SOTUS 2012

Opening: celebrating leaving Iraq, daring the Republicans not to cheer, not to call leaving Iraq a "victory."
Now there are "no Americans fighting in Iraq."  [Not in the armed forces, perhaps, but we're still indirectly paying for mercenaries there.]  "Courage, selflessness..."
Reminder a couple minutes in: Osama bin Laden is dead.
The armed forces win because they work together.  "Imagine what we could accomplish if we worked together."  [But we're not an army: we're a diverse collection of individuals, boisterously so.  Unfortunately, he'll come back to this at the end.  Ring composition.]
Education; high-tech manufacturing.  [Manufacturing?  Yep, this is a key theme of the speech.  Wonder if Obama read this terrific article in the Atlantic about the challenges of change on the manufacturing front in this country?]
Yes to energy "that we can control."
Yes to "an economy built to last."  [Unfortunate auto industry associations.]
Rewarding responsibility, rewarding hard work.  [A missed opportunity.  Surely an orator as good as Obama could find some way to talk about why the economy has changed, why blue-collar jobs don't pay like they used to, why corporate ethos has changed to allow for late-career lay-offs and gigantic pay raises for successful -- and failing -- CEOs.  But no.  Rather --]
"We can do this."  Grandfather made it on the GI Bill, grandmother on the assembly line.
"This is the defining issue of our time": how to keep mid-20th century opportunities alive.
Restore an economy "where everyone who works hard gets a fair shot."
"Bankers made bets and bonuses while everyone looked the other way."  [Did I write too soon?  Is the big-picture critique on its way?]
Finally: "The state of our union is getting stronger."
Manufacturing, again.  [Scratch comment above.  The laundry list of tax credits and spending programs begins.  Shades of Bill Clinton.]
I saved the auto industry.  GM is top of the world, ma!
Stop tax deductions for companies that outsource jobs.  Lower taxes for companies hiring in-country.
Support community colleges and partnerships with business.
A jab at teacher unions.  A call for merit pay and firing bad teachers fast.
Raise the minimum school age to 18?
Colleges and universities had better keep costs down!  [But why have they gone up?]
Let illegals who go to college become citizens; let foreigners who earn college degrees here in the US stay here.
Expand tax relief for small business.
Spend more on research.
Spend more on energy research.
Spend more on clean energy subsidies.
Open more domestic oil fields and gas resources.
The Department of Defense is going green!  [What a relief.]
Responsible homeowners need to be able to re-finance easily.
Regulation is good.  [The base knows this: and he doesn't really make an effort to convince the unbelievers.  Another missed opportunity.]
The Deficit.  "We need to make choices."  We need to tax millionaires.  This is not "class warfare"; it's "common sense".
Americans are cynical about Washington.  So let's "ban insider trading" for members of Congress.  [Insider trading? That came out of nowhere.  But the real problem is: not a whiff of real reform of lobbying (a missed anti-Newt opportunity); not a breath of campaign finance reform.  But then again, the pig doesn't set the trough on fire.]
We need Consensus.  Let's Stop Fighting.  Or rather, let's Keep Fighting, but Together, like members of the team that assassinated Obama.  [What did he just say?]

As real bloggers like to say: Reax.  As I listened to the speech -- and this is sad proof of the sharp recent decline in American political oratory -- it struck me as fairly well-constructed, effectively if not brilliantly delivered, statesmanlike without pomposity, a bit laundry-listish but a reasonable balance between concrete proposals and the typical platitudes.  A safe election-year speech, as opposed to a riskier visionary one.
Yet as I type my notes, I can't help being discomfited by just how squarely conventional the speech was: how Clintonesque, how compromised, how different from the promise and the vision of his speeches during the 2008 campaign.  This isn't a deep surprise to me -- I'm used to being disappointed by this president, though I'm not half as bitter as Andrew Sullivan or many New York liberals -- but I remain unsettled by Obama's choice to avoid taking the big issues.   He repeatedly told his audience tonight, "we can do this." But he, it seems, cannot do this -- when "this" means hard-hitting, thoughtful, accessible analysis that grounds a powerful call for justice.   Nor can he recover the freshness, the sense that here was someone thinking new thoughts, that he brought to those early election-year speeches.
And the ring composition about the military, which ended with a call for Americans to imitate the military and "watch each other's backs," was awful.  What are we supposed to be fighting against?  This is a good example of pro-warrior republicanist rhetoric gone bad.  It leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

SOTUS blast from the past

For over a decade, just about every year, I've taken running notes on the State of the Union speech.  Some flashes of yesteryear: guess the year!
"We will answer every danger and every enemy that threaten the American people."
"Our faith is sure."
"...excessive litigation..."
"...faith-based programs...transform America one heart and one soul at a time."
"God does miracles in people's lives."
"End partial-birth abortion."  "No life should begin or end for an experiment."
"Our calling as a blessed country..."
"...scattered network of killers..."
"Many others have met a different fate.  Let's put it this way: they're no longer a problem to the United States...One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of justice."

And here's another:
"We love our freedom and will fight to keep it."
"Radical Islam is a perversion by the few of a noble faith."
"We will not retreat from the world and never surrender to evil."
"We accept the call of history to aid the oppression...We have a clear plan for victory in Iraq."
"I am confident." (repeated at least twice more)
"We are in this fight to win, and we are winning."

And just before everything falls apart:
"Unemployment is low."
"...school choice...vouchers..."
"We see a future of hope and opportunity."
Handle illegal immigration "without animosity, without amnesty."
And here's a kicker: he actually mentioned "global climate change" (which Obama did not do tonight)


Answers: 2003, 2006, 2007

Face-to-face vs Facebook

You've had enough of students checking Facebook and online shopping in lecture.  Can you ban laptops and smartphones and tablets?  Yes you can!  Won't the students revolt?  You can expect some push-back, but if you explain yourself clearly, firmly, and with a sense of humor, it'll dissipate fast -- and even if there are a few holdouts, you're certainly not obliged to give into them.    (The exception is students with learning disabilities, which requires a note from the Moses Center.)  Some students may even tell you how glad they are to be free from their cybernetic overlords.  

Since many students, even sophomores and juniors, still don't know how to learn effectively in the lecture setting, the first week of class is a perfect chance to ask them what they expect to get out of the lecture and what kinds of notes they're taking -- and explain what *you* want them to take away from lecture and what you advise them to write down.  Along the way, you can lay out your policy on machines and the reasons for it. 

I present my no-laptops/tablets/phones rule not as a ban (though if pressed I make it clear that it is in fact a ban), but as an opportunity -- an opportunity for the students to exist for a brief time in space free from the internet, to meet and chat with seatmates instead of staring into a screen, to engage with me.  As the teacher, I tell my students, I want to look them in the eye, I want to connect with them, I want to be able to ask them questions, I want some energy in the room.  If they're staring at their screens, all that is impossible.  Yes, of course, students doodle, doze, space out, stare out the window.  But just as we work hard to develop interesting material and well-structured lectures to keep students' attention, we can keep the machines that distract them outside the classroom doors.  The addiction to email and Facebook affects even the soundest students, and this policy takes the burden of choice, which is itself distracting ("is he about to say something really important or can I check my friends' status?"), off the students.  

Most importantly, I tell them, if they're trying to write down everything I say -- typical of those who beg the most passionately to take notes on their laptops -- they're almost surely not *thinking* about what I'm saying, and so they won't be able to track whether they understand my points, and they will have a very tough time asking or answering questions.  But lecture isn't a movie: it's an opportunity to engage and think, and students should aim to be active listeners.  What does this mean in terms of concrete note-taking?  I tell students to jot down my main points, the main examples supporting the points and the reasons why.  I tell them to listen for the signs that reveal the structure or arc of my lecture, because part of getting the most out of it -- a skill that will help them in meetings and strategy sessions their whole lives -- is learning how to follow the verbal expression of complex ideas.  There is value in training the brain to concentrate for longer than five minutes at a time.  (For all these reasons, I don't hand out lecture outlines unless a lecture has been so chopped up by questions -- mine and the students' -- that it feels impossible to follow: then I post my lecture notes online.)

I've found that opening up these issues in the first week creates a healthier dynamic in the room, a sense that the lecture is a collaborative enterprise, even though (despite occasional questions from me or the students) I am the one doing nearly all the talking for nearly 75 minutes.  It makes the classroom not quite a "student-centered" classroom, as the education gurus call it, but an idea-centered classroom.  It also helps me monitor myself more responsibly throughout the term.  Having demanded their attention and engagement, I have to live up to my side of the bargain: I make more of an effort to pause to underline the most important points in lecture, to sum up at the end of lecture consistently, and so on.  When I break the news about laptops, and whenever I have to remind someone who unthinkingly lifts her computer out of her pack that she needs to put it away, I tell the class that my main reason for doing this is to use the time in the lecture hall as effectively as possible.  I remind them that I'm always working on making lecture clearer and more interesting, and I ask them what arguments have been hardest to follow, what kind of information helps make points stick.  (Keep these evaluative questions as specific as you can.  If you ask, "What bores you in class?" you're guaranteed to get some joker who says "Everything: this class sucks", etc.) 

Suggest that they take notes in a notebook.  Tell them that the lecture form developed in a handwriting culture and there are good reasons to think that the typing culture isn't well suited to the lecture scene.  You might also tell your TAs to ask to see their students' lecture notes in an early recitation, so that they can see what students are writing (in a non-judgmental way) and give them advice on note-taking.

Should we discourage would-be PhDs?

I never learned calculus.  I didn't understand basic concepts in physics until my twenties, when my partner, a philosopher of science, had the grace and patience to start explaining them to me.  (This side of my education continues: just the other day, I got a refresher course in the physics of sound over a tasty dinner at Simpson Wong's new Chinese fusion place.)  My ignorance is mostly my fault -- I've happily exercised my capacity of rational choice and concentrated on things I was good at and found pleasure doing -- and partly the result of baneful external influence.  By the time I was twelve, I'd been convinced by a few small-minded teachers that girls weren't really suited to math (this in a girls' school!-- with terrific teachers of English, religious studies, and history, I might add).  My high school physics teacher, now retired, was perfectly friendly to me on a one-to-one basis, but I have clear memories of his boasting that his AP Physics class was all boys -- proof, to him, that it was a tough and serious class.
Partly thanks to this experience, I don't have a blanket policy of discouraging students from any course of action.  Who am I to tamp down another person's desire for knowledge?  Who am I to say whether a student who comes late to the study of ancient history or Greek won't be the next Peter Brown or Froma Zeitlin -- or Michel Foucault, for that matter?   This is what Peter Abelard would have called the sic, the "yes."
Now for the non.  There are very few jobs out there.
Here's another non -- to me, the most important.  I would ask any student seeking employment in an industry or government agency where questions of ethics immediately arise, say, the tobacco industry and the CIA, whether she or he has thought about the ethical implications of doing such work, if parents or friends are the driving forces in the decision, whether other desires or interests are being sacrificed and for what reason.  I no longer give academia a free pass.  I'll ask any student considering pursuing a PhD to consider what she or he is getting into, institutionally and ethically.  The university has a lot of self-examination to do, as an institution, and I think that we need to focus intently on how we operate and how we govern ourselves before we throw more students into the churn.
Here are some of the questions faculty need to ask themselves about the institutions that employ them, how they're run, and where their resources are going:

• What work am I being paid to do?  Does the institution operate in such a way that I can do that work?  For example, if I am being paid to do research and teach with some service (a typical answer at a research university), how much time am I spending on service?  
• Do I have sufficient administrative support?  Am I losing time I would have spent on teaching and research to filling out forms, assessment exercises, reimbursements, xeroxing, maintaining websites, managing student files, and other jobs that may have been done by administrators or admin aides in the past?  (Worth talking to older colleagues to get a sense of history on this one.) 
• Is work on departmental and university-level committees distributed transparently and fairly?  Who in the department and in the dean's office keeps track of this?  If I want to raise a question about my assignments, may I do so without raising a firestorm?  If a colleague wiggles out of work, who manages the problem?  May I complain without being a snitch?  In sum, do management procedures exist and does everyone know about them? 
• Another management/accountability question.  When someone's teaching is not up to standard, what happens?  Is there a process in place by which legitimate student complaints can be distinguished from whining about low grades or a stern personality?  Is this run by faculty or by deans who have not stepped into a classroom in years? 
• Does the university reward teaching to a degree that professors are encouraged to improve?  
• A few meta-management questions.  Who runs the place?  Aside from the president and (in many places) the provost, how many vice-presidents, associate provosts, vice-provosts, special assistants to the president/provost/vice-presidents, and so on are on the payroll?  What's the size of their support staffs?
• Is the administration dominated by people with PhDs in "higher ed administration" or professional fields like law or engineering?  If so, how do they value teaching and research in the non-professional parts of the academy, which we used to think of as the core -- namely, the humanities, arts, and sciences?    
• What work does the institution reward faculty for?  How does this work affect or connect to the students who are paying the bulk of our salaries?  (True at most institutions, barring the super-endowed places like Princeton, at 17 billion and counting, and Harvard, an eye-popping 32 billion last year.)  
• What procedures are in place to change the university's priorities or to establish big projects, and what role do faculty play?  

I don't think I'll succeed in turning away students from academia in large numbers, and part of me doesn't want to do that anyway.  My aim is rather to get them in the habit of asking these questions in the first place.
Academics are great critical thinkers, but as I'm far from the first to note, our critical faculties wither when we turn them on ourselves.
 

Should we punish silent students?

Sorry for this long post.  I'm still figuring out how to set up a "read more" link.

When I was a student in high school and college, I loved the give-and-take of the seminar and dining-table debate: I scarcely gave a thought to the quiet students in the back or those who put up tentative hands only to recuse themselves in a panic when the teacher's eye bent in their direction.  This isn't to say that I always found the scene of discussion comfortable.  Unlike many of my friends, especially in college, I grew up in a family that was neither academic nor particularly invested in debate.  They liked to talk, but talk, of course, is not debate.  During a typical meal, my parents solicited news of my sister's and my doings, exchanged family news and neighborhood gossip, and told stories of their own -- about what they'd done that day, childhood memories and the like.  To move from that to the hothouse of collegiate argument over sexuality (it was the late 80s/early 90s), the Iraq war, Andrew Ross' "Television" course (a radical offering for Princeton at that time), Spivak, Derrida, postmodern architecture -- for me, trained to attend more carefully to the table's ease and comfort than to whether we were getting anywhere with our ideas, it was a leap, and often an awkward one.  Despite my sense that I was struggling to catch up with minds and tongues whetted sharp by years of parental pressure, though, silence was never an attractive option.
As a young teacher, largely thanks to memories of those flashes of nauseated anxiety, I sympathized with students who rarely or never spoke up in class.  I tried notes of encouragement in my paper comments -- "Great insights here: the whole class would benefit from hearing them!" and so forth -- but I recall only one person over whom they exerted any influence.  Perhaps there were one or two more.
Now a middle-aged teacher, I have done an about-face.  Very few of my undergraduates can speak well and with confidence, and some of the confident ones shouldn't be.  Most students grope for words, repeat themselves, say "like" every few words, deploy a limited vocabulary, and admit that they can't say what they're thinking.  "You know what I mean?" takes the place of explaining what is meant.   To paraphrase Darth Vader, I find the lack of words disturbing. Since (unlike Vader) I don't want to strangle my students -- they're doing a good enough job to themselves already -- I decided to make speaking in class compulsory, I made participation count for 20% of the course grade, and I wrote this handout:

You may find it tough to believe when you’re crammed into a windowless room in the basement of Bobst, but the recitation is preparation for many moments in your future: the start-up strategy meeting, the graduate seminar, the environmental activism group, the art/architecture “crit,” the neighborhood council, the PTA.  In all these places you need to be prepared to speak your mind clearly and to explain your reasons; to listen with a critical but civil ear; to engage with others’ ideas; to think on your feet; to be willing to change your mind to incorporate another viewpoint, or even to reverse your original stance.  For some of you, the recitation will be the perfect place to develop the nerve to talk (fear of public speaking affects most people).  Or you’re the kind of student who welcomes the opportunity to think out loud.  Or you may treat the recitation as a totally open opportunity to think about big, sometimes messy ideas—the kinds of ideas that shape the world.  

Part of the point of the discussion section is to learn how to have an effective discussion.  It’s not the same as hanging out with friends, but it’s not an oral exam either.  So long as everyone does his or her bit, recitation will grow more interesting as you learn each other’s views and preferences.  

Speaking with eloquence and verve about complex ideas is a skill that will bring you satisfaction forever, regardless of what you pursue in life.  It takes practice.  Some ways of talking are more convincing, thoughtful, inspiring, and well-informed than others.  Part of the college experience—the reason you’re paying so much money to be here instead of living with your parents and taking courses online—is to learn how to speak in an intelligent, well-informed way.  This means that your instructor may comment on your comments, so that you and the rest of the class will understand on the spot what works and what doesn’t.  Don’t take it personally.  Where else will you gain experience in expressing your thoughts in front of a random assortment of people?  Here’s Dewey: 

The winged words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech… Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are…broken and imperfect thought.  

The basics. We expect you to arrive in class on time capable of briefly summarizing the argument and/or the main points and themes of the reading, and to be sufficiently alert to answer elementary analytic questions.  We won’t always ask for volunteers, and we won’t allow the same people to speak all the time.  You should speak up at least once in each class meeting.  Most recitations will include a few minutes of Q&A, often at or near the beginning.  (“I don’t know” or “I didn’t finish the reading” don’t count as answers.)  If you don’t know how to answer a question, don’t worry: chances are you’re not alone, and unless you come in unprepared week after week, your grade is not on the line at that moment.  The key is to give it your best shot.  Feel free to ask for a lifeline—for example, a passage to comment on.  At these moments, the instructor is evaluating two things.  Have you prepared responsibly?  Can you respond intelligently to the question, even if your answer is wrong or temporarily leads the discussion off the track? 

Our aim is to foster intelligent conversation about the ideas in our texts.  Once it’s clear to the instructor that the class understands the main points of lecture and the readings (this can take anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour), the class shifts into a higher gear.  Now the class becomes a kind of lab or brain-storm exercise or town meeting, where ideally you will take a position about an idea or a text, explain or defend it with evidence and logical argument, and listen and respond to others.  From time to time, you’ll need to think “meta”—take a step back and consider criteria, methods, and unspoken assumptions.  

How do you prepare for this?  Do the reading, obviously, and jot down a few notes.  Read the syllabus, where weekly themes are listed for the recitation.  Listen at the end of Wednesday’s lecture for hints of what’s to come.  Your instructor may email you to solicit questions or reactions.  

The APA

Just back from the APA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, where I organized a panel sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (CSWMG, fondly pronounced "Sea-swimming") that followed a format new to the American Philological Association.  What is the APA?  The answer displays the stunning diversity of the field we tend to refer to with the shorthand "Classics."  The APA is the professional association in North America for classicists (a label that formally implies concentration on ancient literature but that also is used by synecdoche to describe the whole field), ancient historians (who may focus on politics, military history, social history, gender, or the economy, to name a few), archaeologists, epigraphers (experts on stone or metal inscriptions), papyrologists (who study the usually tattered remains of texts written on papyri and other soft materials), numismatists (scholars of coins), art historians, ancient philosophers who may also belong to the "philosophical" APA -- and anyone else connected with the study of the literature, history, thought, culture, religion, and art of the ancient Mediterranean world.  But the APA also includes scholars who study what is sometimes called "classical reception" or "the classical tradition," that is, the impact of Greek and Roman thought, literature, and art on later periods, up to and including the contemporary world.  And I still haven't captured the whole picture, because the APA also makes space for people who work on societies like Egypt or Persia that neighbor the ancient Mediterranean, who might be housed in their universities in departments of Near Eastern Studies or Anthropology.
The APA Annual Meeting brings hundreds of these people together to listen to scholarly papers, hold job interviews (see my post below on job-hunting), meet with editors, browse the huge book displays run mostly by university presses, and schmooze.  The schmoozing is facilitated in the Philadelphia Marriott by the so-called "circle bar" in the central lobby of the hotel, where most of us are tempted to drink far too many martinis far too late into the night.  
For my panel, I borrowed a format used by the philosophical APA: "Authors Meet Critics." The CSWMG chose two recent outstanding books on the reception, or to use the panel's preferred term, the engagement of African-American and Caribbean writers with classical literature, Emily Greenwood's Afro-Greeks and Jim Tatum's African American Writers and Classical Tradition (co-authored with Bill Cook).  Four critics responded to the books: Simon Goldhill (Cambridge), Patrice Rankine (Purdue), Sydnor Roy (Temple), and Cornel West (Princeton).  More on the panel in a few.

De Kooning at MOMA

What struck me most today at the crowded, impressive, almost overwhelming De Kooning show:

• one prominent black drip from an eyeball-shaped figure in the righthand side of Asheville (1948), which proclaims the presence of unrestraint in a piece otherwise straining with the tension of its own meticulous composition
• the close relationship with Pollock's color and composition in works like Untitled (1948-49) and Painting (1949-50)
• the depth of the lemon-beige overpainting in Excavation (1950), which simultaneously obscures and unveils figures of people, houses, trains, and objects, nestling in folds outlined in black 
• the raw flesh tones of Interchange (1955), against a background painted by Diebenkorn on Adderall 
• the adventurous blocking of Gotham News (1955), a painting whose colors are held apart by slashes of cornflower blue and slate gray
• the box of turquoise sea with a small sea monster swimming within in Fire Island (1946) 
• the vermilion blotches in Collage, which every photograph I've ever seen bleaches out
• January 1st and Easter Monday, hanging as a pair, Diebenkorn kelly greens and mustard yellows leaping out across the room. Both works prompt the question, how and why do large globs of paint mean?  I see their three-dimensional mass (especially in January 1st) as metonymic of the painter's hand, even his whole body; M sees them as paint transformed into masonry.  

What De Kooning's work is not: sly.  Before today I would have added "serene," but serenity was present in some of the rural landscapes -- perhaps not Merritt Parkway, but Bolton Landing (though it is far from my favorite work).

More Occupy links

A large and I think ongoing collection from the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. I recommend the pieces by my NYU colleague Nicholas Mirzoeff, Jason Adams, and (surprise) Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

Occupy (at) the APA

I'm preparing for the APA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, where I organized an "Authors Meet Critics" panel on race and the reception of classical literature, as well as an informal Saturday roundtable to discuss the Occupy movement, and I recommend this collection of short essays on Occupy in Theory and Event as well as the papers by George Shulman and others posted at the Social Science Research Council website.  
A panel discussion at the APA (Philosophy) about Occupy organized by Purchase philosopher Jennie Uleman drew 150 people -- great job, Jennie!

John Ford

After watching My Darling Clementine and Fort Apache, a very brief note in praise of John Ford and Robert Pippin's recent book on John Ford.  Ford was Catholic, Republican, and Irish: he turned a blind eye to the experience and character of women and people of color (and when he looked at them, his vision was usually blunted and his humor crude). But those limitations are part of what make his movies great.  Combined with a marvelous eye for framing stylish, even baroque images, his embedment in prejudice -- of which he seemed to grow more critically aware as he got older -- make his movies into living documents of mainstream America in the early and middle twentieth century.  Terrific stuff.  Go here for more.

Going on the Market

Probably my most popular publication is the handbook called "Going on the Market: An Affable Guide" that I started work on over fifteen years ago, at first in collaboration with Jacqui Sadashige, a graduate student and then assistant professor in the Classics department at Penn.  Long before it became fashionable, Jacqui was keenly attuned to professional socialization, especially the habits of confidence and self-presentation that often accompany gold-plated educations like the one I was lucky to get.
In terms of background our cohort at Penn was a pretty varied bunch, as Classics departments go: among us were students from Brigham Young, Penn State, and the University of South Carolina as well as Princeton and Oxford.  Class, race, religion, the proportion of family members in academia, and how these things affected our career prospects were frequent topics of discussion among us.  We generally agreed that students from less privileged economic circumstances (today we might say the 75%) as well as students of color -- and in our small field, even students who didn't go to an Ivy League-type school -- sometimes hit the wrong note with faculty and other students because they followed a different social rulebook.  We weren't talking about not knowing about opera or fine wines so much as the ability to grasp academia as a hierarchical network, with rules about whom to know and whom to know about, and with codes of dress and deportment that seemed more constrained than we expected.  Intimate knowledge of the field comes most quickly from personal mentoring by people at the center of it, and students trained in small programs where faculty published relatively little felt out of the loop.  And though this was not a major issue at Penn, where faculty had (and have) broad tastes and an egalitarian style, at conferences and dinners with guest lecturers, it seemed clear to us that the opera and fine wines mattered too.
On top of this, the unwillingness of many academics to talk frankly about the concrete details of making a living -- how much salary to expect and ask for, how to ensure getting fair letters of recommendation, what to expect at a job interview -- meant that even "pedigreed" students, especially shy ones, found themselves at sea when it came to getting a job.
Never one to sit back when she could actually do something about a problem, Jacqui wrote a short handbook about writing cover letters and preparing for interviews at the APA annual meeting.  She circulated it around the Penn department, and if I remember correctly, it got passed around to other graduate students in the area in xerox copy -- this was before email!  When I left Penn for the University of Washington, Jacqui was moving onto other things, and I got her permission to develop the handbook.  It ended up over twenty-five pages long, and was posted at the Women's Classical Caucus website and (for a while) at the APA website.  Today I gave it a much needed update.

Committing to art

Two years ago -- from late December 2009 to March 2010 -- I spent a few exhausting but rewarding months in the Guggenheim from eight to sixteen hours a week working as an interpreter for Tino Sehgal's artwork "This Progress."  I say "working," but making the piece come into being felt more like an intense form of play.  There are plenty of descriptions of Tino's work (the Times review of "This Progress," for instance) so I won't bother recounting it here.  What I'm interested in this New Year's Day is recapturing why, for me, making art is so laden with meaning, insight, and pleasure.
Each December I carve and block-print holiday cards.  I've done this for years.  This summer for the first time I began to paint with a brush, usually cards I use to thank dinner hosts and the like.  Most of my designs are simple arrays of stripes and polygons, half-conscious responses to work by Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, or Donald Judd.  But not long after starting to experiment with painting on sketchbook pages, most often rough, blurry abstractions drawn from memories of hiking in the White Mountains or walking in the Botanical Garden, I had the epiphany that I suspect happens to most painters when they're about twelve years old: I realized the complexity of the flow and drip of the paint on at the tip and up and down the edges of the paintbrush, how little I understood about controlling it, and how stimulating it was to feel that for an instant I had controlled it, that I'd managed to get a line or an arrangement of lines and color right.  The deep sense of rightness, which I experience both as a capacity of reflective judgment and as an instinctual reaction, is much stronger when working with the paintbrush than when carving and stamping printing-blocks, especially when multiple colors are in play along the brush-hairs--or brush-tines, as the case may be, since I am so unskilled that my paint clumps, making my paintbrush look rather like a paint-fork.
In his review (abstract) of the enormous De Kooning show up through next week at MOMA, Peter Schjeldahl noted that when you look at a De Kooning painting you feel "anchored." That word captures something at the heart of my sense of rightness (or wrongness) when I paint a line.  Something about the relation of line to line (especially in my Stella-like stripes) reinforces my sense of myself in relation to the object.  But this does not, importantly, lead to egocentric self-reflection: I am not feeling more myself.  I am feeling myself in relation to something else whose motivations I need only pause and reflect upon (if I'm willing and able to devote some time to it) in order to grasp.  Which makes me leap to the question -- what values and expectations go into creating that sense of anchored questioning?
Jeremy Tanner, an art historian I met this summer at a conference on aesthetics in London, commented in his TLS review of Richard Neer's study The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture on the "informing polarities" that Neer sees in Greek image-making: "surface/depth, presence/absence, body/soul."  This year I want to dig into the informing polarities of image-making in both politics and art, and I think I will gain insight into them by making more art.