Mean Professors

I found this today on Facebook.  I think if you’ve taught for any length of time you can understand why the professor did what he did.  I’m not excusing it or agreeing with it, but I do understand it.

Ok, let’s get serious here. A popular professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business replied to a student’s email in a way that is party jerkface but mostly, part sage life advice. Deadspin reports that a student walked into the 1st day of class an hour late and the professor told her to leave & come back to the next class. In the comments section, most people were surprised to find themselves siding with the professor, citing topics like the rudeness of interrupting 80 people who pay full tuition to the foolishness of  “shopping” 3 classes in the same time slot. The professor actually XXXX’d out the student’s name and emailed it to all of his students! See below.. what’s your take on this?

The rest of the article (including the letter from the student and the professor’s response) are found here. 

Paul Laudiero's 'Shit Rough Drafts' tumblr to become a book in 2014

Reblogged from Laura Ellen Scott:

He entered the Chronicle Books' Great Tumblr  Book Search, hoping to win $100 worth of prizes and ended up with a book deal. They are expecting initial sales in the tens of thousands, and Chronicle is the only press with a dedicated rack display at Urban Outfitters.

Paul is my former student, set to graduate this May, and while other Seniors in the humanities worry about what lies ahead, Paul has brought everything he loves together--literature, writing, and comedy--to give one hell of an answer to that most annoying question of all: what are you going to do with a degree in English?

Read more… 39 more words

One of GMU's amazing undergraduate creative writers makes it big:

Teaching Ethnography: post mid-term blues

So today one of my students comes up  after class to talk about his progress.  It’s something I wish he had done weeks ago, preferably after I had emailed him half a dozen times asking him why he hadn’t turned in ANYTHING this semester.  He disappeared right after the break, so I assumed he decided to take a late drop.  Then he came back to class last week an eager participant, engaged and by all externals, loving the class.

This is the first time I’ve had an enthusiastic disappearing student, but something like this has happened to me every semester for the last 15 years. There is always some student issue.  I’ve had my fair share of disappearing students who come back the week before finals and are incensed to find out that I won’t accept all of their unsubmitted work.  Once I had a student who informed me that I needed to create an alternative assignment so she could “make up” the eight weeks of the semester she couldn’t make it to class.  It happens all the time, and it always leaves me feeling queasy.  I genuinely like my students and I want to do what I can to help them.  But sometimes they mess up.  Spectacularly.  I’m a big believer in natural and logical consequences. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy seeing those consequences in action.

So every year as the weather gets warmer, the trees and flowers bud and the days get longer, I find myself getting the post mid-term blues.  I wish all of my students were able to dedicate the time and attention to my classes that they should.  I would prefer that they come to me to discuss problems before they’re catastrophes.  But that’s not the way life works in the world of undergraduate education, so I mete out justice, as gently as possible, and hope next time they’ll do better.

Keep calm

Writing your own bad review

Keep calm and Keep Writing

I know, I know. You thought getting your book published would be it.  The happiest day of your life.  Once book is in your hands things are rarely as you imagined.  I realized this last year when I was touring with my book.  Admittedly, it was a very limited regional tour (it was an academic book, after all), but it was NOTHING like I had imagined:  driving to small college towns, sleeping in cheap hotels and eating bad food. And after those lovely weekends I got to go home and work a full week.  I loved meeting people who were interested in my work, but it was expensive and grueling.

Then come the reviews.  Most fiction writers dread reviews because it’s the last part of a long process where they have almost no control.  And let’s face it, it’s hard to think that someone might hate your work after you’ve suffered years to get it into print.  To preempt this, one of my colleagues created her own first bad review just to get it over with: “I figured it was better to have one on the [Amazon] site.  Then I could say the book had a bad review and I had survived.”

Today in the Guardian some leading authors have published bad reviews of their work:

The same is true of the confessions collected by Robin Robertson in his 2003 book Mortification: Writers’ Stories of their Public Shame. Most of the tales of disastrous experiences are from the start of the authors’ careers, as with Julian Barnes’s anecdote about a literary party that couldn’t have gone worse for him, or Margaret Atwood’s account of an early signing session in the men’s underwear section of a department store and a TV appearance in which she followed a woman from the Colostomy Association. You don’t believe the shameful memories still keep them awake today.

This makes the self-rubbishing under the heading “What’s Wrong with Me?” in the latest Dublin Review more radical, as the authors who responded to its invitation (to reveal “what they do that causes them dismay, or what they wish they could do but can’t”) are exposing abiding, apparently ineradicable, flaws – not long-ago humiliations, or callow books, or problems since conquered.

Most of the confessions are nonetheless informal and relatively straightforward. Anne Enright berates herself for punctuation tics (“I am tormented by my need for commas”). Richard Ford is unable to “describe how people look”. Tessa Hadley admits to repeating images. Neil Jordan says he has written “a thousand beginnings” but few become finished projects. Ruth Padel convicts herself of “too-muchness”, writing too much and overdoing imagery.

The truth is, the author knows his or her weaknesses best.  I find it comforting to read that these wildly successful authors share my insecurities.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg eyes political push on immigration – Michelle Quinn and Anna Palmer – POLITICO.com

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg eyes political push on immigration – Michelle Quinn and Anna Palmer – POLITICO.com.

What the Immigration Rights Movement Can Learn from the Gay Rights Movement

Reblogged from the Washington Post
by Frank Sharry

There is something about being under attack that makes a movement stronger.

I’ve been an advocate for immigrants for 30 years, working with Central Americans in Boston and policymakers in Washington. And for a long time, my colleagues and I assumed that if we developed strong reform ideas and clever lobbying strategies, we’d help create a road map to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working in America.

But in 2005, with the rise of the Minutemen and fresh attention from Capitol Hill, many in the Republican Party started to turn immigration into a wedge issue. They demonized hardworking immigrants as criminals and moochers. They blocked national reform and passed harsh state laws aimed at purging immigrants. Their goal: to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they would be forced to leave the country. Democrats were divided, our opponents were on the march, and we in the immigrants’ rights movement were on the defensive. Fortunately, we had a community we could learn from, look up to, emulate. And that was the LGBT movement.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community might have been even more marginalized than ours. In fact, I used to joke with a friend who works for an LGBT activist group about who was lower on the totem pole, gays or immigrants. But the LGBT movement bounced back from significant setbacks a decade ago to win multiple state referenda on marriage equality, turn the Obama administration around on the federal Defense of Marriage Act and repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Read the rest of this article here.

The Paradox of Self-Publishing

At AWP this spring, most of the agents and editors were not in favor of self-publication. The reason?  It provides the author with a track record and if your sales are poor, you’re less likely to be picked up by an agent or receive a conventional book contract.  But is that really the case?  And could self-publishing be any worse than publishing a book with a press that doesn’t do that well?

If the self-published book does well your options expand considerably.  Consider this from the LA Times:

“By the time a self-published author has made a success of his or her book,” [Laura] Miller observes, “all the hard stuff is done, not just writing the manuscript but editing and the all-important marketing. Instead of investing their money in unknown authors, then collaborating to make their books better and find them an audience, publishers can swoop in and pluck the juiciest fruits at the moment of maximum ripeness.”

So it seems that it’s just not enough to be a talented writer, one must either impress an agent and make it out of the slush pile or become a literary Don Draper and market your way to success.

Either way, it’s a slog.

GMU-LOC Field School for Cultural Documentation

The Cultures of Work:

A Field School for Cultural Documentation

May 20- June 22, 2013
Arlington, Virginia

Sponsored by the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress,
and the Folklore Studies Program,
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

Workers at Arlington National Cemetery

Course Content

This intensive course will offer hands-on ethnographic training for beginners in the documentation of local cultural resources, the preservation of documentary materials, and the public presentation of cultural heritage.  Instruction will cover such areas as research ethics, preliminary research, interviewing and sound recording techniques, ethnographic observation, and field note writing. Training will also be provided on the archival organization of documentary materials gathered in the field and the use of documentary materials for exhibitions and other public presentations.  Course instruction will include lectures, hand-on workshops, discussions, and supervised team-based fieldwork with a carefully selected cultural community.

Study Community: The Arlington National Cemetery

The fieldwork conducted during the course will examine the culture and traditions of workers at Arlington National Cemetery.  Arlington National Cemetery includes 634 acres of gardens, ancient trees and grave sites. This impressive landscape and its rituals serve as a tribute to the service and sacrifice of every individual laid to rest there.

Students will document the essential but often overlooked contribution of cemetery workers who maintain this iconic national shine, including gravediggers, landscapers, arborists and stone masons, as well as the military and civilian personnel who preserve the traditions and services essential to making Arlington the nation’s premier military cemetery.

Who should apply?

The field school is designed for adults who have a strong interest in ethnographic documentation but little previous training or experience in this area.  Preference will be given to persons who are in a position to utilize newly learned skills upon returning to their home communities.  School teachers, museum curators, local historians, leaders of cultural groups and foundations, librarians, community organizers and activists, and undergraduate and graduate students are among those who have benefited from the Center’s previous field schools.

For more information, please visit: Folklore | Field School for Cultural Documentation.

10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer