"The Humanities Are Not a Luxury"

Or, Goose Makes Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

September 30 was a day of apocalyptically bad weather in the Washington area. To say it was raining cats and dogs is to understate the case considerably. To say it was raining elephants and blue whales, with interludes of giraffes and hippopotamuses, comes closer, but even that doesn't quite capture the deep dreariness and tropical weirdness of the day.

In Roxie's World and on the campus of Queer the Turtle U, however, September 30 was a day of celebration and inspiration, as our very own Goose delivered her much anticipated lecture, "The Humanities Are Not a Luxury: A Manifesto for the 21st Century." The lecture was part of the prize package that went along with Goose winning a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award this year at QTU, which is a pretty big deal on account of just a handful are made each year. We grew to like the poster advertising the series of DS-T lectures, once we got used to an image that at first looked like Emily Dickinson was smoking crack through a saxophone. (One of Goose's fellow awardees is a sax player from the School of Music.)

Goose's 45-minute lecture, delivered to an overflow crowd of more than 200 weather-braving souls, was a stirring affirmation of the value of the humanities and a shrewd critique of the rhetoric of crisis that so often characterizes discussions of the field. The talk was by turns folksy and fiery, as Goose compellingly wove together insights gleaned from her career as a scholar of poetry and a builder of institutions with recent reflections on the state of the humanities by good guys like our blog boyfriend Chris Newfield. Lest you think we are something less than objective when it comes to our Goose, here's how the event has been described by a neutral observer from the QTU English department:

Throughout her lecture, Professor Smith was gracious and seemed jazzed to be addressing such an enthusiastic crowd.  She was warm, funny, and above all, impossibly smart.  Smith made profound historical connections between the humanities and their perceptions over time, musing upon the generative and integral nature of the humanities in academia.  Smith iterated the vital nature of humanities studies for our university, our collective histories, and our society.

"Impossibly smart": Well, yes, but you know she still has to ask Moose for help every time she wants to heat something up in the microwave. "Two and a half minutes on 7," Moose says patiently, knowing that all those deep thoughts in her partner's brain occasionally crowd out the mundane facts of daily life.

Follow that link, darlings, and you will be able to watch the tape of the whole fabulous shindig, including the hilarious and heartwarming introduction in which Goose sings and Moose interrupts the proceedings to correct a botched joke. Late in the lecture, Goose works in a clever reference to this humble blog by invoking the phrase excellence without money (™RW Enterprises, LLC) to describe the unrealistic expectations the public has for institutions of higher ed these days. We held off blogging about the occasion until the tape was available, but now it is, so there you are. Go watch it. You can't spend all day grading papers, and if you are grading on this impossibly beautiful autumn afternoon then you are probably in need of a little professional inspiration. Pop some corn, crack open a beer, and press play, my pretties. Rev. Goose is down front and has some testifyin' to do.

Congratulations, Goose, and thanks for bringing sunshine to us every single day. Sing it with us, kids. You know you want to:

RIP Bitch PhD

News: Another blog has bitten the dust (zOMG -- only 1,242,411 left!), and this time the casualty is a pioneer of the feminist blogosphere, a bastion of fire-breathing, finger-flipping, feminazi truth-telling since 2004. Yes, my virtual but beloved friends, I speak to you of the brilliantly named and consistently illuminating Bitch Ph.D.

Reaction: The feminazis of Roxie's World are sorry but not entirely surprised to hear the news. We thought the blog was showing signs of exhaustion. Truthfully, we became less devoted readers once it went from being a solo project to a group effort a few years back. That shift already seemed to suggest burnout or boredom on the part of the alpha Bitch (understandable, given the effort it takes to maintain a solo blog, particularly one that hits it as big as hers did). Nonetheless, we learned a ton from the ornery women of Bitch Ph.D. about what this blogging business was all about, and we are grateful to them for lessons on writing with edge, intelligence, humor, and indignation. We raise not a middle finger but a paw to you, grrls, and thank you for the years of hard, good work.

Postmortem Q&A:

• Does the closing down of one influential, well-established blog mean the blogosphere is dying, a casualty of the mindless ease of connecting to social networks through Facebook and Twitter? 
• Does the closing down of one academic-ish blog mean that interest among scholars in using our skills and expertise to communicate to a broader audience is waning? 
• Does the closing down of one fiercely feminist blog mean that heteropatriarchy has won, again and forever?

For readers in a hurry, the answers to those questions are no, nope, and hell, no! In that order.

Our blog pal Annie Em has had a bit of a blog death watch going on lately. 'Twas she who called our attention to the demise of Bitch Ph.D., and she gave us a heads up today that Michael Bérubé and a couple of other academic bloggers have or are about to give up the (virtual?) ghost. (FYI: Bérubé says he's putting his last post up on Friday. You will want to click in -- Dude knows how to stage an ending.) Annie Em has noted signs of flagging energies throughout the academic blogosphere. We've noted that, too, but figured it was just us projecting, on account of my typist has this insanely busy post-leave life that requires her to get dressed and leave the house every single day, which seriously cuts into the time available for surfing the Interwebs and coming up with snarky yet inspiring stuff to say.

Here's the thing, kids: Blogs come and go, but blogging will abide forever until such time as technology and the collective ADD of the human animal decide it's time to look for other ways to express ourselves. If, eventually, the form and the phenomenon run their course, something else will emerge to provide a platform for uncensored, unedited, un-gatekeepered communication between John/Jane Q and the broadband-equipped Public resourceful or benighted enough to find us. That genie is out of the bottle, my friends, and there's no stuffing it back in. Don't let one half-baked piece by Malcolm Gladwell make you think the party is over. Here is the best reply we've seen to Gladwell's straw-man attack on the political value of blogs, Twitter, and other tools of social networking. It's from Destructural (via), and it nicely maps out the different roles played by different tools in different situations:

The question for activists is always how to use available tools effectively. So blogs are for sharing longer ideas, Facebook is for spreading basic information and links, and Twitter is for sending small amounts of information publicly on the go. We even use phones sometimes. The internet can’t hammer a nail, but that’s what hammers are for. But there are some tools that don’t stand the test of time as well. Gladwell writes, “… what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church?” Of course, this is a completely useless question. What good would Twitter have been for dinosaurs? THEY COULDN’T EVEN PRESS BUTTONS! By putting the historical comparison on his opponents (who would “no doubt” make it), Gladwell attempts to dodge responsibility for an absurd line of argumentation. He writes that [Martin Luther King, Jr.] needed discipline and strategy because of certain exigencies of the particular movement (the need to maintain a moral high ground for the white viewing public), but never explains why those tactical decisions should carry over. In fact, Alain Badiou has argued that while patience was the cardinal virtue required in the past, right now we need nothing so much as courage. Fetishizing the 60′s is a bad idea because we don’t live there any more. Material conditions change; so should our strategies, so should our tactics, so should our methods of communication. (Emphasis added.)

It's like we said: Blogs come and go, but the longings to speak truth to power, to share great stories, or to pass along urgent brief bits of information or vacation photos abide forever. The great question of our time is not whether the Interwebs are making us dumber or more distracted. It is, What is the best tool for any particular communicative/strategic goal? That is a good problem to have, darlings, a very good problem indeed, because we are not dinosaurs and can push many buttons, even simultaneously if we have to.

A blog is dead. Long live blogging. And Facebook. And Twitter. And sit-ins. And vigils. And marches. And academic conferences that feel like consciousness-raising sessions. We need them all, and thank dog we have them all at our disposal. Peace out.

(Not a) Moon Over Manhattan

(Photo Credit: Moose, 10/8/10)

Sorry for the radio silence, kids. My typist had a busy teaching week and then took off for the Big Apple Thursday evening to attend a ginormous (gynormous?) lesbo shindig at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. No time for details right now, as day two of this academic/community extravaganza is about to get underway. It's an amazing multi-generational gathering of scholars, poets, community members, and cultural workers who invented, resisted, inherited, and survived lesbian culture and community of the 1970s. Suffice it to say, there were hugs, tears, knowing laughs, harrowing herstories, and pearls of wisdom passed along in session after packed session that concluded late last night with a group poetry reading that featured, among others, Cheryl Clarke, Jan Clausen, Joan Larkin, and Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, daughter of the late Audre Lorde, who beautifully read some of her mother's and her own poetry.

More soon! We've got a date with a bunch of hot cranky women who gave us the dream of a better world and the guts and the tools to try to build it. Peace out, sister/wimmin/warrior/pals.

In Sorrow and Solidarity

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind. -- Henry James (1902)

(The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River. Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi leaped off the bridge to his death on Sept. 22, after his roommate showed video of him being intimate with another man on the Internet. Photo Credit: Richard Perry, New York Times)

A candlelight vigil will not change the world. A video will not bring down the socio-cultural machinery that encourages violence toward individuals and groups seen as threateningly non-conforming in relation to sex and gender norms. A "Safe Space" sticker on a resident assistant's door won't stop a drunk kid with a baseball bat determined to find a fag to bash in a dorm hallway on a Saturday night -- or a sober kid with a camera, a gay roommate, and the ability to stream live video.

We know that none of these gestures is sufficient to end the violence aimed at sex and gender queers of all ages. Nor do they offer much to the targets of such violence beyond the perhaps hollow comfort of knowing that not everyone wishes them dead. And the dead, of course, are beyond even that hollow comfort.

Nonetheless, we see more in these gestures than salvific wishes and sentimental longings for some easy, individualized way to achieve a feeling of having done something in response to verbal and physical assaults on LGBT persons. Insufficient as they may be, such gestures are nonetheless important, because they demonstrate our determination to be kind rather than unkind. That determination is not nothing, and it is not merely sentimental. Henry James was no fool. He knew that kindness made life bearable and its absence made life unbearable. He knew that if we forget kindness we have forgotten how to be in relationship with others, for kindness is above all being considerate of others. Kindness comes from having the capacity to imagine how one's words or deeds will affect another -- precisely the capacity Tyler Clementi's tormentors seem to have lacked.

Technology hasn't made humans less kind than they were in some non-existent machine-free past. It has only amplified the sound and accelerated the speed at which our unkindnesses circulate. We shouldn't disparage any act of kindness or any effort to foster greater kindness in the world. Instead, we should commit ourselves to creating a world in which kindness travels as quickly and gets as much attention as its opposite. Yes, it's corny and naive to promise that "It gets better," but it's better to be naive than silent  or cynical when kids are killing themselves. (Here's an even better response, though, from another video in the "It Gets Better" campaign, from a young dyke of color who critiques the false assurance of the campaign's slogan while insisting that the victims of bullying will get stronger, more able to love themselves and more equipped to deal with what the world dishes out. Go watch it. H/T)

If we could, we would stand in the rain this evening, on the campus of our alma mater, with students, faculty, and friends, to honor the memory of Tyler Clementi and to protest the brutal unkindness that appears to have led him to take his life. You deserved better, Tyler, as did all the other young queers bullied to death in recent weeks. We stand for all of you, against hatred, fear, and thoughtless violence that calls itself pranksterism. We can't guarantee it will get better, but we promise we will work like hell to try to make it so. Peace out.

Update (early Monday a.m.): Here are some local links on the Sunday night vigil at Rutgers: 1) The report in the Star-Ledger, which says there were close to 1000 people in attendance, and 2) a photo and commentary from our friend Kate, a member of the Rutgers faculty. Send more links if you have them, and we will update as necessary.

WaPo Calls MD Gov's Race

Whew! That's a relief! And we didn't even have to bother NOT to vote! And now our buddy GlassPen won't have to worry that our refusal to vote will deliver the governor's mansion to the former governor known as Bobby Haircut! And the fauxgressive Irish rocker known around here as You, Sir, Are No Jack Kennedy will have another four years to campaign for the higher offices for which he clearly believes he is destined by making the kind of cynical, short-sighted moves that pass as Democratic profiles in courage these days!

Roxie, you may or not be thinking, has death impaired your ability to process information? What do you mean WaPo has called the election?

Let me 'splain it to you, darlings. WaPo published a poll today showing that current Gov. Martin O'Malley has opened up a sizable lead over his opponent, former Gov. Robert Ehrlich, whom O'Malley defeated four years ago in the heavily Democratic state of Maryland.

The poll indicates that Ehrlich has made the sale with Republican voters (yes, both of them) and is leading by 20 points among Independents, but O'Malley has a 64% favorable rating among all voters and 87% of Democrats say they are inclined to vote for him. (Some deets on the poll are here. The full data dump is here.)

O'Malley also has a sizable cash advantage and is using his money to get his pretty face and determined jaw on the teevee. He's on the air constantly with slick ads that alternate between emphasizing his record of making supposedly tough decisions in difficult times and trying to terrify voters with reminders of the spooky-scary Bob Ehrlich.

Ehrlich isn't doing himself any favors. He was actually pretty moderate as governor, but he seems to have taken a sip or two of tea in deference to the lunacy currently gripping his party. He criticized Maryland attorney general Doug Gansler's February ruling that the state would recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions, calling it "government experimentation with the state's social fabric." He has also proposed rolling back a 2007 increase in the sales tax without saying a word about how he would replace the $600 million in lost revenue. One of the nice things about Maryland voters is that they are slightly less hysterical about tax issues than voters in many parts of the country, perhaps because a sizable number of them work for the federal gubmint and lie awake at night wishing Barack Obama truly were a socialist.

Given that, though, it's disheartening to see that Maryland's Democrats don't seem concerned that O'Malley asked the state's 70,000 employees to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden of closing the budget gap, resorting to furloughs three times in three years rather than, as we have suggested before, taking on the state's liquor lobby and finally raising taxes on beer, wine, and distilled spirits. O'Malley leads Ehrlich on all the questions about who voters trust to manage the economy, education, crime, taxes, and the environment. How confident is the O'Malley campaign right now? Confident enough that Obama will be headlining an event for the MD gov next week, the first time the president has done that for a Democratic candidate since January (when he campaigned for, um, losing Massachusetts senate candidate Martha Coakley).

Wevs, kids. Moose saw the poll news this morning and thought, Fine. O'Malley is comfortably ahead. I think I'll show the same respect and support for the work he's done for the state as he's shown for the work Goose and I have done for the state. I think I will just stay home on election day -- Hell, maybe I'll take it as a furlough day! I've got several more of those to schedule this year! (Between them, the moms will have 11.5 furlough days this academic year.)

And then Moose realized she can't take a furlough day on election day because it is a Tuesday and she teaches. Furlough days should be scheduled in a manner such that there is no class disruption, intoned the e-mail faculty and staff received from QTU's office of human resources yesterday.

Because in the ugly autumn of 2010, in the Democratic state of Maryland, political courage means that you pretend there are no consequences to tuition freezes and salary cuts and budget reductions. You turn your head away from the damage you've done, gaze at the camera with your rock star's smile and your lawyer's rectitude and assure us you are brave and strong and on our side.

At least two of Maryland's 70,000 state employees beg to differ. No, we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Nor, however, should we delude ourselves into thinking that cowardice is courage or that getting re-elected is the highest political goal to which we can aspire. For three years, state employees have carried the load for Martin O'Malley and 6 million fellow citizens who gave up not much of anything to help the state weather its fiscal storm. We respectfully decline to endorse this course of action by casting a vote in favor of a second term for Gov. O'Malley. If he gets one, fine. We hope he will spend it making wiser and more equitable decisions.

Manure Central

Regular readers of this blog know that the official philosophical position of Roxie's World is that serious times call for un-serious responses. No Joke Left Behind and all that.

Per usual, it seems, we've got our paw on the pulse of the zeitgeist: John Avlon declared in The Daily Beast today that comedians have officially taken over our politics. (Avlon's examples are about what you'd expect: Stephen Colbert testifying before Congress, in character; Jon Stewart's upcoming "Rally to Restore Sanity" on the national mall; Bill Maher's merciless trial-by-video-clip of Delaware senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, who appears to be just as nutty as advertised.) According to Avlon, comedians are driving the political debate this year and doing a better job than either journalists or politicians of doing the one thing that matters most in public life: telling the truth. That's right, people: It takes a joke to tickle a village into facing the facts, sordid or painful as they may be, and you have to admit the facts are pretty sordid and painful these days. That's why we're here. And we think it's why a lot of you are here. Here. Ya know? (H/T to a QTU classicist for calling our attention to Avlon's piece.)

Anyway, it's in that spirit of comic public service that I sent my typist back to the University of Illinois agricultural extension's website dedicated to promoting resources related to the production and management of livestock manure. (We stumbled upon this vital repository of scatological information by way of University Diaries. Lord knows how she got there, but we are glad she did.) We decided to pilfer the image that runs across the top of the website, which, as we noted the other day, is on a rich, poo-brown background. We have a hunch it might come in handy around here, as a way to call your attention to stories on, oh, golly, I don't know, this, that, or the other thing. What do you think?

We think it's a nice succinct visual representation of our determination to call 'em as we see 'em. And a cute evocation of my typist's Midwestern girlhood, despite the fact that she spent way more time at the mall than she did on the farm, I assure you. Be sure to let us know when you come across stories that you think deserve this label, and we'll slap it up here quicker than you can say, "Does Obama think we don't know he could overturn Don't Ask, Don't Tell with the stroke of a pen?"

Happy Saturday, my little pooh bears. In keeping with today's gastrointestinal emphasis, we'll play you off with a bouncy bathroom ditty from Sarah Silverman. Enjoy, darlings, and whatever you do, don't step in it! Peace out.

The Sarah Silverman Program
Poop Song
www.comedycentral.com
Nick Swardson's Pretend Time Big Lake Ugly Americans New Episodes

(Fashion) Excellence With Less Money

From the Department of Hey, This is Way Better Than Apples: Our favorite clothing retailer for sensible gals of a certain age is offering discounts to teachers:

Why, it's as though they've read a fabulous series of blog posts on the subject of Excellence Without Money in higher education! Where could they have stumbled upon such a thing? Here? Here? Here? Perhaps they heard we were giving out advice on how to dress for your furlough and figured there was some vast under-served and under-paid market of women whose favorite colors are charcoal and gray. (That's a joke, actually, and it is not intended to suggest that there are currently 947 pairs of black pants hanging somewhere in the closets of Roxie's World. Moose is pretty sure there are at most 891 pairs of black pants in the house, but she is refusing to count sweatpants and is overlooking the 44 pairs in the giveaway pile in the hall closet.)

Thank you, J. Jill. The teachers of the world appreciate your shrewd marketing. Don't know if you'll be able to get Historiann into the store, though. She has been indulging in a shoe and clothing fantasy far afield of anything we've ever seen in your catalogs.

While we are on the subject of Excellence Without Money, Non-Fashion Division, here are a couple of pieces you really must go read. (We've been remiss about keeping you up to speed on this topic, but my typist has discovered that teaching a course on blogging cuts significantly into the time a girl has available for blogging. Sorry, darlings, but she is dancing -- and typing -- as fast as she can!) Anyhoo, there's an excellent interview with our blog boyfriend Chris Newfield that was published on AlterNet a few weeks back. It's a great distillation of his thinking about what he has termed "the war on public universities," which he argues has been going on for several decades now, and its relationship to the recent devastating budget cuts in the University of California system and elsewhere. Meanwhile, back on Chris's indispensable Remaking the University blog, there's a guest post by Gerald Barnett of the University of Washington on the funding "free-fall" shaping up in Seattle. The piece is brilliant on what we consider to be the crux of the problem we named Excellence Without Money: Campus administrators who publicly pretend that budget cuts, while damaging, don't undermine the quality of institutions. It's a long piece that takes up a number of topics, including how the press covers these issues and how universities hurt themselves by carrying on a charade. Here's a passage that will give you a good sense of what Barnett is up to, but you should click over and read the whole thing:

The problem for universities, and for the reporters, is that university administrators are not coming clean on why there are university budget problems. It is not just that the states are no longer supplementing the budgets as they used to. Yes, that is a bad thing, a bad thing in the context of other bad things. Rather, it is the priorities that university leaders place on the spending of the money they do have. It is not reported that there are huge cuts to student instruction. The university issues no press releases or even brusque reports about this. These cuts, like cuts to department staff, happen in silence. There will be no departure notices in the local paper, like the notices when the university hires another senior administrator.  Every student knows (and I have a daughter at UW) that there are fewer courses offered, these are harder to get into, with less information about them, with less and poorer quality instructional support—and all this at substantially greater cost. This is not within the definition of “excellence."

He ends by saying that university administrators are well-intentioned but intellectually dishonest in these situations. Often, we reluctantly acknowledge, that term is justified. Though never on our campus, of course.

Which for some strange reason makes us want to end by passing along a post Margaret Soltan put up earlier today that got our attention because it conjoined the terms "University of Illinois" and "Manure Central." We clicked straight over, concerned that our once furloughed friends out in Shampoo-Banana had been visited by yet another crisis or scandal, given Soltan's knack for being first on the scene at any academic Augean stable in need of sweeping. Alas, the meaning in this instance was literal, but that link is amusing nonetheless -- and offers some very fetching animal photos, too, I might add. Props to the designer who had the nerve to use a rich poo-brown background on the website for the extension service's manure management program. Nice touch!

Still, Manure Central -- Don't you think that would be a swell name for an academic admin blog? We'll have to see if we can get Moose to bring that up in class tomorrow. She and her students have recently been discussing the all-important matter of blog names, so who knows? Peace out, darlings, and sweet, manure-free dreams to you.