Showing posts with label CitizenSE Hawthorniana Link-o-rama Friday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CitizenSE Hawthorniana Link-o-rama Friday. Show all posts

Thursday, July 07, 2016

This Is A (Guccifer 2.0) Test of the Google Search System

Quick questions to my remaining readers:

  • are you aware of the Guccifer 2.0 story?
  • have you been trying to follow it?
  • have you been able to find any good sources on it through google searches?

Just to be clear, I had not been aware of or following the story until one of my best friends started blogging about it in mid-June.  As he's been writing about his experiences going down that particular rabbit hole, I've started looking for other sources.  Not very hard, to be sure.  And I know that I've been on leave from blogging for awhile, but what ever happened to google's blog search?  Back in the bad old days, I was at least able to find a wide range of voices on almost any topic, no matter how obscure.  But when I search "Guccifer 2.0" on google, I get nothing interesting or new.  If I didn't know about posts like this, I would never be able to find them.

There's got to be more out there, right?  Are you there, google?  It's me, The Constructivist.

This will have been a test of the google search system.  This will have been only a test.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Fredonia's Got Talent!

My students in Fantasy Fiction and Novels and Tales did some amazing work throughout the semester, and particularly at the end.  Unfortunately, most of them chose not to do web authoring projects, so I can't share their work here.  Fortunately, a good number did; here are links to their work:
Please check 'em out while you're waiting for me to finish grading!

[cross-posted at Mostly Harmless and sf@SF]

Friday, March 12, 2010

Go Blue! Hamilton Goes Need-Blind

Thought I'd pass along the news from Inside Higher Ed: my alma mater, Hamilton College, has invested the $2M it will cost per year to go completely need-blind in its admissions policies. I wonder if there are any long-range plans to grow the college, should this policy attract more of the best students in the state and country to Clinton?

[Update 1 (10:07 am): Check out the average financial aid package that Hamilton is able to offer. The endowments of private colleges like Hamilton are so high (but not even stratospheric by the standards of the Billion Dollar Endowment Club) that they can afford to discount tuition and fees so that larger numbers of students pay less than 40% of the $50K cost per year of attendance. Just imagine what kind of aid SUNY could offer if they changed their structures to make it easier for privates to go public and pool their endowments in a single SUNY endowment.]

Friday, January 23, 2009

Someone Break the News to David Horowitz

News flash: there are a lot of Republicans on the PGA Tour. Finally, David Horowitz has a chance to prove how fair and balanced he can be by mounting a campaign for a golfer's bill of rights, promising to discover the networks behind this nefarious conspiracy to exclude liberal golfers, and publishing a list of the 100 Most Dangerous Golfers.

Friday, July 18, 2008

On That Day in Golf History: The Ward Wettlaufer Story

A story from golf history with Hamilton College and western NY angles? How could I not take the opportunity to pass it along to my colleagues? While I'm trying to educate academia's golfy philistines, I'd better link as well to some of my somewhat more analytical golf writing thus far this summer....

Friday, July 04, 2008

I'm Back*

*Well, kinda. Just here celebrating Hawthorne's birthday by linking to this (read all the comments there on the only movie I've seen in a theater in, um, I believe, since onechan was born), which is one of the many great posts I've missed in the last month and a half while I've been away. And, yes, there is a (boring) story about that last part. But, no, I'm not telling it now. Got fireworks to go to!

Friday, May 16, 2008

To the Virtual Barricades!

Picking up where the public intellectual/op-ed discussion at The Edge of the American West left off (last I checked), here's an op-ed by UUP president Phil Smith on the executive branch mistreatment of SUNY. Critical enough for ya? Or too conciliatory?

Guess Who's Got His Grading Done?

Not me. MacDougall. And he's got a fantastic series on concept courses going. I'll join in sometime this month, with luck! For now, you can check out my place-based Introduction to African American Literature and Culture, a model I cribbed from Kenny Mostern.

[Update (5/19/08, 3:39 pm): Nope, I'm still not done, but MacDougall has installed his third course widget thingie--this one will actually be (co-)taught.]

Friday, April 25, 2008

Now That's More Like It!

I'm a little late at spreading the word about this bill to secure collective bargaining rights for graduate student employees, but better late than never, eh? Get on the horn and ask Obama and Clinton (they're co-sponsors) to pledge to put some real weight behind this when he or she is elected President. And get your representatives to sign on. Here's who's in so far:

Senators Kennedy, Brown, Clinton, Feingold, Obama, and Schumer
Representatives Miller, Andrews, Grijalva, and Tierney

Friday, March 21, 2008

Who Is This Guy? Revisited

Dropping a link in a comment over at Tim Burke's place is roughly the equivalent to getting "Around the Web"ed by Inside Higher Ed, apparently. So in the interest of keeping this blog going while pre-spring break work calls, I'll add for his readers in particular that another sign of how low The Nation has sunk is to compare your reaction to what's-his-face's recent piece there with a couple of Arts & Letters Daily selections from the Times Literary Supplement that you might think you'd find similarly irritating for their "English departments r teh suxxx!" set-ups: Sophie Ratcliffe on James Wood and John Mullan on Rónán McDonald. If you're anything like me, you may have found plenty to disagree with in them, but also plenty of appreciation for their being, well, interesting and thoughtful review essays. But now I'm falling prey to the oldest trend of all in English: Anglophilia.

Friday, February 15, 2008

English is Rotten Here

Well, at least at Politics and Culture, according to Amitava Kumar. Here, too, though, I would hope. And perhaps also in the state of globalizing U.S. higher ed, as Andrew Ross suggests in a long excerpt from his co-edited collection, The University Against Itself.

Friday, February 08, 2008

We Interrupt This CitizenSE Hiatus to Bring You This sf@SF Public Announcement

For those of you who have been itching to see Samuel Delany's "significant distortion of the present" idea applied to George Stewart's Earth Abides, you've come to the wrong place. Go here, young geek! Or old geezer. Or whomever you may be. Westward, ho!

Friday, January 25, 2008

A Thing That Makes Me Say "Yay"--No, Four!

The Atlantic Monthly has opened its digital archives--which go back to 1857.

That is all.

No, wait! Marc Bousquet passes along the fantastic news about Adjunct Whore....

Oops--one more thing! Elizabeth at verbal privilege has posted her poetry commonplace book. Now there's a meme I'd like to see propagate!

Oh yeah, this is my 200th post here, too.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Zutto Zutto Tomodachi; and, The Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far)

Cross-posted at Mostly Harmless

Has a better ring to it than "best friends 4evah," right? Well, it has about the same meaning. It's a line from the song onechan and her friends sang at the graduation ceremony for the older kids in her yochien this past spring. Since we're leaving Fukuoka before she can get to take part in a similar ceremony herself--in fact, we've already spent a full day in Chiba--I'm taking a break tonight from LPGA blogging to convey a big "sayonara" to all the Fukuoka friends she's leaving.

Maybe their parents can read them the Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far), courtesy of Uncle Bill Benzon, and leave a comment or three here for him and onechan....

July 9: For onechan [in response to this and that]
July 10: The discussion continues
July 11: Onechan's Adventure [in response to this]
July 12: Where's Onechan? and Calling Onechan! Calling Onechan!
July 14: Help is on the way and There They Are! Yippieeee! [in response to this]
July 17: Onechan's Choice
July 19: Calling all kidz! Calling all kidz! [in response to this]
July 23: Sigh
July 28: Catch you later alligator
August 1: Where's the bunny rabbit?

[Update (8/3/07): New one--Onechan Tells a Story]

[Update (8/11/07): Another new one--The Little Worm from Kansas]

[Update (8/14/07): And another--Twas brillig]

[Update (8/16/07): And yet another--Sparkychan & Gojochan Adventure Time Mystery Theatre]

[Update (8/21/07): Check the comments on the last installment (thus far) for onechan's and imoto's immediate reactions to Sparkychan and Gojochan showing up in Dunkirk!]

Monday, July 30, 2007

A Real Citizen of Somewhere Else Moment

So on the way to the local Matsuri festival, the tsuma voted in yesterday's historic parliamentary defeat for the LDP. Inside the junior high school gym, onechan and I had the following conversation.

Onechan: What is mama doing?
Me: She's voting.
O: I want to vote, too!
Me: You can't yet. You have to be older.
O: Go-sai? [Five?]
Me: No, bigger. Like 18 or 20.
O: You should vote, too.
Me: I can't vote in Japan. I can only vote in America.
O: Why?
Me: Well, you have to be a citizen to vote. Mama's a citizen of Japan. I'm a citizen of the U.S.
O: America?
Me: Yeah. So I can only vote in America. And mama can only vote in Japan. But you and imoto can vote in both countries when you get old enough.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: And then when you're even older you'll have to decide which one country you want to be a citizen of.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: OK, mama's done. Time to go to the festival!
O: Yeah!!

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Lit Bloggers of the World Unite...

...you have nothing to lose but your self-respect and the esteem of your closest friends and colleagues. No, I'm not talking about the ongoing Mostly Harmless event--although Europhiles and Europeans among you may be interested in it. I'm talking about my campaign to get Michael Berube elected Mayor of Blogoramaville in 2008! Pass it on.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Somebody Tell Neil Gaiman

Thanks to the brilliant Bill Benzon, Gojira's telling Tie-Dye Hana Kuma onechan adventure stories over at Mostly Harmless. Reminds me of certain Sandman issues!

P.S.: Somebody (else?) tell me how to get real titles for my posts!

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Whoa! Japanese Defense Minister Resigns Over His A-Bomb Remarks

It turns out the exact same day I was giving my first talk on "Shifting American Images of Japan," Defense Minister and Nagasaki native Fumio Kyuma was in my tsuma's hometown sharing his own views on the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan--views close to the mainstream in the U.S., I would add, with the predictable result that Right Blogistan and the 101st Keyboarders are in Red Alert mode. Of course, in Japan, news of his views prompted a wave of highly critical editorials and other responses, leading him to first apologize for his remarks, then retract them, and later resign from his post.

In other news, President Bush shamelessly stands behind discredited Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and commuted Scooter Libby's sentence.

So far the most interesting analysis I've seen has been from Observing Japan. If you know of other interesting ones (even if you don't agree with them), please let me know. I'm sure I'll be getting questions about this during my talk this coming Saturday!

Friday, June 29, 2007

White-Blindness

In honor of BitchPhD's brilliant and impassioned takedown of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts's "reasoning" while explaining why the Court struck down some voluntary desegregation plans, I'll direct my handful of loyal readers and googlers lost in blogoramaville to my mid-'90s pre-blog graduate-student web-rant on whiteness, which was reprinted in slightly different form as "White-Blindness" in the 1998 and 2005 editions of The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States (and which I last updated in 2005 to bring a few personal references up to date).

[Update: For more on race, you must check out Daniel Gall's plans for Hug the Shoggoth. If this isn't on your blogroll, it should be!]

Special bonus for those too lazy to click, here's my now-dated-yet-still-sadly-relevant piece, with dead links restored thanks to the Internet Archive and a few extra comments and sources thrown in for fun:

If you're coming from my OJ Page, you're probably wondering why I highlighted "white." I'll try to make the explanation brief and make it make sense even if you haven't come from there, and get on to the point of this page.

Why should it matter that I'm white in my opinion over OJ's guilt or innocence? What does my being white have to do with considering the evidence and making a decision? In short, what does race have to do with issues of evaluation, judgment, or epistemology? Hasn't the notion of race itself been shown to be incoherent, self-contradictory, fallacious, without basis in scientific fact or religious doctrine? So what influence can an illusion have on people or their habits of mind?

Well, I suspect that most people would say that the answers are simple: it shouldn't matter, it shouldn't have anything to do with it, nothing, yes, and nothing. But I'm not so sure the answers to these questions are at all simple (and I have a sneaking suspicion that "most people" really means "most white people"). I certainly understand and feel the appeal that the utopic vision of color-blindness underlying these questions and answers has, given the horrible history that race-thinking has been such a constitutive part of in modernity, from the slave trade and slavery to genocide to ethnic cleansing. But I want to question the assumption that if we stop noticing race, if we stop talking about race, if we stop thinking of ourselves as belonging to any race but the human, then the system of racial oppression that those who have identified themselves as white have established will simply go away. I want to question the assumption that to "stop" doing any of these things is a simple and easy process. I want to question the assumption so endemic to "color-blind" thinking on race that the best way to fight racism is to attack the notion of race by showing it to be a cognitive error.

You can see, then, that I fully subscribe to the insight of the social construction of race, but that I do not conflate the idea of "social construction" with the notion of "fallacy" or "cognitive error" or "illusion." I prefer to think the idea of social construction through the lens of such concepts as "ideology," "narrative" and "public fantasy." (But more on that elsewhere.) Thus I can fully agree that I am not "essentially" white (particularly because, as Karen Sacks and Sander Gilman have shown, Jews became white in the New World; David Roediger, Theodore Allen, and Noel Ignatiev have made similar arguments on behalf of Irish immigrants to the U.S. in the nineteenth century--for cites, see below), but at the same time I can not ignore, downplay, or dismiss the privilege being positioned as white tends to bestow, and not only in this country. Nor can I simply assume that how I've been positioned in and by U.S. race discourses and formations has nothing to do with how I experience or reflect upon the world.

So let me pose an alternative set of questions that will bring out why I think my being white has a lot to do with how I understand the OJ case: How does my self-perception and self-identification as "white" (as well as perceptions and identifications by others) affect my perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and judgments, not to mention my life chances? What does thinking of myself as "white" enable me to recognize or cause me to gloss over or elide? What relation does my "whiteness" have to other aspects of my "identity"--class, gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliations, order and area of birth, and on and on to even less obvious ones like the enjoyment I get out of watching The Tick, Daria, South Park, The Simpsons, Dr. Katz, Beavis and Butt-head, and, well, just about anything on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim)?

Here's why I think these questions are better than the first three above. For one thing, those questions take for granted as natural and eternal the existence of "the white race." I would counter that this concept is of relatively recent origin, and that thinking of whiteness or race as some simple biological fact is a mistake. I discuss why this is so at length in my race page, so I'll just say it again briefly here. When I say that it matters that I'm white in how I view the OJ case, I don't mean that my whiteness is this accident of birth that has locked me into an inability to understand people of "other races" ("it's a white thing, I can't understand"). Rather, I mean that being treated as white throughout my entire life (along with a whole range of other socially significant categories--male, middle class, short, Jewish, from upstate NY [no, not just north of NYC--the real thing!], and so on) has contributed toward shaping my habits of mind and emotions, including what I tend to take for granted and my gut reactions, my attitudes toward the police, crime, authority, and the law, where I've lived, who I hang with and am close to, and so on. What I'm saying is that "being white" is a learned phenomenon, and until I started thinking about what kinds of lessons I was learning (usually after a friend took the time to call me out on something), I didn't even recognize that I was being taught, much less question the value of the lessons I had been learning.

For another thing, the first three questions above assume that color-blindness is always in and of itself a good thing. But think about that word. When you are color-blind, you only see in black and white, right? (Well, not exactly, they tell me I'm red/green color blind, although I can almost always tell them apart in real-life situations; still, I don't play those damn orange golf balls! But you can see the point here, right?) Isn't that counter-productive? Doesn't it actually reduce the question of race--the experience of living in a thoroughly racialized society--to a binary, instead of opening it up for interrogation? I can go on with this line of argument (the problems you run into when you reduce the complex history of race discourse, racial formations, and racial oppression to the realms of color, vision, and perception, particularly if you are committed to an anti-racist agenda that amounts to more than diversity management), but let's for the moment take this kind of "I treat people as people" position charitably. I submit that if you are truly committed to color-blindness, then your task shouldn't be to go around lecturing to all those (usually people of color) who are still caught in the grips of race-consciousness, but instead to make the case to whites of the necessity of color-blindness, that is, the recognition and rejection of white racial privilege. (For a less charitable take on "color blindness"--not to mention the first serious response to these comments of mine to date--check out Nkenge Maideyi Zenzele's "The Problem with Color Blindness".)

For those to whom this way of thinking is new, I would like to recommend a few works that were crucial in advancing the discussion and analysis of "whiteness" and "the white race" and which are indispensable today:

  • W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (especially the opening first few pages and the last chapter, but it runs throughout this 1903 book);
  • W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Souls of White Folk," in his mid-'20s essay collection, Darkwater;
  • W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (a thick tome from the 1930s that challenges the then-popular racist interpretations of the Reconstruction era [1865-1877], but still a classic, and the source of the "wages of whiteness" thesis);
  • W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (this 1940 autobiography/history of the pre-WW II era is still not often cited in discussions of Du Bois's career, but it is an absolutely crucial text for so many reasons, including an imagined discussion with a white friend in the middle of the book);
  • Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (largely ignored by whites in the academy in the 1950s, this is now the bible of the "race and American literature and culture" movement; see also "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks" in Going to the Territory for an update of his ideas, and of course read his novel Invisible Man if you haven't already);
  • Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (don't believe the hype that puts him as the black demon to Martin Luther King's black angel; read this for yourself--he's one of the best at exposing white supremacy, not only as it worked in the past, but how it is working in the present as well);
  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (a major collection of short and accessible essays that problematize the whiteness of the '70s women's movement and put racism squarely on the table in a challenging and constructive manner);
  • James Baldwin, "On Being White . . . and Other Lies," in Essence (from 1984; good, short, accessible);
  • Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (very recent but very influential book on the literary construction of blackness and whiteness, and of course don't forget to read all her novels and the less well-known essay collections she's edited--on the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas and OJ Simpson spectacles);
  • bell hooks, "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination" (in the collection Cultural Studies and elsewhere);
  • Patricia Williams, "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness," in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano;
  • Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind (excellent historical study that is a response to hooks's and others' work, including George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind).

The reason I cite these classics along with the more recent African Americanist work on whiteness is that any exploration of whiteness today is practically worthless if it doesn't engage, question, and respond to them. People of color have had to figure out white people and survive under white supremacy for centuries. These works represent the tip of the iceberg of black thinking on whiteness. Check out collections like Home Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, ...But Some of Us Are Brave, Homegirls, Haciendo Caras: Making Face/Making Soul, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Criticism in the Borderlands, The Ethnic Canon, Mapping Multiculturalism, Race Consciousness, and The House that Race Built for a slightly larger (and broader) portion of the iceberg.

This is not the place to go into my full response to the important work of a journal like Race Traitor or David Roediger's Towards the Abolition of Whiteness or Ian Haney Lopez's White by Law, but I can at least recommend these and other works on the history and politics of whiteness (in no particular order, with no attempt at completeness, and perpetually [if rather belatedly] under construction):

  • David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Towards the Abolition of Whiteness ; Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
  • Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
  • Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29.1 (Winter 1988); White
  • Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic
  • Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberle Crenshaw, et al.
  • Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor
  • Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale
  • Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters
  • Eric Lott, Love and Theft
  • Karen Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Race, eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek
  • Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race
  • Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; ed., Race Traitor
  • Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism
  • Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law
  • George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
  • Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color

You might also check out the following links:

Monday, June 25, 2007

Why Close Reading Matters I: Guantánamo Bay Poetry

Yoshie Furuhashi just forwarded the following Wall Street Journal article, Yochi Dreasen's The Prison Poets of Guantánamo Find a Publisher, along with a link to the collection of poetry it is about, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (Iowa, 2007) to the MLA's Radical Caucus's listserv. It's particularly relevant to me not just as a scholar and teacher interested in Hawthorne's portrayal of Puritan punishments or as a fan of Alan Moore's comic book series V for Vendetta, but also as a teacher of courses like Introduction to Ethnicity/Race and American Identities. I hope it will be of interest to you, too. Perhaps the following quotations will help inspire you to inquire into the reasoning behind the title of this post:

"While a few detainees at Guantanamo Bay have made efforts to author what they claim to be poetry, given the nature of their writings they have seemingly not done so for the sake of art," says Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Defense Department spokesman. "They have attempted to use this medium as merely another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies."


U.S. authorities explained why the military has been slow to declassify the poems in a June 2006 letter to one of Mr. Falkoff's colleagues. "Poetry...presents a special risk, and DOD standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language," it said. The military says poetry is harder to vet than conventional letters because allusions and imagery in poetry that seem innocent can be used to convey coded messages to other militants.

The letter told defense lawyers to translate any works they wanted to release publicly into English and then submit the translations to the government for review.

The strict security arrangements governing anything written by Guantanamo Bay inmates meant that Mr. Falkoff had to use linguists with secret-level security clearances rather than translators who specialize in poetry. The resulting translations, Mr. Falkoff writes in the book, "cannot do justice to the subtlety and cadences of the originals."

For the military, even some of the translations appeared to go too far. Mr. Falkoff says it rejected three of the five translated poems he submitted, along with a dozen others submitted by his colleagues.

Cmdr. Gordon says he doesn't know how many poems were rejected but adds that the military "absolutely" remains concerned that poetry could be used to pass coded messages to other militants.


And maybe those with somewhat freer time than mine might, say, move from taking down Ann Althouse to taking on the American military's approach to literature. If I had the time, I would tell a long story about how Tom Keenan taught a 1980s'-era CIA-authored counter-insurgency manual's discussion of rhetoric in a grad course I was taking on literary theory, but I have holes to plug in one talk and another to start before I sleep....