Ever wanted to overhaul Academe? Here are all those ideas crammed into one article. It is fascinating just because he hits on all fronts. Overhaul indeed. Thanks to Erin for originally bringing this to my attention.
I plan to eventually go back to grad school myself. Debt is a worry. So is the arcane nature of the hoops through which you jump for a job (this is especially true in the humanities) that will probably have little to nothing to do with the minutiae of your thesis. Unless of course you go into Academe, where your chances of landing a good job are tight. But is graduate education really the Detroit of higher learning? For that you would have to see cratering demand relative to the cost of running it. In fact the article suggests grad programs' problem is over-subscription, ie they are too popular. And do we really want to open up the university job market by abolishing tenure? Perhaps as structured tenure does cause a lack of accountability, but it also fosters intellectual autonomy and free inquiry. And if this cloistered tendency offsets a bias (let's say commercial) in the world of ideas, is it worth the loss of it to abolish tenure? This is what larger (and necessary) reforms would have to beware of, that is losing a system that in its very antiquated structure offers a corrective to other ways of developing and marketing ideas.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Wither Republicans
Ross Douthat's first column for the NYT is up. Just as (conservative) critics predicted it is aimed at reform of the Republican party. But Douthat is just the sort of critic that any institution should want: measured, sober, intelligent, sympathetic but trenchant as to flaws, gentle reason as opposed to fulmination. And his thought experiment about the certain result of a Cheney candidacy would do Sean Hannity some good.
Monday, April 20, 2009
In Praise of Mundane But Unmolested Corners of Your Childhood
Burge's has been selling smoked turkeys and hams for as long as I can remember. Admittedly that is not super long, but that is a long time to go without re-upholstering your chairs. And that is what I love about Burge's. It is JUST the same every time you visit. They don't even play music, which adds to the sense of timelessness. You can sit there in the quiet while you debate whether or not to splurge for the fried pie.
Every Christmas Mama sends me to pick up a spiral cut honey glazed ham from Jay. That's another nice thing about Burge's: the Burge family still runs it. Burge's has a website here, and if you click over you should read the About Burge's section. I did not know, for instance, that they used to offer barbecued goat and peppermint ice cream for the Fourth of July. The picture on that page is of the original Burge's in Lewisville, which if you happen to leave Little Rock in the morning driving down for business in Louisiana you should hit right about lunch. So of course you stop for smoked turkey sandwich and potato salad and fried pie (peach, but that's just me). And you hope Burge's never changes.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
The Class - Changing Web Redux
I went to see The Class the other night, and it has me wondering about possible changes to the web from a different angle.
In the movie a young bourgeois Frenchman is trying to teach French in a tough school. Despite a troubled relationship with a kid named Souleyman, there is a bit of a breakthrough half way into the film when the teacher allows the kid, who refuses to write an assigned self-portrait, to submit instead a collection of annotated photographs. The teacher promptly pins them to the bulletin board and invites the class to cluster around and look. The other kids had to read their self-portraits aloud, so Souleyman gets to participate in the self-exposure too. He stands in the background, half uncaring what anyone thinks, half pleased at the oohing and ahhing. You watch the half smile and his steady gaze at his own work, and you think, "shift." From this point on, supposedly, promise has been hinted at and must be fulfilled or rejected.
I don't want to give away the film for those of you eager to take in a slightly overlong look at French inner city education. But without giving away the ending there comes a moment when the teacher wonders aloud to other professors if the boy hasn't reached his "scholastic limits" in the school. I took this as condescension. The boy can't learn beyond a certain point. My friend took it as sympathetic. The school is imperfectly organized to develop the young and more scholasticism is not what the young man needs. Not more papers in other words, but maybe more photographs.
Schools are where we send the young to receive certain skills and a body of certain ideas we consider basic to function in the world. Public schools in particular spring out of a reformist century that felt the need to bring information to the isolated and bereft. The title of the movie in French, Entre les murs (Between the walls), emphasizes the box of the building as the locale where teaching happens. But for the children the idea of their exposure to the wider world as happening "between the walls" of school would be absurd. And not merely in the experiential sense but also in the most practical sense. Today the slipstream of information and even know-how exists out in a digital flow that transcends walls. Cellphones might be forbidden in class, but they represent content just as do books.
The movie, I should stress, is not at all interested in the students' relationship to new media. Its focus is on the students' relationship to the teacher. But I can't help taking the verité style at face value and wondering what the same kids learn outside the walls and inside the walls and down in the courtyard during break over the web. In the movie schoolchildren have two options (if they finish): university or vocational school. Maybe that does accurately describe what they can do, but it is not at all an accurate description of what they can know, and at least from the point of view of art, the view of a photographer say or a designer or a painter, that knowledge has a thousand different applications in and outside and around the structures of university or vocational schooling. In other words, Souleyman could quit the school any day and begin to work in visual media. He might be working odd jobs to support himself, but profession and means of support are often separate things anyway.
Could the openness of the web cause long term shifts in how the poor or underprivileged consider their options? It would probably take a long stretch of time with current web dynamics in place to tell one way or the other. And what if the perceived richness is temporary, at least at current levels of availability? Will the interaction be the same if more and more things require payment or subscriptions to access? Will alteration in profit models create dams that tamp down the spawning effect of information from site to site? Or will registered identity also transform to accommodate ease of use? I don't know the answers to these questions or even if they are in the right vein, but I do suspect that the students within the walls at poor schools are less confined by their physical circumstances than their teachers might give them credit for.
In the movie a young bourgeois Frenchman is trying to teach French in a tough school. Despite a troubled relationship with a kid named Souleyman, there is a bit of a breakthrough half way into the film when the teacher allows the kid, who refuses to write an assigned self-portrait, to submit instead a collection of annotated photographs. The teacher promptly pins them to the bulletin board and invites the class to cluster around and look. The other kids had to read their self-portraits aloud, so Souleyman gets to participate in the self-exposure too. He stands in the background, half uncaring what anyone thinks, half pleased at the oohing and ahhing. You watch the half smile and his steady gaze at his own work, and you think, "shift." From this point on, supposedly, promise has been hinted at and must be fulfilled or rejected.
I don't want to give away the film for those of you eager to take in a slightly overlong look at French inner city education. But without giving away the ending there comes a moment when the teacher wonders aloud to other professors if the boy hasn't reached his "scholastic limits" in the school. I took this as condescension. The boy can't learn beyond a certain point. My friend took it as sympathetic. The school is imperfectly organized to develop the young and more scholasticism is not what the young man needs. Not more papers in other words, but maybe more photographs.
Schools are where we send the young to receive certain skills and a body of certain ideas we consider basic to function in the world. Public schools in particular spring out of a reformist century that felt the need to bring information to the isolated and bereft. The title of the movie in French, Entre les murs (Between the walls), emphasizes the box of the building as the locale where teaching happens. But for the children the idea of their exposure to the wider world as happening "between the walls" of school would be absurd. And not merely in the experiential sense but also in the most practical sense. Today the slipstream of information and even know-how exists out in a digital flow that transcends walls. Cellphones might be forbidden in class, but they represent content just as do books.
The movie, I should stress, is not at all interested in the students' relationship to new media. Its focus is on the students' relationship to the teacher. But I can't help taking the verité style at face value and wondering what the same kids learn outside the walls and inside the walls and down in the courtyard during break over the web. In the movie schoolchildren have two options (if they finish): university or vocational school. Maybe that does accurately describe what they can do, but it is not at all an accurate description of what they can know, and at least from the point of view of art, the view of a photographer say or a designer or a painter, that knowledge has a thousand different applications in and outside and around the structures of university or vocational schooling. In other words, Souleyman could quit the school any day and begin to work in visual media. He might be working odd jobs to support himself, but profession and means of support are often separate things anyway.
Could the openness of the web cause long term shifts in how the poor or underprivileged consider their options? It would probably take a long stretch of time with current web dynamics in place to tell one way or the other. And what if the perceived richness is temporary, at least at current levels of availability? Will the interaction be the same if more and more things require payment or subscriptions to access? Will alteration in profit models create dams that tamp down the spawning effect of information from site to site? Or will registered identity also transform to accommodate ease of use? I don't know the answers to these questions or even if they are in the right vein, but I do suspect that the students within the walls at poor schools are less confined by their physical circumstances than their teachers might give them credit for.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Savoring YouTube (While It Lasts)
Farhad Manjoo over at Slate is prophesying the end of YouTube. It costs far too much to run, he says. It is hemorrhaging cash. Maybe it will continue to tick on in some form, but not as the no-cost free-for-all that it is now. In other words, goodbye to the free storage, the free watching, and the free borrowing of anything and everything that you liked, loved, or loathed.
When I read this column earlier today my heart constricted a little. Not because I'm surfing YouTube all the time. But the content YouTube generates is present in scores of the ways I use the web. Like many an internet browser my heart is a lonely hunter and I skip around to lots of sites during the week, look for specific content in scores of different places. Art blogs, political blogs, personal blogs etc., most all of them embed video and a big portion of that video content they are pulling from YouTube. Then there is my personal use of the YouTube. Mainly, I'll be honest, that means treating it like a video Wikipedia. I hit it for basic stuff, like promos to things I follow or quotes from politicians or a visual record of some kind etc., like a great big memory bank. But the "oops let me check my encyclopedia" impulse toward YouTube is only part of it. Our ability to torture or convulse our fellow man is intimately tied up in YouTube. My sister Sarah plaguing me with the same Naked Eye music video during every shared endeavor? YouTube. The undeniable pleasure of watching Adolf Hitler rap Notorious BIG? Also YouTube.
I feel sad in advance for YouTube, because I sense Manjoo must be right. Take a look at the figures in his article. No business can lose cash like that for long. So the video forum of everything and nothing will have to change. And it will probably require more registering for things, and maybe money, and maybe subscriptions and other things that will dampen the glut of free info.
Maybe it won't feel that different when the changes come, but my guess is it will make events like Susan Boyle more impossible. She sings one night and once the video goes viral millions watch it after the fact. Not all these people regularly use YouTube. But because it is so easy to stop in and see what is the fuss about some video, they will. In the future, when the massive video clearing houses require registration or payment, maybe not. In the meantime, I want to savor YouTube. Just today it gave me one of the most feel good moments of my year so far.
When I read this column earlier today my heart constricted a little. Not because I'm surfing YouTube all the time. But the content YouTube generates is present in scores of the ways I use the web. Like many an internet browser my heart is a lonely hunter and I skip around to lots of sites during the week, look for specific content in scores of different places. Art blogs, political blogs, personal blogs etc., most all of them embed video and a big portion of that video content they are pulling from YouTube. Then there is my personal use of the YouTube. Mainly, I'll be honest, that means treating it like a video Wikipedia. I hit it for basic stuff, like promos to things I follow or quotes from politicians or a visual record of some kind etc., like a great big memory bank. But the "oops let me check my encyclopedia" impulse toward YouTube is only part of it. Our ability to torture or convulse our fellow man is intimately tied up in YouTube. My sister Sarah plaguing me with the same Naked Eye music video during every shared endeavor? YouTube. The undeniable pleasure of watching Adolf Hitler rap Notorious BIG? Also YouTube.
I feel sad in advance for YouTube, because I sense Manjoo must be right. Take a look at the figures in his article. No business can lose cash like that for long. So the video forum of everything and nothing will have to change. And it will probably require more registering for things, and maybe money, and maybe subscriptions and other things that will dampen the glut of free info.
Maybe it won't feel that different when the changes come, but my guess is it will make events like Susan Boyle more impossible. She sings one night and once the video goes viral millions watch it after the fact. Not all these people regularly use YouTube. But because it is so easy to stop in and see what is the fuss about some video, they will. In the future, when the massive video clearing houses require registration or payment, maybe not. In the meantime, I want to savor YouTube. Just today it gave me one of the most feel good moments of my year so far.
Woo Hoo Zoo!
Zoo digs in vs. UAMS over the old Ray Winder ballpark. I hope the zoo prevails. That land is a city park. No need to turn it into asphalt acreage, no matter no great a hospital is next door.
The Little Rock Zoo could use the expansion too. For a long time it was like a period piece. When I went to the zoo as a child the structures were all basically untouched from when they went up in the 1930s with mortar and native Arkansas stone, courtesy of Roosevelt and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Having that all unchanged for so long gave the park a quaint atmosphere. But the cages, though they looked impressive to my six year old eyes, reflected a different age in standards, and the zoo lost its accreditation a few years back. Instead of plowing under everything they could, the zoo's renovations have brought things up to date without losing the flavor of the old park. Now they are fully accredited and looking to expand. Let's let them.
The Little Rock Zoo could use the expansion too. For a long time it was like a period piece. When I went to the zoo as a child the structures were all basically untouched from when they went up in the 1930s with mortar and native Arkansas stone, courtesy of Roosevelt and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Having that all unchanged for so long gave the park a quaint atmosphere. But the cages, though they looked impressive to my six year old eyes, reflected a different age in standards, and the zoo lost its accreditation a few years back. Instead of plowing under everything they could, the zoo's renovations have brought things up to date without losing the flavor of the old park. Now they are fully accredited and looking to expand. Let's let them.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Sunday Links
Lego Jesus
Playmobil bible scenes
Matthew Collings of The Times (UK) gives his Easter Art Top Ten (but no links?)
So here are some links of my own, favorites not on Collings' list:
Albrecht Altdorfer's The Resurrection of Christ
Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St. Thomas
Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo
Playmobil bible scenes
Matthew Collings of The Times (UK) gives his Easter Art Top Ten (but no links?)
So here are some links of my own, favorites not on Collings' list:
Albrecht Altdorfer's The Resurrection of Christ
Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St. Thomas
Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Keo, AR
Famous for it's pecan groves and it's pie.
Here is the official sign. I call it the pie shop. Some people in Little Rock call it Sue's every once and again. My dad did it this morning. They are confusing it with the old Sue's Pie Shop, which used to be in the Heights next to Terry's Finer Foods. It looked perfect to me when I was little and nothing has ever moved into that space since, which is my explanation for why people talk sometimes as if Sue's were still around, just closed for a very extended vacation. Sue was a misanthrope and it closed for related reasons so I'm told. Thankfully the Miss Charlotte of Charlotte's Eats and Sweets seems very cheery.
Goodbye Keo
Here is the official sign. I call it the pie shop. Some people in Little Rock call it Sue's every once and again. My dad did it this morning. They are confusing it with the old Sue's Pie Shop, which used to be in the Heights next to Terry's Finer Foods. It looked perfect to me when I was little and nothing has ever moved into that space since, which is my explanation for why people talk sometimes as if Sue's were still around, just closed for a very extended vacation. Sue was a misanthrope and it closed for related reasons so I'm told. Thankfully the Miss Charlotte of Charlotte's Eats and Sweets seems very cheery.
Goodbye Keo
Friday, April 10, 2009
Sandy's Homeplace Cafe
I never go to Hanger Hill. Hardly anybody does, although it is one of the oldest parts of town. The town went up the river and Hanger Hill is down, so even after a century of modern sprawl everywhere else, go a few blocks through Hanger Hill and you are outside of town. I've lived in Little Rock all my life and I've worked for three years only blocks away, but I've never been in Hanger Hill till this week.
My friend Evin is an obituary writer for the Democrat Gazette and sometimes we have lunch. He shows me snippets of lives he has enjoyed researching or curious turns of phrase submitted by families or just eye catching names that once were current enough for a baby but now are no longer used. He suggested a recent find, Sandy's, and when he crossed I-30 and continued more than a block I had the sensation you might have when you dream discovering an extra wing of your house or an unexplained forest in your backyard, which might have nothing in them but which are exciting to walk through and look about because they weren't there a minute ago. The overgrown lots and moldering houses seemed neglected even of the ghetto, central to nothing, but some were clearly very old and once even fine. And then in a second we were down by the railroad tracks and the edge of town. There were several industrial yards looking small and unimportant in the way old industry does and next to a Budweiser distributorship was Sandy's Homeplace Cafe.
Evin calls it the best deal in town because he likes the food and it is all you can eat for $6.50. Inside there is a small buffet, and a hot box for rolls or cornbread, and a table with pieces of the daily pie, although the pie is not included in the $6.50 and will cost you $1.50 extra. You get a plate and a plastic pitcher of ice tea, unsweetened. The glasses are lined up with long tea spoons in them so you can mix the sugar or sweetener in yourself. There are no other beverages.
Evin and I had lunch. The food was just OK, but then I am not a big fan of beef stroganoff, so I plan to try it again some other time. Evin showed me his clippings.
I think I'll go back to Hanger Hill, just to look around, see if I can determine the oldest homes and whose they were. It's no bother about the past inhabitants, surely now joined up with the Church Triumphant. But it's nice to discover something around you that you didn't know was there. I'll go back to Sandy's too.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Tempest in a Teacup?
There has been a back and forth going on between Christopher Knight of the LA Times and arts lawyer Donn Zaretsky on de-accessioning of artwork. First here is Knight slamming this article in Art in America by Zaretsky. Then Zaretsky responds.
When I first read this it sounded like Knight was handing Zaretsky his lunch. But reading Zaretsky the “what a nutter” ad hominem from Knight (and Tyler Green over at Modern Art Notes) seems unserious. Zaretsky argues that “each proposed sale be analyzed on its own merits, rather than assuming that it's always wrong, no matter the circumstances,” which is essentially the position of Knight and the AAMD. Of course Zaretsky does tweak the concept of "held in trust for the public." I think he is right in so far as the language of "public trust" implies an immutability to museum holdings that is something less than reality. However if there is a disconnect between a museum's aim and the language it uses to describe it, that only seems to argue for a more articulate or particular language, not an excuse to weaken safeguards against predatory use of one's own collection.
I had an acquisition/de-acquisition experience in microcosm last week. I donated a copy of Apollinaire’s Chroniques d’Art to a library. The library took it for the collection, then decided it really wasn’t useful to the library and gave it an individual. Now, as someone who works in vaults housing pieces acquired decades ago under weaker standards, my traditional thought process is that once a gift is made, the responsibility and judgment over what is best for that work is transferred also, so ultimately it is the museum’s call if something needs to go. It might be a long and thoughtful process with lots of hurdles, and even then it might never happen, but the avenue is there. However that was not my reaction when the library gave away my donated Apollinaire! Access to works in French is very sketchy in AR and I wanted the public to have access to it, so I thought either the library (where it would be nice to have one of the top ten seminal works of art criticism in the original language) or my high school French program (where the Picasso/Braque angle might be fun). I had a larger goal in mind (access of public) and a backup choice if the library didn’t want the work. By giving my gift away, the library was defeating my larger purpose. There is warm glow associated with thinking you’ve given something to a wider public, a bit of a burn when that is thwarted, even if the institution goes about it in the most regulated of ways. So I was briefly in sympathy with the saddest little estate donation passing it's life in vault three, or gracing someone’s mantelpiece via a de-accessioning fund raiser, not because I think there is necessarily much value in those works, but just because “public trust” might have been said on the front end, and the reality is a little sadder. Museums will de-accession, and any curator will tell you that there are things in their collection they would secretly love to move on, but as long as the museums are using a language of higher duty to which other considerations are secondary (public trust), then the rub will be there. Maybe that's a good thing.
When I first read this it sounded like Knight was handing Zaretsky his lunch. But reading Zaretsky the “what a nutter” ad hominem from Knight (and Tyler Green over at Modern Art Notes) seems unserious. Zaretsky argues that “each proposed sale be analyzed on its own merits, rather than assuming that it's always wrong, no matter the circumstances,” which is essentially the position of Knight and the AAMD. Of course Zaretsky does tweak the concept of "held in trust for the public." I think he is right in so far as the language of "public trust" implies an immutability to museum holdings that is something less than reality. However if there is a disconnect between a museum's aim and the language it uses to describe it, that only seems to argue for a more articulate or particular language, not an excuse to weaken safeguards against predatory use of one's own collection.
I had an acquisition/de-acquisition experience in microcosm last week. I donated a copy of Apollinaire’s Chroniques d’Art to a library. The library took it for the collection, then decided it really wasn’t useful to the library and gave it an individual. Now, as someone who works in vaults housing pieces acquired decades ago under weaker standards, my traditional thought process is that once a gift is made, the responsibility and judgment over what is best for that work is transferred also, so ultimately it is the museum’s call if something needs to go. It might be a long and thoughtful process with lots of hurdles, and even then it might never happen, but the avenue is there. However that was not my reaction when the library gave away my donated Apollinaire! Access to works in French is very sketchy in AR and I wanted the public to have access to it, so I thought either the library (where it would be nice to have one of the top ten seminal works of art criticism in the original language) or my high school French program (where the Picasso/Braque angle might be fun). I had a larger goal in mind (access of public) and a backup choice if the library didn’t want the work. By giving my gift away, the library was defeating my larger purpose. There is warm glow associated with thinking you’ve given something to a wider public, a bit of a burn when that is thwarted, even if the institution goes about it in the most regulated of ways. So I was briefly in sympathy with the saddest little estate donation passing it's life in vault three, or gracing someone’s mantelpiece via a de-accessioning fund raiser, not because I think there is necessarily much value in those works, but just because “public trust” might have been said on the front end, and the reality is a little sadder. Museums will de-accession, and any curator will tell you that there are things in their collection they would secretly love to move on, but as long as the museums are using a language of higher duty to which other considerations are secondary (public trust), then the rub will be there. Maybe that's a good thing.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wither Blanche
It looks like Senator Blanche Lincoln is set to earn the ire of unions and the NAACP.
The NAACP thing is minor, still it must feel to her like she can't catch a break right now. First reports that her numbers are weak for her 2010 reelection race. Then forced to take a stand on card check, knowing that either the business community or unions would afterword be baying for blood. And to top it all off she forgets to kiss the ring of a major democratic constituency by failing to make a sop to racial quotas. Sigh.
The NAACP thing is minor, still it must feel to her like she can't catch a break right now. First reports that her numbers are weak for her 2010 reelection race. Then forced to take a stand on card check, knowing that either the business community or unions would afterword be baying for blood. And to top it all off she forgets to kiss the ring of a major democratic constituency by failing to make a sop to racial quotas. Sigh.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Speaking of Urban Planning... Little Rock Planning Commission Strikes Again
Little Rock Planning Commission is set to cave to Deltic Timber "over the strenuous objections of the Planning Commission advisory staff."
Yard signs have been springing up around West Little Rock in protest of plans to re-zone portions of Rahling Road from residential to "general office," plus extend Beckenham and Wellington to provide cut-throughs between Rahling and Hinson roads.
Naturally the property owners association for the affected neighborhood is seeing red.
"She (Dana Gaddy, resident of Hillsborough neighborhood) believes the city is too beholden to developers, who seek approval of new developments in exchange for street construction."
Yard signs have been springing up around West Little Rock in protest of plans to re-zone portions of Rahling Road from residential to "general office," plus extend Beckenham and Wellington to provide cut-throughs between Rahling and Hinson roads.
Naturally the property owners association for the affected neighborhood is seeing red.
"She (Dana Gaddy, resident of Hillsborough neighborhood) believes the city is too beholden to developers, who seek approval of new developments in exchange for street construction."
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Sunday Links
How apropos, a miniseries on debtors prison: Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit on PBS
Another celebration of feminine charm, slightly different context
For Cathrence, eternal quest for acorn meets eternal quest for love, or Scrat + female wiles: Ice Age III trailer
Update: From one of my favorite blogs, Bicycle Kiss
Another celebration of feminine charm, slightly different context
For Cathrence, eternal quest for acorn meets eternal quest for love, or Scrat + female wiles: Ice Age III trailer
Update: From one of my favorite blogs, Bicycle Kiss
In Which I Clear Out the Old Links Idling Around on My Laptop
Coming back from vacation, read this interesting article in The New Yorker on the centennial of Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago.
This resonated coming from LA, which doesn't look like all that pleasant a place to live, urban planning wise.
Nicolai Ouroussoff of the NY Times is already on the case. He has ideas for transforming America's cities. I'm not sure the bailout is this ambitious, but my shovel is ready.
This resonated coming from LA, which doesn't look like all that pleasant a place to live, urban planning wise.
Nicolai Ouroussoff of the NY Times is already on the case. He has ideas for transforming America's cities. I'm not sure the bailout is this ambitious, but my shovel is ready.
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