One sure way to measure your network dependency is to live in a building in which broadband is included with your rent, and see how you respond when the Internet suddenly, completely, and inexplicably breaks.  And there is nothing you can do about it—no router you can reset, or DSL modem you can futz with, no customer service hotlines on which to hold.  There is only your apartment’s leasing and maintenance office, where you’ll be told, “uh, yeah—it’s broke.”

How many times do you turn to the computer to look something up, only to realize you can’t, before the aggravation really starts to kick in?

How long does it take before you pack up the laptop and head down to the coffee shop, the one with the open wi-fi?

How long before you start picking fights with roommates or family members?

How long before paralysis sets in, in which you feel it impossible to accomplish anything?

Just curious.

[UPDATE, 5.17.06, 11.00 am:  Yes, I changed the title of this post.  I’m so deranged by my lack of networked communication that I totally fumbled the support group reference.  And left the ball lying on the field for a full day.  What a maroon.]

This is one of the scariest things I’ve read in quite some time.

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

Scary enough, but not the part that really sends chills up my spine.  Read the comments, an alarming percentage of which cheer the administration on in its efforts to silence the media.  The media, which is at least in theory trying to report on the administration’s illegal activity.  It’s positively Orwellian:  the problem is not the right’s violations of the Constitution but the attempts by a Constitutionally protected free press to report on those violations.

There’s a fair bit of discussion on Unfogged today about resistance—both the historical Resistance in Vichy France and its implications for life in the U.S. today.  It’s these kinds of attempts on the part of the right to control the nation’s discourse—and worse, the level of success they’ve had in the last six years, regardless of what the approval ratings seem to suggest—that make me despair.  Is resistance even possible?

Graduation just began back in Claremont, and it feels mighty weird not being there. Cooler, certainly; I’m not missing sweltering under the klieg lights in my fluorescent purple triple-knit polyester robe. But I miss the ceremony, nonetheless—miss the opportunity to say goodbye to my students from the class of 2006, to congratulate them on their accomplishments, and to feel the relief of another spring being done.

Perhaps that’s what I miss most of all. Because the end of this spring hasn’t brought relief, only a bit of melancholy. It’s been a fantastic leave, but it’s been a whirlwind, and while I’m happy to be heading back to SoCal in about a week, I’m a bit sad to see the end of my time in Baton Rouge. Not least because I know the summer will go equally quickly, and the freedom that I’ve felt over the last four months—the freedom to work at my own pace; the freedom to stare into space; the freedom to be a whole person, one equally concerned with the health of her body as with the output of her mind—will begin to disappear.

But: I’m bringing back to Claremont with me a renewed sense of the balanced life I want to live, and I have fantastic, exciting projects ahead of me. So let the summer commence! (And class of 2006, drop me a line sometime and let me know how you’re doing.)

Jazz Fest
Originally uploaded by KF.

I took a few pictures during Jazz Fest using the less crappy than you’d expect but still crappier than you’d like camera on my cell phone. They’re now up on flickr, if you’re interested. In this particular photo, you can get a good sense of what I was able to see. Top center is the large video projection screen next to the Acura Stage, on which you see Bob Dylan. If you load the full-size version of the picture, you can see a small white speck onstage, just west of that young woman’s arm; that would also be Bob Dylan. Mostly, though, it’s just a sea of folks, on a gorgeous day.

Dear President Sexton,

As an alumna of New York University (Ph.D. English, 1998), I receive the usual set of appeals for donations, both from the university’s annual giving fund and from other fundraising bodies within NYU. In the past, I have given, not much, but happily—both to the Friends of Bobst Library and to the annual fund—but I feel it is important to let you know why, until things change, my response to any and all such appeals will be not just “no” but “hell, no.”

I was admitted to NYU in 1993, as a post-master’s Ph.D. student. I was given absolutely nothing in the way of funding during my first year—no fellowship, no assistantship, no tuition remission. Poor advising and a real desire to be in New York led me to make a decision I now counsel all of my undergraduates against—I enrolled anyway, supporting myself through that first year on loans and freelance work. Because of this decision, I graduated from NYU $21,000 in debt, a debt that was accumulated at your institution alone.

That I managed to hold my debt to $21,000 was due in part to the teaching position I applied, interviewed, and was hired for in the Expository Writing Program (EWP) in 1994. At EWP, instructors—all of us post-master’s Ph.D. students, from across the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—taught two courses a semester. This is, of course, the same teaching load as that of full-time faculty at NYU. These were, furthermore, student-contact intensive positions, as we were teaching required first-year writing courses, and we instructors thus spent countless hours not simply in the classroom, in class preparation, or in grading, but in student conferences, in faculty development programs, and in the evaluation of required writing proficiency exams. For this work, we instructors were given tuition remission (those of us still doing coursework, in any case) and a stipend of less than $10,000 per year.

In New York City. For more than forty hours of work per week. Less than $10,000.

Needless to say, nearly all of us held down a second job as well, simply in order to eat. Many of my colleagues picked up teaching at other institutions around the city; some worked in publishing; others did tutoring or worked corporate jobs. All of this, of course, in addition to both being full-time graduate students and to teaching a full 2-2 load. I was lucky enough to find freelance work in electronic publishing, work that has not only helped me in my career since graduation, but that was sufficiently highly-paid that I was able to make ends meet.

In fact, during my fifth and final year at NYU, as I was on the academic job market, my freelance work had become lucrative and enjoyable enough that I decided to leave EWP. I made nearly $60,000 that year. (Of course, I took a significant pay cut when I landed an assistant professorship. But that’s another story.) More importantly, I spent no more than 40 hours per week working for pay, freeing up many hours for my own work. Given that ability to maintain better control of my time, I was able to finish my dissertation that year, spending a total of a year and a half on it.

The point of all of this history is to make clear exactly how the treatment of graduate instructors and teaching assistants affects their lives. All of us struggled to make ends meet. Most of us graduated in serious debt, debt that our future salaries—if we were lucky enough to land full-time professorial positions—would not easily cover. And many of us were put in the position of having to sacrifice our own studies, our coursework, our exams, and our writing, to our teaching. If we did so, it was because it was our job to do so, as employees engaged in the core mission of the institution—the education of undergraduates.

Things changed somewhat after I graduated: the English department moved toward a policy of accepting only those Ph.D. students to whom it could grant funding, for one thing. And the graduate students organized, and won recognition for their union (the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, or GSOC), successfully bargaining for a contract that dramatically improved their working conditions. I was enormously proud to have graduated from the first private U.S. university to recognize and bargain in good faith with its graduate employees union, and I was thrilled to think that students who followed behind me might not have to make the same difficult choices that I did, compromising the quality of their studies or taking on insupportable debt in the pursuit of a degree.

This pride made it all the more heartbreaking when it became clear that you were going to take advantage of the National Labor Relations Board’s politically motivated 2005 ruling in order to refuse contract-renewal negotiations with GSOC, and that, worse, you were going to use ugly strike-breaking and retaliatory tactics in an attempt to bust the union. That you still, months later, refuse to negotiate with the graduate employees, even when urged to do so by both U.S. Senators from your state, is an appalling display of pigheadedness on your part, and begins to suggest to me that NYU has become less educational in function—that “private university in the public service” that I put myself in debt to attend—than, as detailed by NYU Exposed, a giant corporation, one working to undermine job security through an increasing turn to underpaid adjunct labor, while simultaneously (and underhandedly) overcompensating its senior executives.

I did not go $21,000 in debt and work two full-time jobs in order to receive my doctorate from Wal-Mart.

With this letter, I want to add my voice to the many others, including not only many of your own faculty but also thousands of professors and graduate students around the world, as well as untold numbers of sympathetic citizens, urging you to resume good-faith negotiations with GSOC.

But I also want to note, very clearly, that until such time as you do, what modest donations I would have made to the university will instead be sent to the GSOC Strike Hardship Fund. Moreover, I’m going to urge my fellow alumni to do the same. And I will advise my undergraduates, 75% of whom go on to grad school in some form, not to apply to or attend NYU. They will certainly receive a better educational experience at an institution that values their labor appropriately.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Associate Professor of English and Media Studies
Pomona College

P.S. A video detailing the history of the GSOC’s strike can be found here.

This post has taken me an unconscionably long time to write. I didn’t have net access in Nassau—or, more accurately, I didn’t seek out net access in Nassau—and have had a bit of a hard time getting myself going again since I’ve been back. But at last, the Bahamas post, which begins with a cautionary tale of sorts. Or perhaps just a lot of whining.

Bottom line: never, ever brag about your fabulous weekend trip plans. The trip itself was wonderful, but I really paid for it in the getting-there part.
Read the rest of this entry »

On another note:  last night’s Alias contained what I have to call the worst moment of product placement in the history of crass commercialism.  It went something like this (names have been elided to avoid spoilerage):

Scene:  car interior, en route to crucial surveillance mission.

Operative 1:  So you finally bought the Ford Hybrid.
Operative 2:  Electric.  Good for when you need to be quiet.

Cut to:  zoom on Ford Hybrid logo on back of car.

And I thought that season three’s “Quick!  To the Ford F-150!” was bad.

If there’s good news, I guess it’s that it’s a bit harder to effect such product placement on Lost.

This weekend, as others are celebrating the end of classes for the spring semester, I’m flying off to Nassau. This trip is in the main a girls’ trip, a long weekend with my mother and my sister, to be spent on the beach and by the pool and in other modes reflecting an appropriate state of torpor. Or even lassitude. The kind of thing where you wait for someone with a tray to wander by before you really begin to contemplate doing anything about your thirst.

This befits the other purpose of the trip as well, which is, for me, a toast to the passing of my sabbatical, an acknowledgment of the onset of summer, and a reckoning of what must (and indeed, can) be done before teaching resumes in August. It’s a weekend of taking stock, of assessing what I’ve managed to accomplish during this leave—which, frankly, has turned out to be not at all what I thought I’d do—and what I haven’t, and figuring out where to go next, and how to get there.

Here’s wishing all of you who are wrapping up a semester a speedy conclusion of spring and a well-deserved onset of summer. For me, however, a little delay would be good, a languorous last weekend of leave.

Or, On Not Being a Bruce Springsteen Fan.

Such a subtitle will be greeted as sacrilege by a subset of my old grad school pals, or would be if they were still reading here, as their adolescences were entirely framed by his music.  My adolescence moved between classic rock of a much more southern-fried variety and effortless mainstream pop, before finally veering off in a more new wavish direction.  What Springsteen I knew was what got played on the radio which, in pre-Clear Channel Louisiana, wasn’t terribly much, and what there was always struck me as being overwrought and way too testosterone-dependent.

So I went into Sunday’s concert, the closing set of the first weekend of Jazz Fest, with pretty low expectations.  I figured the highlight of the afternoon would be Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello, the dean of New Orleans music and, well, Elvis, performing music from their forthcoming collaboration.  What could be better?

See, when I heard Springsteen was playing, I assumed it would be, at least to some extent, the old stuff, the E Street Band stuff, the sort of power-trio-plus stuff, and I figured we’d listen a while and then wander off when it got old.

It didn’t get old.

This was perhaps the most inspired hour and a half of music I’ve ever seen performed.  Springsteen’s appearance wasn’t at all the rehash of old favorites I’d expected, but an entirely new venture, the first date in his new tour with the Seeger Sessions Band.  I’d been sitting on the ground, waiting between concerts, packed into my tiny, muddy spot of real estate, when the announcer began his intro.  And ended it.  All he said, in contrast to earlier, effusively descriptive lead-ins, was “Ladies and gentlemen, Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band.” By the time I’d gotten to my feet, the music had begun—and I was stunned to see that there were something on the order of 20 musicians on the stage, all playing acoustic instruments.  There were, of course, a couple of backup guitarists and a drummer, but there was also a pianist, a stand-up bass player, a steel pedal guitarist, a five-piece horn section, two violinists, a banjo player, and an accordionist.

Not your average Springsteen concert, I think.

For an hour and a half, the band played an all-out set of Americana, folk and country and gospel-inspired songs, deeply political songs about devastation and hardship and the will to survive, songs that originated in the twentieth century’s many traumas.  Most of the songs came from the just-released album, but a couple didn’t, including of course How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?, but also including a few reimagined versions of the older stuff that I thought I was going to hear—so thoroughly reimagined that I didn’t recognize them at all.  And while it’s far from an original thought to say that Springsteen is at his best in concert—bringing astonishing energy and joy to his performances, playing on long after the crowd expected that he’d quit—it would be a mistake for me not to note it anyhow.  Of all of the concerts I saw over the weekend, each of them worth far more than the ticket price on their own, Springsteen’s was the most amazing, a gift to a city that still hurts, a city that needs its own to come home, but that also needs to know that the rest of the world noticed, and cares.

I would not have expected to find myself, so far from my long-over adolescence, finding Bruce Springsteen relevant, much less rushing out to buy his new album.  But here I am.