Herding cats

The way the world thinks of English professors:

The way I think of English professors after departmental meetings:

I can read!

The most glorious thing of this encroaching spring, beyond the sun and relative warmth (it's indicative of this past winter that seven degree celcius feels like the height of summer), is the loosening of time ... the freedom now to start reading that stack of books I've had to ignore these past few months. I have this past week been taking an hour or so in the morning with my coffee to simply read ... and between that and the sun streaming in through my living room window, it has felt positively decadent.

I have spent part of this semester using up the last bit of the startup grant MUN gives new professors; we're strongly encouraged to use it all by the end of our second year. And so, finding myself with somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1200 left, I've been putting mileage on my credit card ordering from Chapters.ca.

I love love love subsidized book-buying.

So anyway, I now have a massive stack of books to work through -- many of them pragmatic purchases in history or theory to fill holes in my library, some of them speculative buys toward possible courses I might propose in the future, but also a lot of texts I've either been meaning to read for some time or simply capricious buys that struck my fancy.

One of the courses I'm toying with proposing is a special-topics course tentatively titled "Postmodern Warfare." I've taught some texts and films under this rubric in the past, and last year presented a paper on the subject at our departmental colloquium. To give credit where it's due, at least part of this idea owes its genesis to Tim Blackmore's excellent book War X (which will certainly find its way onto the reading list), as well as his legendary course "Killer Culture" at Western.

At any rate, one of the books I've read this past week is Tim O'Brien's fiction/non-fiction collection of stories based on his tour of duty in Viet Nam, The Things They Carried. It's a haunting series of interlaced narratives following the members of his squad, their friendship and the inarticulatable experience of warfare. The title is also the title of the first story and refers to the massive amount of weight in terms of gear, weapons, and personal items the soldiers had to shoulder on their missions into the oppressively hot jungle; it also of course refers to the weight of the experience itself that the soldiers continue to stagger under after their tours.

(Also on the list to read is Tim O'Brien's novel In the Lake of the Woods, Anthony Swofford's Jarhead, Michael Herr's Dispatches and Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down ... all of which, should the course ever happen, will explore the blurry boudaries between memoir, fiction, journalism and myth in the representations of contemporary warfare).

I've also recently finished Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men ... and if you've never read McCarthy, you're denying yourself a rare pleasure. He's one of William Faulkner's heirs apparent, with spare impressionistic narratives set in the American South, most frequently along the Texas-Mexican border. No Country seems at first glance a typical potboiler in which a man stumbles across a drug deal gone sour in the desert, where everyone is dead and a case with two million dollars is there for the taking. And while it unfolds predictably in some ways, in McCarthy's hands what would otherwise be a formulaic narco-drama becomes something infinitely more terrifying and profound.

Incidentally, a film version directed by the Coen brothers is set for release in August. Holy crap. If the collaboration of Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers isn't a recipe for something brilliant, then I'm quitting show business.

I'm also almost done Black Dogs by Ian McEwan. It's the story, presented as a memoir, of a long and difficult marriage, recounted by the estranged couple's son-in-law. McEwan is always astonishing, and this book is no different. I hate him for the understated elegance of his prose.

Anyway ... I'm ready to move on, and can't decide what to start next. The choices are:

• Julian Barnes, Arthur & George
• Anthony Swofford, Jarhead
• Norman Mailer, The Gospel According to the Son

Cast your votes! Polls close tomorrow at midnight ...

Transitioning

While back home in Toronto last weekend, I was speaking to a family friend who asked me about where I was at in terms of the school year. I responded that classes were over and than I had grading to do, but after that I was done. "Oh, and what are you doing this summer?" Well, I answered, I'll be catching up on research that had to be put on the back burner in the winter term, as well as finally turning back to rewrite my thesis.

"It's nice that the university lets you work on your own stuff!" the family friend enthused.

I refrained from correcting her by saying that "lets you" is perhaps better phrased as "compels you" ... because really, on the balance, right now I feel like I've got the best job in the world. Never mind that I just came off a winter term that had me feeling buried alive, or the the work the university is "letting" me do this summer will be crucial come my formal interim tenure review in September ... nevertheless there is a deep satisfaction right now in looking at a summer term free of teaching --a feeling I didn't quite have time to savour this time last year, as I was busy preparing to drive back to Ontario for three months.

I spent today in my office thinking ... just thinking. I organized some books and files, made a few notes and made a library trip, but really today was just about being lost in thought and slowly working through the substance of my summer projects. I've been chomping at the bit to get started these past few weeks, but I resisted the temptation to jump in and run off madly in all directions, having learned from experience that, while productive in the short term, it would ultimately just muddy the waters.

A day of thinking -- I highly recommend it. It's very calming ... and odd, too, that as someone who is more or less a professional thinker, I so rarely have the opportunity.

On not living in fear

I was eating lunch at the student center here on Tuesday, when I was approached by a reporter and a cameraman (from NTV, I later discovered), who, upon ascertaining that I was a professor, asked if he could ask me some questions. I said sure, and he led with "What do you think of the events at Virginia Tech?"

Can I first comment on how stupid and clumsy a question that is? I answered, "Well, other than abject horror, there really isn't much more of a response." Which is true -- what else can you say? I continued, "But I suspect what you're getting at is how those events impact my own feelings of security as a professor here at MUN." He nodded. "I don't think we can live in fear, nor do I think it is wise to barricade ourselves in with heightened security and metal detectors -- not that I think anything like that, in the end, will prevent a determined lunatic from acting like the one in Virginia."

OK, I'm embroidering my answer a bit in hindsight, but that's the gist of what I said. Predictably, in the aftermath of the shootings the second item on the news -- after updates on what we knew about Virginia Tech -- was the question "Are our campuses safe?" replete with man-on-the-street interviews with students. And I'm happy to say that, with only a few exceptions, most responses tended to echo my own. University campuses are no safer or more dangerous than, really, anywhere else, and the prospect of turning them into an armed camp in the hopes of deterring a random psychotic with a gun fills me with dismay.

If it weren't for fear, I think the news media might just whimper and die. Or possibly return to just reporting the news. I see the "are our campuses safe" angle as incredible cynical and indeed irresponsible ... especially considering that civilian deaths in, say, Iraq, in numbers comparable to Virginia Tech, are not tragic bolts from the blue but the daily norm. What are we afraid of?

If ever a lunatic walks armed into my classroom I promise you I will shit myself in terror. But not until then. And were it to happen, I hope I have the courage that one professor had who died trying to protect those in his classroom.

Reason #23 why no one takes Hollywood seriously when they speak of environmental responsibility, conservation or, well, anything ...

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are buying a $268 million yacht which will be 280 feet long, complete with a swimming pool, a helipad and a submarine.

The helipad and submarine are egregious enough, but what really gets me is the swimming pool ... because apparently there won't be enough water for them in, you know, the ocean.

On the other hand, there will be enough space on this leviathan for them to adopt another dozen third world kids. Two dozen, if they don't want to spoil them ...

The top ten reasons I know I'm in essay-grading avoidance

10. I'm thinking seriously about doing my taxes, even though I've still got twenty days, fourteen hours and thirty minutes until midnight, April 30.

9. I keep looking at my bulletin board, thinking that it's time I rearranged everything on it.

8. I'm writing a blog post.

7. It seems to me to be the height of disorganization that ALL my books aren't alphabetized.

6. I'm somewhat disappointed that the coffee kiosk downstairs in my building is staying open for exams, because that means a trip to get coffee only takes a few minutes.

5. I'm surprised that the roulette wheel has never caught on as a means of assigning grades.

4. The overwhelming compulsion to go home and do laundry.

3. The obsessive hour and a half I spent last night making up possible reading lists for my courses next year -- which I don't yet know for certain if I'll be teaching.

2. I really want to go to the gym RIGHT NOW.

... and the #1 reason I know I'm in essay-grading avoidance?

1. I brought a copy of my thesis into the office today to begin rewriting it as a book!

The shallow end of the alphabet

My principal task this morning has been to write a 500-word abstract for a conference, and damn if it doesn't make me want to jump off a bridge. When did writing something so short become so painful?

Anyways ... as is my wont as I sit in front of the computer agonizing over writer's block, I turn my head and stare blankly off in space. As it happens, this has me looking at the bookcase right beside my door, the bookcase I think of as the "Shelves of Theory" ... five shelves of critics, theorists, philosophers and literary historians arranged alphabetically -- the only shelf I have arranged alphabetically, as it happens.

So as I sit here not writing my abstract, staring at the Shelves of Theory, I notice the odd phenomenon that the vast majority of the authors there fall into the first half of the alphabet. Given that A-M is the first half, and N-Z is the second, we don't have that M-N transition (When Alan Nadel picks up the baton from Elaine Tyler May) until almost at the end of shelf #4. Which means that -- taking into consideration that the first half of shelf #1 is taken up with anthologies and essay collections -- the A-M crowd account for three and a half shelves, while the N-Zers have just slightly more than one.

So I'm wondering if this bespeaks a broader trend in surnames to fall into the first half of the alphabet? Or whether something more insidious is at work: that on a deep genetic level, the first thirteen letters make you more inclined to engage in the exercise of literary criticism? Or perhaps there is a secret conspiracy on the part of academic presses giving precedence to the A-M fraternity (in which case, dudes -- I'm an "L"! just barely in the first half, perhaps, but there nonetheless). Mysterious.

Upon reading back over this post, I'm a little leery of offering this insight into the inner workings of my mind while in the throes of composition. Little wonder my writing process is glacial.

I do want to point out however that I'm very pleased with the title of my post, and I think someone should use it as the title of a novel.

Monday cuteness -- an overdue Morgan update

My brother Matt sent me these photos about a week ago. How unreal is his little girl?

A few things:

(1) She's talking more now, with an ever-expanding vocabulary.
(2) I have a name now -- she recognizes me in photos (though not, I'm sure, making the connection to who I am in relation to her), and calls me "Dis." Uncle Dis.
(3) She LOVES the Toronto Science Center. Matt and Michelle take her there every sunday, and apparently she is so excited when they pull into the parking lot that she's practically vibrating.

Hibernation, bad blogging, and the weirdness that is Facebook

Hm. Five entries for all of March—that’s some pretty lazy blogging on may part, if I do say so. Possibly my worst month yet. I don’t entirely know why; I suppose I’ve been busy, but I also really haven’t had much to report. I have only recently felt as though I’ve started emerging from winter hibernation, only recently started feeling energized again as the season slowly (so painfully painfully slowly) sloughs off its skin.

It’s odd: even as I feel utterly spent as far as the teaching and administrative parts of work go, my recent glimmerings of energy are all to do with my own research and writing—stuff long since relegated to the back burner this semester. Actually, saying that my own research has been on the back burner suggests that it has still be cooking away all this time, when in reality I think I’m dangerously close to having removed it, cooled it, repackaged it and returned it to the store.

Can I beat a metaphor to death or what?

So anyway, hopefully this newfound energy translates into more and better blogging.

Though to come to my third subject here, it’s a sign `o the times that I have begun to feel as though blogging has become quaintly antiquated, a charming affectation like parchment paper and fountain pens; Facebook is the new blogging, as well as the new email and the new … well, everything. I wondered a while back why so many of my former students from UWO whose blogs I link to had become so lackadaisical in their posting. I was assuming it was symptomatic of spiritual ennui and moral bankruptcy, until it was pointed out that everyone had simply migrated to Facebook—from whence they carried on all of the activities previously inefficiently separated into different forums like email, conversation, social gatherings and the like. Now we’ve arrived at this spectacularly efficient means of wasting time. We truly live in marvelous times.

I signed up for Facebook largely to see what the fuss was about, and for the first little while was a little creeped out—creeped out by me, that is, because as more and more people (students, generally, both current and former) started linking to me I realized that they were all at least a dozen years younger. I felt as though I had blundered into a social scene dominated by people in their early twenties who collectively wondered who the old guy was wandering blindly around.

Fortunately, I have discovered that the ranks of those on Facebook are not limited to twentysomethings (though they do tend to dominate) and undergrads; a few professor friends, and a lot of grad students now link to me. And what’s even better is that in some cases I’ve reconnected with old friends that I haven’t spoken to in a while. So that’s all right then. And really, I’m relieved, because I’d been running out of strategies for wasting time ….

I'm all about the 1930s crime fighting

I have written several times of my friend Gregg's radio-show exploits -- the two serials he writes, directs, produces and posts online -- the tales of Canada's geatest crime-fighting superhero, The Red Panda, and the hard-boiled adventures of Black Jack Justice.

I can't recommend these wonderful sagas enough. But now you have an even better reason to tune in -- the most recent Red Panda episode features none other than yours truly.

That's right -- unsatisfied with being interviewed about potholes in The Telegram, doing public lectures, and being interviewed about Nick Hornby novels on TV, I've sold out and whored myself out to that most commercial of media: web-based homages to 1930s radio serials.

That's right. I hear you condemning me for selling out. But wait: don't judge me until you've heard the show. You might think it's all about the money and the glamour, but I truly think I've managed, in that Gemorrah of voice-work, to do something truly avant-garde. Playing the part of the gentle but determined Father Michael, I satirize the legions of American actors with crappy Irish accents by doing just that -- you think Leonardo DiCaprio was abysmal in his Irishness in Gangs of New York? Just listen to my cutting critique of his wanna-be accent in my first few moments in The Red Panda. And it doesn't stop there -- though my part in this episode was recorded last May, see how I presciently affect a Danny Williams impersonation after I get going, so very very timely to our sputtering premier's criticisms of the federal budget.

It may be that my genius is only appreciated years and years from now. But you, gentle readers, can appreciate it now ... listen, and understand, and tell your friends. And take note, when others scoff at my embracing of such a crass, commecialized medium, that in the end I go uncredited. Because for me, it's all about the art.

George Orwell: Republican schill?

OK, so normally I generally try to ignore everything that comes out of Anne Coulter's mouth, but this one is too mind-bendingly idiotic to let go. While discussing an anonymously-created anti-Hilary attack ad parodying Apple's infamous 1984 homage to Orwell (the "think different" ad in which the woman throws the sledgehammer into the screen displaying Big Brother's face), Coulter stated "That is an amazingly powerful ad. I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat again after that." The problem with this evaluation is that it's a pro-Obama ad. I'm not entirely sure why it necessarily follows that a "powerful" ad promoting Barack Obama makes one more inclined to vote republican, but that's just the palate-cleanser -- the massive "Huh?!" comes a few seconds later when Coulter says "I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat after reading Orwell's 1984."

Let's all just think about this a moment. Savour the absurdity, if you will.

Who was it again who introduced the Patriot Act? Suspended habeas corpus? Consigned hundreds of people to the purgatory of Guantanamo Bay, or the hell of Abu Gharib, without recourse to representation? Introduced secret wiretaps to keep tabs on the domestic population? Has rolled civil liberties back to pre-1930s levels? Invoked executive privilege more than the last dozen administrations combined?

I don't know about you, but when I reread 1984, it ain't the Dems I think about. But then, I guess as Anne would maintain, we've always been at war with Oceania.

Of course, I know I'm making a mistake in paying any attention to this at all. For her, saying "I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat after reading Orwell's 1984" is approximately on the same level as saying "I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat after drinking a glass of milk" or "I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat after doing the dishes."

Springtime, for St. John's, and New-ew-foundland!

I may be speaking too soon on that front, given that it was -2 when I got in the car this morning, but at least the feel of spring is in the air. It is perhaps inevitable that there will be more snow before all is said and done; however, winter's back has been broken, I think, and any more blizzards will just be the petulant expression of a season that has overstayed its welcome.

Hear that winter? Get out! Get your lazy ass off our collective couch and go home.

Loving the early Daylight Savings Time. Best idea George W. Bush ever had. Well, the only good idea he's ever had. Quite the epitaph for his legacy.

Anyway, sorry for the long blog hiatus. I'm back and am in fact wearing black. The end is in sight: the last day of exams is less than a month away, and I have that date circled on my calendar. There is much to get through between now and then, of course, but at least I feel more energized than I have since, oh, september. Amazing what a little sun can do.

Doodling

In the first year of my PhD, after one of my classes, a classmate of mine who was an exchange student from Wales came up to me

"I'm on to you, Christopher," she said

"What do you mean?" I asked, taken a little aback.

"Next week I'll be doing my first seminar presentation in this course. And I've realized that if I look down at you and you're intently drawing precise, geometric doodles in the margins of your page, it means you're listening very closely to what I'm saying. But if I look down and you're madly writing away, you're not paying any attention at all, and what you're writing has nothing to with anything going on in the class."

Well, she certainly had me figured out. I've never been much of a note taker -- not much of a multitasker, I guess. I find I miss stuff when I'm writing, especially in a seminar class. But it's a nervous habit -- I like to keep my pen moving. And so in any situation when I'm sitting listening but without the particular need to take detailed notes, these abstract geometrical compositions creep up and down my margins, like fractals.

I'm thinking of this because in the last ten minutes of tidying up my office I happened across about a half a dozen half-filled pages on odd pads of paper ... the remnants of various meetings, I'm suspecting. Anyway, a gallery of doodles:

Snow clearing

Sorry for the post lapse. I've been burning the candle at both ends for the last two weeks or so, and, frankly, haven't had much to talk about or report. Just the same-old, same-old ... and a lot of snow.

One of the hardest things to communicate about St. John's in the winter is the sheer magnitude of the snow accumulation. Because of the nature of the city, with its fairly narrow streets, sidewalks basically disappear after the first big snowfall. So do cars parked at the roadside. The ploughs do a very good job of clearing the streets in pretty short order (most of them), but because there's not a lot of space for the snow to go, it gets heaped up in massive berms and inevitably encroaches on the road to the point where some streets are effectively reduced to a single lane. It's a good thing people are generally polite and courteous: driving along any residential street at this time of year involves taking turns with the oncoming traffic through the bottlenecks.

And then comes the snow removal: a slow, systematic process of closing off streets and reclaiming the streets and sidewalks from the snow. A caterpillar digger scoops the snow out and piles it into a dump truck. The results are rather dramatic: whereonce were unruly mountains of snow are now seemingly precisely machined cliffs ending at the sidewalk, perfectly perpendicular to the ground.

My question is: where does the snow go? Where is it carted off to? Is there a snow landfill outside the city? A snow dump? Or is it tossed in the ocean?

Here's my idea: we should find a cliff on the sea north of St. John's and manufacture our own glacier there ... a small but compact glacier formed by the sheer weight of the snow dumped there. Then, in mid-May, when tourists begin showing up looking for icebergs, we shove this glacier off the cliff, thus guaranteeing at least one iceberg per season. Also, I'll finally get to see an iceberg ... it's a source of some bitterness to me that global warming really seems to have kicked in just in time for me to move to Newfoundland, and the only icebergs I get to see are in postwards.

Insomnia and the storm that was

I can't sleep at the moment, so I've decided to try and fatigue myself with an overdue blog entry. I'm not holding out great hopes. But at least I will be a good blogger and get something new in before or at the one-week-since-last-post deadline I unofficially hold for myself

It has been a while since my last post. Has anything of import happened in Newfoundland since then? Hmm, let me think .... Yes, yes, I do seem to remember a giant motherfucker of a storm. Only vaguely, though. I seem to remember glancing out my window into my parking lot and seeing something like this:


And that's after the plough came through. The second time

Yes, as you might have noticed if you watched the national news for more than a nanosecond the last few days, we got hit with one of those storms I'd like to say we get once or twice a winter here -- if it weren't for the fact that we get them a few more times than once or twice. Say, three or four or twelve times.

And poor Kristen seems to have a talent for visiting me just in time to experience them. Last February she came, and had her flight cancelled because of a comparable storm. All in all, we discovered, not such a bad thing! She ended up staying for an extra two days. So when we woke up on tuesday morning to an ongoing blizzard, we were quite delighted ... until we realized that Air Canada was being a bit cagy and not cancelling her flight, only delaying it by degrees. It was supposed to have left by one in the afternoon ... and then two, and then two-thirty, and the four ... so instead of a lovely extra day of visiting, we were left checking the A/C website every fifteen minutes in the hope that the flight was cancelled. Which it wasn't. Arrgh.

That on top of the fact that we'd had to cancel our dinner reservations the evening before because of the storm. That of course didn't stop us from putting a pizza delivery person through the agony of driving through the snow. Gotta love the gumption of the Giovanni Cabot's people. They're the like the Post Office, only tastier.

Anyway, Kristen made it out yesterday (Tuesday), though her flight was delayed four hours. And driving her to the airport was entertaining, to say the least -- both for the occasional terror of the road conditions, and the perennial amazement I have in watching this city dig out from these storms. I wish I'd had my camera on hand to document the anthill-like activity. Everyone will have to be satisfied instead with some pics I snapped on campus this afternoon:



And downtown:

Why 24 has jumped the shark ...

The problem with shows based on a winning formula is that eventually they do become, well, formulaic. And I have to say, 24 has done a fairly decent job in terms of keeping my interest even when this became apparent around say season three, but lately things have become somewhat ridiculous.

To be fair however, the conception of 24 jumping the shark is sort of entertaining in itself -- one imagines Jack Bauer flashing his badge to Quint and Chief Brody, commandeering the great white "on matters of national security," then riding the shark and jumping it (a la Free Willy) over a jetty or something to have it land squarely on top of the lead terrorist and eat him. Betcha didn't see that coming, Fayed!

But I digress.

My problem is that, now that the show is working through the same basic storyline for the sixth time, in order to keep things from getting stale they've turned things up to eleven.

Bored with the relatively few civilian casualties in previous seasons? Let's start this time with a pre-existing state of emergency! Hundreds already dead!

Not satisfied with near-misses from nuclear weapons? Let's set one off in Los Angeles this time!

You think Jack Bauer's been given an easy ride so far? Let's make him the victim of three years of torture!

And wait! Let's have him kill his best friend to save a terrorist!

Enemies not sufficiently dastardly? Let's make the mysterious bluetooth guy from last season Jack's brother!

That not enough of a disfunctional family for you? Let's make Jack's father the evil mastermind! (Paging Dr. Freud ...)

Jack's willingness to torture has become a little wussy? Let's have him torture his brother! (Shall we start a pool betting on how many episodes it will be before he tortures Daddy?)


To be fair, the expectations game in television is a hard one to play ... shows that hit on a winning formula become understandably reluctant to tamper with it, even when it's painfully obvious that it's becoming tired. Television is a conservative medium in the truest sense of the word insofar as it fears change -- which is why almost every sitcom since The Honeymooners is essentially the same story, with just the characters, fashion and sexual vocabulary changing from year to year. I am in fact enjoying 24 this season, but I have to wonder where it's going to go from here -- what are they going to do next season to up the ante?

And there's the rub. This season we're already starting to venture into the absurd. What happens next?

When Jack was kidnapped by the Chinese at the end of last season, I got excited about the prospect of a 24 that would break all its own conventions and have as its story arc a daring rescue mounted by rogue CTU operatives in Manchuria ... away from their usual setpieces, away from LA, eschewing the comforts of home. Have Chloe set up in a remote trailer with jury-rigged equipment on a Chinese mountainside while Bill and Curtis (RIP, poor Curtis) and whoever else was still walking at the end of last season infiltrates the prison camp. Meanwhile, have the president, upon finding out what's going on, have to choose between running interference for his guys and risk an international incident or giving up his people.

That would have been cool. It would have been a departure. And it would have forestalled the shark-jumping for a season or two.

Happy corporate-manufactured kitschy heart-and-Hallmark day!

I was very pleased with my Valentine's Day entry last year, and don't quite have the brainpower today to top it ... so, like so many people do when inspiration fails them, I'll let Savage Chickens express my feelings for me:

Ender's vindication

There’s an interesting article in the current Harper’s about “The Coming Robot Army,” dealing with the increasing presence in the American military of unmanned vehicles. The article’s author, Steve Featherstone, narrates his experiences at a handful of “industry” shows—where engineering firms, large and small, pitch their products to the military. Everything from tank-sized robot weapons platforms to tiny spybots (both airborne and ground-based) is on display, along with promotional videos featuring Full Metal Jacket’s R. Lee Ermy and MacGyver himself, Richard Dean Anderson.

What struck me was the frequent recourse the prostheletizers of robot warfare had to the language of video games when relating the user-friendliness of their machines. “If you can operate a game boy, you’re good,” says one representative. R. Lee Ermy, in full drill sergeant mode in his promo video, screams “The next time you start thinking about telling kids to put away that video game, think again! Some day they could be using those same kinds of skills to run a robot that will save their bacon!”

This made me think of Orson Scott Card’s excellent SF novel Ender’s Game, in which, in which gifted children are recruited early into the military and taught the art of warfare. Ender Wiggin, our protagonist, proves talented beyond the dreams of his mentors and graduates into a specialized form of training, in which he plays simulations of space battles, networked to other children trained at the same academy he attended.

(Warning for those who have not read the novel: I’m about to give away the ending, so if you want to read it—and I recommend that you do—stop reading now).

The simulations get increasingly difficult, with increasingly greater odds against them and an enemy increasingly familiar with Ender & co.’s tactics. Ultimately they face the enemy at their homeworld with a pitifully small fleet against vastly superior enemy numbers. In desperation, Ender sends his fleet in a suicidal attack that destroys the entire alien planet.

The twist is that what Ender took to be a training simulation for when he would command actual fleets from a distance was in fact real—that the ships he and his cohorts commanded were not simulated but actual; and the final, total destruction of the enemy was an actual genocidal (or “xenocidal,” I suppose) massacre.

The point here is that every time I play an online first-person shooter game, I get killed rather a lot—and I suspect that many of the people killing me are all of about twelve years old, kids raised not so much on as in computer and video games, whose intimate familiarity with these virtual environment is second nature … while for me, having grown up with the archaic technology of Space Invaders, ColecoVision and the Commodore 64, the extra split second it takes to be aware of things in those sophisticated virtual worlds is the difference between virtual life and virtual death.

Hence, the insistence of military engineers’ on the Playstation-esque qualities of roboticized warfare makes me think that Orson Scott Card’s dystopian vision was pretty spot on. One of the principal criticisms of the novel was its lack of believability (always a dubious thing when talking about SF, but that’s another discussion), insofar as some readers couldn’t accept the premise of twelve-year-olds exhibiting the kind of expertise as those in the novel. I’m not so sure. In the CGI industry, firms don’t hire computer programmers and train them to be artists—that would be futile. Rather, they hire artists and train them to use computers, because a talent for art is not something that can be taught. If warfare ever does come down to the remote operation of machines from computer terminals, who then becomes the best candidate—the twentysomething soldier relatively new to the intimacies and nuances of cutting-edge technology, or the ten-year-old prodigy who wipes the floor with people twice his age at computer game competitions?

And would the generals let him know those are real people he’s wiping out?

The week that wouldn't end

Normally weekends don't make much of a difference in my life, nor have they for a long time. I frequently work half- or full days on Saturdays and Sundays, either at home or at the office, and my weekly schedule is open enough that if I'm totally overwhelmed, I can take some me-time midweek. It's one of the reasons I love my job.

But all I could think this week was "My god, is it Friday yet?"

I'm not sure what it was, but this week seemed to last forever. Part of it -- or much of it, I guess -- was simply the intersection of a variety of tasks and concerns. We're hiring two new people for next year, a postcolonialist and a Shakespearean, and we saw candidates for both; as I'm on the search comittee for the former, monday and tuesday were taken up with the interview and squiring the candidate around campus to her various meetings. We had a department meeting on Wednesday (always fun), a candidate for the renaissance job thursday and friday, and we hosted a poetry reading last night -- which, being on the Pratt Comittee, I was partially responsible for organizing this week.

Oh, and there was that teaching thing I do as well. On tap for this week was Alfred, Lord Tennyson in my second-year class, and The Human Stain by Philip Roth, the film Dark City and some apparently blood-pressure raising writings by erstwhile neocon Francis Fukuyama. Good times.

And marking essays ... though I did not get as much to to attend to that as I would have liked, as my second-years can attest. Monday, guys, I promise!

All in all, not exceptionally mind-blowing ... I hear my computer network-guy brother tell of his not infrequent 36-hour (or more) marathons getting a new network up and running, or of the all-nighters he pulls when a network goes down somewhere, and it makes me feel positively lazy. I think part of my problem this week was just frustration with the glacial progress of my own research. Considering that I come up for a formal interim tenure review in September, I'm getting a bit anxious about getting some writing out there. I have three articles on the go, two relatively close to completion and a third a little more of a ways off, but what they all need is a few days of focused attention. Would that I were that enviously hated species of academic who can devote the odd half-hour of free time that surfaces in a day to productive writing. But no ... I'm one of those who requires a certain amount of momentum, and that first half-hour is usually taken up in necessary screen-staring.

However, as Danine pointed out to me yesterday in a much-appreciated reality check, I'm actually in pretty good shape for the review, and when it gets down to it I can use the summer to devote uninterrupted time to the articles. (Given that the ideal plan however is to finally perform major surgery on my thesis this summer -- a task I look forward to as much as I would to, well, major surgery -- I'd really rather have them out of the way).

OK, enough of me whining about my week. Given the administrative circus I've been engaged in this week, I would like to provide my non-academic readers with one occasional glimpses into the machinery of academia offered here on this humble blog. The topic du jour: the academic job interview.

I bring this up in part because of course I'm involved this year for the first time in the hiring process, but also because of a question raised by a student. I had let my second-years go a little early on Monday because I was heading directly from class to the two-hour interview with this week's candidate. One of my students commented, as we walked from class, "A two-hour interview? Wow, that's pretty intense." To which I responded: "That's just a fraction of the interview, actually."

You see, not satisfied with the various fiery hoops through which we have to jump over the course of a graduate degree -- comprehensive exams, ball-breaking scholarship applications, the thesis, the thesis defense -- universities impose a particular species of hell on prospective faculty members in the form of the day-and-a-half interview. First of all, there's the process of application, in which you send your CV, letters of reference, teaching dossier, and writing sample (the assembling of which represents a week of work in and of itself), which the search committee pores over with excruciating minuteness.

(Seriously -- I was quite amazed at the level of detail with which we examined the applications. When the cut comes down to a handful of comparably impressive candidates, any mistake or inconsistency can sink an applicant. It made me somewhat incredulous that I ever made it to the interview stage).

Some universities then perform a series of phone interviews with a long list, and on the basis of that narrow it down. Mercifully, we skipped that step.

Then, if you're called in for an interview, you fly out to wherever the university is (we had two candidates come in from the prairies, which made for a lot of travel time), and you a subjected to a series of meetings with a variety of administrative types -- the Dean of Arts, Dean of Graduate Studies, Vice-President Academic, Faculty Relations, Faculty Union, and of course the Head of the Department -- all of whom ask you questions that are variations on the same theme: namely, Why Should We Hire You?

You also deliver a half-hour or so lecture to the department to demonstrate your research chops, followed by a half-hour question period. And then of course is the interview with the search committee, which here lasts two hours.

Also on the roster: an open lunch to which all members of the department and graduate students are invited, and dinner with a three or four faculty members. And if there is one thing drummed into you -- if you come from a university nice enough to train its graduate students in how to interview well -- it's that there is no time during this process when you are not being interviewed. So in other words, limit yourself to one glass of wine with dinner, and keep your game face on. More than a few promising candidates have sunk their chances by saying something off-colour after one glass of wine too many.

The basic idea behind all this is partially to test the candidate's stamina. This is an exhausting process, even if you're gregarious and like to talk about yourself (as I do). I can't even begin to imagine the seven types of hell endured by people who are shy. At MUN, we're actually comparatively humane -- spreading it out over a day and a half gives the candidates a breather here and there, and our faculty is generally very friendly and courteous. Some universities however make a point of cramming it all into one endless day ... starting at 8am, leaving no time between meetings, and basically trying to run the candidate off his or her feet. Also, some people, even if they're otherwise very nice, will be difficult or even hostile in the job talk question period, or the interview -- principally to see if they can rattle the candidate, to get him or her to drop their guard.

Yes, we're all really rather mad here.

I'll take oddly-named stage managers for 500, Alex ...

Answer: Tiggers are wonderful things.

Question: What is the wonderful thing about Tiggers, Alex?

So this falls into the realm of the ultra-cool: one of my dearest friends will be a contestant on Jeopardy! The Lovely and Amazing Tigger Jourard -- Trivia Geek, Theatrical Martinet and Stage Manager Extraordinaire -- flies to sunny LA to tape her episode on February 7. And I'm betting that the only way she won't be kicking serious ass is if they decide to bring back Ken Jennings. Even then, Mr. Smartie-pants better bring his A-game.

Read about it all here.

For those who don't know Tigger, she and I were joined at the hip for all four plays I've directed ... and let me tell you now if you're thinking of dabbling in the directorial end of the theatrical pool, you need to find yourself a Tigger to be your stage manager. It helps that she was actually a professional stage manager for eighteen years, before finally leaving theatre for sanity reasons. I met her in winter of 2000 (well, I'd met her before, but only really got to know her at this point) when she agreed to come out of retirement as it were to stage manage a production of Joe Orton's Loot that a friend of hers was acting in. I was playing Hal (the last time I acted in a play, incidentally), and we hit it off immediately. That summer I made my first tentative foray into directing with UWO's Summer Shakespeare ... and I asked Tigger if she would be willing to stage manage.

The conversation went something like this. Tigger: "What play do you want to do?" Me: "Richard III." Tigger: "OK. What story do you want to tell?"

At first I thought the question was a bit wacky. What story? Richard III, of course! But then as I thought about it, it made increasingly more sense, and I realized the depth of this woman's wisdom. And the rest is history.

Here's Tigger relaxing with her hubby Bryan. Please note the Macbeth shirt he's wearing.


Answer: all our love and best wishes.

Question: What are we sending with Tigger to LA, Alex?

Break a leg, sweetie!