January 03, 2008

Resetting the purpose...again

As I'm typing out this post, in the typical before-semester lull, a song has come up on my random mp3 shuffle. The song is exactly 1:11 in length. It's by Resurrection Band, from their 1995 album Lament (in many ways the best thing that the old-skool Christian rock outfit has ever done). The song is called "Parting Glance."

These are the lyrics of "Parting Glance", in full:

I
I don't believe
Not in you
Not in us
Nor in this place
Leaving.

Thoroughly appropriate for this season, that. Not with places or employment or belief systems, mind you - but people and situations.

I'm realizing that I aspire to use this space for a real purpose - that I aspire to be a blogger who has a clear and dedicated mission, and that I want to be somebody who can deliver the goods on a regular, disciplined basis. (Dean Dad quotes Steve Martin in yesterday's missive: "The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking...What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances." He calls it something of a "blogger's credo". It's probably applicable to more than that.) I'm also realizing that I have no clue right now what that purpose is, and that the visions I might have are clouded by my own anger.

Make no mistake: Right now I am very angry. Not at any one person, or any group of people, necessarily, although obviously there have been influences and there have been breaking points. But what makes me most angry is the dark, dark realization that people will let me down, and there is nothing I can do to change that.

It's the latter part of that realization that makes me angriest. The former I'm fine with. I've known that we're all broken people for a very long time. But part of my M.O. for the longest time has been with sufficient intervention, or sufficient encouragement, or sufficient something-or-other, I could change people's brokenness by the sheer force of my will. It is being impressed upon me, repeatedly, that I'm not the guy who can do that sort of thing. That's not an easy realization to reach, and it is inducing all kinds of emotional response.

Whatever happens here has been reduced to personal journaling for some time now. It will probably continue to be so. I'm still trying to work out what is breaking in my mind, and how it fits within this Christian-academic life that I still feel called to lead, more forcefully than before (if that's possible). As it's appropriate to make those thoughts publicly available for feedback, I will do so.

Posted by Chuck at 08:29 AM | TrackBack

August 15, 2007

Bob Jones University Press

Crosspost from Growing Up Goddy. One of the features of the website is the ability to link key websites in the Christian culture (and - how cool! - the second link so featured was Kamp Krusty!). This is my first addition to the site's blogroll.

Following up on Jeremy's post on theology (!) in mathematics curricula, I thought it only appropriate to post a Christian education publishing house's website, and Bob Jones University Press absolutely fits the bill for being a flashpoint for those of us who grew up in the church.

Most people who would happen on a site entitled "Growing Up Goddy" would know the history of BJU, immortalized in the Steve Taylor classic "We Don't Need No Colour Code" ("B.J. went and got a school/founded on caucasian rule/bumper sticker on his Ford/says 'Honkies If You Love The Lord'"). While Bob Jones University no longer has a policy against interracial dating, many of its Fundamentalist distinctions remain (most notably for me as a science teacher, the efforts of the school to support creationist ideas). So you might be understandably nervous about their homeschooling press.

Surprisingly (depending on your choice of curricula), it's not awful. I have actually taught out of BJU's high school chemistry text. It does have a great deal of the language about understanding God's nature from the chemical world that set Jeremy off, and it doesn't do what I'd really like for a Christian text in the sciences to do - point out people of faith who made key contributions to chemistry. (Of course, if you did that, you'd have to mention Michael Faraday, and based on my loose understanding of the history, Faraday's Sandemanian sect was no friend of the Baptists, and that might be a whole new can of worms.)

But much of the fundamental chemistry, the book does well, especially the descriptive stuff, such as the periodic law and the nature of chemical bonding and chemical structure. I actually had homeschooled high-school students deeper into VSEPR theory off of that book than I was able to get college students on a competing college textbook, despite the fact that I only met the homeschooled students once a week (as opposed to three times per week for college students).

And here's where it's BJU Press (and most other homeschool publishing houses) FTW: I defy you to find another high school chemistry text for $37. Anywhere. That was the single biggest reason the homeschool cooperative I worked with adopted the book in the first place.

As long as they pound the competition on cost-effectiveness and pay a measure of attention to standard curricula, hyper-conservative presses like Bob Jones are going to continue to dominate the homeschooling world.

(Now, if the only text you'd ever seen was the biology text, I might understand you having a slightly less accomodating view.)

Posted by Chuck at 12:21 AM | TrackBack

July 16, 2007

On Kennedy Jr, golf, and media overkill

(From a mailing list post on July 19, 1999. I'm in the midst of flipping through old mailing list archives and picking up snapshots of how I thought and wrote long-time ago, and for instant response to an overhyped media event as tragic death of a public figure, I think it holds up pretty well. I also think this is about the point I gave up on television news having any relevance in my life ever again.

Warning: I was also in the midst of finishing my dissertation in fits and starts at this time, and I was frustrated already; hence, my language was a bit saltier then. This is actually pretty mild for me at that time, honestly...)

I got royally pissed off Saturday morning when the news came down that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Junior, had disappeared in an apparent plane crash off Martha's Vineyard.

Of course, the crash is a tragedy, and one offers condolences to the involved families and all that. But what pissed me off was how the major television networks responded to the tragedy.

They started news coverage. And they didn't stop until 6 PM that night.

Meanwhile, I'm wanting to watch a golf tournament.

Was that selfish of me? That I should place my own entertainment desires over the responsibility of the networks to interrupt their normal broadcast schedule with breaking news?

Maybe I would have been more understanding if news had actually been breaking. As far as I could tell, though, there were exactly two news points during the day:

  1. The plane is reported missing early Saturday morning;
  2. Debris from the plane is found on the shores of Martha's Vineyard around 2:00 PM Saturday afternoon.

To report these two pieces of news, NBC, ABC, and CBS each gave us TEN HOURS of coverage during the day on Saturday.

The nature of this coverage was comical at times. At the height of my personal frustration, around 10:30 AM on Saturday morning, as the leaders of the Open were preparing to tee off, ABC was showing a Barbara Walters interview with Kennedy from a year previous. They were showing this interview for the THIRD TIME in an HOUR.

It was tantamount to admitting "Look, we don't have anything new to say on this issue, but this is important to us and to hell with your golf tournament."

I'm listening to NPR right now, 6:20 AM on Monday morning after, and Bob Edwards and Cokie Roberts are talking about the Kennedys being "America's Family". Which raises the question: why? What ever did the Kennedys do to become America's family?

Well, one of them was President. And another was Attorney General. Big freaking whoop. George Bush was President and he's got two kids who are governors of their respective states, one of which is the favorite to win the Presidency in 2000. The Bush clan isn't America's family. It's not political power that makes America's family.

It was something more. Kennedy Senior, the young leader of Camelot, was embraced by the baby-boom generation because of his youthfulness and vigor. His death - tragedy on the historic scale - was Camelot laid in bloody ruin. [1] From that point forward, there was some sort of emotional connection between that generation and the Kennedy clan. And I don't know if any of us - the Kennedy family, the baby boomers, all of America for that matter - ever recovered.

And so the kids of the baby boomers - me, for instance - were born into a world where what happened to the Kennedys was considered important. We were taught in school about the wonder of the land in which we lived, the freest of all lands, without the trappings of the monarchy we fought so hard to free ourselves from way back when. And yet there was this family recieving all the benefits accorded to royalty.

The Kennedys, obviously, have always been a mystery to me. Even though my politics lie to the left of my parents', I still don't understand why Ted Kennedy is such a respected senator, even without mentioning that little occurrence called Chappaquiddick. To say nothing of my lack of understanding on why any of the other Kennedys are in public office. And John Kennedy Jr (despite being, by all accounts, a far more decent and respectable human being than the rest of his kin) has never been anything than a second-rate lawyer and a second-rate magazine publisher.

Whereas, to my parents' generation, all these people are links to a man of so much promise as a leader whose time was tragically cut short.

In the end, then, I suppose I understand the fascination. The passing of John Kennedy Jr might not be a historical occurence, but indeed it is a cultural one.

It still remains bitterly disappointing that there has been an almost total lack of criticism and analysis of the knee-jerk love fest that the media on the whole engaged in on Saturday. To date, I've seen one article addressing the issue - from the Daily Telegraph, in London. England, not Ohio.

And even then, that piece was written with some disdain for the younger generation. Mark Steyn wrote about the "perfunctory" delivery of the US network affiliates' local coverage of the Kennedy crash: "rich man from New York social scene dies; up next, sports. There was none of the tasteful accessorising of the national coverage - the sombre music, shots of the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery...Why the difference?" Well, because the local journos are young and have no connection to the Kennedy mystique, as opposed to the old farts running network news.

To Steyn's credit, though, he recognizes this, and also the far more disturbing reason for the network media's obsession with this story, as far as it implicates the journalists' impartiality (which has always been little more than a rumor anyway): "Dan Rather went to the same restaurants as JFK Jnr, the same parties, the same summer resorts."

Still, what does it say about me - or the world around me - that the quote from the press that I identified with most came from the sports talk radio station? Where Ryan Miller, whose lone claim to fame was as a starting role player on one of those Ohio State gridiron teams to nearly (but never quite) win a championship, saw the same Barbara Walters interview with the apparently deceased for the tenth time that morning instead of Craig Parry's stunning charge up the Open leaderboard and burst out, "Who cares about JFK Junior?" I found myself saying "Amen" to the radio, in front of my daughters no less, in spite of myself.

[1] After the fact, I think I recognize that I ripped off the "Camelot in bloody ruin" analogy from Lewis Grizzard. I was not as careful about citation in 1999 as I am now. Which is weird, since after all, I was writing a dissertation at the time...

Posted by Chuck at 09:15 AM | TrackBack

June 27, 2007

Cornerstone - what I'm missing

In my crashed-out stupor this weekend, I forgot to note that an article by my good friend Jeff Elbel appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, on the topic of Cornerstone Festival in Bushnell, Illinois. This is where I'd really like to be this week, both for the sake of the music and for the sake of my dear friends who are live-blogging the fest this week.

It's a great article. And I'm not just saying that because Jeff called me and my elitist-mates asking if we could help out with the "For every rocker there's a Christian counterpart" section at the bottom of the page. (I don't think Jeff would have written that if his editors hadn't asked him to; Christian music counterparts tend to be a dumb idea, especially when you have people like Flyleaf, Relient K and Family Force 5 who are pretty big in their own right; that said, it worked out AMAZINGLY well. I'm still in awe of calling Tess Wiley a mix of Shawn Colvin, Regina Spektor, and Liz Phair - that is just about DEAD ON. If you've never heard Tess before: here, have some.)

I'm also not just saying that because Jeff asked me if I could come up and help him out with mediastuff surrounding his band's show at the fest, as if he liked having me around and stuff.

By the way, Jeff Elbel is an amazing human being. By the way, Jeff's band is called Ping, and you can buy tracks from their latest album The Eleventh Hour Storybook on their MySpace page (including "Bark Along With Cody", featured on the Dr. Demento radio program!), or you can order all of Ping's albums through Marathon Records.

By the way: PLUG PLUG PLUG.

Posted by Chuck at 08:34 AM | TrackBack

June 22, 2007

Atmosphere

(Originally posted on the 2006 Cornerstone Festival blog on July 6, 2006; this repost is me bumming over not being able to go to Cornerstone this year, and thinking I really had a privilege in being involved with the coverage of the fest last year.

Remember, as you read through this whole enterprise: this is a snapshot from the past. Any resemblance to this year's fest, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

The word stuck in my head, as I leave Wednesday and go into Thursday, is atmosphere.

I had a question yesterday as I did a bit of wandering about the grounds. One of the things that is has really sprouted like mushrooms since the last time I was here in 2001 is what I hear referred to as the "generators" - the little tents, and sometimes no tents at all, that are set up just so a smaller band can play and get some attention. (That's theoretically the purpose of the New Band Showcase / Underground Stage / whatever it gets called these days, but there are only so many slots to play, and there are SO MANY bands.) I have no idea of the official status of these stages; I can't imagine the artistic band that's playing Encore 1 can be terribly happy about the thrash metal growlers right next door, and the acoustic people playing NoisyChristians.com certainly aren't (he attests from personal experience). But if there is a truly creative band doing their thing, that's potentially one of the things that makes the fest for me. Hard question.

The problem is, most of those bands playing those "generators" don't grab you at all. One of them sounds just like another, and I want to offer respect to all these guys putting together their own things, but dang it, how many random screamo bands can you listen to without getting a headache? I don't want random screamo, I want something like The Juliana Theory (so sorry they had to call it a day) to smack me upside the head - yeah, Brett could scream when circumstances demanded it, but the melodies and the sound they generated was absolutely unmistakable. When you were listening to Juliana, you could tell it was Juliana.

All of this setup to say: I had something of a revelation while watching Bernard last night.

I'm not convinced that Bernard is that special technically. There were times in their set when they just boiled down their playing to the absolute simplest concepts. A chord on a keyboard, then a single note struck. Repeat several times. My daughter could do that, technically. Other times a guitar solo would borrow almost exactly from something you could hear a band like Dredg do on the radio. Because they only have three instrumentalists, they canned a great deal of the background stuff - and there are times in the audience where you don't know what to do when you're hearing music, but the present band isn't playing.

And, with all that, Bernard's set was one of the best I saw yesterday. Why?

Because Bernard has a sound. They have that distinctive thing that, for lack of a better word, I'm going to call atmosphere. It becomes apparent, while they're constructing their song, that the song is building towards something - repeatedly I heard one of their songs start as a simple thing, add layers, build towards a climax, and then just blow at you with a WALL of sound. They know what they want to be, and they get there.

It didn't work all of the time, but when it did work, it was absolutely phenomenal.

And at that point, I really thought about everything else I was seeing that was working, and started putting it into the context of atmosphere.

Take Jonezetta. What I heard going into the show was that these guys were something of a Franz Ferdinand clone or a Killers clone. And I could see how somebody who wasn't looking for something could walk into the room and say "Yeah, that sounds like 'Take Me Out', that sounds like 'Somebody Told Me'..." (What I thought, when I heard the first guitar riffs, was "bah! This is "10,000 Years" by Tim McAllister and Flock 14 all the WAY! I am so old.) All of that, at the end of the day, matters not - the band wasn't trying to actively sound like anybody in any way other than employing any means necessary to get you off your feet and dancing around. (Was it Jonezetta who had the train of people marching around the tent getting their groove on in so many cool ways? Hey, I think it was!) Pulling in all of those tricks, a riff gathered here and there, the rhythmic pounding and pounding to set a pulsating beat, and even the old guys like me find ourselves doing that thing I can only describe as...erm...um...well, let's just move on. [1]

As much else as I would like to have seen at that Relevant stage, because I am an older gentleman, and because I got into this Christian music scene by listening to bands like Daniel Amos and The Choir and the 77s, I had to go to Gallery stage, set up the chair in the tent, and settle in for the night to hear old beloved songs that I only get to hear live every five years or so. Both the Lost Dogs and the 77s sets were outstanding, of course - they did put on "the most professional shows in Bushell, Illinois" - and others have already commented appropriately on this.

But this got me thinking about atmosphere as well. The Lost Dogs are Americana, thorugh and through. The music they're doing and the style of their play fit into the great traditions of simpler rock and country. (Terry Taylor even joked last night that it was their dream to write a hit country song, and "If You Love Here (You'd Be Home By Now)" was just that dream. Agreed, agreed.) The 77s, in the incarnation they live in these days, are a blues rock band, and progressively turning more and more into a jam band with each passing year. (This causes great consternation because this consternation never crosses the path of songs like "Do It For Love" and "This Is The Way Love Is" often enough, but that debate is best saved for another day.) With the song that each set started with - the Dogs started with "Wild Ride", the Sevens started with "Perfect Blues" - the tone for each set was established, and you knew what was coming. And you knew that nothing else played at this fest was quite like this, and you were so much the better for being there.

(Even if you were missing Underoath at Main Stage. I fully intend to be at Main Stage today. There will be Main Stage blogging. Thanks for your patience.)

A couple more things about the 77s and Michael Roe. I can't give that man enough props for basically playing two separate shows in one night, over the course of three and a half hours, doing lead guitar for both, and having his creative juices flowing thoroughly through both. If you never have seen Mike Roe play, find a way to do so, even if you have to drive a few hundred miles to get there. It is well worth it.

And I know the man has heard the aforementioned consternation, and wishes that he could get people to love the stuff he's doing right now half as much as they love the stuff he did 20 years ago. It has to get tiring to put out work that is what you love and adore and have a whole fleet of fans who do nothing but ask "Are you gonna play 'The Lust, The Flesh, The Eyes, and the Pride of Life'?"

But "The Lust, The Flesh, The Eyes, and the Pride of Life" did get played last night. Twice. Once during the Dogs' set, with Terry Taylor on lead vocals, and then once sung by Michael Roe himself.

And then - wonder of wonders - when it was time for the encore, Roe shifted gears on the atmosphere one more time, went from blues rock to nostalgia time, and broke out "I Can't Get Over It" from what is, in my honest opinion, one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

And then, one more. Despite myself, I found myself pleading to myself. "Come on, man. You know you want to. You know you NEED to. Come on..."

And, as brightly as I ever remember, the guitar riff to "Do It For Love."

YES!

I think I dreamed last night leaving a 77's fan in 1986, walking away from Main Stage, singing repeatedly "do it for lo-o-o-ove, do it for lo-o-o-ove..."

Okay, whatever pretense I had of being a serious music critic is now officially shot.

[1] I simply could not type "getting jiggy with it" on the Cornerstone blog. I apologize for even THINKING it.

Posted by Chuck at 03:31 PM | TrackBack

June 15, 2007

A word about blogs, and anonymity, and memes

As you might notice, this thing doesn't get used quite like a blog should.

I could always do this the easy way, of course. There are HORDES upon HORDES of academic blogs that are published anonymously, which are updated every far more frequently, and where the writer is much, much freer to vent their spleen about whatever sets them off about academic life. (With all appropriate warnings about content if you follow the links, here are any number of fine representative examples - some of these very worthwhile reading in which pseudonymity is essential to making the blog work, some of them not worth a second glance.) Or religious life, for that matter; when he started writing Real Live Preacher, Gordon Atkinson didn't let his identity be known, and I'm sure if I cared to look very hard I could find a couple of pastors behind pseudonyms online in this day.

But very early on in my internet life, I saw the danger in establishing this alter-ego persona and how that could literally change people INTO the alter-ego, and I made the decision that I would stick my name - my real life name - behind everything I published. Yes, I've left a paper trail (or a pixel trail?) throughout the web. But each statement I've published reflects who I really was at the time, and as messy as that can be, it's honest.

And there's a Margaret Becker song stuck in my head, with a lyric along the lines of "God's not afraid of your honesty/He can heal your heart if you speak honestly."

But there's a catch. The catch is: Words can also hurt people. Words do damage your employment prospects. Words do cause people to change how they see you. There is real talent required to describe a situation and put the words out there in a way that will edify and teach, and won't destroy others. And when my name is sitting there up top, I can't escape the consequences of what I write.

Now I'm thinking of Garrison Keillor, telling a story of when the neighbors are coming to visit and everybody in the family is scrambling to "make the house look presentable." "Make the house look presentable", of course, is code for "pretend we live neat and pristine lives so nobody finds out we're really slobs." And when the neighbors arrive, of course the closests are looking like they're going to explode with all the stuff that's been crammed in there at the last minute, and of course the throw blanket looks like it's been draped over the couch hastily, but of course the guests remark about how lovely the house is, and of course the matron of the family brushes her hair aside like it was nothing at all...

"Sometimes you have to look reality in the face and deny it!"

We live in a world that's good at looking reality in the face and denying it. We see something going wrong, and we want to say something to somebody about it, but there are a lot of feelings wrapped up in that thing that's going wrong, and we know that if we call it out in the wrong way that we're going to do damage that's irrepairable. So we say very nice things about our mission, very nice things about the quality people around us, very nice things about our ministries, very nice things about the person who's leaving to go to another job, very nice things about the wonderful place where we live and work. And it's anybody's guess whether we really mean them or not.

I'm not good about that sort of thing. But I'm not good at speaking the truth in love, either. I know that if I leave myself unchecked, I'm going to damage people.

So I say nothing.

You want to know what honestly inspired this post? Brant Hansen. As a gag, when he posts something out of line, or when he just doesn't have time, what does he post? Cute animals, that's what.

And how many people do we know who post cute, entertaining stuff to distract from the real issue at hand? Those are the people who we dismiss as hopelessly shallow, right? They contribute to the "entertain us all the way to hell" faction of society, the people who just want something more fun or more hip or more quirky so they can keep looking reality in the face and denying it.

And I honestly have a hard time doing that.

Unless, of course, I can find a rapping physics geek.

Now, what was I talking about again...?

(Physics Guy permalink.)

Posted by Chuck at 08:20 AM | TrackBack

April 06, 2007

So many people don't know what to say

Originally a Xanga post from May 7, 2006. Reposted because we're coming up on a year since, and we can't allow ourselves to forget. Also reposted because...well, when history repeats itself, it's hard to take.

So many people don't know what to say.

And how can you, really?

Look, Shadow Robinson is a name I automatically associate with a bright, shining face, and a gloriously loud voice (and if you know me, you know how much I appreciate loud voices!), and the type of personality that puts a smile on your face regardless. She was almost the definition of an extrovert. The one thing she was not was lifeless.

But she is lifeless now.

And every sign points to suicide.

And "suicide" is a word that we all automatically associate with a person who is desperate and lonely and fearful. We can cuss and swear and moan about how selfish an act it is. We can lash out in anger, and wonder what in the world was so awful in her life that she couldn't talk to somebody. We wonder what it was we said, what it was we did, what she really thought of us behind that mask of brightness. We can say "if only she had talked to us."

But more than anything, we can't figure out how to put the person who we knew and loved with the act that we can't possibly understand.

---

Now, I'm speculating. And I'm speculating in the desperate, irrational hope that I'm completely wrong and somebody is going to discover that this really wasn't a suicide and that we will have a nice, neat description that this will fit into. I want to be wrong about what I'm proposing here.

But I know all too well how much of a front a person can put on to hide the pain that's going on underneath. Dare I say that I'm experienced in it.

When your mind goes to these dark places that make you contemplate what it would be like to end everything, you find nothing but absolute, overwhelming emotion. It's so unfair to say that "suicide is a selfish act" because it presumes that you're able to think about what somebody else would think or feel about what you're going through. What little experience I have with that territory, I can speak with absolute certainty that other people's thoughts or feelings weren't even there - they had been pushed out with the absolute intensity of the emotions I was having myself.

If you have to deal with real life, to go out and see people and be engaged in the world, what you're doing and saying and acting becomes completely disconnected with what is going on in your head. If you're skilled at pulling on that mask, you can make people believe there's nothing really wrong, even when everything is wrong. You hear so much of the time in these circumstances how important it is to remember that we're not to blame, it really isn't our fault, and that's part of the reason why - it is so difficult to really know what's wrong.

But that also speaks to why it's so important to take care of one another. Because - and this truth also comes from my own experience - the more you know another person, the more you dig into that person's life, the harder it becomes for that person to keep the mask on, and the more you get to see what it is that really makes that person tick.

Here's what's even harder: College is when that taking care of one another is easy. So many of us go to college in part to break the chains of how we were seen as we were growing up, to "find ourselves" and to experience life apart from the chains of childhood. But when we pass outside of those gates, into the "real world", we find that there aren't too many people there who are really interested in us "finding ourselves." They're far more interested in what they can take from us, in what of our talents and skills they can use for their profit or their own ends.

So, especially for those who did receive that precious piece of paper yesterday, when I type "take care of one another," it takes on a special importance for you - because this is where taking care of one another becomes a true challenge.

---

Shadow, you were loved more deeply than you ever knew.

---

If you're reading this, let us make a vow to one another - or let us renew that vow - that we always make sure we're taken care of, each one of us.

---

"If you're a depressed individual...
...if the light has gone out long ago...
...and you can't find the switch...
...for God's sake...
...and your own...
...share the burden...
...tell a friend..."

- Bill Mallonee

Posted by Chuck at 03:33 PM | TrackBack

April 02, 2007

Generic "I haven't done this for a while" entry

And not only have I not done this for a while, I'm not even doing this now. This was originally a LiveJournal post from May 25, 2002. Certain links have been updated or removed to avoid broken-link disease.

Nancy told me a while back I ought to just get on this thing more often and bang out whatever I'm feeling at the moment, and that I ought to stop planning long, drawn-out entries about whatever. I hate doing that. Part of the way that I write is that I have to have a reason for writing, and a thing that I want to communicate.

But right now, my reason for writing is that my head is about to explode with all the various stuff that I don't feel like I can write about in a public forum. So I've got to rant about something or other. And so all kinds of random stuff is going to come out. So, for once, Nancy, this is for you. Appreciate, dang it. :)

My music-of-choice lately is The Juliana Theory. My beloved wife hates 'em - she finds them annoying as all get-out, and they give her a headache. (I think I have to have at least one band-of-the-moment that does that to her.) Every song from Emotion is Dead is simply awesome, both musically and lyrically - hit their lyrics page and just click on random lyrics. On second thought, go to one lyric first - "Don't Push Love Away". "Here's a thought if you're willing to listen. I only tell the truth of the feelings I'm given. Can you hear me now? Listen. Whispers in the rain? Listen. Don't push love away; you know you do. It's all we have..." Grab ye some mp3's while you're there, too.

"It's a chore, holding on to a vision..." I'm banging this out on campus. I came here because I've been utterly preoccupied with any number of things that directly or indirectly have to do with work. (Those who've talked to me over the past couple of weeks know some of those things, for better or for worse; if you're curious, e-mail.) Unfortunately, there's a limit to what I can talk about up here because one doesn't want to betray confidences and topics of private conversations, particularly when those conversations are with people who I work for and stuff. Suffice it to say that I've laid quite low on this campus for the past couple of years, and I fear I'm not going to get that privilege anymore, one way or another.

And what worries me about that is my tendency to wear my heart firmly on my sleeve, and not to hold anything back in terms of my emotions. I fear that the end of me laying low is going to be the end of getting along well with everybody, because taking a stand on thing one or thing two usually ends up pissing people off. I want to be principled and want to be clear about what I'm for and against, but I want everybody to like me too - and if not like me, at least understand and respect me.

And people in hell want ice water, too. "We knew you'd hate this before we wrote it; so listen up, we're telling you before you tell us. We're not misinformed or misdirected..."

The thing that bothers me the most is that being so passionate and preoccupied about one thing or another is that it's not the best way to be a good husband or father. It has to drive Kristin nuts to see my eyes in this faraway place when I've got some process working in the background and it's taking up more and more of the system's resources. (Okay, that was an utterly horrific geek metaphor. I apologize profusely.) In part, I moved away from my postdoc because I was afraid that, to be a good research scientist, I was going to wind up working 80-100 hour weeks. Only I come here to be a professor (and not a research professor chasing after hundreds of thousands of dollars of grant money, but a teaching professor - something, as I said before, I think I'm already pretty decent at) and I wind up throwing myself into about that many hours, if not actually on campus, in my preoccupations. I never thought of myself as a workaholic, and I really don't feel like a workaholic, honestly; but I have to fight myself to remind myself that I do have a wife and children, and that they are really dang awesome and I do enjoy spending time with them. And I do; but it's not natural. Coming in to my campus office and thinking through a chemistry homework set or through some grand five-year plan for my career (or any other number of things) is very natural.

I have no answer here, just the rant.

One other tidbit, for those who haven't heard otherwise: I cut my hair. I mean, all of my hair. I mean, the shaggy bearded guy in the infamous mouse-pic is no more; in his place is a clean-shaven guy with an almost military-looking flattop. There's no real reason for the haircut except that I got utterly tired of dealing with hair everywhere, and if I'm going to do something, I don't do it by halves. The universe is screaming "GIF! GIF!", and I'll probably have to appease at some point; but until then, let your imagination run wild. :D

...and, in a memo from the present, you guys don't know how tempted I was to cut off all my hair for April Fools'.

Posted by Chuck at 09:46 PM | TrackBack

October 09, 2006

Need for prayer

Usually I don't like anonymous academic blogs - too many of them strike me as excuses for people in an absolutely charmed vocation to moan about administrators or students mercilessly. (For examples, browse through Inside Higher Ed's Around The Web section and the associated blogrolls. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader as to which anonymous blogs really hack me off.)

For better or for worse, though, some anonymous blogs are absolutely invaluable. They work when you have an individual who gives you insight that there is no possible way anyone could give without being anonymous. The blog Confessions of a Community College Dean is the pinnacle of those blogs. I understand more about how administrators work, and why, for having read this blog than anything else academic I have read. I learn about hiring presidents. I learn about professorial politics. I learn about cultures of departments. And that's just in the last month.

Today, reading the latest post where Dean Dad is being necessarily non-specific...I feel like he knows what I'm going through right now.

I'm confronting a happy-fog vs. truth-teller issue, and I'm starting to get worried. Without getting too detailed or revealing, I'll just say that it involves the limits of what internal reform can accomplish in the face of negative external demographic changes. The happy foggers say that there is no limit to what internal reform can accomplish, as long as everyone stays focused. More darkly, they intimate, people who mention limits are saboteurs or malingerers, dooming the college with their self-fulfilling negativity. (To be fair, curmudgeons frequently like to style themselves truth-tellers, when in fact they're just bitter and nasty. So the intimations don't come out of nowhere.) The smarter truth-tellers actually support internal reform, but suggest that expecting too much to come of it can only end in tears.

We're at the point at which a significant number of painful internal reforms have already taken place, but their impact has been disappointingly small as against external changes. This is where the conflict gets tricky. Both groups agree that the payoff has been frustratingly small, but they offer different explanations. To the truth-tellers, the payoff was probably the best that could be expected in a hostile external climate. The next job is to face up to the reality of that climate, and start making some really unpleasant decisions. To the happy-foggers, the payoff was small because too many people don't like change, too many nay-sayers are running around, and too many people just refuse to get with the program. There's nothing wrong with the program; it just needs to be amped up.

Of course, I'm still trying to figure out how I became one of the happy-foggers.

So pray for Dean Dad. And pray for me while you're at it.

Posted by Chuck at 06:19 PM | TrackBack

September 24, 2006

Clarity, George Orwell, and torture

There are two things that are bothering me every time I turn on this computer.

One is the load of work that I haven't gotten done and the load of people I need to talk to and haven't.

The second is this George Orwell essay entitled "Politics and the English Language".

In my uneducated state, I first heard of this essay on Friday when I was listening to NPR (as I was driving back from Athens). In one of a series of "You Must Read This" essays on All Things Considered, Lawrence Wright argued the importance of the essay, especially in this time where "politics and the English language once again seem to be at odds". And many of the arguments laid out - that the English language has been neutered by, whether carelessly or cynically, a writer using words without regard to their actual meaning - make a great deal of sense.

In regards to the problems with "modern writing" circa 1946, Orwell offers two cases in point:

The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

I really wonder why I haven't read this before. Sudennly "Orwellian doublespeak" has a whole new meaning to me.

And is this a time where Orwellian doublespeak is finding more and more widespread use? As if Wright's essay didn't resonate with me enough, Andrew Sullivan has spent the past three days absolutely pounding both the Bush administration and the Congress for striking an "agreement" to "clarify" what "alternative interrogation methods" are allowed for terror suspects. Sullivan offers a series of "clarifications" in the Sunday Times today, taking neutral names for these "coercive interrogation techniques" and calling them what they really are, citing other "wimps" and "liberals" on the way...

“There is the method of simply compelling a prisoner to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands only while being interrogated — because that, too, exhausts and breaks a person down.

“It can be set up in another way — so that the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the guards see to it that he doesn’t lean against the wall, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all.”

What wimp wrote that? Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who documented “long time standing” as a method used by the Soviet Union in the gulag.

I'm nervous about living in this time in history. I feel like just hammering out thoughts on a laptop, or standing in front of people and yammering about physics or chemistry or even theology, isn't doing nearly enough.

I suppose using clear language is a start to changing things. I suppose encouraging people who are influenced by me to use clear language is another.

But I still feel like I can be, should be doing more.

Meanwhile, I still have e-mails to answer.

(You should read the whole essay yourself if you have any interest in English communication. Here is a version in HTML, courtesy of Mt. Holyoke; and here's a very nice printable .pdf, courtesy of Stanford, for you to clip and save.)

Posted by Chuck at 05:22 PM | TrackBack

October 04, 2005

Think before you blog.

As I've said a few times before, in a few different places: if you have any interest in higher education at all, and you don't read Inside Higher Ed, you should. Not only do you get news and notes from academia in general, but you get little feature tidbits about real pitfalls of modern academic life.

This is a very important case in point:

Last year, three students had to face the University of Mississippi’s judicial system after campus police officers found out they had created a group on the Facebook, an online network for college students, that consisted of people who wanted to sleep with a particular professor.

So when a student asked Thomas Reardon, dean of students at Ole Miss, for a recommendation, he decided to take a spin through Facebook. Sure enough, he found the student had posted something that "lacked judgment," he said. Reardon still wrote the recommendation, but he "felt obligated to call the student in and tell him about it."

For a generation of students who grew up with blogs, online journals, and peer-to-peer sites, the Internet has become an arena to write, post and link all the things they might not be able to express normally. The difficulty now, for some, is realizing that, more and more, their "peers" include professors, administrators, prospective employers, and sometimes law enforcement personnel. Whereas administrators used to tell students to take the "Hey dude" messages off their answering machines during job hunting seasons, now some students are being told to watch their digital profiles.

My response, of course, is: It's true, it's true.

You can't assume that anybody is not reading your blog. I have to keep in mind, when I'm writing this, that this might be read by anybody ranging from students, superiors, pastors, fellow parishoners, long lost acquaintances...even daughters. And I have to temper my words accordingly.

The thing is, I don't believe the correct response is to pull stuff down, not if your desire is to actually have your words - your ideas - influence people and events. All of my stuff from my previous blogging existence is still online (you might have to scroll down to the page's bottom or see previous 20 entries to see the truly ancient stuff.) You're even welcome to have a look. It's from a previous existence, so there is some raw stuff on there and some ill-advised stuff on there, but it's out there, warts and all, so you can see what I was like then I was "growing up."

But we do grow up. All of us, as loath as we are to admit it sometimes.

So here's the question: Which of the words that we speak are going to come back to bite us at the end of the day? What things do we say online that really don't need to be online in the first place, for all the world to see?

There are a couple of particular topics right now that I could speak to directly. Honestly, though, I don't think I have to, because of that wonderful old adage called "if the shoe fits, wear it." You make your own online decisions, and your conscience is a pretty good guide to tell you if you're making the right ones or the wrong ones. If you know what I'm talking about, all well and good (and feel free to call me out and disagree if needed). If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's not necessarily a bad thing. (And if you think you know what I'm talking about and you aren't sure, don't jump to conclusions - I might well be thinking of something COMPLETELY different. In fact, I probably am.)

(Of course, there are examples of where you can be so cagey with the you-think-you-know-but-you-really-don't-know motif that it gets flat out annoying to read. The entire last paragraph, for instance.)

I think this is what I'm trying to get at. I want my words to be an open book. I want you to get a sense, by reading this, of what I truly believe, of what I truly am, of how I truly live my life. But I don't want to do that at the expense of any other person - I want to respect other individuals, their individual lives, and the things that they would rather not see the light of day in what I write. (This, by the way, is a large part of the reason I don't write about stuff that goes on at home anymore - because my wife saw some of the things I wrote about that in a previous experience, and as much as I tried to focus what I wrote about what went on in my mind, her name turned up and she got uncomfortable in that.)

It seems like a tightrope, doesn't it? Well, it is.

A couple of other notes, and apologies that I've successfully disjointed this post beyond all recognition:

Posted by Chuck at 12:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 02, 2005

Observations, USA-Guatemala (in Birmingham)

(Crosspost from BLOG MatchNight.)

I am going to ramble and quite possibly come to conclusions as I write this out. I honestly can't tell you going in how much this will have to do with the soccer. Be patient with me.

(My students, given that many of them are English majors and I never have been anything vaguely resembling an English major, will repeatedly critique my writing/journaling style. They tell me that I should just write to get my emotions out, that I shouldn't be as intentioned as I write to the detriment of getting the writing done at all. Well, here, people, this one is for you. Appreciate.)

On Wednesday afternoon, after the fullest day of my teaching week, I threw myself into the car and started driving without stopping from my outpost in the Georgia Mountains to Birmingham. It was a route I'd never taken before (I lived in Birmingham five years ago, but I'd always driven into and out of Birmingham from the south, never the north, so I left early and took backroads here, there, and everywhere to get to I-59 so I could start careening south.

If you've never driven this part of the country, you need to drive into Alabama on State Route 9 and drive into Centre, Alabama on a late March afternoon - over the lake and in clear view of the rolling hills all around. Words will never do justice to the feeling I felt in that car, with The Killers working on the radio ("Mr. Brightside" is an epic pop song) with creation spilling out all around me, in fullness. Just some kind of awesome view.

I hit I-59 right about exactly at 5:30 PM Eastern Time (4:30 Central, I guess) which made my heart dance because it meant that I hadn't gotten bogged down in the backroads for three hours, which had been my biggest fear. I could just drop the hammer and plow down the interstate and be in Birmingham for plenty of time. I even had the odd thought pass through my head that I could have been a press guy if I had known I'd have had this much time, try to do the work in the press box as Dr. Chuck Pearson, Citizen Journalist or some rot

And then I thought straight again. I've seen the US National team play before (even went to a game at Legion Field against Tunisia while I still lived in Birmingham) but never a qualifier. There were plenty of things that I wanted to accomplish on this night. Most of them involved singing, cheering, and generally getting my voice behind the Yanks. In short, I was there to be a fan.

Simply being a fan - a singing, supporting fan - at a soccer match is something I haven't done in five years, since that match against Tunisia. The soccer options in Georgia are limited - I'm grateful for being able to get down to see the Silverbacks, but even then I have been there just as much as an interested media-type party as a fan, and there's been a lot of freedom to lose myself in the game that I simply haven't allowed myself. As I drove down the interstate to see this match, I was going - I realized I was going - simply because this was a chance I hadn't been able to take in the longest time, a chance just to enjoy it.

And in meeting up with a couple of guys - in the persons of ERic Vormelker and Howard Hamilton - who I have traded plenty of e-mails with in the past, and enjoyed company with on the old USENET newsgroups - as well as seeing net.denizens and meeting new faces standing with Sam's Army - I reminded myself how personal this errand was. Meeting ERic and Howard in real life especially was a thrill - each, in their own ways, served as examples of how to do this writing about soccer thing, and I've really enjoyed doing it. But it's nice also to get beyond just the writing about soccer, or even just the soccer, and to take a few moments to share life together - and, when the moment is right, bring the focus back to the soccer.

(Plug-o-matic: Howard has been keeping a blog on the progress of the hexagonal, and I'm amazed and sorry I haven't found it and pointed it out before now. It's about a million times better than anything I've posted about anything.)

There's not too much about the game itself I could write that hasn't been said plenty of other places (and I'm more than willing to defer to El Harfang Supremo on this front, who apparently posts his stuff on The Mother Ship now...Lee, you so rock the free world...), so let me comment on atmosphere:


I crashed out in Birmingham on Wednesday night, as massive rain was opening up. I said goodbyes far too early on Thursday morning, and drove through that massive storm.


Science seminar started at 11:00 AM back at school, just a bit over 20 hours after I left.


I was back just in time.


I have memories to last a lifetime.

Posted by Chuck at 01:04 AM | Comments (2)

March 14, 2005

Oh wow, do I relate.

This Salon piece is worth viewing the SitePass ad for (even better that most of the SitePass ads these days on Salon are the ads for the new Cadillac - "This car is faster than this ad" is very effective when the ad is that quick, but I digress), and I can't say that I don't relate totally.

As debates rage about whether bloggers are journalists, whether they need shield laws to protect sources, whether they brought down Dan Rather and are going to take over the media world, on the other side of the blogosphere the diarists and memoirists and mothers are coping with a different set of ethical dilemmas: How much of themselves should they expose online, and how easily should they indulge their urge to confess? In my case, blogging about suicide might have crossed the line.

My blogging has been cathartic; my self-exposure served some kind of purpose, but there is no doubt that it exacted a cost. One of the problems was that there are a whole lot of people huddled under my particular dirty raincoat. There is my husband, a gracious and good-tempered man, and one who has himself wrestled with the self-exposure business. More important, because they are more defenseless, there are my children, two boys and two girls, ranging in age from not quite 2 to 10 years old. I have always used my children as material in my fiction, and even occasionally in essays, but never with the immediacy demanded of a blog. My daughter shouted at her father, "You like being mean to us; you're nothing but a hatred machine." Half an hour later, it was in print online. The children are not allowed to read my blog -- they are still young enough that I can monitor their computer use with relative ease. Frankly, at this stage they are far more interested in Gaia online and Muffin Films Web sites, but there will surely come a day when they will Google themselves, find my blog and both be furious with me for having stolen their lives and humiliated at the extent to which I have laid open my own. I told the New York Times reporter that blogging was "payback for driving back and forth to gymnastics all week long," but I don't really believe that. As much as I despise carpool, I wasn't trying to exact some kind of complicated revenge for having been forced to spend too many hours in a minivan.

Of course, I'm a dad, not a mom, but there are elements here of my own dilemma that are similar. There is the overwhelming desire (even and especially as I lapse into the moments of egomaniacally thinking that what I write here might somehow Change The World For The Better) to lay open every corner of my life. Thankfully, that will almost certainly never involve the temptation towards suicide (my worldview is built around the inherent value of life for its own sake, and besides I'm absolutely scared to death of death itself) but how many other things could I write about and trigger an outpouring of response with that would be nothing more sophisticated than yanking the emotional chains? To something like that would be irresponsible.

I'm hitting a point in life where I feel like I need to write, and deal with the tensions in my life directly and specifically - but at the same time, I don't want to cross these lines and make my loved ones (or, for that matter, my students or my employers) feel like I'm cheaply getting something to write about off of their backs. How do I resolve this?

Posted by Chuck at 02:59 PM | Comments (4)