After McCain refrained from saying anything about NCLB at the Republican convention Laura challenged me to write about McCain’s education policy. So I dutifully tried, but found it hard not to seem more partisan than I actually am. However, I had a good look at both candidates’ websites, so I was more or less unsurprised by McCain’s answer to the final question in last week’s debate. (Just in case that sounds like a complaint that it was not until the final, rushed, question in the final debate that education was asked about, it isn’t: I can’t imagine anyone’s vote hinges on what a presidential candidate says about education; given how little influence presidents have over what happens in schools that is probably sensible; and anyway all candidates have proven extremely adept at not answering questions).
From the category archives:
Books
Expanding my unsystematic researches into early 20th Century German typography and book design, I recently stumbled across this gem (click for larger):
It’s the George Salter designed cover for a 1930 German edition of Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel.
It’s a perfect example of ‘vague sense of a foreign land‘ phenomenon. He’s got a cowboy in Georgia. A line of Dusenbergs to represent Tennessee, just north of the skyscrapers of New Orleans. A boxer guarding the Mexican border. And we’ve all heard those dreadful stories about trains through Utah menaced by baseball players employing the classic overhead swing. And I dunno what army is invading Chicago. Other examples of this sort of thing?
Like Kevin Drum, I have been sorely tempted to take a poke at the poor Cornerites in their misery – especially Andy McCarthy – but Hilzoy got there first. You can follow her links. it’s all-Ayers, all-the-time, if you’ve been missing the show. Here’s my analytic contribution on top of the straight mockery: this lot have been reduced to arguing that the problem with Obama is that he doesn’t believe the stuff he’s saying, won’t do anything like the things he’s proposing. Or, in the 10% less crazy Frum version, he’s just got to be an incredibly corrupt Chicago pol. Because he’s from Chicago.
This is funny, first, because it converts Obama’s rather pedestrian characteristic of not seeming to be something radically different than what he seems to be into a maddening sort of rope-a-dope achievement. (How does he do it? That ‘appearing to be the sort of person that he probably is’ thing.) Lowry glowers: “he’s a kind of genius at appearing plausible. If the Nobel committee had a prize for appearing plausible, he’d win it every time.” But Lowry isn’t talking about the power of making implausible ideas sound plausible. He’s talking about the power of making it seem plausible that you believe basically plausible things. [click to continue…]
I’m sure there’s nothing to this so-called ‘financial crisis’ that wasn’t explained adequately in that classic Sutherland instructional video, “The Wise Use Of Credit”. If not, then in that companion volume, “What Makes Us Tick”.
We have a friend who travels on business to India a lot. He was discussing how maybe next week isn’t the best week to be away from home because if the whole system melts down he’ll get stuck in Bangladesh, with the airlines unable to buy gas for the planes because money has seized up globally. Getting back to Singapore would be like a cross between Burmese Days and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Not that he really thinks that. It’s just that everyone is thinking that. I mean: it almost definitely won’t happen.
I’ll just talk nonsense for a while. Because: what do I know? I praised Scott Morse’s art a couple weeks ago. Since then I bought a new collection of his stuff, Scrap Mettle
Ingrid’s post below (plus a couple of other events) prompted me to look for G.A. Cohen’s new book: Rescuing Justice and Equality
Via “David Levine”:http://www.againstmonopoly.org/index.php?perm=1253, it appears that George Mason University is “being sued”:http://www.courthousenews.com/2008/09/17/Reuters_Says_George_Mason_University_Is_Handing_Out_Its_Proprietary_Software.htm for over 10 million dollars by the owner of EndNote (which happens to be Thomson-Reuters).
The complaint states, “Dr. Daniel J. Cohen, Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History, and the director of GMU’s Center for History and New Media, developed Zotero, which is a freely distributable, open-source software based research tool that allows users to gather, organize and analyze sources, including citations, and freely share the results with others.” The Center for History and New Media release “a new beta version of Zotero to the general public” on July 8. Reuters adds, “A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert – in direct violation of the License Agreement – Thomson’s 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.”
Now, I’m obviously not an intellectual property lawyer (fwiw the “Wikipedia article”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering on reverse engineering, which may or may not be reliable but is certainly more reliable than me, suggests that suits over interoperability are of dubious legal merit). But I am an academic, and thus part of EndNote’s core end-user market. And I say that, regardless or not of whether it’s legal, this is a bullshit move on Thomson-Reuters’ part. There are a lot of academics out there who have used EndNote in the past and created styles for the journals that they submit to etc. EndNote’s owners are clearly worried that these academics will be tempted to move their styles from EndNote to a software package which in my view (and I’ve used both) is clearly superior. This is a no-brainer. There is _no significant innovation or value-added_ to EndNote’s specific file format. Nor is there reason to believe (given the existence of Zotero) that protecting this file format and EndNote’s purported intellectual property rights over it will encourage innovation in this particular marketplace. On the broad social merits, Reuters’ attempted shakedown is indefensible.
Nor is this as trivial an issue for academics as it might seem. As Scott has “suggested”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/26/mclemee “in the”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/26/zoteromania/ “past”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/12/archival-zotero-fication-or-possibly-vice-versa/#more-6498 Zotero and projects like it are at the heart of an effort to bring something like the semantic web to academia. Zotero combines bibliographical database management with social tagging and other fun stuff – it is gradually becoming a platform through which academics can share metadata and other interesting things with each other. Which means that this battle is likely to have long term consequences in determining whether or not new forms of academic collaboration are likely to be controlled by academics themselves, or take place through some kind of commercially controlled intermediation, with all the forms of stupidity that are likely to go along with that.
For my part, I’m going to refuse to use Reuters’ software in future, strongly discourage graduate students from buying EndNote, and try to get this message out to my colleagues too (at least those of them who aren’t using Zotero or some BibTex client already). If I taught any classes where Thomson printed relevant textbooks, I would be strongly inclined not to use these texts either. I encourage you to do the same (and, if you’re so minded, to suggest other possible ways of making it clear to Reuters that this kind of behaviour is intolerable in the comments). People have argued that the music industry has screwed up badly by suing its customers – whether that’s true or not, makers of academic bibliography software should be told that suing universities for what appear to be entirely legitimate actions is not likely to do their reputations any good.
NB- post corrected shortly after publication for bone-headed error.
Finally and “long overdue”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/05/20/care-talk-blog/, here is my book review of Valuing Children
Folbre formulates four questions which she sets out to answer: (1) Why should we care about spending on the children? (2) How much money and time do parents devote to children? (3) How much money do taxpayers spend on children? And (4) who should pay for the kids (in other words, which share of the costs of children should be borne by parents and by the government)?
[click to continue…]
Hello again, crooked timber of humanity! I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. It feels like I’m always saying that, but then, that’s what happens when you move to the once-every-Jovian-year posting schedule.
My mother and I have a tacit agreement. It’s the same one she had with her father and that I, already, have with my elder daughter. I believe my grandfather had the same pact with his mother. It’s simply this – to alert the other to thriller and mystery writers that they may not have read.
The rule is that the writer has to be good enough for the other person to like. This does lead to some mistakes. Unlike my grandfather, who loved Ovid and Pope (in one of his many failed attempts to corrupt me — or at least loosen me up — he gave me a wonderful translation of Catullus’s dirty poems) but would read any old crap when it came to thrillers, my mother is moderately discerning. I am somewhere in between. But, of course, good mystery writers generally improve with age (examples abound, but especially striking is Julian Symons, who apparently wouldn’t allow his first effort to be republished but ended his career with several absolute blinders; the obvious counterexample being Colin Dexter, whose work is solid proof that the best TV is inspired by substandard fiction). So I was embarrassed when my mother told me about Peter Robinson, whose books I’ve been reading for years without telling her. I had a good reason – at first they just didn’t seem good enough for her (I know that she is a bit, though not much, more discerning than I am). I didn’t really notice the point at which he got good enough to mention, so didn’t do it, even though I think he is now in the top rank of mystery writers.
So it was funny when she visited the other week that she immediately asked if I had read Mark Mills’s The Savage Garden
Comics! That is to say, TopShelf is having their annual $3 sale! You can get some good books, man. I just loaded up. I’m especially looking forward to: Scott Morse, The Barefoot Serpent. (I really like Scott Morse’s art.) Tim Sievert, That Salty Air, and Dan James’ Mosquito (check out the preview.) I loved James’ The Octopi and the Ocean. You should pick that up, too, while you are at it. Hell, you might even buy stuff that’s not $3 but merely on sale! Like Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots.
In other news, the Savage Dragon has endorsed Barack Obama for President. Good for him! But maybe he’s too metrosexual for this to make a big difference.
On the strength of my mighty “Back to the Futura” post, I got an offer from the Prospect Magazine to review Font. The Sourcebook
The review got entitled “Building A Better Futura”, so I’m maxed-out on Futura-future puns for the rest of the month. I concluded the review by squeezing in a quick note on my ongoing would-Obama’s-poster-have-been-illegal researches. (Executive summary: the Nazis were crazy.) Now I’ll just sweep together a few other bits and scraps that ended up on the cutting room floor. [click to continue…]
You might want to check out my colleague Lester Hunt’s excellent new edited collection on Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education
In the course of writing my own paper several things happened. I started off assuming (with no real evidence) that grade inflation was real and believing (for no real reasons) that it was bad; I discovered that there is no evidence of grade inflation (which doesn’t, of course, mean that it doesn’t exist) and that the reasons for thinking it would be bad if it did exist are pretty weak. Commenting on Johnson’s book, in other words, convinced me that his subtitle is entirely wrong (even though the book is, actually, terrifically good). It’s not the first time that I have changed my mind as the result of writing a paper, but it is the first that I’ve changed it quite so radically.
I developed, mainly through reading Valen Johnson’s book, a conviction that student evaluations are next to worthless for evaluating teachers. His book also convinced me that grade variation within departments exists and is bad, though not that there is much we can or should do about it.. Finally, I became more and more irritated with Harvey Mansfield’s piece in the Chronicle. So, below the fold, here’s a taster of the book, adapted from my chapter, and arguing specifically against Mansfield:
I just had a deliciously sweet cantaloupe. How did I know how to pick it? My favorite* chef, Chef Susan aka Chef Q posted some advice on the topic recently. Not only is she an amazing cook and baker, she is also an excellent photographer so her posts are illustrated with helpful images. I forgive her for all the pounds I gained last year due to her cooking (hey, at least I finally started a regular exercise regime) and thank her not just for all the great meals I’ve had the good fortune to experience, but also the helpful material she shares online.
[*] It’s actually a tie with my Mom, but she’s not officially a chef. Of course, that hasn’t stopped her from publishing a cookbook (see some of her recipes here).
Photo credit: Susan Beach
Norm Geras has put up a “profile”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/08/the-normblog-profile-254-henry-farrell.html of me – if you’re interested, click over. The bit I’d recommend really has nothing to do with me, except that I was there when it was uttered – my favorite take on a proverb. It came from an Australian friend whom I’ve fallen out of touch with, Mac Darrow. Off the cuff, he glossed _in vino veritas_ as
Many a true word
Is slurred
which I’ve always thought was a translation tinged with genius.
Also, two very good appreciations of writers. First, Julian Barnes has a “lovely piece”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/fiction on Penelope Fitzgerald both as a person and as a novelist. I fell in love with _The Blue Flower_, less for the portrait of Novalis than for the quiet tragedy of Karoline Just, and read everything else by her that I could get my hands on. As an aside, while she may seem as far from genre as a writer could be, her pastiche of an M.R. James short story in _The Gate of Angels_ is uncanny and brilliant. Second, Kathy G. has a great discussion of “Tom Geoghegan”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/tom-geoghegan-m.html. His _Which Side Are You On?_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Geoghegan%20Which%20Side%20are%20you%20On&PID=29956, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWhich-Side-Are-You-Revised%2Fdp%2F1565848861%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1217606748%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ) is a wonderfully written contrary class of a book about the union movement. As Kathy says:
bq. a lot of people just don’t get his charmingly idiosyncratic writing. He writes about politics, and about policy, but God knows his books and essays don’t read like formal scholarly papers or dry think tank reports — they’re far more fluid, inventive, and playful than writing about policy has any right to be. But the problem is, political types often don’t appreciate the literary qualities of his writing, and the literary types don’t get the politics.
I suspect that’s right – his books don’t have arguments so much as they _are_ arguments – going backwards and forwards between different points of view, looking at different aspects of the issue, proposing viewpoints and counter-viewpoints. For those who haven’t read him, he’s really wonderful; one of the best and most original political writers alive.
My friend Doug Wolk just won an Eisner for best comics-related book for Reading Comics
In other news, somehow I missed the news a few weeks ago that long-lost footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis had turned up in Buenos Aires. That’s almost as good as when they found a nice print of Dreier’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in a Norwegian insane asylum, eh?
Although the new material is in a terrible condition, according to the first appraisals by the German film historians, including Rainer Rother, the director of the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum in Berlin, the newly discovered scenes give a surprising insight into the characters’ motivation. They finally give “Metropolis” a coherent story-telling rhythm, whose absence was often criticized. For example, characters who were practically extras in the shorter version, such as the spy Schmale or Josaphat, Freder’s friend, actually had significant supporting roles and the original dramaturgical concept, which before could only be reconstructed using textual sources and photographs, is now apparent on film for the first time since 1927.
I don’t think we even knew the spy Schmale’s name. He’s always just been ‘the thin man’, right? And he’s onscreen for all of 3 seconds, looking very tall and sinister. I’m looking forward to seeing a bit more. Here’s a YouTube video that includes tidbits of the new stuff, starting with Schmale, I presume, peeking over a Metropolis newspaper:
And, in other German typeface-related news, we are finally going to get to see the lost Yoshiwara district scene.
