will find archways, filled in with brick, with a door and a window, BiL found harbours that had layers of use placed on top of one another. I find change over time fascinating. Then again, I am a historian and that is what I do.

The whole experience last night reminded me of the streetcar suburb that we live in - built in the 1920s with lots of bungalows all alike, and ever since then the houses have been modified and altered, the roads have been modified and altered, the people have passed through generations, and yet still the traces of all the earlier uses remain around us, shaping our space and informing our decisions.

I do think that when I talk about Sovereignty later today I will keep in mind the layers of decision, precedent and otherwise, and that I will emphasize some level of path dependency on the students. People made one set of decisions, and that led to others, and yet to others.

And, I get to talk about John Adams. Adams was fat, fussy, and vain - he was also remarkably balanced.

And so to finish prepping class

Homework: Respond to the

Homework:

Respond to the following statement: "A free people in arms, fighting in defense of their liberty, are superior to any army in Europe."

This is a paraphrase of a statement Thomas Jefferson made around 1810. The students are reading about the War of 1812 this week, while as I wrote the syllabus I was thinking about Charleton Heston and the gun lobby.

Answer posted Wednesday Oct 29.

Homework answer How did

Homework answer

How did the presence of slavery in the colonies affect the American Revolution.

I was looking for a coherent essay that hit some or all of the following points.

1, Presence of real slavery in the colonies, especially in Virginia, sharpened American colonists' thought about what it meant to be subservient to another. I had spent a lot of time in class arguing that because of slavery many Virginians had an essentially binary notion of freedom: you were free (and white and male) or you were a slave (and black). For the crown to make decisions for free white Virginia males without consulting them, was to reduce them to the status of slaves. They read George Washington to Brian Fairfax, 1774, where GW uses this rhetoric and we had done a close reading of the letter in class.

2, Lord Dunmore offered freedom to any slaves who would leave their masters and join the British in 1775. His action was disowned by his superiors, but it was too late: Dunmore had radicalized a lot of Virginia planters who would otherwise have been very sympathetic to the crown position.

3, Former slaves served in both armies. Particularly during the Southern campaign, British officers continued Dunmore's policy of offering freedom to slaves who served Patriot masters. They did return slaves to loyalist masters. A lot of black people fled to British lines, many black men took up arms, these former slaves all left the country after the war - part of the roughly 5% of the North American population who emigrated after the Revolution. Slaves and free blacks, especially from the North, also took up arms with the Continental Army and Washington made offers to slaves as well.

Several students made another point which I had not been looking for but which I gave them credit for.
4, The colonies had a strong economy before the Revolution. This economy was built on exporting tropical staples from Virginia and on trade between New England and the Caribbean. The colonial economy was based on slavery, without slavery they would not have been in an economic position to contemplate independence.

I ended up getting a lot of bad essays on this question - it was the preferred choice for people who had not been keeping up and wanted to BS their way through the exam. I also got a lot of discussion about slavery and the Constitution, something that was outside of the topic.

Scroll up for this week's homework.

Jefferson Recap The lecture

Jefferson Recap

The lecture on Thomas Jefferson went well, but I had seriously overprepared and did not get past the early 1790s in either class.

I spent a few minutes at the start handing back midterms (median C+/B-, 3 A, 3 F, generally good) and giving them the "this contains offensive words, the author presents her characters offensively, we know it is offensive, tell me why Stowe is doing this with her characters" speech about Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I organized Jefferson around "why does he matter" so that I could conclude that Jefferson's use of "The Earth Belongs to the Living" encouraged the nation to turn from worship of a dead set of documents to a live and constantly changing understanding of the founding ideology.

The tall woman in the afternoon class pointed out the ironies in this after class - living constitution is normally associated with John Marshall, Jefferson was a strict constructionist when in the opposition. I reminded her that Jefferson grounded his constitutional thought in natural law - need to remember to put that in on Thursday - and that his strict construction was somewhat tactical.

I did the usual narrative of his life, focused on his ideas, and so on. I added something to the outline (it is now in the outline for next semester) where I talked about Jefferson's inability to speak in public. In his one speech in the House of Burgesses, he panic'd. His throat choked up, he squeaked, and people laughed at him. I put this into a gender context, arguing that public speaking, proving yourself and bending others to your will, was an essential part of turn of the century masculinity and a central part of education in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. TJ could not do it. So, he displaced his masculinity from his voice and gesture into his pen. He wrote incessently, he proved himself and bent others to his will in letters and in personal conversation, and his wrist was his public organ. This let me set up Head and the Heart by focusing on the opening paragraph where he talks about his sprained wrist keeping him up all night - while with Maria he had hurt the body part that expressed his public masculinity, this hurt reminded him of his likely deathbed promise to his wife, and TJ broke off the flirtation in Head and Heart.

I moved Sally Hemings up. I might well have spent too much time on TJ's family and romantic life. I know we spent a lot of time looking at Head and the Heart - not sure if it was worth their time to plow through that. I know I got bored when I re-read it. I did not go into much depth on Sally Hemings and his second family, did not give the pop psyche of "his wife's spit and image, but black and not married so does not count (and the kids can not contest inheritance)." I am not sure if I should squeeze that into Thursday. Probably not; we need to move on.

I tried to do the French Revolution quickly. I need to check to see where I gave the French Revolution in other semesters; it crowded TJ to have to explain the rev althought the time pressure kept me from getting bogged down in the details. I did the quick Financial Crisis --> Political Crisis --> National Assembly --> King Loses Control --> Series of Governments --> Terror and Robespierre (very brief) --> Directory. It was all pretty sketchy, just enough to make the point that TJ was in France at the start of the Rev, and from then on whenever he heard about it he imagined the early days of reasoned debate and not the later period of civil war, scorched earth atrocities, and guillotines in the streets. Put French Rev dates on the board again for Thursday to help give context to the Adams-Madison lecture.

Morning section made it to 1795, afternoon section stopped in 1793. For both I was able to give Joanne Freeman's take on how to practice politics, but in both it was a little short and obscure. Give that again on Thursday.

We stopped in 1795 and then jumped to five minutes on why TJ matters. I had set up Jefferson and slavery in the second ten minutes. The kids read Jefferson's "Fire Bell in the Night" from 1820 but we did not get to talk about it. Use that when we get to 1820 next week. I need to remember that I do not need to talk about everything we read.

What I did not do was give the blow-by-blow of 1794. That is twice now in this era that I have skipped the hardcore review, the first being the Imperial Crisis. I need to think on this: are they better off having me explain Citizen Genet, Democrat-Republican Clubs, and the Jay Treaty or are they better off having me explain writing letters, gossip, and the personalities of the guys? The first is better for the weak students, the second for the strong students. Based on the midterm results, I need to reach out more to the weak students. But, based on class attendance and the midterm results, most of the weak students have been voting with their feet, not attending class, and digging themselves in even deeper holes. Most of the regular faces scored a B or better; most of the strange faces scored a C or lower.

How can I make class more compelling for the weaker students, and how can I grab their attention at the start of the semester so they get into the habit of coming to class?

This was notes for me, sorry readers. It helped me plan my class for tomorrow.

Edit - added paragraph on wrist

And back to work.

Carnival of the Vanities

Carnival of the Vanities

Carnival of the Vanities is up at Eric Berlin. I just submitted something for next week, my first Carnival submission.

I sent them last week's piece on Truth, Lies, and Compulsive Honesty rather than this week's long rant on Out of Character. Both are good, but longwinded.

I probably should have sent in the bit about not having to beat my wife, it amused me and funny is important. But, it is older and that piece has already served its primary purpose - it made J laugh when she read it.

A writing day today.

Thomas Jefferson Day Today

Thomas Jefferson Day

Today I give the big Jefferson lecture. I like this one, I spent a lot of time doing Jeffersonia while down in Virginia, I co-taught a Jefferson letters class, and I use TJ a lot in my dissertation.

I am review it in another window as I blog this, so that I can customize the lecture for this semester, and I had a random thought.

Jefferson never had a thought in his life that he did not quickly scribble down on a piece of paper. Many of those pieces of papers were then mailed to his friends - about 18,000 Jefferson letters survive and we estimate that he burned another 10,000 while preparing his papers for his death.

I tend to blog my thoughts, almost as I get them. I wonder what sort of a blog Jefferson would have kept?

And back to trying to fit a lifetime into 80 minutes.

A New Hero I

A New Hero

I am incredibly impressed with one of my students. She is a single mom with three children, 1, 2, and 4 years old. She works. She is taking 5 classes, and she is holding an A- average in all of them.

She makes me feel like a slacker.

Monday Homework. A while

Monday Homework.

A while back I said I would start handing out homework on Monday and answering it on Friday. I like the idea, but the timing does not work. I collect homework through Tuesday of the following week, and I do not want to post an analysis of what I am looking for until after that date. Some students are very good with google.

So, I will start posting homework questions on Thursday and will answer them on Wednesday of the following week. This week's question will be a Jefferson paraphrase that will get the attention of the pro-gun folks. How shall I keep you busy until then? I shall give you one of my midterm essay questions:

How did the presence of slavery in the colonies affect the American Revolution?

And back to grading.

I am not a

I am not a historian of the Vietnam War.

I study the nineteenth century, and I study ideas and culture rather than war and diplomacy. Still, I teach the surveys and so I have a passing familiarity with Vietnam. Why do I feel impelled to mention this?

There has been a recurring theme in the punditsphere comparing the Vietnam War with the Iraq War. So far I have seen the comparison in Op-Ed pages, on blogs, and in editorials. Some comparisons are better than others.

The next time I have brain energy and am not getting work done I will answer these questions, for now I leave them to the readers and to the punditsphere at large. I shall phrase it in the form of a student exercise.

In what ways is the Iraq war like the Vietnam War?

In what ways does the Iraq war differ from the Vietnam War?

What lessons from the Vietnam war are most appropriate for the Iraqi reconstruction?

My answers in a day or so after I write them up. (And after I dig up some of those things that I remember reading.)

Grading done, and so to fetch the little man from daycare, and then to buy more coffee.

Baby names to avoid.

Baby names to avoid.

J and I have been talking about names for the Macadamia (forthcoming). We have a short list, and we are fairly happy with the names on the short list. Going through this exercise has made us very aware of the difference between good, bad, and strange baby names. Eugene Volokh points out some most extremely bad names, including Latrina and Titiporn. Those are bad enough that I no longer feel quite so guilty about trying to get Norbert onto the short list.

I like the name Norbert, despite having a not very impressive neighbor named Norby when I was younger and despite knowing a gnome warrior in Everquest named Norbert, because Norbert is unusual, because it is a family name (as Norbertus, to go with Martinus and Marinus), because I like Norbert Elias's sociology, and because I like a name that means nor, North, and bert, bright or shining: Bright, Shining North or bright light of the North. Norbert is like Aurora Borealis, only clunkier and not in Latin.

It could be worse. My cousin has told his mom that the leading girls name on his short list is Norberta. He is a notorious kidder, so he might well be kidding. We will know in a few months. Norberta makes just about anything look modern and stylis.

Down to 10 papers, but I grade the essays in order of the identifications, so these ten were written by folks who had train wrecks on the first part of the exam. No wonder I am trying not to grade them.

Second followup Why did

Second followup

Why did I care enough about this to spend about 90 minutes of my valuable time writing it up? I am a cultural historian. My next project will be a study of masculinity, personal appearance, and physical charisma in the long nineteenth century. I have long been interested in the middle classes and in the way that people construct their social realms. When I saw the critical comments about Cat they pushed my "this is significant" button and I tried to tie them into these concerns. I should really have been polishing my skills at discussing legitimacy, the sub-topic of my current project, but I am grading and off my usual rhythms.

I write my blog in large part because it lets me try out ideas and write think pieces. This explains why the blog gets repetitive sometimes - I am working on variations of the same thought. Right now my thought is that writing this was more fun than reading blue books, even though I do not like my conclusion. Like most of my big blog entries, it needs a rewrite.

And so to bed.

Followup to the long

Followup to the long thing just posted.

The Public-Private dichotomy helps explain why same sex marriage is so disconcerting to many people. Marriage is a public celebration and recognition of private acts. It creates a legal protection around intimate human behavior. And, while the precedent of this legal protection stems from concerns about property and inheritance, not about individual privacy and happiness, the institution has changed.

It is possible to feel that same-sex sexual contact is acceptable in private, like pooping, without wanting to see it in public. If someone has internalized the notion that same-sex romance is filthy or disgusting, then they will respond to two people holding hands on a city bus in much the same way that the rest of us would respond to someone defecating on that bus. It helps me understand the distaste with which some people view actions that have never bothered me. It also explains the surprising popularity of the military's "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" policy. That policy pretends that sexuality is a completely private matter, that people who work together never develop friendships and never discuss intimate matters - remember that "who are you going out with on Saturday?" is an intimate question.

Out of Character? Folks

Out of Character?

Folks are often surprised when Eugene Volokh and other pundit types post recipes. Sometimes Volokh gets grief for cutting corners in those recipes, sometimes folks like them. No links, but you can find all sorts of commentary on his salmon croquettes if you google for them. Often, however, folks are surprised to see law professors and semi-professional pundits opine about things other than law and politics.

I bring this up because Cat Nastey has been having trouble with her commentators every time she changes her focus from her sexuality to the rest of her life. This got me thinking. Many people write blogs that are little more than diaries - I know that if I am at the computer I tend to blog whatever comes to mind at the moment. Many of the more readable blogs are focused in one way or another, whether on politics, or on religion, or on sexuality, or on some other hobby. Many of those blogs will often, as with Volokh and recipes, tell their readers about other interesting things in the authors' lives.

What strikes me is that many biographical blogs or commentary blogs will have an apology before giving Too Much Information - I know one person who puts spoiler space around TMI as if she were telling the plot of a movie. Many others edit themselves before giving TMI, I know that I certainly do. The odd thing is that there is a class of voyeurism blogs, like Cat Nastey's, where the entire point of the blog is that the author DOES give Too Much Information. And, oddly, those are also the blogs where commentators get all bent out of shape if the author has a life, a brain, and a personality. (Ob disclaimer, I sometimes visit voyeurism blogs for the cheap thrills, I read them more than twice for the personality)

Why is it that we are more disconcerted to discover that an exhibitionist woman likes Shakespeare than we are to find that a law professor approves of fellatio?

My first thought is that it revolves around the old Virgin/Whore dichotomy, with men feeling somehow ashamed of their own sexuality at the same time that they feel pressured to gratify their sexuality. They resolve this shame by displacing it onto the people with whom they gratify their physical desires, particularly if they have been engaged in what Gandhi called the sin of "sex without love." This is a common mental pattern among modern Western men, less common than it once was, and a pattern that the feminist in me critiques whole heartedly.

My second thought is that this is more closely tied to the history of manners and of polite behavior. Norbert Elias argues in his The Civilizing Process that manners were invented during the Early Modern era as a means by which people could create social distinctions. In the process they created social conventions that first treated defecation, urination, and filth as "disgusting" and then moved on to create refinements in the tools and methods used for eating. The whole was hinged to the use of custom and behavior to alter the animal actions of our bodies. Those who failed to follow the new social codes were stigmatized or, in extreme cases, treated as deviants.

Now, I am much happier to live in a land of flush toilets and regular baths than in the pre-modern world. The thing to note from this is that, according to Elias, the first animal actions to be marked as deviant are those that deal with elimination. Sexual actions soon followed, and although the limited privacy available before the nineteenth century certainly made sexual modesty and sexual prudery less common, sexuality was still something best reserved for private or for bed. (Pre-nineteenth century beds were often common sleeping places used by several people, not always related to one another. Consider Ishmael and Queequeg.)

Thus, to take an example of an 18th century man trying to learn his manners, the second precept George Washington wrote into his commonplace book in 1747 was "When in company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usually Discovered" (made known to others) and the seventh was a warning not to go about half-dressed or change clothing when out of your chamber - both involved physical modesty. The last twenty of the one hundred ten precepts all deal with food and table manners. He does not mention sexuality, but it is hard to be sexual without going at least half dressed or putting hands to "Part of the Body, not usually Discovered."

Most of the time when people are disconcerted by Too Much Information, the information involves the groin - either sexuality or excretion. By the same token, someone whose discourse regularly involves those "Parts of the Body, not usually Discovered" has marked themselves as a person without manners or social status. They are, in the Western European caste system, unclean. For an unclean person to claim a place in polite society, especially by participating in intellectual discourse, is something that hits us on the level of basic socialization. It produces a visceral sensation of wrongness even if we can not explain why.

This second explanation for folks' disparate reactions to people who break their pattern is less helpful than the first. We can try to train ourselves not to despise our sexuality and thus not to have to displace it; we can try to train ourselves not to engage in sex without love and thus not to have to despise our sexuality. Do we really want to train ourselves to drop our basic socialization?

Thus I do think that Carly is right, and pornography will never become mainstream even though the mainstream media continue to titillate themselves and their audience with mention of or discussions about pornography. So long as we have a strong acculturation that the groin is somehow unclean and disgusting, those who make their money from exposing their groins will remain outcast.

And yet, this too is incomplete. Let us add location to our discussion. Remember that Washington made two comments about body modesty when he summarized half a dozen books of manners back in 1747. Both involved the notion of "public." Do not touch below your clothes in public, do not go unclothed outside of your chamber. He says nothing about what we do in private. Indeed, because we can not escape the animal nature of our bodies, we resolve our learned disgust by seeking privacy to fulfill the animal need of elimination: the "littlest room." We could very well have decided that we would need privacy to fulfill the animal need of consumption, private dining rooms hint that way, but we did not. What is done in private may be disgusting to others, but because it is kept behind closed doors we effectively tell others that they need not concern themselves with it. In private, we do as we please.

The question of Too Much Information, then, turns from one of manners and the groin to a question of public and private. And, the line between public and private has moved and continues to move. We can continue to agree that some behavior is public and should be carried out regardless of whether others are around, and that some behavior is private and should only be engaged in when by ourselves. We disagree about where the line should be drawn (kissing in public? holding hands?) but we agree that there are some lines (pooping with the doors open).

Thinking in these terms helps us resolve the question of what is going on with the disparate reactions to people who go out of character in their blogs. The question about blogs boils down to whether a blog is a public or a private document. That, in turn, will vary by blog. Greg Easterbrook's blog-column for The New Republic is obviously public, so is Glenn Reynolds at MSNBC. Blogs written for a friend or a family or as the electronic version of a diary are more private. Many of these, the truly private blogs, are either kept locked and password protected or are rendered effectively anonymous through obscurity. If you do not tell anyone about your blog, they can not read it. Thus, most of the blogs that we actually read are semi-public. They are edited glimpses into the author's thoughts; nothing could be more intimate. But these thoughts have been shared, and edited, and selected.

A blog exists in an intermediate sphere, part public and part private. There are many transitory zones like this. Consider that while most work places are public by definition, most people work with a small group of people who get to know over a period of time. You can get to know your co-workers and become intimate with their thoughts and personalities, although you need not do so. Intimacy varies from person to person. We can think of the gradations of public and private in terms of intimacy.

"Too Much Information", then, will depend on the level of intimacy that exists between two individuals. This is something that is difficult to measure, and so to prevent embarrassment most of us limit the personal information that we share with people.

We can now answer the question we first posed, why do some forms of sharing violate some readers' expectations? When Volokh shares a cake, or a salmon croquette he is sharing something that he cares about, that he likes, but that is not particularly intimate. We do, after all, eat food in the company of strangers. It fits with the level of intimacy he has created in his blog. When Kat shares her love of Shakespeare, it fits perfectly with a blog that is a fairly intimate disclosure of the things that she cares about.

I suspect that the people who are offended or bothered by it are bothered because it violates their expectations of intimacy. They had come looking for a fairly mechanical discussion of ballistics (the science of moving bodies.) When she shares her ideas, she has opened up a level of intimacy that does not exist. My blog is in some ways the converse of the sex blogs: I share my mind and my ideas and am reticent about my animal nature. If I were to recount a sexual encounter, or tell you about my latest poop, it would jar and disconcert my readers just as her revelation of emotion and intellect disconcert hers.

And so to post some followups - let me know if you waded this far.

Things I learned while

Things I learned while grading

Firstly, I did not spend enough time on New England, particularly declension and the role of the British government in softening the original Puritan system. Next time, make some more time for that, and even if I do not talk about the Salem Witch Trials, do talk about the dominion of New England and do put a brief sketch on the board with the dates and highlights of the various charters.

Secondly, We pretty much ignored the Carolinas. As far as the kids are concerned, there were three regions in the colonies, not four. They know of New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Chesapeake and that is all. Oh, they have some awareness of the Caribbean and we did talk about South Carolina but we only talked about it once in the slavery class and in passing during the mercantilism sub-lecture. I do not know how much time I want to spend on the Carolinas but I do need to say more.

So far I have read the essays from the kids who did well on their identifications, gotten a feel for what was possible, and then graded a couple of essays. I am going with minimal markup so I can try to crank these things out by Tuesday. I also started reading Uncle Tom's Cabin so that I can give them their paper topic. I have no idea on the topic and need to focus on grading and Jefferson prep not on Ms Beecher Stowe. I also have to give the little warning talk on Tuesday to let them know that I am very aware that there are obnoxious language and offensive attitudes in the book, both from the author and from the characters.

J and baby are off to the farm market. I get to grade.

Allen Brill has a

Allen Brill has a very smart piece on the recent comments by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir and American general Jerry Boykin. He points out the terrible irony in people who worship the same Abrahamic God claiming that other worshippers from the same religious family are evil. He then takes the comparison in an interesting direction, focusing on a speaker's duty to tell an audience what it needs to hear rather than what will make it comfortable.

It is a good sermon point, I have heard similar sermons before, and it is a point well worth repeating. Perhaps the most destructive intellectual impulse is sanctimony (is that a word?), assuring yourself that you are fine while those other people are flawed, so flawed that you need not pay any attention to their words, their wants or their needs.

Discourse within a closed circle often turns this way, and it turns badly when it does. Brill looks at speech within religious communities, but you can say the same thing about speech within political communities and within intellectual communities. If you are reading this, you probably read other web logs. Look at your blogroll and your bookmarks - is there a pattern to them? Do you link to people who you do not agree with but who do make you think? If not, why not?

And I hear the wife calling.

LeeAnn wonders about shaving

LeeAnn wonders about shaving with a brush and soap.

I wear a full beard, which means that I only have to shave my neck and not the tricky bits around the chin and mouth. Even so, I cut myself regularly - my skin is just rough enough to catch the razor blade.

I prefer the brush and soap to the stuff in the can - it smells better, it applies more smoothly, and there is a certain ritual to working up and applying the lather. It does not take a lot of time or give me problems because I am stumbling tired in the morning - if only because I often wake up, eat, write, and only shower in the mid morning after I have gotten some work done. But even on mornings where I pour myself into the shower while half asleep, the hot water wakes me to the point where, if I am safe using a razor I am safe using the brush and the soap.

I recommend the shaving brush over the can; folks who are looking for a gift for their honey should consider giving one. There is something to be said for morning rituals.

And back to work.

Homework answer. I asked

Homework answer.

I asked Was the U.S. Constitution a continuation or a repudiation of Revolutionary Ideals?

This is an old chestnut in American history and, like many of the homework questions I give, there is no obvious answer. What I look for is that the students take a position and support it with historical evidence. So, rather than answering the question itself, I will lay out some of the main positions and the evidence for each. This is going to be quick and superficial; the alternative would be for me to write a short book.

It is pretty clear that the Constitution was something of a reaction to the revolution, and especially to the way that the contagion of liberty was leading more and more people to desire revolutionary rights. The question is whether the changes in the constitution limited the excesses of the Revolution in order to preserve the core values of the revolution, or whether the constitution so limited revolutionary ideals as to change the very nature of the social experiment. The answer will depend on what you define as the core values of the American Revolution.

If revolutionary ideals were those laid out in the Declaration or the VA Declaration: inalienable rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; government by consent of the governed - then the Constitution was a way of ensuring that these ideals would be carried out.

If revolutionary ideals were those laid out by Tom Paine in Common Sense and by the rabble rousers: government immediately responsible to the governed; an end to hierarchies and elites; society as a commonwealth based on virtue and simplicity - then the Constitution was a repudiation.

We did not read Paine this semester, and so most of the kids decided that the Constitution was a continuation of the revolution because it created a stable structure so that a republic would survive. So long as we have republican self government, we do not need to worry about the detailed workings or ideals of that republic.

I will post next week's homework question on Monday.

I like movies. I

I like movies.

I like movies. J generally does not like movies. Ever since we got her early birthday present (a DVD player) I have been checking out movies from the library and watching them while rocking the baby to sleep.

Tonight we wanted to do something together. I had gotten Gladiator from the library, a movie that she wanted to see. So we had family movie night. The movie was on, the baby was crawling around and every so often standing in front of the TV being opaque, J folded laundry, I read the Chronicle of Higher Education and we were social together.

We do not do that enough.

After about half an hour of the movie, the laundry was folded, the baby was restless, and we turned off the tv and continued our nightly rituals. Baby got to bed late, I am blogging briefly and then to bed myself. I just like to use Sam Pepys line.

And so to bed.

The Friday Five for

The Friday Five for Oct 17, 2003

Answer the following five questions in your weblog or journal. Make sure you leave a comment here with a link to your post (or just leave your answers in the comments section).

1. Name five things in your refrigerator.
- Skim milk
- hummus
- home-made jam
- leftovers
- sourdough starter

2. Name five things in your freezer.
- frozen yoghurt for me
- ice cream for J
- frozen peaches for the baby
- bakers yeast
- ice cubes

3. Name five things under your kitchen sink.
- big box of trash bags
- fire extinquisher
- dog fud
- cat fud
- I think that is all we have under there.

4. Name five things around your computer.
- piles of papers
- desk lamp
- scissors
- paper weight
- small statue of a dog that I got in junior high

5. Name five things in your medicine cabinet.
- niaspan (cholesterol drugs)
- aspirin
- cold medicine
- baby tylenol
- shaving brush and shaving soap

I do not much like this week's Five. It is a list, it gave me no pleasure, no memory, no self-knowledge to make this list. I might get or give some voyeuristic pleasure through this sort of virtual peeking in cupboards, but I doubt it.

Still, I posted it.

Flirting and relationships The

Flirting and relationships

The Washington Post has a nice article on the role of flirtation in modern youth culture.

This ties into my earlier thoughts about romance as the new edge play. There is a very real thrill to a conversation, a lingering brush of the hand, or to eye contact across a room.

Looking back over what I wrote, and over Carly's reading, I realize that two words that I thought were partially overlapping synonyms turn out to be technical terms. "Erotica" appears to be the publishing industry term for written words intended to produce some level of sexual arousal, while "Porn" is images and moving media. I was using the terms as they are found in Academe, where "porn" is material that is solely intended to produce sexual arousal while "erotica" produces sexual arousal in addition to having some artistic, cultural, or political value. So, D.H. Lawrence would be filed under erotica, a Beeline double novel under written pornography.

Under the same criteria, the mainstream movie 9 1/2 weeks would be erotica, pretty explicit but still erotic, while the porn knockoff 10 1/2 weeks would not be. That, of course, leaves the question of how do you file a movie that has both artistic value and graphic sex - imagine that say Henry and June was a little more hardcore. But, that is the problem with ideal types - there is always a grey area in real life.

How does this connect to the death of flirtation and to romance as edge play? Simply in the realization that sometimes, often, emotions are more powerful than physical pleasures. Or, from another perspective, desire is highly compelling. Desire is created from feelings, emotions, and anticipation - the imagination of future physical pleasure. It is a mental state. And, while lots of people will say that the most important aspect of sexuality is internal and mental, it is rare to see that art of sexuality, especially the commercial art of sexuality, take these mental aspects into account.

So, what is our application for todays little rant? Do something nice for your sweet baboo, just because. And, while you are at it, take some time to flirt with them. I think that, tonight at dinner, I shall distract the baby, take J's hand in mine, kiss her hand, and tell her I love her. That would please me, it might please her.

And back to work.

Morning teaching thoughts I

Morning teaching thoughts

I was looking over the midterms, and I was looking over that LONG thing I wrote yesterday, and I had a couple of thoughts.

The first is that I really do need to make sure that I have time in the classroom to go over the Imperial Crisis in good detail, blow by blow. I already knew that I had to walk community college students through it, and at Urban University I can safely say that while the good students can figure it out from the text I need to walk the weaker students through. So, I need to find about half a class of stuff that I can jetison to make room for the full crisis.

The second thing that I was mulling over was that I was wondering why my writeup for How Do You Work This was so very long. It was four pages, single spaced, in the word processor. The answer is, of course, that I went into more detail about what I covered. But why the more detail? For colonial history my teaching notes boil down to mentioning that I gave them one historian's opinion on one thing and another historian's opinion on another thing, we reviewed some facts, and there you go. For the Early Republic, I have been so immersed in it for so long that I can't simply pick one interpretation and summarize it for the kids - I have my own interpretations. So, I need to explain what we did rather than just blogging a pointer to it. I expect that the blog for Jefferson day will be long as well, although there I do intend to summarize a couple of the standard Jefferson interpretations and to use Joanne Freeman's understanding of the practice of politics in the EAR.

In other news, I feel much better today. I slept 8 hours - got to bed early and even spooning with J could not keep me awake. Then she took all the late night baby duty and let me sleep in until 6:30. Thanks J, I needed that.

And so to work. It is a grading day so expect occasional random updates.

How Do You Work

How Do You Work This?

Today I got more experience at teaching class while running on not enough sleep. All things considered, it went pretty well. I did better in the morning than in the afternoon class, mostly because I was exhausted by second class and lost my trains of thought several times. It is midterm week and we had a midterm on Tuesday. Not surprisingly, the turnout was low today.

The outline was:
Ratification
First Congress
Hamilton and Funding
Madison, Jefferson and the opposition
Women and society

I think I need to find some more recent cultural references. I got the name for this section from the Talking Heads song "Once in a Lifetime." I checked, and only one of the sixty-odd kids in class today had seen the movie Stop Making Sense. Another half dozen or so knew the song and a few more got it when I started reciting lyrics. "You may find yourself at the wheel of a large automobile, ... you may find yourself living in a beautiful house ... and you may ask yourself, self, how did I get here? ... and you may ask yourself, how do I work this?" In the movie of their live concert, David Byrne looks at his hand and wiggles it as he says the words.

My mind makes strange connections, and ever since I started working in the Early American Republic I have connected that early 1980s pop song with the period in which the founders were trying to figure out how to make a republican government work properly. I organize the first class in the three-class sequence that runs from the First Congress through the War of 1812 around the notion that the guys were figuring it out as they went along, were very conscious that they were setting precedents, and were very nervous that their fellows were going to make a mistake or become corrupt and so doom the whole endeavor by setting the wrong precedent.

So, what did we do in class?

After introductory remarks focused on the Talking Heads song I went back to ratification. I spent about half an hour working them through ratification and the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate. I framed the difference between the two in terms of democracy v republicanism, with the anti's believing in direct representation where each delegate represented a small homogenous district, every delegate was bound to comply with the policy wishes of his constituents, and constituents could, at any time, hold a public meeting and send binding instructions to their representative. He could then either vote as his constituents desired, or resign. There was no other honorable course for a direct representative. The Federalists, by contrast, believed in indirect representation. They were closer to the old New England assumption that it was the voters' duty to choose a proper magistrate and then accept whatever decisions the magistrate decided were in the best interests of the whole community. I proved this by pointing out the indirect nature of representation under the Constitution, whether the large districts for the House, the indirect nature of the electoral college, the effectively indirect method of having the state legislatures pick Senators, or the mediated election of the ratification conventions.

At around this time I did a brief discussion of the Federalists. I laid out their role as talking points for Federalist delegates, first written for the NY convention but then used elsewhere. I checked, about a third of the morning section had read Fed 10, a quarter had read Fed 51. In the afternoon only one or two had read them before. Note: three Federalists is about right - they were glad we read them but were glad not to have read more. Also, I am not fond of 72 - find a different Hamilton document. Both sections had someone who could re-cap Federalist 10, afternoon section had someone confuse it with 51 but we got there eventually. I worked them through the Montaigne argument pretty quickly and tied Madison v Montaigne to the ideal type of the democratic representative and the republican magistrate. I then reminded them that the US Const was not Sam Adams's Christian Sparta - there was no reliance on morality to create a perfect citizenry who could run a republic. Instead they assumed that people were imperfect and selfish and tried to build a structure that would contain and control human weakness. It was secular social engineering. I think I said more on it, but I was mazy at that point in the afternoon and I am adding this paragraph later at night, and I do not remember.

From there I made sure, in both sections, that I made the popular sovereignty point about the ratification conventions - the constitution was ratified by the people in convention assembled, not by state legislatures. The guys in Philadelphia (I blamed it on Madison, not sure if it was he or not) wanted to be clear that the basis for the new union was the people themselves, not the sovereign state legislatures. And, while this was largely forgotten in the Early Republic itself, it would be re-stated by Jackson during nullification and Jackson's notion of the union would then later be fully enunciated by Lincoln in the Gettysburg address and elsewhere. I even drew the little diagram on the board, with "the people" at the top and two arrows pointing down at an angle, one to each side. At the end of one bottom arrow I wrote "states" and at the other I wrote "national" to give them a visual reminder that the Constitution put the people in the sovereign location that had earlier been held by Parliament.

At this point we finally talked about whether the Constitution was a continuation or a repudiation of Revolutionary ideals. It was a short discussion, but I got some talk from them. I will talk more about that in tomorrow's blog.

Finally, I pointed out that the conventions ratified with amendments. I explained that the guys in Philadelphia had expressly chosen not to include a bill of rights because, as Gouvernor Morris and others argued, to enumerate rights is to limit them to the rights that happen to be on the list. Because no one can write down every right, it is better to have a system that is inherently structured around the notion of inalienable human rights. The guys in Philadelphia bought that argument; the anti-Federalists did not. They had had enough experience with rights developed from precedent and reason under the unwritten British Constitution and they did not trust a new written constitution with an internal structure based on unwritten rights. They wanted it in ink, and they insisted. While some of the proposed amendments were intended as Constitution-killers, in the end most states ratified conditionally and the conditions included rights.

That ended ratification and I was ready for the First Congress.

I was tired and goofed - I had intended to give them Madison's race against Patrick Henry for the US House in which Madison only won because he promised to write a Bill of Rights into the Constitution as amendments. And, after he got to New York, he pushed and prodded the other guys into doing a Bill of Rights so he could fulfill his campaign promise. But, I left that out. I won't be back. And so it goes.

Instead I jumped right into the metropolis problem. I asked what was the largest city in Pennsylvania? What was the capital of Pennsylvania? And Why they thought the founders had packed government off to a small town in the boondocks when colonial government had been located in Philadelphia? I then said a few words about metropoles, using London, Paris, and Boston as the example, and suggesting that while a metropolis that combines wealth, society, politics and culture can produce a rich and wonderful society, the founders feared that the confluence of wealth, society, and power would lead to corruption of the delegates. So, they packed the legislatures off to the boondocks and, not surprisingly, only Boston had a rich cultural life in the nineteenth century.

I did much better with First Congress in the morning section. I got there earlier, I was less tired, I had moved more smoothly through the material to that point. For second section, it took me several minutes to put a train of thought together, articulate it, and then remember it so that I could move on. It was not a good performance.

I did finally get going. I emphasized the problem of precedent, using the examples of Washington and treaties and of the Judicial system to point out just how vague and general the US Constitution really is. That is the genius of the document, it leaves the mechanics to Congress and the political system, unlike State constitution that tend to spell everything out much more clearly and have been amended and re-written almost constantly since 1776. Having set up the problem of precedent and, better in the morning than the afternoon, used MaClay and his diary to set the tone of constant suspicion about the meanings and purposes of precedent, I moved on to Hamilton and Madison.

In the morning I put my pocket Bio of Hamilton here. The afternoon got him closer to the end. I did my usual - bastard, orphan, Nevis, patron-client send him to college, King's College, Imperial Crisis, Army, Washington's staff, marriage, break with GW, colonel of a regiment, back to being lawyer, nationalist, at Philadelphia, the monarchy speech, in cabinet, active and energetic, wrote a lot. We will do more with him on Tuesday as well.

I limited myself to funding. I had not reviewed but rather did it from memory - one of the afternoon students caught me and asked about the bits I was leaving out. I explained that I was focusing on the parts that got Madison nervous, and she accepted that.

I started with assumption, arguing that Hamilton wanted to replace most of the old US debt and most of the state debt with new debt certificates, bonds, paying 4%. These new bonds would be supported by the government while the old ones had not been paid, so it looked like a good deal. (I simplified, there were several tiers of debt and Ham had subtle differences in how he handled foreign and domestic debt. She called me on that, and I did correctly explain that he wanted to pay off the foreign debt with a sinking fund (like a mortgage) while keeping the domestic debt going as part of his system.)

Then, to get these bonds back in place, he set up a bank and said that the bank would accept these debt certificates as capital - you could trade a piece of US debt for a share in the bank. (I simplified here, had to give one quarter cash, three quarters debt.)

The bank then issued currency. I forgot to mention this part in morning section until someone was confused by the whole money circle and, when reviewing it, I realized my goof. They got it the second time after I did a little visual exercise using the students in the front row as members in the monetary chain. This currency was backed by the bank assets, which mostly consisted of those debt certificates. The money circulated, fixed the former shortage of specie by giving new money, and could even be used to pay taxes.

Finally, Hamilton set up an extensive system of taxes. I focused on the import taxes - forgot to say anything about excises. Excises were irrelevant for the political point I was making today, but they will be very important on Tuesday. These taxes could be paid in bank currency or in specie, and the revenues went to pay the interest on the domestic debt and the sinking fund on the foreign debt, thus maintaining the value of the debt, which maintained the capital of the bank, which maintained the value of the currency, which was used to pay the taxes. It was a perfect cycle and very clever indeed.

But, Madison hated it. I set up his hatred in Elkis & McKitrick style by focusing on Madison's dislike of Britain. Madison wanted to favor France, the ally, but France could not generate enough trade to make money through the tariffs, so pragmatic Ham wanted to trade with Britain regardless of any wrongs they had previously done. Ham and Mad began to distrust each other. I then made brief mention of the deal that sent the capital South in exchange for debt assumption and moved on.

That previous section ran me through two whole chunks of my outline without a clear break or demarcation. I think I need a better outline. (Oh, for the record I brought into the classroom a sheet and a half of 14 point type with my key points on it. I only goofed once, in second section, as I was elaborating the very bare talking points.)

At that point, in both sections, I had about 12 minutes left. In the morning I gave them the long version of Martha Ballard, in the afternoon I talked about Ham and then gave the short version. In both I introduced Martha, explained why she was in Maine, talked a little about her work as a midwife, recap'd Laural Ulrich's story about the doctor with the forceps and the laudanum, and then worked them through a brief life trajectory. I did more detail in the morning, including her husband's work as a surveyor, the white Indians who trashed the survey party, his tax collection failure and jailing, her struggle with her son for possession of the house, and her husband's return and the resumption of patriarchal authority. In the afternoon I just kept it to Martha and the doctor. In both, I finished by looking at Martha and subordinate women. In the 1780s she had two daughters and some servant women living in her house, working at weaving on a loom, and selling the cloth. In the middle of the story she was alone. In old age they once again had a servant, and by this time the servant would not mind, looking in a mirror rather than doing what she had been told and then railing at Martha when Martha tried to correct her.

Finally, in the last two minutes, I gave them a precis of the Jefferson letters we are reading for Tuesday. I am looking forward to the Jefferson class. I am going to revise my usual outline for it, I have decided to work the emotional and family story in line with the political story and give them TJ in straight chronological fashion. That means I need to make sure that I have both families and ALL the kids in his time line. It should be fun.

I am glad I got some women in; I have been slacking at women's history. I need to remember to talk about Dolly Madison and the social role of women in a political system where crucial decisions were made over dinner tables. This is a very long writeup. And, even though I stopped to bathe the baby, I need to get back to either housework or grading.

Edit - added paragraph about reviewing Federalists and wanting to change Fed 72 for another.

Zombie Day I have

Zombie Day

I have managed to mess up my sleep, something that I do far too often for my own good. For the last week or so I have been getting to bed around midnight, sometimes a little earlier and sometimes, if the baby cries as I am heading to bed, a little later. The baby wakes sometime between 5:00 and 6:15. J's alarm goes off at 6:00 and I have to get up to help her with the baby. Last night I got to bed after 1:30, so I am on about 4 1/2 hours of sleep.

This would not be so bad if I were not running on several days of short sleep. Yesterday I took a nap in the afternoon so that I could function. I needed that nap, but it may have helped keep me up. If I had gone to bed at the same time J collapsed, around 10:00, I would have gotten some rest before the baby got going.

Or maybe not. The weather changed yesterday. We had wonderful strong winds much of the day - I opened all the windows and celebrated the cyclone. I did not shut all of the windows in the late afternoon, and when J and baby came home at 8:00 the upstairs bedroom windows were still open and the upstairs rooms were chilly. So, we closed up house and turned on the heat. The baby was cold, so we turned it up. J went to bed. The baby was cold and woke, so I turned the heat up again, and then again. I think I have the downstairs thermostat at 73 or so in order to keep the baby's room at a comfortable 68.

When we upgrade the HVAC, this spring, we will indeed want to pay the extra moneys to get a zoned system.

It will be an interesting day of teaching today. I have a LOT of material planned, including a discussion, and when I am tired I tend to fall off the pace, get sidetracked, and then lecture over the time that was supposed to be spent letting the kids talk.

I do like today's class title: "How do you work this?". It is about the First Congress and the Early American Republic, a period where national leaders were very aware that they were setting precedents that would shape all subsequent operations of the government, and it always makes me think of the Talking Heads song "Letting the Days Go By."

See, rambling and distractable. That is me today.

And so to finish prepping class

Classroom clothing Jill Carroll

Classroom clothing

Jill Carroll writes about in-class persona and the way we present outselves.

I think I need to videotape one of my classes and see how I handle myself these days. I tend to have different problems than the person Carroll uses as her example - I am male, bearded and in my 30s, in other words I look a bit like Dad to many of the kids. This helps. It also helps that I learned that you dress to teach, if only to show respect for the discipline. I teach in jacket and tie, slacks, and polished wingtips. I am one step less formal than a lawyer, but still dressier than most office workers. Of course, office workers no longer dress as they once did - downtown Philadelphia is mostly shirtsleeves and dockers.

Appearance is only part of your classroom persona. Carroll suggest that, on the first day of class, you answer syllabus questions with simple yes and no rather than going into detail. I might try that. I already work on presenting a LOT of energy. I walk around, I make excellent eye contact, I project as needed, and I use my hands when I talk. I should probably dig up one of the 19th century elocution manuals that Kenneth Cmiel talks about in Democratic Eloquence because I am sure I could be using my arms better. There is a very important middle ground between being stuck behind a podium and sliding around like Billy Sunday.

I agree with Carroll on a lot of what she says about teaching as performance, I certainly do think of teaching as a form of performance art. When the clock swings around to class time I break off my chat with the students in the front row, take a deep breath, and tell myself "Showtime!"

The wonderful thing is that teaching is largely improvisation. Especially for US history, I know the stuff. All I need is a brief outline reminding me of what I am going to say and, for some days and some classes, a few numbers or data to write on the board. Other than that, I just go. I really really like the classroom part of teaching.

Speaking of which, I have finished prepping tomorrow's outline, which is what I came up to the computer to do. Time to go back to grading, and eat lunch, and so to continue my day.

Warm Fuzzy It is

Warm Fuzzy

It is a very nice warm fuzzy when you get a random phone call from someone who wants to give you a job. This is true even if the job is only adjunct work paying an hourly wage comparable to entry-level retail work. About a year ago I sent cold resumes to all the nearby schools. Monday I got a call from a nearby comprehensive suburban state university. Yesterday I interviewed, and now I have two sections of Western Civ for the Spring.

It looks like I will not be teaching at the community college next semester - unless urban research university has an unexpected lack of demand for the US survey. I expect them to make me an offer in a month or two.

Now I have to dig out and update my Western Civ syllabus - and pick new texts, and pick readings, and do my work. Still, Western Civ is a fun class to teach.

And back to grading.

The new edge play?

The new edge play?

This is an unformed thought. I am writing it down to pin it down. I will elaborate in a week or so. For some people, particularly people who have been embracing a lifestyle of relatively frequent, promiscuous, and kinky sex, romantic love and even monogamy are the new "edge play." They provide an excitement, and a sense of risk and potential hurt, of a comparable magnitude but different nature to their edge play. Dirty Whore is in the process of negotiating with a potentially serious honey. Cat Nastey found that the most exciting thing all week was chocolate chip cookies delivered at work. I think I can find other examples if I look around, including a study of the physical pain of rejection via the Speculist.

I mention this because, elsewhere, Carly asks what is the new genre for pornography. One of the attractions of pornography is that it plays with taboos - this is not the only attraction but it is one. Porn generates excitement by standing right at the edge of social norms, pushing buttons to generate a feeling of unease, coupling that unease with sexuality, and then combining the two to induce fascination. This is one reason why inter-racial erotica is still prevalent, though dated, and why it always uses "Black" with the capital B rather than any of the other words to describe African Americans. This is one reason why youth, or age, or strange sex have been recurrent themes. (Ed. This definition is very unlike the German definition of pornography as anything that encourages the audience to treat a human being as an object.)

As you play with a taboo you both reinforce it in the short term and undermine it in the long term. Howard Stern, for example, gets much of the energy from his show from "I can't believe he just said that" - focusing his listeners on the norm that Stern just violated. But, over time, he needs to find new boundaries to push. Similarly with sexuality and sexual foci, they change as what was once edge becomes mainstream. Examples of this include genital shaving - from kinky to mainstream - and even anal sex. If I recall from when I last rented dirty movies back in the 1980s, anal was unusual, exciting, and rare. These days, it is difficult to find hardcore erotica that uses the vagina. The point of all this information is simple, not so much that we are waltzing to Gomorrah but rather that fashions change, that erotic charge comes, in part, from risk and discomfort, and that falling in love with another, committing to another, is a huge risk which will lead to terrible emotional discomfort if things go poorly.

I could say more about how many young folks these days no longer date. They go out in packs, they "hook up" for casual sex. Sometimes they hook up regularly and get married. But there is less of the ritual, less focus on one-on-one social interaction. I may be hopelessly mired in the world of the nineteenth-century people I study, but perhaps there is something to be said for dating, for emotional risk and physical caution, and for love.

This definitely needs a re-write, but not this morning.
Edit: grammar, white space, and one comment. It still needs a major rewrite.

Weak arguments The little

Weak arguments

The little man woke up at 5:00 this morning, and while he got back to sleep neither J nor I did. I was lying in bed with my mind drifting, and I figured out that the long blog on Lies, Truth, and the Meaning of Words has a massive hole and two questionable rhetorical decisions. Now I need to write it down so the criticism will leave my head and I can grade.

The hole should be pretty darn obvious. I use the rhetorical technique synecdote to argue that popular culture can be reduced to Jim Steinman. And, despite the passing reference to J. D. Salinger, I do not provide any other evidence of a popular culture that values pathological honesty. If I were going to submit this for publication, even as an op-ed piece, I would have to go digging around in the lyrics of Eminem, Britney Spears, and other popular entertainers. Or, possibly, I could include a paragraph on "keeping it real" and the politics of personal presentation. I might still do that, but I won't research for a blog article. Blogging is self-indulgence, and there is a limit to the amount of time I will let it absorb.

The questionable decisions came as I tried to decide what to do with my comparison of Stevenson and Steinman. I chose to take it personal. This fit with the motif of speaking truth that had come up in the previous two entries, and the whole 3-piece set may well have been inspired by an email I sent to DW yesterday morning responding to her blogging about how best to tell the very vanilla man she is starting to date that she can be romantically faithful but not sexually faithful. I told her to tell the truth, for living a lie just eats away at you. (Edit - she agrees that she is compulsively honest.) Writing that email in the morning brought the Stevenson-Steinman thing to the forefront of my mind, I chewed on it all day, and when I got home I blogged it myself. The point of the story is that the whole thing came out of personal reflections and personal experience. A blog is, in the end, self indulgence and my blog is a diary not a manifesto. So, I went personal. It was the best choice for a blog entry, but having taken it personal I am less likely to submit the entry anywhere, even to Bonfire of the Vanities.

The second questionable decision was to go from the personal to the political. Short-term political speech is something that has also been lurking around the back of my head for a few weeks - I posted a teaser to the thought on one of Kevin Drum's Calpundit response threads. I was ignored there, I might be ignored here. In any case, I saw the connection to political speech. If I ever revise these thoughts and put them into proper culture-vulture form, I will return to the opening dichotomy between artistic speech valuing a pathological honesty and political speech grounded in expediency. As it was, coming out of a discussion of personal approaches to truth, I continued to frame the political question in personal terms.

Finally, of course, like a good New England sermon, I gave an application for my doctrine. That, I think, was a good decision.

And so to grade, and to revise chapter three some more.

From Handy Latin Phrases

From Handy Latin Phrases

Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.

I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear.

For some reason this amuses me a lot.

And back to the blue books - slept poorly last night and keep stopping grading to do class prep.

Lies and Truth and

Lies and Truth and the Meaning of Words

The previous two entries have both centered on speaking truth. That, in turn, got me thinking about Adlai Stevenson and Jim Steinman and the role of truth in popular culture. Stevenson famously defined a lie as "an abomination unto the lord and a very present help in time of trouble." Stevenson was notoriously witty. He was also a professional politician and a man very aware that it is not always in the best interests of a person or a community to speak the truth at all times. In part as a reaction to that expedient approach to truth telling, Jim Steinman has been celebrating a sort of compusive honesty in popular culture.

Steinman came of age during Vietnam, a war defined by flexible definitions of truth. He became famous writing music and lyrics for Meatloaf. A recurring motif, perhaps the strongest statement in the music, is his compulsive honesty:

I want you
I need you
But-there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you
Now don't be sad
'Cause two out of three ain't bad

I would do anything for love
I'll never lie to you and that's a fact.

I swore that I would love you to the end of time!
So now I'm praying for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
'Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you
I don't think that I can really survive
I'll never break my promise or forget my vow
But God only knows what I can do right now
I'm praying for the end of time
It's all that I can do
Praying for the end of time,
So I can end my time with you!!

Compulsive honesty is at the forefront of Steinman's lyrics, but it appears elsewhere in popular culture and popular media as well. I do wonder to what extent the common adolescent distaste for "hypocrisy" is cause and consequence of the popular media's celebration of honesty. Holden Caulfield raged against phonies, and we all read Catcher in the Rye in high school, and his distaste for phonies resonates among Americans, just as it has resonated for generations since Salinger created the character. Adolescents, teenagers, are more likely to listen to music, read accessible fiction, and look for simple patterns to shape their world views. Part of becoming an adult is seeing and recognizing the urge to lie, temporize and spin; to see it in yourself and to understand its attractiveness to others. But is that a measure of adulthood that we want to encourage?

I admit that I still have a strong preference for truth telling and a strong preference for fulfilling a sworn oath. One of the things that I have discovered about myself is that I can not lie - a lie makes me so visibly uncomfortable that no one believes me. My dislike of lies is part of why I chose to give the little man the middle name Micajah, the man who spoke truth to power. (1 Kings, 22; 2 Chronicles 19) This compulsive honesty might mark me as a permanent adolescent, but I think a celebration of honesty does have important civic virtues. It is not such a bad thing to assume that others are speaking truth, and then to hold them to their statements.

I tend to accept what others tell me, once. If I find that they have lied or misled, I cut them dead - a fine 19th century tradition of social ostracism that we seem to have dropped. Salesmen, renters, people doing commercial business with me get one lie. Once I find it, I refuse to have any further to do with them. J and I walked out on renters when we were househunting when we caught them in a lie - in one case the man lied for no particular reason or benefit - and we turned and walked out of the house. I may have learned this habit from playing the board game Diplomacy, but it is a habit that suits me.

My approach to truthtelling extends to politics. When I teach the late twentieth century to my students I emphasize one essential similarity between the Clinton and Bush-43 administrations: both tend to use short-term rhetoric. Clinton was long notorious as a waffler and a "pander bear" because he consistently told whatever audience he was facing whatever it was he thought they wanted to hear. All public speakers do this to some extent, but Clinton went farther than most and consequently he regularly contradicted himself. Similarly, when lobbying for legislation on Capital Hill he tended to call Congressmen on the phone and tell them whatever they wanted to hear before they voted Clinton's way. He was good at it. But, each short-term victory came at the cost of long-term losses in credibility. By the time Kenneth Starr got rolling, many folks in Congress were perfectly willing to believe that the Clintons had lied about their financial history because they had all that experience at being pushed and prodded over the phone. As one Representative put it at the start of the impeachment trial: he did not care about Starr's evidence; he knew that Clinton had lied to him and so he was going to vote guilty.

George W. Bush is a similar short-term politician. He tends to tell people what he thinks they want to hear, and he tends to make political decisions for short term reasons. While Kevin Drum and others on the left argue that the Texas Republicans who currently dominate Capital Hill and the White House have a long-term plan for total domination based on hard-right ideology, I believe that most of their actions can be explained by short-term thinking and purely expedient rhetoric. Debts appear in the future, tax cuts come right now, so lets emphasize the present political value and not the future fiscal problems; tax cuts are the order of the day. Some workers might change their votes this month, so lets change tariff policy, and not worry about what it does to future trade policy, balance of trade, overall employment, or total voting patterns; selective protective tariffs are the order of the day. It is all short term thinking.

I think that much of the overblown rhetoric about the Iraq invasion grew out of this short-term political approach to language. The White House had a basis in international law for its intervention in Iraq, that is why they pushed so hard to get UN Resolution 1441 through. What they did not have was a political consensus at home stating that enforcing that resolution was a compelling state interest. So, they pushed and they puffed and they convinced enough people that Saddam Hussein was an immediate and real threat. Some of this rhetoric is coming back to haunt them, and regardless of whether dislodging Saddam Hussein was a good or a bad idea, and regardless of what we have actually found on the ground in Iraq, there is a gap between very specific claims made before the war and what we have actually found on the ground. Either we had a massive intelligence failure, or there was a planned and systematic lie.

I am using the same approach to the Bush administration that I use with my students when they tell me tales of woe and sickness. I believe them, at first. I then look to see what they do. The folks who are telling the truth tend to followup on their statements - I fully expect that the policewoman who forgot that the midterm was today and not Thursday will appear on time for the makeup, do her best, and recover from her goof. Some of the other students who told me stories will surprise me if they appear for the midterm, and will surprise me more if they do well on it. But, I will wait and let them tangle themselves up in their lies, or dig themselves out of their hole. I offer encouragement, this is not a cold and heartless professorius abscondus, but in the end the slackers will reveal themselves.

I have been watching the Bush administration to see if they will also reveal themselves as moral slackers. Anyone can lie once, if they do it again it is a pattern. And while I am willing to give a national politician a little more wiggle room than Jim Steinman gives his fictional characters, I can only go so far.

And so to bed.

No and "No" The

No and "No"

The folks in thepress and on the law blogs have been talking about "No means no." The problem with that is, as a practical matter, a meaningful percentage of women regularly us the word "no" when what they mean is "I want to have sex but I want you to do more to convince me that you want me." One study (unlinked because I read it yesterday and don't remember which blog had it) suggested that about a fifth of university women occasionaly use the word "no" this way.

As a practical matter, any time one person has sexual contect with another without the consent of the other, it is rape. They can use force, or noice, or a power relationship, or shame, or celebrity, but if there is no consent there is no go. (A couple who want to play rape fantasy and have a safe word, have consent so long as the aggressor obeys the safe word.)

So, what should we do? Should we expect women to say "this is rape" when a man goes too far? Should we draw a distinction between saying no and screaming NO? Certainly if we are teaching self defense classes to women to prepare them for future action it is a very good idea to train them to use words and noise to shock a drunken, horny date-rapist into realizing exactly what he is about to do. But these are not useful criteria to bring to a courtroom.

In a trial situation, such as the Kobe Bryant trial that is setting off these speculations, as long as she clearly and firmly says no, she has indicated her lack of consent.

As a man, these discussions lead to a sort of self-searching. Have I, in the past, ever put a date in a situation where I was pressuring for sex, where I disregarded her intentions? I don't think that I have, in part because I tended to mention that I knew the difference between "no," "not yet," and "not tonight" and would abide by them. I did. I am not particularly forceful or dominant in intimate situations. Luckily J does not play word games. That is one of the reasons I like her and one of the reasons why we stick together. If she is tired or not interested or not yet warmed up, she will say so in clear language. She does not play games with words, she does not do the "yes/no/maybe/dangle them on a string" thing. I do not and did not like those games myself. I tended to drop a person like a wet glove if they started to say one thing and mean another, or expect me to guess their thoughts. J and I are both awkward geeks, and we get along well.

That works for us, I still do not know what to say for "he said/she said" situations like the Kobe Bryant trial. I do know that if Macadamia turns out to be a dafter we will do our best to make sure she knows how to scream if she has to.
(Edit 1, added links. Might come back again.)

Homework I assign homework

Homework

I assign homework most weeks. In the spirit of the Friday five, I will post the week's homework question on Monday or Tuesday and then give my answer to the question on Friday or Saturday. Keep the answers to about 200 words.

There is no homework this week - they have their midterm - so I will give you last week's question.

Was the United States Constitution a continuation or a repudiation of the principles of the American Revolution?

I should have warned you, I am recycling historical chestnuts for many of these questions. They are not meant to be deep, they are just meant to make the kids think about the material we are covering and then write 200 words or so.

And so to the rest of the day

Morning thoughts This morning

Morning thoughts

This morning we had yet another gorgeous sun rise. The little man and the hound and I started out when the sky was just turning dark crimson and dark blue. We could barely see as we went down the path to the lake. As we walked around the lake the sky kept changing colors and getting brighter. There was light cloud cover high and to the east and the undersides of the clouds were wonderful. By the time we were heading back up the hill half the sky was glowing in shades of gold and apricot. The sun itself was still hiding behind the trees, but it snuck up soon after we got home.

The skies here are much prettier than they were eight miles farther north. I do not know why. I have some thoughts - it might be the little lake (75 yards wide and several miles long), it might be the Delaware River a few miles to the West, or it might just be that the lake opens up the horizon so that I can see more of the sky than I could when we lived underneath trees and surrounded by three-story apartment buildings. Several skies this week, including this morning and last night, have almost been up to Charlottesville standards. It is hard to reach that - Charlottesville's unofficial motto is "yet another beautiful day in a row."

One more thought then off to the office

Midterm day On midterm

Midterm day

On midterm day I get a good look at the oddities of the student at a modern urban university. Most students show up and take the exam - I try to build a moderate level of stress to get them to study. A few students do not show up. I was the good teacher and called them (why did you think I collected your contact information at the start of the semester.) Two were in court, one as a witness the other as a police officer. One had been in a car accident a day earlier, two more have mentally ill parents.

I assume that the stories are true - most are, and the folks who would rather lie than take a midterm are folks who will bomb the makeup just as well as if they had bombed the actual exam. I will print out many copies of the makeup exam, it will be harder than the real exam, and my office will be very crowded on Thursday afternoon.

In the meantime, I will do what I can to comfort them, for we all need comfort.

And so it begins.

And so it begins.

I mailed out the first seven job applications today. I decided not to apply to three more, either because they were bad jobs or because I was too intimidated to try for them.

That means seven targetted letters, assorted writing samples, and lots of Fed Ex. Someone (me) forgot to check the calendar last week. I need to get the next tranche out earlier so I can use cheaper shipping.

So far my job searches have gotten me three interviews and no offers. Lets hope for a better showing this time.

In other news, a local state University called me to see if I could teach Western Civ part 2 for them. They run 1660 to the present, which means that it is nicely focused in the era that I know more about. If I can pass the interview and they can pay me, I might make enough this spring to pay for day care.

And back to checking schedules and grading homework.

ps, Is the term "A-shirt" really that obscure?

Thang About eight years

Thang

About eight years ago we were at an all-night contra-dance in central Virginia. One of the callers was from Texas. He had a remarkable accent. Among other things, he would call for the dancers to "swang" their partners. He liked to call dances with a lot of swanging; he was also a good caller and a lot of fun.

Afterwards, we started to use swang for swing. Through a process like that of Cockney rhyming slang, we began to use thang for thing. But, a "thang" is not a "thing" - the word had grown more precise meanings in our household vocabulary. A thang is a thing that you do that is distinctly yours, either in that no one else does it or more often because no one else does it the way you do. One of my thangs is making up terrible rhymes on the spot when singing nonsense to the baby. Another of my thangs is that I teach history with a focus on the words and ideas we use to comprehend our surroundings, and on the ways these words and ideas change over time. Popular intellectual history is my thang.

Recently, blogging about teaching, babies, and random mental effluvia has also been my thang.

Random thought I have

Random thought

I have to write this one down to get it out of my head so I can go back to concentrating on Lyman Beecher and the boys.

My blog suffers because I am eclectic. The sex bloggers do their thang (see the nws blogs on the left). The diary bloggers do their thang (see the Cheese over there on my blogroll). The pundits are all over their thang (see the top half of the blogroll.) I think about sex, I have a life, I have opinions on almost every article in the newspaper and on most of the items on pundit-blogs. I could very easily run small blogs specializing in each of these subcategories if I wanted to divide myself up that way.

I do not want to have lots of splintered blogs. I do not have time, or more importantly writing energy, to write about everything that interests me. This is most noticeable with the punditry: I will start thinking about something to punditize, I will even fire up Wordperfect and start writing it up; unless I can finish it fairly quickly, the idea will pass or the baby will cry or I will figure out whatever writing problem I have been stewing over, and I will walk away from the pundit piece. Most of my punditry never ever gets posted - I have a policy against taking serious work energy and using it to research or edit a blog.

I think this is why my blog is so heavily focused on quick impressions of my life - they are things that I can write up in the course of a single study break. I do write many of them offline. You can usually tell the offline entries - they are more polished, more grammatical, and do not wander quite as much. Even so, each of them takes only a couple of minutes to write and polish.

In any case, I am something of a frustrated pundit. I have opinions on everything, I will not post an opinion piece without putting some time into it, and I do not choose to take the time. So, I almost never opine on the questions of the day.

And back to Beecher

Writing sample? I was

Writing sample?

I was revising chapter three again this morning hoping to get it clean enough to use as a writing sample by noon. I can get the text clean enough; I will not have the footnotes in order. Do I send this place that I think would be a really good match a draft chapter with gaps in the footnotes but tight prose and a good argument or do I send them my published article, tightly polished, with a logical hole in the middle of the piece that you can drive a truck through?

If I can get through the last few pages quickly, I will send the big one.

I do not have to beat my wife

I do not have to beat my wife. She does it for me.

J has been doing a very good job of beating herself since long before I met her. That sounds terrible, I know. The funny thing is, she claims that she does not mean to do it. She just walks into things - her little toe on one foot is permanently fused. She walks into more things - she has quite the collection of scars on her shins. She has ripped the meniscus in her knee not once but twice - she claims it was a dancing injury - and has been scoped for it.

She did the best job of beating herself up when she was figure skating. Her first ice rink had grooves in the ice, her rental skates got caught, she fell and slid into the wall, and for the next six weeks she wore a sling because of the hairline fracture in her radius. In a different incident she bruised her tailbone and bruised some of the inner workings of her SI joint. And yet, she kept going back. She even woke up early in the morning to go to the rink, fling herself in the air, and bruise her hips and legs. For a while I would, before hugging and certainly before anything further, first have to check to see where the bruises were.

Lately, she has not been beating herself up as much. Now the kids beat her for me. The little man caught her a good one in the jaw earlier today, and while he did not knock her out or fracture anything, she has been sore ever since. His other new game has been the love tackle where he gets two feet on the ground, one arm around the front of your neck, and drives a hug through you like a blitzing linebacker (only cuter). Meanwhile Macadamia (due at the end of February) has been punching and kicking up a storm.

Maybe I should get an a-shirt one of those sleeveless t-shirts to wear around the house. I wonder if you can get those shirts in the 18-month size?

Edit - clarified last line for the Carnival.

Another silly poll -

Another silly poll - putting this one up so J can take it too.

According to the Belief-O-Matic, I am Reform Jewish. The funny thing is, I thought very hard about converting to Reform Judaism before deciding that I was more comfortable retaining some Christian rituals and simply worshiping from the "courtyard of the temple" when I went with J. J prefers the worship practice at Conservative Jewish Shul, so that is where we go.

Your Results:
The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa.

Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in order of how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith appears on this list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.

How did the Belief-O-Matic do? Discuss your results on our message boards.

1. Reform Judaism (100%)
2. Liberal Quakers (96%)
3. Unitarian Universalism (93%)
4. Bahá'í Faith (87%)
5. Sikhism (84%)
6. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (82%)
7. Neo-Pagan (81%)
8. Orthodox Judaism (72%)
9. Mahayana Buddhism (68%)
10. Islam (67%)
11. Secular Humanism (64%)
12. New Age (64%)
13. Theravada Buddhism (62%)
14. Jainism (61%)
15. Orthodox Quaker (59%)
16. Hinduism (52%)
17. Scientology (50%)
18. Taoism (48%)
19. New Thought (47%)
20. Nontheist (39%)
21. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (38%)
22. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (36%)
23. Seventh Day Adventist (36%)
24. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (33%)
25. Eastern Orthodox (31%)
26. Roman Catholic (31%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (18%)

The Friday Five -

The Friday Five - what's a day between friends.

1. Do you watch sports? If so, which ones?

I watch pro football on TV, rarely for more than half an hour at a sitting these days. I will sometimes watch college football or pro baseball on TV. One of my favorite naps is where I turn on a sporting event on the TV, lie down on the couch without my glasses, and drift off to the sound of the crowd and the white noise chatter of the announcers.

2. What/who are your favorite sports teams and/or favorite athletes?

I tend to watch the Philadelphia Eagles. I check my undergraduate team in the sporting papers, but they are division III NESCAC and are never televised.

3. Are there any sports you hate?

There are none I hate, there are many I am apathetic about. I honestly do not know and could not care who is the current middleweight boxing champion, who leads the NASCAR or IROC, or who plays first base for the Yankees.

4. Have you ever been to a sports event?

Yes. I had season tickets to the Eagles for a couple of years during the Buddy Ryan era with a buddy. We were up in the 700 level with the drunks and rowdies. It was fun. I left town about the time we could have moved down to the 600 level, but we would not have gone down. Sure, you see the game better, but you lose the fun.

I have also been to occasional big time college football games while in grad school, to a fair number of Phillies games (sit in the bleachers, good fun), to see the Sixers (once), Flyers (once), a few college hoops games, and during undergrad I caught all the home football games, some away football games, some men's rugby games, and many women's rugby games.

5. Do/did you play any sports (in school or other)? How long did you play?

I played in high school. It was a small school. I took two or three varsity letters in track, running sprints and throwing weights, one in cross country my junior year, one in soccer for managing the team my sophomore year, and one in football for being a warm body my senior year. I was a senior, so I got in on enough special teams to get the letter. The scary thing is that as a 5'6", 140 pound senior I was not the smallest of the defensive linemen. If I had gone out the year before as well I probably would have started (strong for my size, and all that sprinting in track made me very quick off the ball).

Of them all, cross country had the hardest practices, football made the biggest difference in my personality while I was playing.

That was easy enough!

Job applications. The first

Job applications.

The first set of job applications are due on Wednesday of next week. I help off on sending them because 1, I let myself get eaten by the grading and 2, because I wanted to be as far along my revisions as possible before I signed my name to a letter saying I was almost done.

Well, grading took too long, and I am still looking at chapter 3. But, the letters will go out anyhow.

This is a much thinner year than last year. Of the half-dozen jobs with deadlines in mid October, there are two good jobs in my field, another three or four so so jobs, and another three that I am underqualified for. I am not a senior scholar, and I only have one weak publication.

Still, nothing ventured nothing gained. And out they will go.

And so to revise my stock letter

Site meters I am

Site meters

I am playing with site meters again. The first two do not agree with each other. Why? because I am both vain and curious and I want to see how many (few) people visit my ramblings.

I put a provocative

I put a provocative comment on Kevin Drum's blog talking about short-term goals and the Bush (43) and Clinton presidencies. I should probably elaborate on that - but not at the expense of getting real work done. I might have something later this weekend.

Fall Blues Why do

Fall Blues

Why do we call them the fall blues, when the colors for fall are the red and orange of the fading leaves, or the greys and browns of clouds and bare branches?

In the last few days I have had a couple of students come to me to explain that they had fallen into a funk, had stopped going to class, and needed to get their academic lives back on track. I gave them what advice and encouragement I could, steered them to counseling, and worked up recovery plans to get them back up to speed in my classes.

Looking back at late September, I wonder how much of my getting stuck in grading was also related to a fall funk. I certainly went through a couple of not very productive weeks; I have had a little more trouble with my sleep than sometime, and the light is indeed fading.

But, the leaves are just barely turning - it is almost too early for seasonal emotional troubles.

In any case, I am working on job applications, and while the jobs in New Hampshire and Vermont are not as good as I first thought, the jobs in Washington State and industrial Ohio look better than I had first thought. All of them, other than the Ohio job and a not very good job in West Virginia, are far far to the north. I would have to invest heavily in full spectrum light bulbs.

We use artificial light to correct for the fading colors of the fall; electric sunlight keeps us on a more even keel if only we can get it. Mechanical light makes a fine metaphor for, well, something - especially when we remember all the other metaphors that use light. We had the enlightenment, that period when people praised themselves for spreading, well, new light, and helping others see. The Great Awakening was also built around the "new light" - odd that the illuminati, or enlightened ones, were so strongly opposed by the new lights. Light is a powerful metaphor for knowledge and ability, whether in these cases or in Plato's cave. And false light, mechanical sunlight, brings happiness and, in another meaning of the word, lightness to our emotional selves. Franklin always held that we can change ourselves by acting in a new way, rather than seeking for the natural he was perfectly willing to create naturalness - I forget how he referred to the artificial but I suspect that he praised artifice as skill and hated it as pretense.

But, false light can create happiness. One of the many things that makes me happy is hot peppers, and with the turn to the fall they are dying unless I put them in pots, an environment even more "artificial" than my garden and bring them inside. But even inside our windows are not big enough, and the baby is so destructive, that I fear the peppers will not survive if I just leave them out. I shall have to put them in the basement, and then talk to the marijuana growers to get the right combination of lights, heats, and timers to grow a crop of hot peppers in the basement. That will indeed be an artificial environment, driven by false light. But, it will indeed make me happy.

And back to research jobs - that was one heck of a ramble wasn't it.

Hoorah, Hooray, a writing

Hoorah, Hooray, a writing day today.

I am taking most of this morning as a writing day - going through chapter three again and copy editing. I found a couple of awkward bits, a couple of bad transitions, and a couple of paragraphs that said nothing and had to go. I still have a logic problem where I set up a problem, mention a couple of people who talked about it, give a close reading to a primary source, and then seque directly into a new problem or issue raised by that source - without ever resolving the initial problem. It gives the whole thing a strong Alice's Restaurant feel, even after I don't know how many drafts where I tried to keep myself on tack. The argument itself is tight, I just don't like the feeling of indeterminacy I am getting out of the middle sections of this chapter.

And so to shower, eat lunch, and meet a student - she probably wants to talk about her paper.

Constitution It was Constitution

Constitution

It was Constitution day. We opened with housekeeping - returning the papers, talking about Tuesday's midterm, then dove into Constitution.

I need to revise the first section of this outline; it did not flow well. I started with the Articles and the problems of the Articles. I emphasized the Newburgh conspiracy, Rhode Island inflation, inability to fulfill the Treaty of Paris, British forts on the frontiers, internal trade barriers, and an unwillingness to pay their debts. I placed the whole thing in the context of 18th-century states as institutions devoted to collecting taxes, borrowing money, and paying soldiers, and argued that because the US under the Articles was unable to collect taxes or pay its debts that it was not taken seriously as an 18th century state.

I then did the short version of Shays's rebellion - map of MA on the board, laid out merchants, eastern regions, western farmers. I ran through western grievances and made it clear, by using revolutionary language to describe the dispute, that the western farmers were using the rhetoric and ideals of the Am Rev against the eastern leaders who were trying to perpetuate and continue the Am Rev. I did not do the roleplay exercise, it takes too much time.

From there I broke, and this was a break in the rhythm of the class. I turned to religion, quickly summarized what the continental congress had done, then ran over MA tightening its establishment while loosening test acts, the middle states loosening both establishments (weak to begin with) and test acts, and Virginia doing Jefferson's statute. Note - assign the Jefferson statute, Madison's memorial and remonstrance, or both next time.

The religion mini-lecture broke the buildup to Philadelphia. It should have come first, or in another class. I probably should have cut it and used the time to talk about this week's homework question: "Was the US Constitution a continuation or a repudiation of Revolutionary ideals?" We are long on lecture, short on discussion.

Finally, we got to Philadelphia. I introduce Madison, gave them the VA and NJ plans, ran through the great compromise, and briefly explained split sovereignty. I compared it to the drawings I did earlier on colonial v British notions of the imperial constitution - sort of a Jack Greene light. I took the last couple of minutes to cover constitution and slavery - import restrictions and the 3/5 clause.

Tuesday is the midterm, next week we get to play with Ratification and the First Congress. Reminder - keep ratifications short short short.

Sleep Trouble I sometimes

Sleep Trouble

I sometimes have trouble sleeping. Last night was one of those times. But last night was different, last night the little man also had trouble sleeping. I am now very tired indeed.

Baby was cranky at dinner, skipped dinner, had a bottle, refused to sleep, got a second wind, played, got cranky, had a second bottle, and went to bed around 9:00. I goofed - through much of the evening J had been waiting for me to tag out from grading and take the baby, and I had been waiting for J to tag out from baby duty and give me the baby. She got cranky because she felt stuck with the baby while she had things to do for work. Baby to bed, J went to bed around 10:00. I stayed up to work on the exam for Thursday. Around 11:00 I finished that subset of the exam and decided that I was tired and not very functional. I was also not sleepy. Got to bed around 12:00 and drifted lightly - the weather warmed up and I think the furnace was set too high.

A little after 1:00 the little man woke up and started to screech; it was a horrendous sound. I tried rocking him, tried giving him his pinkie, tried moving to the bed in his room, all to no avail. We went down and had something to drink; little man had some milk and some cheerios and part of a slice of challah, then we went up again around 1:35 or so. He was wet, so I changed him. He was very wet, as was the bottom of his undershirt. J had added an extra layer because he had woken up cold the night before. I do not know if he sweated up his shirt, if he spilled milk on it while leaving his blanket-sleeper dry, or if I had squeezed urine out of the diaper while holding the baby, but his shirt was wet. I was putting the bottom of the sleeper back together so I could open the top and remove the T-shirt when J came in. She sent me back to bed and took over on baby. Baby was asleep within ten minutes.

Around 2:00 J got up to get a snack, and I got up to get a snack a few minutes later. I was hot and hungry and not sleepy. My pulse was going pretty fast, in the eighties, and I could not settle down to sleep. Niacin and the frustration of screaming baby seem to have teamed up to keep me awake. J had some cereal, I had some yoghurt, J went to sleep, I stayed awake until almost 4:00. Finally I got to bed. At 6:15 the baby woke up screaming again. I took him downstairs and fed him breakfast, then fell asleep in the kitchen chair while "watching" the baby while J showered and got ready. Once she came down, I went back to bed and slept until 10:00. I then took a little while to get woken, to walk the dawg, and to eat. I am just now blogging before starting my work day.

I am sometimes tempted to seek a prescription for that new tiredness drug.

Dult I love to

Dult

I love to teach. I do not like to grade. I grade slowly and I have trouble keeping myself at it. Teaching, alas, means grading. Unles, of course, I end up at a research university where TA s or hired graders can help me out. Even a MA University should have grad students I can farm the grading off to.

It is a mark of adulthood that you are able to make yourself do things that you do not like to do. Sometimes I worry that I am not yet a dult. I am very self-indulgent, something that really bugs J and that bugs me as well.

And so to fetch the baby

Morning Twilight Fall is

Morning Twilight

Fall is well on its way. It was cold last night and dark this morning. I woke at 5:00, in part because I was cold, in part because I had to pee, but in the end because the baby was crying. I had been having a strange dream - we were moving from one apartment to another apartment, in the winter. I was married to J, and I was at the same time back in undergraduate. The apartments were very like those that J's friend C used to live in, a place I only visited once or twice when C and her boyfriend were moving house. In my dream, I took a break from moving to walk the dawg. She went out and peed on a piece of ice, and it froze instantly. I then peed on the same ice and it also froze.

I got out of bed, peed properly, and then got the crying baby. He had gotten cold. I brought him into bed with us. He quickly warmed up as long as I had my arms around him, and he went back to sleep. I did not sleep. I had a baby on my arm, and the baby's free hand was flailing and flailing. It is hard to get