Arwen's Blog

Efforts to make this my "official" blog have not been especially successful. My blogging life remains pretty much at labingi. Over there, I've been writing more about the progress of my original writing. Here's a tag to posts that focus on my science fiction universe:

The Continuation

In short, I'm plugging away on my screenplay for The Hour before Morning, slowly but surely. I'm up to Meravyn's big flashback, which is probably 40% of the way through in terms of the first draft.

In teaching news, I've just completed my first term in a few years as a university instructor. What a big contrast to community college! The students, in general, are much more prepared and more "traditional" students. I enjoy both settings, but they sure do have different needs.

And finally, here's a little review of Ueda Akinari's "The Chrysanthemum Vow" or "Reunion."

At long last, my short story, "God of Lemons" has been published in Challenging Destiny no. 25:

http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook54411.htm?cache

It's a story about a 16-year-old Vietnamese-American girl who meets T. E. Lawrence (who else?), Darwin, and Abelard in a Dante-esque afterlife.

X-posted to starmerrow, labingi

I rewrote my bio for this LJ in keeping with my efforts to broaden its focus and make this more my "official" LJ.

For those interested in either the Sengoku Period in Japan or scholarship on homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan, informal book reviews at t'other journal:

Kawanakajima
Saga of the Samurai: Shingen in Command
Male Colors

I've decided to broaden the mission of this "official" blog. I started it mainly to focus on libraries when I was getting my MLIS and shifted it to include teaching and general academia. I'm going to shift it again to include more of my personal views and updates on my original creative writing and sci fi/fantasy organization, StarMerrow.

What I won't include here is, broadly speaking, my "fannish" interests, unless they cross over with academia/criticism. There will be some X-posting between this and my more fannish journal, so apologies to those who have friended both.

On that note, writing the Continuation universe, shipped from t'other journal:

I have resolved that life is too short to spend it writing things I don’t want to write. No more guilt about dropping projects/stories halfway. One of the things I do want to write at some point is Ghanior’s story. He’s been one of my favorites of my original characters forever, but I’ve never gotten down anything about him beyond real juvenalia (the short novel I wrote when I was about 20-22--it’s crap).

I’m not sure where to go with his story, though, so I’m going to ramble about it under the cut.

( Writing Ghanior )

Ah, long overdue update. I've been so busy teaching 4 composition classes that I haven't had time to blog about it. Careerwise, I've been living life rather than writing about it, which is better than the other way around. It has been a fascinating term! No library work but my first experience teaching at a community college: 2 actually in 2 very socially distinct towns. The university town, unsurprisingly, sent me a group of students not unlike university students but slightly more inclined to skip class and not turn in work. A very good class though--one of the most motivated and proactive mixes of personalities I've ever taught.

My 3 classes in out in "rural Oregon" were a revelation. Here's a description adapted from a letter to my pen pal, S. I feel a bit cheap recycling it, but, S., I wrote you first!

This has been the most socially conservative area I've ever worked in. My classes tended to be very patriotic (though, at this point, almost no one is in favor of Bush/the war). Almost all my students were pro-life and many spoke very openly of their devout Christianity. About half wanted a more fiscally conservative economy and half a more liberal economy: these groups, unsurprisingly, fell along socioeconomic lines, with the poor students more inclined to feel there should be more social services for the needy. For many of them, birth control is not part of their culture. Their argumentation runs something like, "You shouldn't have sex as a teen because you're too young to have a baby," as if that consequence were inevitable. There were also many more smokers than I'm used to. Even though they all very politely smoked in the designated areas, my folders all smelled of cigarette smoke all term. And oddly, there seems to be an epidemic of drunk driving in this area. I'm baffled by how many of my students spoke of having loved ones killed/injured by drunk drivers or having close calls themselves. I wonder what's behind that.

I am, however, principally impressed with the sheer dedication of many of these students in pursuing their careers under extremely adverse conditions. Some are almost destitute; some are poor, single parents; some are in/recently out of abusive relationships; some never finished high school or got their GED; some had been in trouble with the law. It was inspirational to work with them (I don't say that lightly). It made me very proud of my fellow Americans. It made me angry that dominant discourses in our country show no sympathy for the day-to-day struggle so many people go through simply to keep going. It made me hope that kinder times lie ahead.

I got a job! It's not a library job. It's teaching composition (which includes an information literacy element) at a community college as an adjunct for no benefits and what my employer describes as "ridiculously low" pay. Oh, and it's an hour commute each way.

So why am I so jazzed? Because for my life needs right now, it's very close to perfect. Let's look at the pros. It's work I'm experienced in, mostly enjoy, am pretty good at (if I do say so), and consider socially worthwhile. It's a lovely campus and a wonderful bunch of colleagues. It's also a smallish, rural school and feels very much "my speed," as I'm a kid from the country. It's part-time work, which is what I need right now because I want time to work on my own creative projects. Moreover, while full-time work would provide benefits, I wouldn't be a good teacher tackling 5 classes/term; 3 comp. classes of 25-odd students sounds like a good maximum to me. And, right now, supporting no one but myself, I don't need much money. And I'm good health, so I probably won't need the health benefits (though, of course, if I lived in a civilized nation, I'd have them anyway). And the commute is not bad: freeway driving, pretty, almost no starting/stopping; I can listen to lots of Russian CDs and books on CD. I only have go down 3 days a week, which isn't bad at all. And it's something relevant I can put on my resume--and my first crack at community college work: a definite resume plus.

I bring all this up because I've just been reading The Tao of Pooh and thinking about the idea of doing what's right for you. This job is not a conventional "career move." It may look a bit sad on paper for someone with a Ph.D., MLIS, and additional BS. But aside from the general social point that giving college teachers poverty-level pay and no benefits speaks deplorably of America's investment in having an educated populace and successful democracy, this is the job I want. It feels like a right choice. I'm stoked.

I was recently reading in PNLA about school libraries using graphic novels to encourage boys to read. It apparently works, which is super, and more power to the librarians and teachers who develop these ideas to get boys to read more.

But part of me is troubled by the idea that while girls will read anything, boys need to have their special "boy interests" catered to if they're going to pick up a book. There's an implicit assumption that the average boy won't touch a book unless it's about action, sports, space adventure, gross-out humor, cartoons, and definitely only if it has a boy (or at least male) protagonist. By this reasoning, you just can't expect a boy to read Nancy Drew or a Buffy novelization or Miss Marple or The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland or most poetry or The Trojan Women or Great Expectations (not enough action) or Robinson Crusoe (way boring) or A Midsummer Night's Dream (where's the sports?) or Rendezvous with Rama (there's some space but little adventure) or The Greensky Triology (no space at all) or The Importance of Being Earnest (the wit's, like, dry).

I'm conflating age groups, of course, and being somewhat hyperbolic. But I worry about our culture's assumption that boys are just too--what?--hyper? intractable? stupid? to wrap their minds around any material not spoon fed to them like their favorite chocolate pudding. Most of the works I've mentioned were written by men. Men (and boys) are not intrinsically incapable of appreciating the written word or wit or high tragedy or interesting women or subtle social commentary. Indeed, it was not so very long ago that most of the world assumed it was women who would never be able to wrap their minds around such things.

Hurray that we don't regard women that way anymore, but we should not regard the other half that way either. Humans of all stripes tend to rise to challenges. If you treat a child/teen as if he's capable of understanding something and support him in his attempts to understand it, he will usually understand it. If you raise a boy to read, he's likely to read: read Dickens, read Shakespeare, read Sophocles, read anything you teach him to value--and it's not hard to find value in the grand old works. That's why they're still with us.

So all in all, my hat goes off to librarians and teachers getting boys to read at all. But as a society, we can do better than that. We can get many boys to embrace the humanities but not if we start with the assumption that they can't/won't/naturally don't like 'em. Boys--like girls--are capable of more; let's treat them accordingly.

Heavens, I haven't updated for 5 weeks! That's because my life has been going through major techtonic shifts, and info. science blogging fell to very far back burner. So did my reporting for LISNews.org, but I think I'm building up momentum again to resume these tasks.

In any case, I just got home from a very interesting job interview at CSU Channel Islands. This is the newest and perhaps most hip of the California State U's (opened in 2002). It's library is very different from other academic libraries I've encountered: more informal (even allows eating/drinking!), more thoroughly engaged with every aspect of the school's academic and campus life development. My overall impression is that the librarians at CSU CI are friends of the school: they work closely with faculty; they know almost all the (small) student body personally; they're the university's go-to people for just about any question or problem that doesn't seem to fit anywhere else.

They are, in fact, a marvelous example library outreach in the tradition we read so much about in library school. The library at CSU CI is not principally a building; it's a community that runs throughout the university, like the mortar that holds the bricks together. It's a fascinating model for what an academic library can be.

I finally got myself an RSS aggregator: Vienna: http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php

It's a great little freeware program for Mac. Easy to use, though, as with most of 'em, the "help" might as well not be there. Thankfully, it's easy enough to use that you can figure it out without the help.

Having an RSS aggregator is going to be a Very Good Thing for my web literacy. Now, in one location, I can scan the BBC news, check up on Lessig's latest copyright comments, look up the latest in library technologies, and (finally) keep up to date on what my Facebook network is saying.

One problem only: information overload. A lot of this material requires some serious reading. I could sit all day and do nothing else. One skill I'll have to practice is how to effectively select feeds and skim them to get the most out of this wealth of information. Still in all, this is one tech advancement I'm happy about.

Side note: my native browser, Safari, claims to have aggregator capabilities, but talk about "help" being useless. I gave up trying to figure it out. Example: the first line in the "Setting Up RSS" topic--yes, that's as basic as you can get: "The 'Default RSS Reader' pop-up menu lets you choose which application is opened when you click an RSS link."

Okay, and where is this "default RSS reader pop-up menu" I hear tell of? No need for that bit of info. apparently. I mean, why should we actually want to find the menus we need to use?

I rant a lot about this type of bad computer tech communication. I do so because it's pervasive, and in 2007, it shouldn't be. Sure in 1994, when the computer age was being substantially forged by techie kids in their early 20s with zip educational training, you expected communication to be iffy. But today, there's just no excuse for this basic inability to convey information. Everyday people trying to negotiate these technologies deserve better. That's my opinion as an educator, and I think it's worth griping about.

There's an interesting discussion going on here at fandom_lawyers about the legal aspects and implications of LJ's recent suspension of journals deemed to have "objectionable" content. (Kudos to LJ, by the way, for promptly restoring many of those journals.)

I'm not a lawyer, so I can't comment on the legal points this conversation is addressing. But I do want to respond to one of the questions brought up: why should LJ--a private company--have any obligation to let people use free speech? As a private company, they can restrict speech more or less as they want, right?

I'm perfectly willing to suppose that LJ has no legal obligation at all to allow any particular type of speech. (Interesting that it does claim a legal obligation to limit certain types of speech.... A curious irony in the land of free speech.) But LJ represents 13 million accounts. Of those accounts, I might guess that maybe 4 million of them are actively used by people who have some vested interest in them.

Millions.

Millions of people rely on LJ as an important part of their social and political networks.

LJ may have no legal obligation to allow those millions to do anything. But when you are responsible for channeling the voices of millions of people, morally you do have an obligation to be mindful of the "natural rights" of those people (to use the 18th century lingo on which LJ's home country is founded). You have an obligation not to silence those people without a very pressing, fairly indisputable reason for doing so. ("She writes chan" is not such a reason, nor is "this doesn't reflect the community we wish to build.")

The fact that the law doesn't reflect this is, I think, a problem with the law. And "natural law," as Thomas Jefferson would observe, demands that people abused by such restrictions fight them, as the users of LJ quite successfully and laudably have.

Most of our media is controlled by "private companies" with no "legal obligation" to give anyone a voice. The result is sound-bite news, unequal representation of political campaigns, a misinformed/uninformed public, unwise voting, George Bush, and a worsened, degraded society for most people. Sure, it's legal. It just shouldn't be. And for LJ to grant us our freedom to speak freely in this venue is not just "nice." It is--according to the values on which America, at any rate, is founded--a moral obligation: to uphold our inalienable right to Liberty.

Check out Nate Anderson's article on the arrest of Polish translators for translating/distributing foreign films with no licensed Polish translation.

I find this scary. On the one hand, I do understand concerns that free amateur translations/downloads will undermine legitimate sales. I try very hard myself to buy official versions of such material where it's available, but I confess those free downloads are very seductive. But if it's a choice between audience access to artistic material and copyright holders' potential profits in a particular niche market, audience access clearly seems the greater moral priority to me.

Without fan translations of either video or text material, I'd never have known about Ai no Kusabi, would have access to only about 1/10 of all I now know about Mirage of Blaze, and probably wouldn't encounter Winter Cicada for several more years. Yet all three of these stories--especially the former two--greatly enrich my life. Their value is beyond price. And, yes, I do look forward to spending a bunch of money on the official AnK novel when it comes out in English in late 2007-2008. Indeed, the entire audience that is looking forward to spending that money would almost certainly have never heard of AnK if it weren't for fan translators.

This is cultural production. It's as old as humanity. And while a commerce-based economy must protect commerce, it must not protect it at the expense of the human spirit that thrives and has always thriven on artistic stimulation.

Sharon Mehdi's The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering is a book about grandmothers changing the world just by standing together.

It was a centerpiece at this year's Mother's Day gathering in Sonoma, California, where my mother, Patricia Spicer, took a rather amusing picture of local columnist, Joan Huguenard, holding up the book for all to see (at the expense of anyone seeing Joan's actual face). I posted this charming illustration of the book's importance here. You can also read Joan's column on Mother's Day and the influence of Mehdi's book in The Sonoma Valley Sun.

My alter ego unintentionally stepped into the midst of a riotous debate in fandom over the agenda of FanLib.com, a for-profit site designed to bring fan writers and copyright holders together to work on common projects/for common aims.

My response to this debate is posted here: http://community.livejournal.com/starmerrow/49374.html

Basically, I'm not evaluating FanLib.com itself at this time, but I am fascinated by the idea of bringing copyright holders and fan fic writers together and collapsing the distinction between original and derivative work.

elenuial brought to my attention this interesting article suggesting a fundamental rethinking of how we evaluate pricing and purchase of music: http://jefitoblog.com/blog/?p=1179.

In a very vague nutshell, the idea is that since people are buying licenses to play music, not the item itself free and clear, they should be charged not as if they were buying a free and clear commodity (like bar of soap) but as subscribers under a license (ex. at different rates per number of downloads or types of use allowed). I haven't studied the music industry and copyright much, but this article is certainly worth a look.

To spread the promotion, I'll pass along this notice from the Libs-Or mailing list. No copyright infringement intended. Since the aim is to publicize the service, I'm taking the view that reposting the message for further publicity is okay.

"Several Oregon librarians (Margaret Mellinger, Hannah Rempel, Kate Gronemyer, and Jane Nichols), one librarian to-be (Michael Baird) and myself have been maintaining a blog dedicated to reviewing information tools on the Net. A little shameless self-promotion never hurts, and I wanted to spread the word. :) We hope our website is useful for librarians and other information-lovers.

Please check it out at http://infodoodads.com

Have a great day!

Laurie

--------------------------
Laurie Bridges
Business & Economics Librarian
Oregon State University"

I did check out this blog, and found some interesting tidbits I'm definitely going to explore more.

This is actually my first post to this journal, the previous ones being moved from my previous library blog at Blogger. No offense to Blogger, I'm just infinitely more comfortable on LJ, in part because I've been using it since 2004, in part because I just think it has a great overall design for helping people network.

So here I am, feeling cheerful about doing yet more LJ stuff (I now have two journals and run two communities). It's good to be home.

[Back dated entry moved from my Blogger blog.]

There's a very good lecture by Lawrence Lessig on copyright here.

(It's about half an hour long. When I last tried the page, the only link that was working was to the slide show version [Flash], but this is more than adequate.)

I had to respond to this lecture for a class, but since the material is germane to all people who produce and consume creative work, I'm going to post my response here. (Cross-posted to starmerrow.)

Response in two parts: 1) Before viewing the lecture, based on Lessig's blog:

In brief, Lawrence Lessig is concerned that emerging technologies (mainly the internet) are being coopted by "cultural monopolists" as an excuse to increase copyright restrictions and reduce public domain in order to control information. This has the effect of stifling creativity and impeding the free flow of information upon which a free society depends.

I agree with Lessig. The blurb for his book, Free Culture, states, "For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs." This is an excellent articulation of the appropriate purpose of copyright. It should reward creativity by allowing creators to profit from their work, but it cannot pursue this goal at the expense of a society's creative output. The goal of copyright should be to foster creativity, and the balance between copyright and public domain should ideally rest at the point where creativity and free expression are maximized.

( Read more... )

[Back dated entry moved from my Blogger blog.]

Today at the University of Oregon weekly library faculty meeting, we heard an interesting presentation on the evolution of popular in the information age. The presentation emphasized the concept of memes: the viral spread of repeated/modified tropes through internet communities. The central example was the massive buzz over "Snakes on a Plane."

One question that was raised was how much formal library services participate in such pop cultural phenomena. For example, do people use library services to obtain information about "Snakes on a Plane"? The answer seems to be it depends on people's interests. Libraries may not have much to offer regarding "Snakes on a Plane," but they might offer a lot on the history of rock music, which might tie into many pop culture interests.

My own pop culture experience is oriented around science fiction genres and the LiveJournal community. In my own experience, I see an overlap with academia (my own fields of literature and library science) in two respects. Literary criticism has thoroughly infiltrated fan culture (though fan culture remains something a mystery to published lit. crit.). Indeed, many fan fiction writers have advanced degrees in literature. Good examples of literary criticism in the pop culture fan world of LJ are the communities, metafandom and fanthropology.

Library and information science, in contrast, is so pervasive it's almost invisible. But it's influence can be felt, I believe, as a "trickle-down effect" influencing the way user communities organize information. For example, Fanthropology uses several different organizational schemes: high-level navigation links grouped by category, low-level "memories" listed alphabetically by topic, a date-based archive, etc. To use a personal example, I maintain the LJ community, mirage_trans, which organizes fan translation resources for the very long and officially untranslated series of Japanese novels, Mirage of Blaze. In this highly pop-culture endeavor, I rely heavily on my training in information science to sort links into useful categories. (I may not always succeed!)

The upshot: the barriers between pop culture and academia are certainly permeable. Based on my own experience, I'd say the pop culture end is often more open to the academia than the academia to pop culture.

[Back-dated entry moved from my Blogger blog.]

I've put up an information literacy quiz for an introductory organic chemistry class here:

http://uoregon.edu/~arwens/chem_111.html

It's the most boring-looking thing you've ever laid eyes on. Even duller is the answer page (a static page that just gives the correct answers--we're low-tech, folks).

This leads me to ponder that oft-pondered pedagogical question of how much responsibility we as educators have to make information "accessible" to the hyper-visual-multimedia students of today vs. how much responsibility the students have to suck it up and read stuff.

I do think balance is good. There's nothing wrong with using the latest technologies to do cool things that students find entertaining as well as educational. But there's a value to sitting down and reading black-and-white paragraphs too: a value for the students, not just in saving time/effort for instructors.

Now, I don't have this backed up with research, but its my hunch that the increase in ADHD often discussed today is exacerbated (if not caused) by an environment that overstimulates kids almost from day one. I grew up in a quiet environment, and to this day, I feel physically assaulted by things as simple as TV commercials for some talking toy. They are so loud and obnoxious that I hardly know how any child could be routinely exposed to them and not end up requiring massive audio-visual-interactive stimulation to feel "normal."

Certainly, not all interactive media is like that. Some can be very elegant, slick, concise, intuitive, and many things that are wonderful for learning. But if I may paraphrase Peter Brook's version of the Mahabharata, silence is necessary; thought is necessary. And sometimes low-level sensory input is conducive to serious thought, to concentration. It requires you to be alone with your thoughts, to galvanize your own thoughts. And that is precisely what an adult, collegiate learner should know (or be learning) how to do.

So I'm going to gently defend my boring quiz because ultimately, adult students at a university should not be taking it because it looks neat or makes library learning "fun." They should be taking it to learn about the library--to learn about learning. And sitting down to read little black-and-white words may be just the sort of challenge their thinking needs.

(Of course, I'm massively stereotyping and generalizing: some students will breeze through this quiz with nothing new to learn at all; some will prefer the boring text; some will never be able to absorb anything based on text alone. But as a generalization, I'm standing by it.)*

* This evening, I am apparently a generalization--and I'm standing by my dangling mod too:)