Plot cliche I never want to read again

We were in a tight spot, that was for sure. Every idea we came up with had some flaw in it, some Achilles' heel. The enemy was just too powerful.

"Hey, wait a minute, guys," said Jake. "I have an idea. I know it sounds crazy, but it ... just ... might ... work."

He told us his idea, and pretty soon everyone in the room was nodding. It was the only hope we had with time running short. We assigned Louise to play decoy, while Fred was a back-up distraction. I would go in the back way and Ted in the front. Meanwhile, we sent Terry out to get the supplies we needed.

We were nervous, but the plan went off just as Jake said it would. Fred's backup distraction wasn't even needed. In just half an hour, we had done the impossible and taken the enemy down.

Spectators gaped at the burning rubble where the enemy fortress had once stood. "But how did you do it?" asked General Fortescue, who had come out of his bunker to see if the rumors were true.

"Ah, it was easy, once we figured it out. All we had to do was use to Device backwards, running the current through the Field while the enemy was distracted," I said.

THE END.

If the only way you're building suspense is by signaling loud and clear to the reader that you're withholding The Plan for now, you're building fake suspense. The reader thinks, "I wonder what trick the writer is going to end with," not, "I hope these good guys take down the enemy."

I recently read a story of this genre in an anthology by editors whose taste I generally trust. Sure, it was an older story, but this isn't a case of "was fun but it's been overdone." This is a plot that couldn't have been good the first time someone crawled out of the primordial ooze and used it.

Link potpourri

For everyone freaking out about the name of the latest Apple product. Really, people? Menstrual products were the only thing you thought of when you heard the name?

"Humilitiation (the game) and J.D. Salinger." That is, elitist pride that comes with not having read a classic.

One of those "duh" papers that it's good someone actually did: Students who get FAFSA help are more likely to attend college. (Seriously, have you filled one out lately? Not easy.)

On the off chance you're interested, here's info on the quantitative seminar our department runs.

This novella is one of the most brutal stories I've ever read. It's also amazing and brilliant. You should read it.

Professional development

I've been reading the serieses (um, what's the plural of series?) of a particular novelist in reverse chronological order as of late, purely by happenstance - I was introduced to her through her latest series, and then happened to find two older ones at a used bookstore. It offered me an interesting perspective on her development as a writer, one I wouldn't have seen if I read in the other direction. For one thing, I wouldn't have made it this far.

The newest series is really quite good, and the characters and setting stay with you afterwards. The previous series is the equivalent of beach reading for the sword-and-sorcery set. I enjoy them when I'm reading them but forget about them not long after I put them down. This may sound like a criticism, although it isn't intended as such; I find most of Tolkein's offspring utterly undigestable, so mindless fun is a huge step up. The series before that - well, it isn't bad. I wouldn't say it's good, either. If I had read it first, I doubt I would have picked up anything else by this author - although if it had been a choice between her next book and the usual airport selection, she might not have lost.

What's particularly interesting is to see writing issues in this earlier book that have been eliminated from her writing by now. One I kept tripping over in the early stuff is changes in the scale of time. You know, two characters are having a conversation, so the action is occurring almost in real time, and then suddenly 15 minutes have passed and the heroine is fixing the ship's engine, or something. These transitions were handled awkwardly in the early book; I kept finding myself going back a few sentences to figure out what I had missed. This isn't a problem in her later books. It's nice to see this kind of development on the author's part, because it sometimes seems as if literary figures spring up fully formed; their later books get deeper and richer, although not necessarily better.*

*Or, unfortunately, they get worse, as every napkin they doodle on gets snapped up by a publisher.

What I'm not reading

Dave sent me this article advocating reading books you expect to hate. I like the idea in theory, but there are plenty of books that I feel confident in my pre-judgments of and won't repent for refusing to read:

• memoirs (unless they are of really spectacular achievements - and never 20-somethings recounting their childhoods)
  
• "true" paranormal revelations
  
• serialized Star Trek novels
  
• the Left Behind books
  
• "Christian" series romance
  
• Danielle Steel
  
• inspirational stories
  
• series that are hurriedly gotten-up imitations of successful ones
  
• novelizations of movies that are based on books
  
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

But, to be open-minded, there are books I tend to avoid that maybe I need to go out on a limb on ...

• books without quotation marks around speech (I'm looking at you, Cormac McCarthy)
  
• novels about some famous dude's wife or some girl in a painting
  
• Jack Kerouac
  
• epic multi-generational tales
  
• biography
  
• the secret importance of {some ordinary object} in civilization

Meet the Bechdel test

If you've never heard of it, which I think most of my three readers haven't, it's a movie litmus test that originated here. The test is simple: "Is there at least one conversation between two female characters that isn't about men?"

The test can also be applied to novels, with one big caveat: Novels that use first person or tight third with a male protagonist are less likely to pass, and that's not necessarily something to get excited about. Movies, by contrast, don't generally glue a camera on one person's head and leave it there all film.

One of the better discussions of it is here. I see people object to this test with, "Well, there is this particular novel here, and this is why it doesn't pass the Bechdel's and it's OK." Sure, fine - the canonical example is The Name of the Rose. Setting a novel in a medieval monastery does indeed limit the potential for female-female conversations. But I think this misses the point of the test.* The test is better as a general diagnostic for a body of work - modern movies as a class, or the work of Robert Heinlein, or rom-coms.

The exception I would make to this is in a very particular class of movies/novels. This consists of stories set in the modern world (or a future similar to it) with a wide variety of characters and, if it's a novel, omniscient third narration. I read a novel recently, by an author who I would consider to not have reactionary opinions about the place of women, which had 39 speaking male roles, and only 5 females, the only major character of which is a damsel in distress (who is also the MacGuffin). In the book, it was clear that some women had power, because they are mentioned in passing, yet somehow every major character except the explicitly objectified female character was male. Maybe one or two of these gender decisions were driven by the needs of the story; the rest were like, "Well, I need a random person, and the default personhood is male." Needless to say, it didn't pass Bechdel. It pretty much ruined my enjoyment of a book I would have otherwise liked quite well.

Well, maybe you're saying, so what? Think about (third-person omniscient) books and movies that don't pass the reverse Bechdel's - no male-male conversations. All I can think of is The Women, although there are probably others. However, they are very rare. Start paying attention to Bechdel's and its reverse during your cinematic excursions, and then ask yourself what we can conclude about how genders are portrayed in our society.

*At least, IMHO. You can only put so much in a ten-panel comic strip. So you could reasonably argue for another purpose, and since it's a free country you can use the test however you like. I won't stop you.

Reading the top ten translated novels, part II

Last time I checked in on my project to read the top ten translated books of 2008, I had three books down. Five more I finished within a couple of weeks, leaving two. One of those I had tried, and finally decided life was too short to spend that bored (Voice Over by Celine Curiol). The final one has been sitting on my shelf. It was good, but not light, and I hadn't gotten around to it in part because it was a loan from a friend rather than the library. Now I am finished, or finished with the nine I am ever going to read, and so here are mini reviews.

Of course, while these books may have been shortlisted as for best novel, what is really meant is literary novel. There's nothing light and fluffy about them.

The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederick Hermans is the story of a man who may or may not be a Dutch resistance fighter during World War II. He may be deluded and actually harming the resistance's cause, or he may be a hero whose contact in the resistance has disappeared. Either way, he is an unlikable character who does some very bad things that are not related to the war. (I'm being vague to avoid spoilers, but let's put the emphasis on very. He's not pilfering gumballs from the five and dime.) The author manages to achieve the right balance of distance from our main character - no matter how close we get we can't be sympathetic, yet we are right there with him - or at least there as he believes it to be, which may not be reality. The plot of course is unusual; most stories of World War II that take place in Europe are either about victims or about heroes.

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge is a tough read; it's the one I just finished. Serge was Russian but wrote in French, and his novels are highly political. In this case, the political shades over into the philosophical. It's the story of several people who are agents for Communist Russia in other parts of the world. Like the previous book, the question of whether one is on the right side or not is asked, yet it is not quite the same situation. The characters know exactly who they work for; the question is whether the organization is still dedicated to the cause or whether it has become overzealous and power-hungry. Given that this is Stalinist Russia, the answer is fairly obvious. But what does one do? To defect is not only risky but it cuts one off from the central purpose of one's life; to remain is morally compromising; to become an active communist separate from the organization is suicidal.

Yalo is psychological rather than philosophical. Like Darkroom, it involves a character for whom it is difficult to determine the truth. In Frederick's novel, though, the main character knows what he thinks - he may be delusional (or not), but he believes in his version of reality. Yalo, instead, is a man who does not know what he thinks or feels, who even has trouble knowing what he remembers. It "revolves around a single consciousness unable to make sense of it or its surroundings." For most of us, consciousness is a coherent experience (even if that coherence is an illusion); for Yalo consciousness is fragmented and indeterminate. In this story Yalo, our main character, has done things more senseless and awful than in the above two books, and the world has treated him in the same way. Yalo is not fully human, in a sense, and how does one respond to someone - or punish them - if they are not?

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya is on the shorter side and written in long sentences, long paragraphs that are almost stream-of-consciousness. The narrator is a rather paranoid young man hired to copy edit a 1000-page manuscript of atrocities, and he is also - pardon the language, gentle reader - to use the current slang, something of a douchebag. You can't really like the narrator, and this dislike is possible, perhaps, because he is just another self-centered, shallow guy. In other words, you can feel free to dislike him without fear of reprisal. (Yes; I disliked him more that the morally compromised characters discussed above.) I didn't feel like there was much to this book, or understand why it made the shortlist. It wasn't bad; it just wasn't great.

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig is about a young German woman who lives a narrow, impoverished life, working in the post office. Then suddenly her aunt invites her to stay in her glittering world of wealth for a while and she - not entirely honestly - reinvents herself. When she has to go home again, she can't adjust, and she eventually meets another young man with similar difficulties. They feed off of each other's unhappiness and eventually plan a future together - not one of hope. The book was easy to read without being shallow or glib, and rather fun in spite of its dark tones. Perhaps it was simply "fun" in comparison to the other books! But Zweig's writing is, frequently, light rather than ponderous.

And then there is Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai, which is short and easy reading. The reviews of this novella I saw are all raves, and I just don't get their enthusiasm. I found the book uninteresting and unmemorable, and I really have nothing at all to say about it.

So, that's it for 2008. I may do this again next year.

Books for new faculty members

As I've mentioned previously, I've been reading (and skimming) a lot of books aimed at helping faculty members. Many of these are aimed specifically at new faculty members; several more are targeted toward achieving tenure. Needless to say, I've formed some opinions of these books.

I can't tell you how objectively useful these books are, since I haven't actually started a faculty job yet, I'm a sample of one, yada yada disclaimer disclaimer. ( in other words, this is not, "In this study, we randomly assigned new faculty members to read one of ten books. New faculty who read Turducken's Guide to Achieving Tenure, or, Guess Which Part of Research-Teaching-Service is the Chicken were twice as likely to achieve tenure as those who read Cthulu's Top Ten Tenure Tips.") Nevertheless, I found some books more helpful than others. The biggest problems?

• Spending a lot of time on the applying to grad school or early grad school process in a book whose title guarantees it won't be picked up until well into the dissertation
  
• Dubious advice (ie, "List your marital status on your CV")
  
• Lots of remedial tips ("Many professors have offices, and these often have desks.")
  
• Vague tips that can't be easily operationalized
  
• A tendency to assume all fields are like the author's (ie, advising scientists that it is important to publish a book to get tenure)

With that said, here are the books I would recommend to grad students looking into faculty careers or new faculty members dealing with how to manage their time, run their own classes without drowning, and figuring out what exactly their job is. Because the one thing I consistently hear from assistant professors is that the first few years are painfully harder and that they work longer hours than they did in grad school. If that doesn't strike fear into a PhD student's heart, he or she doesn't have a heart.

1. James Lang's Life Life on the Tenure Track: Strictly speaking, this isn't an advice book - he does have one, and it is a fine book. This is merely an account of his first year as an English professor in a small liberal arts college. This book just tells you what to expect (yes, even if you'll be teaching grad students and carrying a heavy expectation of research) so that you will then want to go out and read the others. You should also give this to your spouse, your parents, and anyone else who will wonder if you are trapped under a heavy object and unable to reach the phone during that first year.
   
2. Emily Toth's first and second Ms. Mentor books: These have the enormous advantage of being funny and the disadvantage of not pretending to be comprehensive in their coverage. Although the first one is specifically for women, I think lots of the advice is applicable to any gender. Together, these books do the best job of conveying the culture of academe.
   
3. The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure--Without Losing Your Soul by Rockquemore and Laszloffy: You may not be a black academic, but then again, neither am I. I am not recommending this book because it will make you a better person by making you aware of what some of your colleagues may be going through (although it might do that), but because it has some very specific, useful tips for how to organize your office and use your time efficiently.
   
4. Finally, Robert Boice's Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus is an absolutely terrific book on how to be productive. You can read it now, and maybe that will save you some trouble, but I recommend buying it and putting it away until some time in your first year when you realize your first year is at least as miserable as James Lang's was (except perhaps without the chronic disease) and that you thought you could handle it but you can't and you are SO BEHIND and oh crap here comes the department chair ... that is, when you've hit academic bottom, because only then are you ready for change.

Sigh

As I continue to read/skim books of advice for faculty, today I encountered something disturbing. It's not the only book that does this, which is why I'm not calling it out, but it was particularly blatant in this case.

The book has chapters on minorities and women, and those chapters are aimed specifically at minorities or women. The presumption seems to be that whites or men have no need to learn about these issues, which is odd when the chapters discuss encounters one will have with Neanderthal colleagues. It is especially odd given that some of the women-only advice includes why one shouldn’t date colleagues; unless the authors meant to specify lesbian relationships, male faculty members are clearly just as involved. Why is this a women's issue?

At one point, a chapter mentions that students will ask, "Why do we have to learn about this multicultural stuff?" A good question, given that apparently faculty are excused from doing so.

Footnotes

Quite possibly the best quote I've read in class so far this semester: "This highly stylized example [the invention of the grenade harpoon] is of course chosen to honor the conference site of Tjøme, not because I have any knowledge of whaling, my entire contact with which consists of having eaten whale steak about thirty-five years ago at a Norwegian restaurant whose name I cannot recall but which was located in an alley between Boylston and Eliot Streets in Boston, right between the old Trailways bus station." (Time Matters by Andrew Abbott)

When book covers go wrong

I have always gotten annoyed when the people on the covers of books didn't accurately represent the characters within. I used to wonder why authors allowed that, until I learned that they have almost no say in book covers. (I link to Jenny Crusie because I learned this through her blog, although plenty of other writers discuss this as well.) Still, I mostly thought of the inaccuracies as random, not having an overall pattern. Well, I should have known better.

For example, I recently finished Samuel Delany's Neveryona. I had stared at the cover for a while and noticed the following:
1) The man is "gigantic," but the artist depicts him as similar in height to the heroine.
2) He is wearing the wrong number of belts.
3) He's not Mr. Hygiene, but the cover has him depilated and oiled up like a Chippendale.
4) The heroine has bushy hair, but it is shown as just slightly curly.
5) She looks vaguely Italian, but she is half black and half ... well, we don't know what the predominate race is, but it explicitly neither black nor blond-white.

The wrong number of belts surely was random, but the decision to render a biracial woman as white surely wasn't, especially in the predominately white world of sci-fi. A few days later, I saw this blog post by an author about her book where the black protagonist is shown as white on the cover, which jarred me out of my naivete (ok, my white privilege). In the case of her novel, the cover has misled readers about the identity of the narrator because she is an unreliable narrator - but she isn't wrong about her race. In the Delany case, by contrast, the reader has no cause to doubt the narrator, general postmoderism aside. But both covers represent a systemic tendency to "whitewash" covers; try finding a book with a white protagonist depicted as black.

Oryx and Crake

I recently finished Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake. I had found A Handmaid's Tale interesting but didn't care for Cat's Eye. However, I'd heard a lot of good things about O&C, and then I found it in hardback for 25¢ at a garage sale. Ultimately, I was disappointed.

ALERT! THE REST OF THIS ENTRY CONTAINS SPOILERS!

The book centers around the friendship between the narrator and his friend Crake. Their friendship felt like a retread to me. Imagine, if you will, two boys growing up together. One, the narrator, is easily led by his friend. The friend is a genius, or at least has a strong sense of his own destiny. The narrator feels dumb by comparison, not only to his friend but to his privileged milieu, but he isn't stupid, and he is at least verbally skilled. (This makes it much easier for him to narrate cogently later on.) However, he's cast/casts himself in the sidekick role. They may compete for the love of a woman. Eventually, after the friend does great and/or terrible things and is dead, the narrator is left to carry on, bereft. Sound familiar? This territory was already explored brilliantly in A Prayer for Owen Meany - as well as a lot of other works. ("Burning Chrome" by William Gibson comes to mind, although it doesn't map across all the details.) There's nothing wrong with this trope, but it results in a lot less originality than I'd expected.

My other issue comes in at the very end, and this is where I have a real spoiler: The book has a non-ending. The narrator finds out other people are alive and could be a threat to the creations of Crake. As we leave him, he is trying to decide whether to kill them or what.

The first time I read that kind of ending, back in middle school, I thought it was pretty clever. By now, I've lost my tolerance. While a writer doesn't have to wrap everything up in a bow, this kind of ending suggests to me that the writer doesn't know how to end it - particularly if it comes after a traditional narrative structure. (If the author has been telling a story in a very different way from the get-go, like in Robert Bolaño's 2666, you're not set up to expect a classic denouement.) I got to the end and thought, really? I would have bet you a pony halfway through through that the narrator would find other humans, so his discovery wasn't much of a surprise. And I don't even have a pony. For that matter, it was evident early on that Oryx, the narrator's lover, was a point of contention between the two men. This isn't a work of great subtlety.

I can't really recommend it, unless you're a big Atwood fan - but then you've already read it.

Reading the top 10 translated novels

I started off with Robert Bolaño's 2666, a very long novel in five sections. One reviewer on Amazon gave the book one star because the fourth section was filthy, in their mind, and "unless you like reading 'anally raped' over and over you shouldn't bother," they said. Now, this part of the book is the hardest to read and by far the longest, but what makes it difficult is the nature of the crimes described, not the manner of the description. It's not snuff that describes violence with pleasure. It's detached, clinical, in the manner of a police report, and technical rather than graphic. That Bolaño could come up with this doesn't suggest he has a depraved mind - the crimes in the book are based on a series of real murders - so much as it suggests that the world around us is, at times, depraved. (Still, if you prefer not to read about this sort of topic, aesthetically or morally, fine, but then you're something of an idiot to pick up a book about the murder of hundreds of women in the first place.)

The fourth section ("The Part About the Crimes") is wonderfully effective at inducing shame. In the first three parts, I found myself despising the characters to some degree because all these terrible crimes are going on around them, and they pay little to no attention to them. Then in the fourth section, I began to wish I was reading about anything else. The crimes and the larger milieu of Santa Teresa, with its corruption and poverty, become overwhelming, and I wanted to go back to reading about boxing and Pynchonesque authors. Of course, then I could no longer look down on the characters that momentarily deplored the crimes before turning to something else.

The second book I read was one I didn't have high hopes for - Attila Bartis' Tranquility promised to be in the vein of Philip Roth. It's about a man who lives with his crazy homebound mother, a former actress. I unexpectedly enjoyed it, although after the fact I was bemused by the jacket description of the work as laugh-out-loud funny. It never occurred to me to laugh - not because it was unfunny, like Larry the Cable Guy, but because for the most part it didn't occur to me it was supposed to be chortle-inducing.

I then went back to Bolaño for Nazi Literature in the Americas. If you love Lambshead, you'll like Nazi Literature. It's an encyclopedia of (fictional) fascist authors from the North America, Central America, and South America. (No Canadians though.) It's a small work compared to 2666, but still fun.

After reading three books in a row about authors, I was ready for something else and turned to Voice Over by Céline Curiol. I wasn't expecting to like it, and I liked it even less than I expected. It is no doubt a failing on my part, but I'd much rather sympathize with a main character who is something vile like a murderer than someone passively amoral. I have no patience for characters like our protagonist here, a needy woman screwing up her own life, someone I don't like or understand spending time with other unlikable people in tacky situations. And I really don't want to be stuck in her head for 250 pages of stream of consciousness. After only 25 pages I would prefer to go back to section four of 2666. I might have to put this one down and come back.

God bless you each and every one

godbless
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

I'm back with another book from the dustbins of the mid-century. This time it's a book whose title caught my eye while I was searching for a different volume: God Bless Our Queer Old Dean by W. Lee Storrs. The book is a non-technical easy read on the job of the dean of student affairs, at least as that job stood in 1959.

Usually, the 1950s don't feel that long ago to me, but this book is practically a museum piece. The are of "deaning" as described by this book sounds nearly as quaint as does its description of colonial student affairs. Mentally, it is not much more of a stretch to imagine the days when students were ordered by social standing and presidents directly meted out corporal punishment than it is to imagine separate Deans of Men and Women overseeing a student affairs apparatus so small that students have personal relationships with the appropriately gendered dean.

But back to the fun stuff: Let's start with the title. Now poor Dean Storrs can't be blamed for failing to anticipate the newer meaning of "queer," and in fact the preface reassures one that he doesn't mean that sort of queer by listing "whether the suspected homosexual should be immediately separated from the student body or given therapy" as one of the many dilemmas deans face. Nevertheless, the vigorous manhood of mid-century just doesn't inflect the same way now. Much of the sentiment belong more to the era of Kipling and Baden-Powell than to Sputnik, and the author's irrationally exuberant slang would be right at home in the mouth of one of Sinclair Lewis' Rotarians.

The illustrations add to the reading experience - notice my personal favorite above. In addition to these charming sketches, there are also prosy sketches designed to illustrate the challenges of deaning. One tells the story of a student who reported seeing pancakes in his dresser drawer. After referring him to first a counselor and then a psychiatrist to no avail, the dean looks in said dresser and finds - pancakes. A friend of mine remarked that this raises more questions than it answers, not the least of which is why someone had stored delicious breakfast foods in a bureau.

But the author (and I) have saved the best for last. Below, I present the final two paragraphs, which I swear I have not tampered with in any way. *SPOILER ALERT* After discussing the increased permissiveness on college campuses, which today we recollect as the last gasps of in loco parentis, Storrs concludes:

"The undergraduate of the next decade undoubtedly faces a harder grind, tougher competition, severer stricture, and as the avalanche of collegians such as has never been known in any country in any age descends upon the campus, most of the flummery about the permissive attitude and the progressive approach will be lost in the shuffle. Readjustment will take a long time, but it is clear that a new era or rigor and regulation is coming in, and the dean will be called on once again to swing the strap.

"Bend over, son."

Read the world

Every now and then I start to feel guilty about what I read - or rather, about what I don't read. (I make no apology for wanting to find out what happens to Dalziel in the final Bastion Club novel. Many graduate students say they read nothing for pleasure at all and claim to long for the day they graduate and can pick up fiction again. Yet I know how much television many of these students watch. I'm not arguing against TV; my point is simply that we all manage to make time for our own brain candy, and mine happens to be fiction that does not have the imprimatur of literature instead of TV. I feel no more guilt over this than do my friends who watch Lost or Double Shot at Love. But I digress.) To assuage this guilt I periodically resolve to read more of a certain type of book or another - more African-American authors or more classics, perhaps.

My latest guilt-wave was set off by seeing this article that laments how little translated fiction Americans read. The author of this article managed to stay on my good side by devoting more space to citing statistics than to implying that America was a race of barbarians, and I resolved to do my part to fortify American reading.

Thus, this month I am going to try to read the top 10 translated novels of 2008. Step one was finding them. I started my quest at the Nashville Public Library, which had two of the books (the Bolaños), although one had a long request queue. Two more were on order. I then looked for the remaining eight at Vandy - which had one, but it was at the bindery. No wonder Americans don't read this stuff - we can't FIND it!

We'll see if I succeed in this endeavor. It works out to a book every three days, and I don't know if that's sustainable, not when I have other things to read as well. (You know, that pesky dissertation, that kind of thing.)

Great books

My post on Matlin led me to start thinking about what my favorite books in higher education might be. I do not represent this as a definitive list of the best or most important books in the field: This list is necessarily idiosyncratic and reflective of my own interests. it includes books ranging from the informative overview for the newcomer to the provocative.

The Chosen by Jerome Karabel. This book won more awards than Michael Phelps and might break a flimsy coffee table. It's also an engrossing and compelling look at the history of admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares is another book about elite admissions. This book was what inspired my original, now-abandoned thesis topic.
The Higher Learning in America by Thorstein "Pecuniary Emulation" Veblen. His rant on the commercialization of higher education from a century ago still is powerful, not to mention really funny. Captains of Erudition everywhere, beware!
How Colleges Work by Robert Birnbaum. The title tells you exactly what it is, and it is as accessible to laypersons and practitioners as it is to researchers. My criticism of this book is that the types of college governance he lays out are not empirically tested but are based on experience and gut feeling.

I was surprised to see how short this list turned out to be. Notice too that the first three books are written by sociologists and only one is by an education researcher, albeit one with an organization theory perspective. A few runners-up:

Best fiction: Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson with an honorable mention to Jane Smiley's Moo.
Best finance book: Tuition Rising by Ron Ehrenberg.
Best edited volume: The High-Status Track by Kingston and Lewis.
Best book that's not specific to the field and yet ought to be read by every higher ed researcher: The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills.
Best book based mostly on experience instead of research: The American University by Jacques Barzun.
Best book on the presidency: Legitimacy in the Academic Presidency by Rita Bornstein.
Best book on fundraising: Philanthropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education by Curti and Nash.

Stalking Norman Matlin

I've been reading an odd little volume called "The Educational Enclave: Coercive Bargaining in Colleges and Universities" by Norman Matlin. It's from 1970 and was published by Funk and Wagnalls.

Dr. Matlin had an odd career. He went to Yeshiva as an undergrad and then to the New School for his sociology doctorate, where his dissertation was on "A Heuristic for Education." He married and then taught in Puerto Rico in the early 1960s, where he met Carlos Albizu and joined him at his new graduate school for mental health professionals. From there on out, all Matlin's work was in psychology, much of it in Spanish. He retired about ten years ago.

This book seems to have left few marks on the world. I can only find one book review, and that review took it entirely seriously. Even the dust jacket suggests it is serious. Yet in spots I had real trouble believing this book was anything other than satire (see the sample below), and it's quite possibly the funniest commentary on higher education I've read - in places.

"Most of the student's contractual obligations require his presence, at stated intervals, at appointed locations. Minimizing the number of appearances is obviously beneficial. While the appearance or nonappearance of any particular student is of no great import to the institution, the simultaneous nonappearance of large numbers tends to be conspicuous. Prudence suggests that the nonappearance of students be staggered. In situations of comparative inelasticity, the relative infrequency of nonattendance allows for this solution with a minimum of formal organization. In situations of higher elasticity, a fair amount of cooperation and coordination among students may be necessary to maximize minimization."

In places the book is dead-on, and in others it misses the mark by a mile. The above excerpt is from his chapter on students, which also contains a very close examination of why student cheating is an entirely rational behavior, with a cost-benefit analysis of different types of cheating. It is terrific, although it fails to explain why some students don't cheat.

In the very next chapter, however, he claims that "private educational institutions set academic policy by maximizing profit ... For various diplomatic reasons, however, institutions prefer to consider that they are operating at a loss." This seems to me to be a gross misreading of the situation. Institutions prefer to be able to boast that they are operating in the black. They ask for funds in order to continue to be able to do so in the future or to "promote excellence," i.e. be able to spend more. (In order words, they prefer to consider that if their income is not increased at once they will only be able to offer a sub-standard educational product). I am not taking issue with his statement that institutions act to maximize profit but with his claim that they pose as operating in the red. An analysis of annual reports and fundraising appeals (now or from the 1960s) would show otherwise.

I have two theories I can't decide between:

1) This book is a parody. How could someone write about "maximizing minimization" in regards to skipping classes with a straight face? The book review frowns upon his pedantic language, but it is too pitch-perfect to be accidental ... or is it? This book was his last salvo in an area he was tired of. This explains his refusal to cite, his scorn for educational research that goes beyond the de rigeur posing, his grandiose thesis (he alone can combine economics and sociology!), and his willingness to fit every quanta of educational life into his grand unified theory.
...or
2) This book was Matlin's last effect to re-establish himself in the sociology of education, but it failed. The world in 1970 wasn't ready for a thesis that considered education to solely be a prestige-maximizing exercise, and Matlin was impolitic enough to, for example, fail to note that cheating can be treated as a moral activity and not simply an economically rational one. He also made the unwise choice to ignore the work of his contemporaries and only take into account giants like Veblen. Socially tone-deaf and convinced of his own brilliance, he had trouble finding a job in sociology. To quote Garbarino from his review, "the relentless translation of every bit of academic minutiae into sociological jargon over more than 200 pages makes for heavy going. ... The book would have benefited from a greater degree of selectivity in characteristics analyzed and a more straightforward style."

In other words, is this book a comedy or a tragedy? It falls short in some way no matter which light we view it in. Yet I've spent a lot more time thinking about this book than any other education book I've read in a while. For that reason I think it deserves more than the obscurity it languishes in.

Note: Sorry I haven't included a link. I bought a copy off of Amazon, but there are currently no copies for sale there or at Powell's - that tells you how obscure it is! - and no good pages to link to.

Keeping up with the modern world

When dogs blog.

Terribly geeky things you will want, like a wafflemaker that makes keyboard-shaped waffles.

Are cell phones killing bees?

When I needed I new clutch, I figured it was time to learn how one worked. Here's how.

Sci-fi archive. There are a lot of interesting stories here - far more than you'd want to peruse at one go - but so far I've mostly looked at the "classics." There are a lot by big names in sci fi, and some of them are surprisingly bad. I won't name names, but writers I know and enjoy have some mediocre work here. Reading old sci fi is often an exercise in fitting your brain around yesterday's future, which sometimes works better than others. Futures where all the women are housewives and all the men smoke are one thing; futures where unfunny gender and racial stereotypes drive the plot are another. It's as painful as reading the comic strips in Parade Magazine.

Then again the short story is a very demanding art form. You have little space to convince the reader the characters are real and behave realistically. This is hard enough in stories set in our present world, and it gets harder when writers depict humans encountering something that we never have before. Frequently too the author builds a story around a gimmick and doesn't think the implications through. A story I read years ago - I don't remember the author - had the premise that all the pollution produced in a year could be shrunk down to a doughnut, which could then be neutralized by human digestion - killing the person in the process. Scientific dubiousness aside, I never bought the author's further premise that a random citizen was chosen by lottery to eat it with great ceremony (and why it was done this way was not explained). Why not pick from willing suicides, suffering cancer patients, or death-row inmates? Why not have super-secret agents send it to the slums of a third-world nation to be unknowingly eaten by a waifish street urchin? You'll encounter a lot of these types of gimmicks here. But there is also some good stuff. I had never heard of Ward Moore, and the couple of stories by him are both excellent.