A listserv I frequent has, on and off, had a bit of conversation about the plight of adjuncts in the academy, and one listmember this morning posted a link here, mentioning my recent post on the Chronicle article about Invisible Adjunct.  (Hi there, wallace-l!)

Another listmember followed this post, however, with a link to a Village Voice article about adjunctification, exploitation, and the Internet, which includes references to IA.  It’s a great article, and it gets at the madness of encouraging smart undergraduates to go to grad school in a market in which the vast majority will never break even on their investment.

But here’s the creepy thing about it:  I think that the article’s author, Anya Kamenetz, is the daughter of a couple of old profs of mine from my MFA days.  The last time I saw her, I think she was six.

I am, officially, old.

This entry comes with an Irony Alert, though it’s an irony more in the Alanis Morissette sense, rather than irony in the classical sense.

The Chronicle of Higher Education contains in its April 30 issue an article about the sign-off of the Invisible Adjunct, both from the blogosphere and from academic.  (If you are a Chronicle subscriber, the article can be found here; otherwise, the article can be read here for the next five days. [UPDATE:  the article is now available on the free site.])

As the article, by Scott Smallwood, opens:

Through the blurry glass of the classroom door, a professor can be seen at the front of the room. It is a woman, but the thick window obscures any clues about how old she is or how tall or what color hair she might have. Maybe brown.

She’s the Invisible Adjunct. Or at least, she used to be. After five years of being an adjunct and a year after starting one of the most popular academic Weblogs, she is giving up and getting out. More than a decade after entering graduate school with great promise, she hasn’t landed that full-time, tenure-track spot she dreamed of. So although she’s unsure what comes next, she is quitting the academy and shutting the blog down.

“What I need to do, I think, is to revise and rewrite my own script,” she wrote months ago when she began to consider this jump. “Get me rewrite! I’m done with this story and I want a new script.”

Her departure from the classroom at the end of this semester will cause barely a ripple on her campus. No farewell parties. No mentions in the department newsletter. Remember, no one can really see her. But on the Internet, her goodbye spurred an emotional cascade. Scores of other blogs mentioned her departure. Some even mourned it. Nearly 200 comments were posted to her final blog entry in late March. They called it essential and “one of the great good places.” One fan gushed: “While academia is becoming a poorer and poorer place by the minute, the lucky place you end up will be enriched by your arrival.”

There’s of course an irony in the contrasting responses to IA’s departure, which Smallwood rightly points to—that only in her invisibility, or rather in the discursive space she created through her invisibility, will she be missed.  But there’s another irony, one that Smallwood must surely have picked up on, but of which the article gives no real hint:  that this ceasing-to-exist of an online persona has forced the academy itself to take notice, in the form of an article in its journal of record.

And yet:  one can imagine IA’s very “colleagues,” reading in their offices, shaking their heads and muttering about the terrible loss to the field, never noticing the woman down the hall, packing her few things to leave.

This is the way we like our tragedies:  visible enough to be clucked over, invisible enough to avoid any personal implication therein.

A third reading, for class, but sadly partial; too much grading prevented me from finishing.

I’m upright, today, and out from under quarantine.  Both of these things feel like victories.

With a week and a half remaining in the semester, one must take one’s victories where one can.

Thanks, all, for the good wishes.  More soon.

So, that incipient case of the “chicken pox”?

Is not the chicken pox at all.

It is now, according to my doctor, a “virus of unknown origin.” Something almost certainly infectious, but untraceable without major lab analyses, which frankly aren’t worth it, as the virus seems pretty close to running its course.

Of course, because a mystery virus just wasn’t enough, my sore throat—which began as just a regular old sore throat such as one gets with the chicken pox, and then developed into nasty sores down the back of my throat, such as I’ve heard can also happen with the chicken pox—has morphed into a bacterial infection, which is in the process of turning into tonsillitis.

Antibiotics are on the way.  Which is great and all, but I really want to run a full system scan, to root out any other little bugs that are lingering herein, waiting for their opportunity to surprise me.

In far too many ways, for too many election cycles now, the political right has had a lock on several key campaign buzzwords, despite their repeated violations of everything that I’ve understood those concepts to mean.  Like “family values,” which has been used not to support such actual families as exist in this country but instead to bludgeon them into a non-threatening conformity.  Or “morality,” which has had less to do with actually thinking about any of that love-thy-neighbor stuff than it has with exclusion and passing judgment.  Or being “tough on crime.” Or standing for a “strong national defense.” And so on.  The right has gradually, almost invisibly, shifted the terms of political discourse in the U.S. in such a way that the left is forced either to argue against ideas that sound awfully important to the majority of Americans or to shift rightward themselves.

As my last post suggests, I’m getting a bit cranky over it all, and wish like crazy that the Democrats—and I don’t mean the pundits, because Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo and Michael Moore can do this until they’re blue in the face, and it won’t change anything; I mean the politicians themselves—would finally call the Republicans on the carpet over these little rhetorical deployments.  I want someone—and I’m looking at you, John Kerry—to stand up and say that it’s utterly hypocritical to claim that you’re for “family values” and then to insist on regulating what gets to count as a family; to say that “Affirmative Action” and “racial preferences” are not the same thing, and won’t be turned into the same thing no matter how many times you say they’re the same; to say that it’s wholly possible to have a “strong national defense” without bankrupting everything that the nation you’re defending stands for.

But the politicians on what amounts to the left in this country just aren’t working to reclaim the language in the ways they need to, and so the right continues to make its inroads.  On October 25, 2001, Congress unanimously approved a resolution, signed by the President on December 18 of that year, declaring September 11 “Patriot Day.” Between this and the PATRIOT Act, the Bush administration has been not-at-all-subtly working to lay claim to the conceptual ground of “patriotism,” transforming it from a sense of pride in a nation that strives always for justice and equality, or at least to improve the chances thereof, into a mindless conformity and acceptance.  If the right has its way, a “patriot” will no longer be one who questions, who protests, who fights for the rights of her fellow citizens, but one who shuts up and does what her leaders say.

And, unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Democrats have by and large gone along with this shift.  If “patriotism” is going to be reclaimed, it’s going to have to begin without the politicians, with the patriots themselves.

From my pal David comes The September Project, a grassroots effort to reclaim the meaning of “patriotism,” by encouraging Americans to spend September 11 in their local public libraries, reading, talking, questioning, becoming informed, and acting collectively to imagine—and create—a better United States.

It doesn’t surprise me that, in a number of venues where I’ve seen the September Project discussed (on air-l, for instance, or at Crooked Timber), the initial response has been somewhat tinged with hostility, precisely because the invitation to participate is framed using language that rings with the right’s buzzwords:  citizens, community, country, and, of course, patriotism.  But there are also other words, words the right would just as soon we didn’t see:  creative, informed, engaged, collective.

So more power to the September Project for working to take back the high ground of “patriotism” for those of us who have for too long felt shut out by the reactionary uses of the concept.  Now if only the politicians would follow suit.

I’m still looking at you, John Kerry.

Well, the Bush campaign has finally dug up somebody to call John Kerry’s military record into question.  Apparently, as Scott notes, they’re now claiming that Kerry may not have actually “earned” the first of his three purple hearts.

In response, Kerry is releasing his Navy records to the public.

Why, oh why, do the Democrats always cave when faced with this kind of nonsense?  Why don’t their campaign advisers ever realize that—and for god’s sake, in this situation more than in any other—there’s one and only one workable response to such bullsh*t accusations?

The response?  “You want to see my military records?  Fine.  Everything on the table, complete and unabridged.  I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.”

A quick story from the France trip that I’ve been looking forward to telling, but hadn’t quite found the right moment for:

I took the TGV back up from Tours to Paris, as it turned out, with the organizer of the conference I’d just attended, as well as another attendee.  We chatted on the train, and then, disembarking at Montparnasse, discovered that we were all taking the same Métro line on to our next destinations.

Walking through the maze of the Montparnasse Métro station, Éric (the conference organizer) said how sorry he was that I didn’t really get to do anything in Paris during my trip, since I spent the majority of my time in Tours.

“Actually,” I told him, “the night I arrived, my friend Marcus had a vernissage for a new group show he’s in, and –”

Éric stopped dead in his tracks.

“You know Marcus McAllister?”

Yep.  My college roommate, and my roommate once again in New York.  My best old late-night meaning-of-life debating pal.  The guy who once went with me to a Halloween party, for which he dressed as me dressed as him, and I dressed as him dressed as me.  (We were both wearing bluejeans, white t-shirts, and old sport coats.  It seemed pretty funny at the time.) That Marcus.

I always knew that kid was going places.

On George’s recommendation, I’m attempting to move my book links from Amazon to BookSense, which links independent booksellers nationwide.  If you’re in the U.S. and follow one of these links (like the link to Cryptonomicon in yesterday’s entry), you should find yourself on a page asking for your zip code, and then be redirected to a local bookseller from whom you can purchase the book.

In theory.  In practice, the redirect isn’t working.  If any of you have had any luck getting this to work, let me know…

We’re discussing Cryptonomicon right now in the Big Novel class,[1] and so information security is at the top of many of our minds.  Imagine my amusement, then, when one of my students forwarded me this Enterprise IT Planet story:

Out of a small sample of 172 office workers that were approached on the street, more than a third (37%) willingly divulged their password when simply asked, according to Infosecurity Europe 2004’s organizers. Sadly, a large majority—a full 71 percent—forked over the information when bribed with chocolate.

Mmm-hmm.  Stephenson’s links between contemporary hackers and World-War-II-era soldiers begin to make all that much more sense.

fn1. Or at least those of us allowed to get out of bed are.  (The whininess, you will note, is not passing.)