September 29, 2005

Cylons Are The New Tribbles

A few months ago, as some of you are aware, the Chronicle of Higher Education posted an essay by one “Ivan Tribble” warning academic job-seekers against the perils of blogging. The essay triggered considerable indignation from Blogtown, lots of discussion about the rewards and pitfalls of this new medium, a pseudo-retraction from the pseudonymous Tribble, and more Star Trek riffs and Tribble / trouble / tribulation puns than one would think the infrastructure of the internet capable of sustaining. [For my mom: What's a Tribble?] My man Ralph Luker, who’s got more links than the PGA, provided a round-up of comments on Tribble from the history district of Blogtown. And as Exhibit A in the case for blogging on the job hunt, he offered yours truly! (Plus the brilliant Caleb McDaniel.) Thanks for the shout-out, Ralph. I actually have it both ways: I have a blog, but to please the Tribbles of the world, I never post on it.

I wasn’t going to say more about the Tribble troubles myself because a) all the other folks Ralph linked to have already done a fine job defending academic blogging, and b) every time you blog about blogging, a puppy dies. But I did take the time to answer Rebecca Goetz’ survey on blogging and the job hunt, and my answer got long enough that I thought I’d excerpt a bit of it here. [...]

I started out by answering Rebecca’s questions: Did I include my blog’s URL on my CV and job hunt materials? (Yes, usually.) Did blogging come up in any interviews? (No, or at least very rarely.) Do I think blogging helped or hurt my job search? (Not strongly in either way.) Then I said a few things about the culture of fear that surrounds the job hunt:

The job market is scary and stressful and competitive, of that there is no doubt. But I also think there’s a culture of fear in grad school that goes far beyond what is necessary or healthy. At least there is at our particular grad school, and I doubt that Harvard is alone. That fear is often fed by well-meaning career advice workshops and Chronicle of Higher Ed. columns. … For some people recounting stories of job hunt disasters and pitfalls may be cathartic, but I can’t stand it. I never needed outside help coming up with things to worry about.

We cling to the illusion that we can control the job hunt process, but for the most part we can’t. All of us on the market will apply for dozens of jobs that we are more than qualified for—but so will all of our peers. And in all but a very few cases, our applications will be rejected for some largely arbitrary reason over which we have very little control. That reason could be some random comment we made in our weblog, or even the very fact that we blog. But it could just as easily be somebody’s prejudice about where we went to college, or something our advisor said to somebody once at a conference twelve years ago, or the mood somebody on the search committee happens to be in at the moment they pick our cover letter off of the stack. (I like Chris Williams’ comment over at Early Modern Notes: “It’s not as if conferences (with their face-to-face communication, bars, hotel rooms, etc) don’t already allow academics to make fools of themselves in academic and personal ways.”) You can agonize about foreseeing every single thing that might put a search committee off, or you can let go of the illusion of total control.

Finally, I came around to my one reservation about the defense of academic blogging. I am an academic who blogs (occasionally), but I’m not 100% sure I want my blog to be “academic.”

What does disturb me about the Tribble article … is the tenacity of the idea, sometimes spoken, often just internalized, that as an academic you are not entitled to have a life outside of work. You lose your right to be frivolous. You are not supposed to have hobbies, to let your hair down with your friends, to geek out about comic books or the ouevre of Joss Whedon, to get into flame wars, whatever. That tendency has to be fought.

I applaud efforts to investigate and explain how blogging can be useful to our research, teaching, and professional life, but I would hate for blogging to have to be useful. … The internet is changing scholarly publishing, I hope. It offers the possibility of rethinking and repairing a clunky model of distribution that really ought to work better. But if getting “credit” for my blogging in promotional and tenure reviews meant that I couldn’t also post stupid silliness on a LiveJournal, I don’t know if I would want that credit.

One thing I love about the internet as it relates to history and academia in general is that it is a place where professional academics and non-academics actually talk to one other. The rules are loosened a bit. There’s room to shoot from the hip, there’s room to be silly and room to be wrong. There’s a third space being born, or reborn, on the internet that is neither “home” nor “work.” I love this space. You can’t roam around in your underwear there, metaphorically speaking, but you don’t always have to wear a tie.

I want my blog to be a place where I can play with history. I can prattle on about Ben Franklin versus robots; I can construct alternate histories in which Don Cherry is the ruler of a fascist super-Canada; I can make obscure conceptual jokes about Hal Holbrook that nobody but me finds amusing. I would never do those things in a classroom or in a journal article, but they are absolutely part of my relationship with history. They’re how I have fun with it, and they’re part of what brought me into the field.

I think it’s unfair and unfortunate that such a lively and creative new hobby might interfere with the job hunt. But I hope the solution is not to make blogging more like a job. I’d like to think the solution is to always protect our right, when work is done, to play.

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September 14, 2005

Let Them Eat Wireless

In which Yr. Humble Correspondent tries his hand at that most dee-verting genre of blog posts, impotent griping about the slings and arrows of outrageous customer service.

Calamity Jon Morris, the Gen-X Winsor McCay, wrote in his weblog the other day: “While thousands upon thousands have lost everything they ever owned, their homes, their families or their lives, I remain very angry at Netflix for dragging its feet on my latest returns. I may just be a monster.” I know how you feel, Jon. I myself feel a bit of a monster for posting the following. It does me little credit to moan about having no telephone while so many have just lost their homes. On the other hand, there were people suffering in the world long before Hurricane Katrina. What are we the bloggers of the world supposed to do, keep our whinging to ourselves until all of the world’s real problems are solved? Unlikely.

So, L & I moved into our new home two months ago. We love it. A downstairs and an upstairs, shiny appliances, funky details, a yard, a garage, a hidden treasure (allegedly), and the cutest little tree-lined street you’ve ever seen. Anyone who hadn’t been paying Boston rents for the last decade would judge it a modest little starter home, but I feel like an English colonist surveying the New World: “We will NEVER use up all this space! Never in a million years!” But there’s always a but, isn’t there? Here’s ours...

It’s taken us two months to get telephone service. I ordered service from Bell Canada on July 5th, the day before we moved in. We did not achieve dial tone until September 7th. Two months! Did somebody at Bell Canada read my dissertation? Am I on a blacklist somewhere? Is this revenge for my unflattering portrait of the company’s early days? No telephone also meant no internet, and the two combined threw a big wrench into the million little things we had to do this summer after the move. The telephone hassle has also made it very difficult to convince my American beloved that I have not whisked her off beyond the northern edges of Civilization, as she may occasionally have feared.

Competition has only recently returned to local telephone service in Ontario, and the long delay in getting our land-line working gave me a chance to enjoy its fruits first hand. My work on the history of telephony makes some effort to rehabilitate the first era of telephone competition. Though the telephone was introduced in 1876, the Bell System as a unified corporate entity only really took shape after about 1907. In the 1890s and 1900s, the various local and regional Bell companies, only loosely affiliated, faced stiff competition from thousands of tiny independent systems, particularly in the American Midwest. The traditional Bell-centric history of these years regards the era of telephone competition as an aberration if not an abomination, a very wrong turn on the road to regulated monopoly. I’m quite aware that the telephone industry of the early 20th century was often a chaotic mess. But I’ve also tried to present it as an era of laudable experimentation and rapid growth. Shows what I know.

I ordered service from both Bell Canada and its new competitor, Rogers Cable, thinking they would race for my business. Whoever managed to hook me up first would be rewarded with my telephone, internet, and cable TV business thereafter. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? Free market competition, red in tooth and claw. But “race” implies speed. And “competition” demands that each side at least pretends to make an effort. Neither speed nor effort were much on display this summer, as July wore into August, August into September, and our telephone remained an ornate paperweight.

What was on display was an object lesson in corporate culture. Ma Bell, the incumbent, responded to all our pleas for service with the imperious hauteur of the nineteenth-century monopoly she once was. “Your telephone will be connected in mid-September, and not before,” a Bell rep told me flatly in early July. “We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.” I like that. She didn’t presume to guess whether or not going without a phone for nine weeks might cause us any inconvenience, but if it did, she was sorry.

The new economy challenger took a different tact. Every time we called Rogers Cable, they expressed dumbfounded outrage that our telephone wasn’t up and running yesterday. “What? You’ve gone three days without a phone? What century is this, anyway?” And they swore up and down that a technician would be there first thing tomorrow. Of course we’d have to stay home to meet them. So we’d wait. And nobody would come. And after we’d spent the day waiting, we’d call Rogers again (on a cell phone, of course), listen on hold to forty minutes of “Für Elise,” and finally be told “What?!? The technician didn’t come? Inconceivable! They’ll be there tomorrow, for sure!” Then they’d ask if we’d like to sign up for high-speed internet or a digital PVR.

(Speaking of PVRs: I suspect we’ll have words at some future date about what passes for TiVo in Canada. But I really will wait until the flood waters recede before that post. My monstrosity does have its limits.)

In our next thrilling installment: Yr. Humble Etc. tarts up his moaning with some historical context. PLUS! The looming snickersnee between telco and cableco to rule the broadband age.

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September 12, 2005

Professor Booty

I teach my first class as a professor today! In about two hours.

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September 06, 2005

The Good Flood

What has happened down here, is the wind have changed…

One of those odd synchronicities that seem to accompany natural disasters like spooked horses and whining dogs: the week before Katrina, I happened to be reading up on the Louisiana flood of 1927, in James Cobb’s The Most Southern Place on Earth and John Barry’s Rising Tide. The American Studies course I’ll be teaching this year is built around a series of “places in time.” Each week or two, we’ll examine an event or site or moment where “America” and what it meant was constructed, contested, or otherwise up for grabs: the Boston Tea Party, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and so on. I wanted to get a little farther off the path beaten by textbooks and survey courses, and I’d thought about including the 1927 flood. But with a historian’s unerring sense of topicality, I decided not to, three days before Katrina hit.

The scope of the 1927 disaster was similar, if not quite equal, to the size of today’s. The death toll then was over a thousand, and one million people—one percent of the U.S. population at the time—were driven from their homes. John Barry, who wrote the book on the Louisiana flood, had a piece in this Sunday’s New York Times comparing the watery disasters of 1927 and 2005. It’s good reading, and I recommend checking it out before the link expires. But there’s a funny shift in emphasis—at least, I believe there is—between Barry’s book on the flood, published in 1997, and his op-ed piece, published Sunday. The NYT piece seems to cast 1927 as the Good Flood, 2005 as the Bad. This might just be the effect of trimming a dense 500-page history into an 1500-word op-ed. Or it might be because Barry’s home is submerged today in fifteen feet of oily water. Whatever the reason, I’m struck by the soft-focus portrait of 1927 in the latter piece. “People responded by bonding together,” Barry writes. “Goodness emerged. The fault lines of race and class melted away with the levees, and the commonality of the burden that victims shared created a sense of common humanity.” In contrast, naturally, to the ugly inequalities and unhappy chaos on display in New Orleans this week and last.

Was 1927 the Good Flood? I don’t have Barry’s book in front of me any more (another library user recalled it the day after Katrina, and they weren’t the only one looking for the book—Rising Tide jumped this week to #11 on Amazon’s best seller list, and the NYT reports it’s just gone back into print), but the picture of 1927 that he drew there was considerably less heartwarming. The majority of people displaced by the flood were black sharecroppers. The whites who owned flooded lands desperately feared that black labor would simply abandon the region after the waters receded. White planters had refused outside assistance after earlier floods for fear it would undermine their control of the region. In 1927, the planters succeeded in taking over relief efforts to see that they did not. National guardsmen were used to keep sharecroppers imprisoned in the refugee camps until they could return to working the land, and local officials charged homeless blacks—on credit, ever deepening their debts—for food and medical supplies the Red Cross had intended to be free.

Barry describes how 1927 became a turning point in attitudes towards federal activism and relief—not because the U.S. government stepped in to help the victims of the flood, but because it didn’t, and the American public was outraged. Things changed after 1927. The Flood Control Act of 1928 was the most expensive single bill Congress had ever passed, and Barry sees it as a crucial first step towards the ambitious relief activities of the New Deal. But in the wake of the flood and right through the New Deal years, the prime beneficiaries of the new federal paternalism remained the region’s white planters.

The 1927 flood inspired dozens of songs, among them Memphis Millie’s “When the Levee Breaks,” covered by Zeppelin forty-five years later, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Rising High Water Blues,” and Bessie Smith’s “Muddy Water,” which I believe gave Muddy Waters his name. But I agree with Greil Marcus that Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927” is one of the most affecting. It’s hard to resist that marvelous opening line—“what has happened down here, is the wind have changed”—simple, mysterious, biblical, and American all at once. I see that a lot of bloggers are using Newman’s lyrics in posts about Katrina, but most leave off the final verse:

President Coolidge come down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
President say, “Little fat man, isn’t it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker’s land?”

I imagine the bloggers quoting Newman worry his reference to “crackers” is insensitive. If you ask me, Louisiana has few chroniclers more sensitive and thoughtful than Randy Newman. But he never does come right out and tell you when he’s serious and when he’s kidding. And even if you do include that last verse, it still seems like the lines to really explain “Louisiana 1927” are missing. Is the song calling the flood an act of God or man? Is somebody exacting some kind of justice or revenge? Who is trying to wash who away?

Newman pictures Calvin Coolidge surveying the damage. But the man most associated with relief efforts at the time was Coolidge’s secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover. (Maybe he’s the little fat man?) Hoover had made his name engineering famine relief in Europe after the First World War. And with no real precedents for federal disaster relief, the flood fell under the Commerce Department’s purview by virtue of its authority over interstate commerce on the Mississippi. Hoover’s efforts after the flood earned him immense positive publicity and helped put him in the White House in 1928. But his apparent abandonment of the Louisiana refugees in the months to come, it’s been argued, played a big part in splitting black voters from the party of Lincoln for good.

This is the second time you’ve read me struggling lamely here to pull lessons out of the tempest. There’s so much to say, so much that can’t be said, and so much that will be better said by people closer to the hurricane and more eloquent than I. So I’ll just sneak out the back of this post with another Randy Newman song, one that almost never gets played or quoted, “New Orleans Wins The War.” It’s a happier song than “Louisiana 1927,” but just as mysterious and weird, about battles won and lost and wars forgotten or not yet fought, and New Orleans as a place both American and forever apart:

In 1948 my Daddy came to the city
Told the people that they’d won the war
Maybe they’d heard it, maybe not
Probably they’d heard it and just forgot
‘Cause they built him a platform in Jackson Square
And the people came to hear him from everywhere
They started to party and they partied some more
‘Cause New Orleans had won the war

(Crossposted at Cliopatria.)

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Ahoy-Hoy

Wow. That is the longest I have ever gone without internet access. Except, I suppose, from birth until 1993. I still don’t have internet at home—or a @%#$! telephone—but finally my office is equipped. You might think I could have logged in over the summer at the library or something, but come now: a grown man doesn't blog standing up.

So. What did I miss in the last three months?

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