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Nashville Impressions

Based on admittedly very limited momentary experience, but here’s some things I’ve noticed: people actually say, with no irony intended, things like “ah appreciate y’all,” and “ain’t you the cutest li’l thing!” (after hearing that for the third time, my daughter said “people are funny here.”)…women wear makeup. Lots of makeup…everybody wears t-shirts with slogans related to alcohol, sex, and NASCAR. Or all of the above…nobody wears black…words are pronounced differently, and it’s not just an accent (a couch, coffee table, and an armchair are a “living room suit” and those delicious chocolates are from “the Godova chocolate store)…Applebee’s and Friday’s and Chili’s are considered not just acceptable (which they’re not) but actually desirable. A rare treat.

The red states (probably suburbs in blue states, too–in a way the red states are all just giant suburbs) really, truly, are different.

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5,200 Childish Chessplayers

SupernationalsWell, not only childish, but actually children. I’m with my daughter and her team at the 2005 US Chess Federation Supernationals III Tournament in Nashville, Tennessee. The team (the PS 282 Royals) is doing quite well.

PS 282 RoyalsThis is no powerhouse team, it’s only their second year and first trip to this level of tournament, but they’re playing right up there with the big winners. And it’s a team of boys and girls (more boys than girls–that’s a problem in the chess world, and one that needs more attention than it gets, but there is some effort at least to address it. I’ve discussed it with several other more experienced chess moms and dads this weekend) who really demonstrate the diversity that makes NYC, and particularly Brooklyn, and more particularly PS 282, so great. Most of chess outside of NYC is a white world (and some Asians), it seems (mostly–there are two Native American teams I’ve seen, and a Black team from Detroit). These kids are teammates, and that means a lot to them. Some are stronger players, some are weaker, some are sweet, some are obnoxious, but they care about each other and they care about their team. Even I’m feeling warm towards even some of the obnoxious ones!

So far, there has been vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach pain, headaches, tears, bloody lips, and tantrums, but no actual fatalities. It’s an imposing (frightening?) sight to see 5,200 children, all playing chess, all discussing their moves and strategies, as well as running, wrestling, screaming, overeating, swimming in the pool, and whining like other children.

I’m a proud parent–not just because she’s winning (which she’s not, much) but because she’s competing with such a positive spirit, and working so hard, and bonding with her team-mates. Today, after a very hard match (the fifth in two days) which ended with a loss at about 30 minutes past her normal bedtime, I told her that if she was too tired, she could skip analyzing the game with her coach (a normal part of the routine), and just have ice cream and go to bed.

“No, Dad,” she told me. “I think I played poorly this time, and I want to learn from this game. I’d like to analyze it with Mr. O. That would help me learn.”

If you’ve ever seen a dad so blown away with pride he swelled up like a blimp…that was me.

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Sad but sadly not too surprising

John Rennie at the SciAm Perspectives Blog describes a truly disheartening encounter with a group (more than a dozen, he says) of university presidents. At a media roundtable he posed the presidents this challenge:

Suppose we have a petition here that says, “As university presidents, we affirm that evolution by means of natural selection is a demonstrated fact of science. We also assert that any failure to teach evolution, or to teach ‘intellectual design’ as an alternative theory, harms students’ educational standing.” Who here would not sign, and why?

How many university presidents said they would sign? All? Some? A few?

Nope.

None.

🙁

College presidents, unfortunately, far too often, have priorities that are far removed from student learning, or the growth of a rational society, or civilization or science. They see themselves, really, as executives, not as educators.

I remember the days, years ago now, when our own current (then new) president faced, and lost, a vote of no-confidence from the faculty. I remember thinking how much easier it could have been for him, and for all of us, if he had approached us (the faculty) cooperatively–as our leader, but our leader who was our ally, who was working toward the same goal as we were.

Time has passed since then, and my opinion of him (and probably his opinion of us as a faculty) has certainly improved. I’ve seen him take some actually brave steps, and I’ve seen clear evidence of a real commitment to our students. He’s still an executive, and I’ve begun to see reasons why an executive is an important thing to have.

But I wonder if, faced with the kind of challenge Rennie posed, our own president would have reacted as an educator, as a colleague, as someone who cares about truth and learning and knowledge. I like to think that he would. I like to think that he would be braver, less political and more principled, than the presidents of the University of Texas, Stony Brook University, the University of Chicago, and the others (the hiss of shame upon them all) Rennie encountered.

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The Original Podcast

Captain KirkJ. Curtis, in an email to Jason Kottke, points out that the first, the very earliest audioblogger/podcaster was none other than…
Captain James T. Kirk.

“Captain’s Log, Stardate….”
🙂

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Under Attack!

I feel so bad for those folks in Dover, Pennsylvania. I mean those poor, beset (I should say “benighted”) religious folks who are having their kids abused in school science classes. Abused, mistreated, misled and misunderestimated because in science classes they’re actually having to learn…science.

…Pastor and parent Ray Mummert, 54, explained their point.

“If we continue to indoctrinate our young people with non-religious principles, we’re headed for an internal destruction of this society,” he said.

“Evolution is just a theory and there are other theories,” Mummert explained, smiling through his beard.

“There is such a complexity in life, and science wants to hang its hat on a belief that life somehow started — they say there is no creator, no order … I believe there is a creator,” he said.

Both sides acknowledge the political context of the debate over Darwinism, and the relation to the re-election of staunchly Christian President George W. Bush.

“Christians are a lot more bold under Bush’s leadership, he speaks what a lot of us believe,” said Mummert.

“We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture,” he said.

You know, if that’s who’s “attacking” you, mightn’t it be a good idea to just maybe consider why you’re being “attacked”?

Thanks to DovBear for the link.

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Great New Blog on the Blogroll

Thanks to Nick Matzke at The Panda’s Thumb, I’ve added the SciAm Perspectives blog to the blogroll. It looks like a much funner version of old favorite Scientific American magazine (already quite fun–witness their hilarious “OK, we give up” editorial in the April issue”) magazine.

And if I didn’t have the blog, how else would I know that there’s actually someone out there campaigning to remove the magazine from public libraries on the grounds that the cover story on homo floriensis was “pornography”?

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Test post

This is a test from vagablog–a small program to allow blogging directly from the palm (in this case the new Treo 650).

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Normally constituted. That’s me.

As I said in an earlier post, I’m a lot like Nathaniel Martin in Patrick O’Brian’s The Far Side of the World.

like most normally constituted writers Martin had no use for any candid opinion that was not wholly favourable.

And now that I’ve received the response from a reviewer and the editor of New Directions in Folklore to the article (“‘Quacks, Yokels, and Light-Fingered Folk:’ Oral Performance Art at the Fair”) that I submitted over a year ago, I’m feeling even more normally constituted than ever!

The response was favorable, and they want to publish the article, but it wasn’t wholly favorable, and they want some improvements first. I can see their point and (partially) agree, but I also think there’s some ways in which they’re quite simply misunderstanding my point, and my approach. I’m not a folklorist, that’s part of the problem, and that’s why I was happy to submit to New Directions in Folklore. But they’re pushing me a bit towards a traditional folklore approach (preservationist, exoticizing, romanticizing, and outside-in) and that’s just plain not the approach I want to take.

So, how much of my resistance is “normally constituted” affection for my own words, and how much is legitimate and appropriate insistence that my approach is unique and valuable? Or is there a difference? I want them to publish the piece, so I’ll do my best to follow the suggestions. But at the same time I’m not going to abandon what (to me) makes the article work so well.

I’ll take the time to work on a second draft. I’ll try to make my approach and the reasons why I think it’s worthwhile more clear. But the editor’s already made clear that I’m going to be working uphill on that, to some extent. I’ll do what I can do. And I’ll get what I get.

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Historical/Ahistorical Judgments

Jon Rowe has a blog that I like a lot, and read regularly (it’s right there in my blogroll). But in a recent post he made a point to which I had to take exception. It wasn’t his primary point in his post, but he was making an argument that tends to really annoy me–it was the “they didn’t know better in those days” argument. This goes (generally) “the Founders (or Columbus, or any literary or historical figure you’d like to excuse) lived in a time when nobody really questioned slavery (or genocide, forced conversion, racism, sexism, etc.). So we can’t blame them for just accepting what everyone else accepted and nobody at all ever saw anything wrong with.”

That argument just doesn’t hold up. In the guise of a call for historical accuracy, it’s a whitewashing of history. At the time of the US Constitution, there was a lively, active, and loud abolition movement, with a long and distinguished history. Las Casas was very clear about the immorality of Columbus’ treatment of the Indians, right there at Columbus’ moment in history. Conrad’s racism, or Hemingway’s anti-Semitism may have been more broadly acceptable in their times, but that certainly doesn’t mean that nobody saw the immorality and hate, or that nobody was willing to call it what it was.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t read Conrad or Hemingway, of course, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t honor the accomplishments of the Founders. But to let them completely off the hook for their lapses is just as ahistorical (maybe more) than to condemn them completely for those lapses.

To Jon Rowe’s credit, when I pointed this out to him in an email, he promptly and fairly put my email up on his blog–asking for more reader discussion. I hope he gets it. I’ll be interested to read it. (Although I do wish he would just have comments on the blog, rather than waiting for emails).

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Andre Norton (1912-2005)

Andre NortonThe Science Fiction Writers of America site reports that Andre Norton, “Grand Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy,” died yesterday morning at the age of 92. She was never my absolute favorite writer, or one that I returned to very often, but I do remember some wonderful experiences with her writing when I was a kid. And that’s what she really did well…SF (more fantasy) for “young adults.” It’s a difficult audience, and she did a great job of reaching out to them. And I think that her books brought a lot of young women (as readers and writers) into a field which (especially in those days) was almost exclusively “boys’ books.” And she was a cat person, too, which is overwhelmingly common in SF circles, for no clear reason I can think of. In any case, RIP, Ms. Norton.

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