garlic mustard massacre

Pulling garlic mustard , I realized that if there are garlic mustard historians or novelists or prophets, they’d describe me as a mass murderer or an angry god. I’m sure I thought of this because I’m reading Paulette Jiles’s The Color of Lightning . The opening chapters describe a violent attack in 1864 by Comanche and Kiowa warriors on the women and children in a small mixed-race settlement in Texas. The events are told from the point of view of the White and Black women who are repeatedly beaten, raped and then enslaved by the tribes. The tale is not one-sided. Other scenes in the book have people talking about violent attacks and treaty-breaking by the White settlers, providing the context for the raids, and as the story unfolds, there are positive images of the family lives of the native people. But because the violence against native people happens off camera, as it were, while the violence by the native people is vividly described from the point of view of the victims, there is an asymmetry in the descriptions in the book, at least so far.* The Black and White women are individual people who suffer, while the Comanches and Kiowas are unknown enemies, or abstractions.

From the book summary and the review I read, it sounds like more conflict and violence is to come, as the Black husband will try to rescue his wife and a pacifist Quaker reformer is coming out to try to make peace with the tribes. The book is well grounded in the reality of the history, so a happy ending all around seems unlikely. This conflict is like so many. There are the depersonalized political historical forces, in this case European invaders attacking and displacing native people and native people fighting back. And there is violence and pain at a personal level on all sides. The reality of the personal suffering, or the reality of the joy of overcoming adversity and establishing a new settlement, are etched into consciousness and passed down to generations, creating fundamentally antagonistic ways of understanding the past.

So, having read the flyers from the Department of Natural Resources,  I view the garlic mustard as the invader, as a powerful invasive species that must be beaten back or it will take over and destroy all the other “good” plants. I’m playing God, deciding which plants will live and which plants will die in my yard, just as humans for millennia have decided which plants to nurture and which to weed out. From the point of view of the garlic mustard, this is just a massacre. The innocent plants were not doing anything to hurt me. I seek out and destroy all the plants I can find, even the little baby ones, and from the point of view of the garlic mustard, this is as bad as the White settlers in the Americas and Australia and South Africa killing the native people for sport. I think about this. All living organisms affect the lives of other organisms, helping some to live and damaging others. As animals, we must eat other living organisms to survive. As humans, we know that what is good for some of us may hurt others. As a White American, I know that the United States was founded on the destruction and enslavement of other people, and that I would not be here or have this house and this yard without the destruction of someone else’s way of life. But even members of groups who have been oppressed have to face the same reality: the things that benefit them often hurt other people. Some people react to this reality with a fearful or hostile “kill or be killed” mentality. I don’t. I still seek to live in peace and justice with all of life and all of humanity. But I know it is complicated. I  live with those contradictions as I seek to eradicate the garlic mustard.

* The review suggests that there will be other points of view to come.

Turf

These are excerpts from two longer statements written by Ida Thomas, an older Black woman who only completed the ninth grade and considers herself uneducated. She and I are members of the same racial disparities task force. She has a son who has been in prison. She wrote up her ideas because she wanted me to speak for her at a meeting she could not attend. Most of her writing focused on concrete recommendations relevant to the task force agenda. But I was blown away by some of what she said and wanted to share it. She specifically asked me to edit what she wrote so it would sound good, and I have complied by doing minimal editing for spelling and grammar. All the ideas and word choices are hers. I am posting this to my blog with her permission after reading it to her and receiving her approval. She wants her name used.

What we Blacks fail to realize is that we have invaded their town. We are on their turf now. It’s do like we say or go to prison, for sometimes petty stuff. And we did wrong by coming here, trying to change their ways. They only know how to protect their own color. They are not used to us. Especially the way we think or act. Every race has its own culture. I don’t think this will ever change here if you ask me, Ida. They really want us to go away like the wind, rain, winter and summer.  It’s a nice place to live if you can stay out of their system. But can you be sure to do that here? No. It’s like in the slave days here. Yes Madam, yes sir, you are right. Every Black person here is living on borrowed time for freedom. You have to walk a straight and narrow line. Please let’s change this.

. . .

Many White people do not know how to deal with Blacks here in Wisconsin — they look at us like we are from another planet. Their culture is much different than ours. We think differently, look at life differently. We need people in our culture that will defend us, that understand our way of thinking.  Where are those people for us to communicate with?  .  .  . * Your best bet is to stay out of trouble if you can here, or you will end up with your back up side the wall like so many have done before. It is said, come down here on vacation, go back on paper.**  But that’s not true about going back on paper, because sometimes they want you to stay down here and finish your paper here. That’s unfair because if you sneeze the wrong way you will be going to prison to finish up some of your time. You are never free here.  .  .  .  It’s is a beautiful place to live but there is a price that you have to pay to live here. Myself, I love it here.  But Madison keeps you walking a straight line on a narrow path. Let’s live and let live.

* The omitted material talks at length about the lack of Black judges, district attorneys, public defenders, and police.

** To be “on paper” is to be on probation or parole, i.e. living in the community but under correctional supervision.

social critic?

I’m on an extended vacation in Italy with my spouse, so not posting much. But this part of my travel journal seems pertinent to sociology. In Venice, we visited the Church of the Frari. There is a lot of important and wonderful renaissance art here (the Titian and Bellini works were gorgeous), and we listened to an informative audio tape that described the art. But what blew me away the most was a piece that was not described in the audio and had no English (or Italian for that matter) interpretative material. Lots of Latin on the signs. Intricately carved statues of Black slaves in tattered clothes holding bags of flour? rice? on their shoulders and thereby supporting the edifice above — a rich Doge surrounded by angels and dragons. The slaves are very human and wear unhappy expressions. There are also two black skeletons holding scrolls that tell about his life. I thought that the artists were perhaps making a statement about the source of power and wealth. I spent a lot of time looking at it. To me, the “message” of the piece was unmistakable: this wealthy doge lived by exploiting the labor of suffering Black people. It seems to me that the artist had to intend some critique. But as the monument was meant to honor someone, maybe not. I bought a postcard so I could look this up later. It is the monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro, designed by Baldassarre Longhena; the giant statues  are by Melchior Barthel from Dresden.. You can see a lot of good-quality slides showing the details of this monument beginning here.

Here is some straightforward text description from one tour site.

Here is another reaction: “Beyond the Titian, and over the small door of the S. Aisle, stands the gigantic, vulgar, and ugly monument of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, (d. 1659,) by Longhena and another. This is the worst Baroque work in this church, almost equaling in pretentious vulgarity the tomb of the Valiers in San Zanipolo. The boastful character of the monument is shown, not only in its vast size, but in its theatrically gesticulating Virtues, its fly-away Faith, Hope, and Charity, its oddly startled figure of the Doge, jumping forward under the canopy of his own sarcophagus, (which is supported by very fearsome nondescript animals,) and, above all, in the four figures of captive negroes (black marble faces with white eyes) which sustain the whole. The skeletons below are in the vilest taste of their period. The bombastic Latin inscriptions, exactly paralleling the style of the tomb, state that the Doge “lived 70 years,” ” unlived,” (not died,) “in the year 1659,” and “lived again in this monument in the year 1669.” A monstrous and hideous nightmare.” Source:  http://www.oldandsold.com/articles29/venice-30.shtml >

From Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad: “The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, is a curiosity in the way of mortuary adornment. It is eighty feet high and is fronted like some fantastic pagan temple. Against it stand four colossal Nubians, as black as night, dressed in white marble garments. The black legs are bare, and through rents in sleeves and breeches, the skin, of shiny black marble, shows. The artist was as ingenious as his funeral designs were absurd. There are two bronze skeletons bearing scrolls, and two great dragons uphold the sarcophagus. On high, amid all this grotesqueness, sits the departed doge.” Source: http://twain.thefreelibrary.com/The-Innocents-Abroad/23-1#Pesaro

My spouse and I keep debating whether the artist meant to glorify the doge or meant some social critique. The doge was dead when the monument was built so its object did not have to be consulted. It obviously had to be at least readable as honor by his heirs. But was a critical alternate reading meant by the artist, or am I just imposing it later with my own sensibilities? If it almost universally strikes viewers as ugly and vile, can this reaction not have been meant by the artist? The Internet tells me that very little is written about this monument in English. I wonder if anybody knows.

Sharing the pain

There’s a lot of dissensus and hard feelings in the interracial task force I’m on right now. Some of it erupted publically the other day at a public hearing (with TV cameras running, no less). Everybody is committed to addressing the issues and cares about them, but this does not take away the divisions among us: divisions by race, class, and  institutional position. We are suspicious of other people’s motives or commitment; irritated what we consider to be their abrasive or insensitive or over-sensitive or authoritarian or disorganized personal style; and tired and frustrated from trying to work on a huge task with too little time while having to put up with our interpersonal differences. We blow things out of proportion and we sit back in sullen silence. We get mad at the chairs, who themselves are exhausted and wounded from working hard to keep everything moving after having an organizational mess dropped on them and then putting up with all the criticism. Although other groups I’ve worked with are racially diverse, this one is more diverse than most of the others by class and background as well as race. Some of us have worked together on boards and committees many times over the years; others have no prior working relations. Anger and distrust abound, despite genuinely shared goals. We talk through a difference, end on a conciliatory and friendly note, and then blow apart again the next time.

Our small work groups were intentionally formed to mix people with different demographic and institutional statuses and tasked with coming up with recommendations on a tight deadline. Many are struggling. My work group exploded again today in anger and recrimination. The last time, I was the angry one; I reached out later to privately talk to and make peace with the person I got mad at. Today I was the calm one while two high level professionals got very angry with each other. At root is a genuine and important conflict about policy priorities and interests and ways of doing things that becomes  personal as people get tired and frustrated about the impasse and try to talk each other into submission. I think I managed to play a constructive role this time and we ended with some forward movement, although there is still a lot of tension. I also talked afterward with one of the disputants, who is taking double heat in our group and as a co-chair. I made a point of telling her how much I appreciate all her work, even though I don’t always agree with her. I also told her that when I get really frustrated and irritated in community meetings – which is often  – I remind myself that the deep differences of interest and experience and the inequalities and injustices that fuel the conflicts are real. Not to mention the cultural style differences that can drive each other crazy. We bring these differences with us when we come to the table. We are experiencing the very pain of the world we are trying to help heal. It’s our share of the pain. She said it helped to think about it that way.

facts

Originally posted at Scatterplot. I just stumbled across the matter of Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article last year telling the story of vengeance fights in Papua New Guinea based on stories told to him by his driver.  As Diamond told the story, the driver Daniel Wemp and other real people whom he named by name and attributed to a specific tribal group — bragged about murdering and raping people in an ongoing vengeance war. The short version of what appears to be true (the case is still in process) is that Daniel Wemp told Diamond the stories when they were driving around in 1999-2002, but  Diamond did not take notes on them at the time but rather reconstructed them from memory and a follow up interview in 2006, and got the facts all wrong about who did what to whom and when and why and what tribes were involved, as described in meticulous detail byRhonda Roland Shearer at stinkyjournalism.org. The original article was pulled from electronic archives last year. The driver and purported murderer, Daniel Wemp, and one of his purported victims, Henep Isum (who was not, in fact, paralyzed by Wemp or anyone else), filed suit April 20 in New York for libel and defamation of character, asking for $10 million in damages.

Taking Offense

(I’m mostly busy writing on my overdue project. I wrote this paragraph as part of it, and am fond enough of it that I’ve decided to share it here.)

When confronted with evidence of racial disparities in treatment, one reaction is to blame the measurement. It is not uncommon for agencies or officials to refuse to collect data on race or ethnicity, or to refuse to analyze the data they do have, claiming that the data cannot possibly be meaningful, because race is not real and the classifications are arbitrary. Or they say that they “don’t see race” and treat everyone equally, and argue that collecting or reporting data by race is, itself, racist. Or – and I’ve heard this said quite a few times by criminal justice officials – “the data would be used in the wrong way.” If you ask what that means, it appears the answer is that the data might be used to suggest that there has been racial discrimination by the agency. (I responded to one police chief who said this by saying, “Well, the data could show that you don’t discriminate.” He said, “I never thought of it that way.”) It is sort of like blaming the thermometer for a fever. Or – and this is probably closer to the problem – like blaming the auditor for finding that money is missing from the cash box. The implication is that somebody is a thief. Even asking for the books to be audited can be taken as an insult.

Certain kinds of racial discrimination are illegal and overt racial discrimination on the part of public officials is generally censured. Beyond that, discriminatory behavior is generally seen as stemming from the personal flaw of racial prejudice. Many people believe that prejudice is a moral failing and that unprejudiced people are incapable of discriminating. Evidence of possible racial discrimination is thus seen as evidence of moral turpitude. Just as people are offended at being called thieves, people take offense at any implication that they may have discriminated on the basis of race. I have heard and read quite a few White people assert that calling someone racist is “just as bad as the n-word.” Many people face these issues without the help of even weak understandings of the social science ideas of unconscious discrimination, systematic or institutional racism or discrimination, indirect consequences of actions taken for other reasons, or pernicious interactions and feedbacks among different social forces. They focus solely on whether there is evidence that an actor intended to behave in a racially discriminatory fashion; if there is any ambiguity about intentions then, ipso facto, there must have been no discrimination.

Smart and stupid

Smart: Taking a four-mile test walk with backpack wearing my proposed travel clothes and new travel shoes and socks.

Stupid: Taking a four-mile test walk with backpack wearing my proposed travel clothes and new travel shoes and socks.*

I’ve never had blood-soaked shoes before. At least I have several weeks for my feet to recover before the trip. Which will be made in my old shoes.

*I wasn’t as stupid as it may sound, as I had taken several one- and two-mile walks in the shoes, and I thought those preliminary tests had revealed no problems. The socks might have contributed. Still, I’m both really thankful that I had this experience now, before the trip, and at the same time really mad at myself for doing so much damage to my feet.

Public Hearing

My recent posts may make it appear that all I’m doing is writing Stata code. That would be only half true. Apart from some personal issues I can’t write about (because they involve other people) and trying to remember how to write sociology, I’ve been at a LOT of meetings for the disparities task force. One of the public hearings was last week. Away from the computer and out into the heartbreak of real life. As I expected, we heard stories of unfair police treatment, including mass ticketing of Latinos for playing music in the park, A Latino guy who says he has been here 20 years but things have gotten much worse in the past two years, and one guy who was basically claiming he had been framed by police on a drug charge (his story was quite specific about what he said happened) whose testimony led a lawyer on the panel to caution him that he should be careful about what he said about a case that had not been adjudicated yet. I had not expected to hear about ICE [immigration] raids here: I guess I have not been paying attention.   People saying they are police knock on the door and ask to come in; once in they announce they are ICE and haul people off to the ICE holding center 90 miles away to be held for deportation hearings. Tearful women speak in English and Spanish (there is an interpreter): we are here, we have been here twenty years, we are working, we are law abiding, we pay taxes, what about our children who were born here and went to school here, what will happen to them if we are deported, if their fathers are deported? There is also concern that any Latino picked up for any law violation (no matter how small) is taken downtown and run through ICE. Many minor offenses turn into deportations. Suggestions from public officials that they are holding closed-door negotiations trying to deal with these issues and a lot of “could you talk to us privately later?” statements from activists.

Most of the testimony was less about racial disparity per se and more about the Kafka-esque nature of the criminal justice system and the way it perpetuates economic hardship. We heard from a young White woman whose father was imprisoned for sexually assaulting older siblings, whose complaint was that the family was left without a breadwinner and no social support for her now-single mother and a family of young children. We heard from a number of people, both Black and White, about the arbitrary rules and restrictions of probation and parole supervision, including GPS monitors that malfunction and lose signal indoors (one malfunctioned at the hearing while a high-placed official watched it), forcing the person monitored to leave what he is doing (even if he is at work and being watched by a boss) and go outside, or face incarceration for escape. They also complained that supervision is all about keeping track of you and making you show up for meetings, and not at all about helping you get a job or housing. If you miss an appointment or a meeting or violate the terms of supervision (perhaps go to a party at your boss’s house where alcohol is served and a condition of your supervision is no contact with alcohol), you can be charged with felony bail jumping and there you are, incarcerated. A middle-aged White guy (imprisoned several times for drunk driving) complained that he had a job waiting for him in a city 50 miles away with a boss who said he’d accept responsibility for his housing etc., but the parole officer would not authorize the move out of town.

If you are on “community supervision” (probation before prison, parole or extended supervision after), you are under constant surveillance. Community corrections officers have almost complete discretion to tell you what your conditions of supervision are, including a high level of reporting. The basic rule is that you cannot violate any law (federal, state, or municipal) nor do anything that would threaten the public good or your own rehabilitation in any way. Ninety percent of the people revoked from probation or parole and sent to prison in this state have no new prison sentence – they are what is called a “technical violation.” If you get revoked, the clock starts over. There are many folks who will be on community supervision basically for the rest of their lives. People on supervision also get thrown in jail periodically for short periods on “holds” for things that are not bad enough to justify a revocation, but the corrections officer thinks you need to be taught a lesson, or perhaps you are alleged to have done something and they want to hold you until they figure out whether you did it. These don’t count as revocations, but a typical result of a hold is that you lose you job and your housing and thus start the spiral toward revocation and prison.

There was also a lot about child support, which you might not think connects with criminal justice, but does. For one thing, the meter keeps running on child support while you are in prison, so when you get out, you are automatically in arrears and in danger of being incarcerated for failing to make payments if you fall behind. (The money is actually owed to the state for welfare payments to the family, so only about half of the child support actually goes to the children.) When you have a prison record, it is hard to get a job and make the payments.  People told stories of being incarcerated for non-support just at the point at which they had finally gotten a job and were going to be able to make payments. Or another said he’d gotten a good job, was making payments and doing fine, but then lost job and complained that he was being threatened with incarceration for non-payment even though (he said) “they are withholding half of my unemployment check, they know I’m unemployed.” Oh and another penalty for non-support is losing your driver’s license. Then you get to choose between losing your job because you can’t get to it or risking arrest and incarceration for driving without a driver’s license. On a side note, this was the first time I’d actually heard a man use the phrase “baby mamas” non-ironically to refer to the mothers of his children.

And there was testimony about tickets: tickets for noise, tickets for smoking a joint, tickets for retail theft, tickets for parking or speeding. These seem like pretty minor things for those of us with money, but a $200 ticket is unpayable if you are poor. So the tickets pile up. And then one day you get arrested and incarcerated for failing to pay the tickets.

We now return to our regular programming: Stata files and trying to figure out how in the heck I’m going to turn all these graphs and tables into a massively-overdue book. Oh, I forgot the part where my task force subcommittee is behind on getting our recommendations together, largely because we don’t actually agree on what to recommend and have not done a very good job of working through our differences. That would be another story, if I could figure out how to write about it discreetly.

Writing Complex Tables in Stata

Over at scatterplot, I asked for help with Stata code for automating descriptive tables. I did not fully solve the problem, but I am posting here a sample of the code that worked because when I searched for help, all I could find was partial syntax outlines that did not give enough information to help me avoid pitfalls. The particular feature of this problem is that it is non-standard: each row/column is a different subset of the data, not different variables or different statistics on the same variable, and each table is a different subset of the data. This code puts each table on a separate page (page breaks between them). Word or WordPerfect can parse the output tables and can turn them into tables with the “convert text to table” option available in both programs. (For some reason, however, Excel did not properly parse the page breaks, viewing them as unrecognized characters.  In any event, a spreadsheet is less desireable as a target for this application because spreadsheets treat all columns the same, and in this application there are different numbers of solumns and the columns have different widths in each table.) I have not successfully generated a macro in the word processor to mark and convert the tables — my attempts to do this with “record macro” in both word processors were unsuccessful because the recorded macro did not work the way the program worked during recording.  If you know how to write a Word or WordPerfect macro that will select a block of comma-deliimited text with varying numbers of rows and columns and convert it to a table with the option to resize columns to fit contents and then right-justify the columns (or, better, right-justify the right-most n of the columns while left-justifying the leftmost m of the columns), please drop a comment here.  (For you techies out there, I’ll tell you that LaTeX does not appear to be a particularly good solution for this kind of problem because LaTeX does not automatically wrap text in a table unless you pre-specify how wide you want the columns to be. Of course, there may be an add-on out there somewhere that would do it.)  Below  is a condensed version of the code that worked to generate the tables:

Parenting

I was reflecting even before church about some of the hard things parents have had to do, and then the minister brought up one of them in a wonderful Easter sermon. Here are the things I was thinking about: (1) The parents who paid for and accompanied their adult child overseas to get sex change surgery and have been supportive even as they have had to work through their own confusion and grief over the loss of the son they once had and their fears about their new daughter’s quite serious other health problems. (2) The father whose son murdered his daughter, who has stayed connected with his imprisoned son even as he lives in the depths of grief and anger about the loss of his daughter and the enormity of his son’s crime, and others’ anger at him for staying connected with his son. (This father is the minister’s brother-in-law.) (3) The parents whose son died in an automobile crash this year, who have had the courage to embrace the depths of their sorrow and to go on living without him. (4) The parents who are respecting an adult child’s wish to have no contact with them, even as it breaks their hearts and they don’t know what is wrong.

My reflections were triggered by a conversation the other day that began with people complaining about their parents. These conversations take a new twist when you have been a parent. As I’ve often said, it was parenthood that forced me to confront my own deep imperfection. From parenthood I also learned about the clutching fear when a child has an ailment that has no cure, and about the pain of realizing you have hurt someone you love and are charged with nurturing. Grief is part of parenting even if we have the good fortune to avoid tragedy. We grieve the baby who is gone forever, and then the young child, and then the teen. This grief is an essential part of parenting – if we cannot let the baby go, the child go, the adolescent go, we hinder her growth to healthy adulthood. Sometimes we are called to love our child when he has taken a path that seems wrong to us. Sometimes we grow to understand that the path was “right for her,” and sometimes we have to stand by and love a child who has done something irredeemably wrong, not making excuses, but being together in the pain and the shame. And yet, amid the inevitable sorrow and fear, there is great joy and meaning in being connected with one’s offspring, with watching the unfolding of a new person, and with feeling your own growth in the process.

Easter is the day when Christians celebrate life arising from political persecution and death. Non-Christians draw similar religious or secular lessons from other stories. And we all learn from nature, from spring emerging from winter and the brutal realities of biological life.  John (12:24-25) links them: “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.” (Edit: The translation is Eugene Peterson’s The Message.)

Going and Stopping

Almost everyone agrees — and this is supported by my own many years of observation of colleagues — that the  most productive scholars have regular schedules of writing a few hours every day.  We binge writers can be intensely productive when we are working and can get a lot done in a short time, but over the long haul we are simply less productive than the “write every day” people.  A big reason for this is that if you have been away from the writing for more than two days, you forget what you were doing and have to invest a lot of time in start up and remembering where you were. The turtle beats the hare every time. I have known this for years and “write every day” is the advice I give students, even though I have never successfully followed that advice for an extended period.

Today I figured out the other half of the problem. It isn’t just a problem with self-discipline.  I actually have quite a bit of self-discipline in some areas. The problem is that when I am working, I become extremely focused and I don’t stop. I’m on sabbatical now and finally got time to overcome angst and distractions and re-engaged my work. I became so focused I lost track of time, forgot to eat, and even stayed up all night. No deadline, I just could not let go of the work. This always happens when I really engage my work: even if I have outside obligations, I do the bare minimum and return repeatedly to the work whenever I can.  I sleep too little and exercise too little. After a while, other things pile up:  unpaid bills, undone laundry, unwritten letters of condolence and letters of reference and article reviews, unprepared lectures,  undone shopping, unplanned vacations, neglected family. Even when I’m not actually working, my mind is on my work and I’m just not attending to anything else. At some point the “rest of life” explodes and demands attention and yanks my focus away from work.  And the cycle starts anew. When I’m aware of more than one thing that it is important to do, I lack focus, I’m easily distracted, and I experience anxiety and tension from being pulled in different directions.

So there’s the crux of the problem. To be a “write every day” person you also have to be able to take care of ordinary business every day, too. You have to be able to shift your attention and focus from one thing to another, to compartmentalize not only your life, but your brain and attention. I find it easier, for example, to do “mindless” activities like exercise or laundry when I’m focused on work than to do other intellectual work like prepare classes or write reviews, because they do not compete for mental attention. I wonder if people may actually differ in their innate ability to shift focus, or whether this is a skill that can be developed.

I still plan to keep trying to develop the “write every day” habit.  But now I know that for it to be sustainable given my lack of a personal life assistant, I also have to have a “do some urgent tasks every day” habit, too.

My “first day” comments in a class about race

The link from pitse1eh reminded me that I said I’d post my “first day” comments that I emailed to her. This is a follow up to my earlier post on teaching about race.  These are my rough notes that I speak from, not a polished set piece, but they will give you the flavor of how I try to set the tone.  I tell the students I’m giving them the pep talk.

Introduce topic and me.
1.    Topic: social movements approach to ethnic groups.  Key is emphasis on politics and grassroots action.  Not economic studies of discrimination, although sometimes we’ll cite those.  Not lifestyle or cultural diversity, except as it comes into the political story.  Not music, dance, drama, food.  Instead matters of how you know who you are as a member of a larger group, what do you think that group is, how do you act together.  It will turn out that a central theme of ethnic history in America, maybe the central theme, is: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN AMERICAN?  Who is a  REAL American?

2.    I’ll be stressing that everybody has an ethnicity.  There is a tendency for “white” European-Americans whose ancestors migrated more than three generations ago to think they have no ethnicity, they are “just American.”  I’ll be showing you that you are just as ethnic as everybody else is.

3.    Me:  I am an expert on SM.  Still learning about ethnic history, the more I learn the more I realize how little I really know.  We will learn together.  I want to say the obvious: I am white and I know I’m white.  I know I cannot tell you from personal experience about being “minority.”  I do read lots of books written by Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, and try to learn from their voices what they feel about their lives, and what they think about their situation and political ways of dealing with it.  So when I talk about what minorities think, that is where the information is coming from. I have learned a lot over the years from the students in this class who tell me what they think.

4.    Personal issues:  One thing I’ve learned is that all Americans have problems with race and ethnicity.  There is a real sense in which US is inherently racist, in a way that goes beyond the personal feelings of any particular individual.  I want to talk about these as structural, social problems rooted in history and the legacies of history.   We will try to talk about how these structures got set up through the past actions of people, and how they constrain our choices today.  We will talk about stereotypes and prejudice as consequences of these structures and constraints.

There’s a lot of talk lately about “white men” being picked on, feeling threatened, as the only group it is safe to trash.  I think it may help up front if we try to see that every group in America feels this way right now.  We all feel stereotyped and put down for what we are.  We are all wanting to be appreciated for our unique individuality, at the same time as we want to be able to be proud of our background and roots.

Let’s just say up front that we all have group similiarities and differences.  All the whites, blacks, asians, hispanics, native americans in this class; all the men and women, all the heterosexuals and the gays and lesbians in the class; all the Christians, Jews, believers in other religions, and those who do not believe in any religion all want to say to everybody else in the room: Some of us come from wealthy families, and some of us come from poor families; some of us work long hours to support ourselves in school, and some of us are supported by our families; some of us have parents who went to college, and some of us are the first in our family to go to college; some of us are ignorant and prejudiced, and some of us have a lot of experience working with other racial and ethnic groups.  Many of us come from multi-racial families.  Some of us are conservative, some of us are liberal, some of us are radical, and some of us don’t care about politics at all.  Everybody in this class wants to say: please do not assume you know about me from superficial things like my skin color or my accent or my gender.

5.    There’s a cartoon that used to be on an office door upstairs that captures another important theme.  It shows a group of whites sitting around a living room and one person saying: “Why can’t we all ignore our differences and just get along?”  The next panel is a group of blacks sitting around a living room with one person saying: “Why can’t we all accept our differences and just get along?”  Almost everybody really wants to get along.  But there are emphases about whether we get along by ignoring our differences, or by accepting them.  And if we accept them, how can we accept difference in a way that doesn’t mean we think less of our own culture?

6.    All term we’ll want to be talking about structure and agency.  The US is a very individualized culture, and we tend to think that everything is a matter of being a good person.  We tend to imagine that if you have a good character and the right values, you can automatically transcend your race, or your class background.  As a sociologist, it is my job to teach you how much what you do and what you believe is a product of the particular circumstances you have grown up in.  At the same time, I do not want to deny agency.  People can and do make choices.  What I will show you, however, is that most significant social change happens by way of collective agency. [Draw picture: society as constraints, you make individual choices within the circle of constraints.  But collective agency is how you challenge the size and shape of the circle.]

7.    I also want you to be able to get a sense of history, a sense of where things come from.  Do you remember the beating of Rodney King in 1992?  And the LA riots that followed?  The meaning of the KKK.  Where affirmative action comes from.  Need to understand how past actions created present structures, and how the conflicts today are located in the context of what has come before.  We can be proactive and create a new future, but only if we are willing to look honestly at what has come before us.
8. Encourage students to speak up when they disagree. Talk about how we all are likely to get upset about something. Classroom rule of civility and listening.  No personal attacks. Try to understand what the other person is saying. If you find something upsetting, try to explain why. Students are encouraged to write in their daily journal comments [which I read after every class] if they are upset or concerned about something that happened in class.

9. Introduce me. [[In a small class, I encourage all the students to do similar introductions about themselves.  I don't always have time for this on the first day, but I do stick in stories about my experiences throughout the term.]]  A little about me. I grew up in Torrance, 3rd largest city in LA county.  No blacks at the time I was there (through 1967).  They were being kept out explicitly; there were sit-ins and civil rights marches for integration after I left.  Quite a few Mexican Americans & Japanese Americans in my school.   All spoke English, little ethnic consciousness that I was aware of.  Civil rights movement was in the South.  Watts riot 1965.  Grandparents in the riot area.  College: read lots of black literature.  Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X required reading.  Took other courses.  Anti war movements, black power, black separatism.  More riots.  Grad school in the south.  Saw separate black, white waiting rooms; the shadows from the old white/colored signs still on the doors.  Memories of segregation were very vivid in the early 1970s.  In the south, people knew race discrimination was real.  In the newly integrated school, kids tried to get to know each other.  Traditional black areas of southern cities.  Louisville during the anti-bussing riots.  Neighborhood groups: people trying to be nonracist in a polarized climate.  This city seemed very white when I moved here.  It was.  Listening to the coded racism of the White areas.  I’m your basic guilty liberal.  Privileged.  Educated.  Now working on racial disparities, involvement in mixed-race groups. Teaching this class. I’ve learned a lot, but there is still a lot I don’t know.  Every time I teach this class, I learn from the students.

I don’t know what to say

We just got a glossy 10-page magazine-type advertisement addressed to my spouse from the alumni association of  the state university where I’m employed and he took a graduate degree.  Title: “Around the World By Private Jet.”  For only $57,000 a person double occupancy we can take a 24-day group tour in November by private jet to Cusco and Machu Picchu, Easter Island, Samoa, the Great Barrier Reef, Angkor Wat, Lhasa, the Taj Mahal, Tanzania (a safari), Egypt and Morocco.  Hotels and meals included.  Also four professors to explain things, a trip physician, and a trip chef who will prepare presumably-edible airline food and “lavish banquets” each day.  I looked it up in case you want to know more.  I bounce between being amazed that anyone could afford such a thing to thinking how naive I am to be surprised this exists to thinking it would be fun to wondering if their customer base has declined lately.

Beauty, age, gender

These reflections were prompted by an interview with Renee Fleming in the Met broadcast of Massanet’s Thais.* She commented that Thais’s religious conversion is tied to her recognition that she is aging and will lose the beauty and sexuality that has defined her identity and personal power. Fleming commented that “we all” feel that way. I realized that I don’t so much. This is not to say that I am never shocked by my age. A couple of the wedding photos – not the formal ones where I’m all gussied up and wearing a lot of makeup, but the candid “getting ready” photos in the kitchen with the morning light streaming in the window – made me look so old that even my son said, “You don’t look that old in real life.” My bathroom mirror is relatively kind to me, due to the soft yellow light and the fact that I have to take my glasses off to wash my face or apply makeup.  My hair is just now beginning to gray, while most of my age contemporaries were fully gray fifteen to twenty years ago. But the deep wrinkles I see in photos or television shots taken in harsh light tell the truth. I’m not young any more. This is not much of a trauma for me, it is what it is, and I’m sitting easy in this skin. To the extent I’ve had aging crises, they’ve been more typically male, as I realize I have not accomplished all the professional ambitions I’d set for myself. I was reflecting that some of this may be because I was never treated as attractive or pretty when I was young, so there was not much to lose as I aged. It has been my impression that some of the gender traumas are harder on beautiful women, as their sexual attractiveness to men gets more in the way of their desire to be taken seriously as professionals. Being taller matters too: no man has ever patted me on the head. My gender issues have been different: I’m more the Dragon Lady sort who frightens and intimidates a lot of people of all sexes. I’m naturally bossy and have often been asked questions as if I were the person in charge even when I’m just standing around as part of an audience or crowd. I’m blunt and straightforward and can be tactless and insensitive. The gender price I’ve paid has more often been that of being seen as “difficult,” while a man with these personality traits is seen as more normal. An older male colleague once told me that I seemed odd and difficult to people because I’m the sort who will walk up and shake a man’s hand and say, “Hi, I’m Olderwoman.” When I asked, he confirmed that it was because I was a woman that this was unsettling, that I was acting like a man. Yes, I can also be very warm and nurturing, and in the academic context, I’m told that I have more social skills than many of my colleagues. My persona seems much more out of place in the real world of ordinary human beings, especially White Midwesterners, than in the academy.  My way of being was more troubling to people when I was young. Now that I’m old enough to be my students’ mother (and old enough to be the mother of assistant professors, for that matter), my tendency to assume authority is accepted more, as is my capacity to be very warm and nurturing in a motherish sort of way. So the sociological reflection I guess is simply that we carry many different traits with us as we move through life and these traits interact with other traits, giving us a wide variety of ways of doing gender and doing age.

*This opera broadcast was smashing, by the way. I was totally blown away by the opera and the performance on many levels. If you have any taste for opera, you may wish to look into the HD broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera into local theaters. This is the Saturday live broadcast that has been on radio for years. There is often a taped replay in a local theater about 10 days later. Everyone I’ve talked to who goes to these loves them (assuming they like opera): it is a great entertainment experience to see the performance close up, the behind-the-curtain footage of the scenery being put in place and the performers warming up is fascinating, and the intermission interviews range from weird to wonderful. The $20 price tag is the best bargain around for opera.

pronouns

This is hardly a new observation, but I’ve been reflecting lately on how much easier and less painful many people’s lives would be if the gender dichotomy were not etched into our speech by the necessity of choosing between male and female pronouns when referring to a person. Not to mention all the other ways in which gender is a central axis of social organization. I’ve been wondering if it is possible to make the pronoun shift and whether it would help.  Feminists used to push for neutral pronouns, i.e. ve or ze, but that push seems to have died down. Should we try to rev this up again, or is it a hopeless cause? After all, for the majority of heterosexuals, the binary is a pretty important part of how we think of ourselves. Are there languages that do not mark the sex of a person being referred to?  From the common mistakes of Chinese speakers in gendering English pronouns, I’m guessing that Chinese lacks the equivalents, but perhaps Chinese marks gender some other way. Even if it does lack gendering in speech references, I don’t get the sense of that Chinese people are any less dichotomous in gender thinking than the rest of us. I know some languages (Japanese?) mark the sex of the speaker as well as the sex of the object, so it could be worse.

I also find that my intellectual understanding of the social construction of gender does not take away unsettled feelings about gender ambiguity nor are constructionist concepts necessarily helpful in being supportive of the identities and struggles of transgendered people.  Just to be clear, I’m not blaming other people for making me feel unsettled, I’m just commenting on how deep these feelings go.

This Should Not Have Surprised Me

I admit I was taken a bit aback when my daughter said she wanted to take her (new) husband’s name, as I’ve been so comfortable living with my own (father’s) surname while married all these years.  But she’s something of a romantic and I understood her feelings about bonding with her husband’s family and it is her life.  And the day after the wedding she changed her facebook name to “firstname husbandssurname” which seemed weird, but then I thought, well, OK, she needs to live her own life.  Today she was running around getting name changes.  But it turns out that I did not understand her intentions.  You may (or may not) recall from prior posts about names that my childrens’ names have the pattern “firstname middlename fathersurname mothersurname” where their legal surname is “fathersurname mothersurname” — space no hyphen.  Turns out that her intention is to now have the three-name surname “fathersurname mothersurname husbandsurname.”  She ran into trouble at the social security office where there was not enough space to write in all the names, and is now researching her legal options. I realize most of you do not know my daughter, but as someone who does know her, I should not have been surprised.  It appears that the social security problem is a character limit.  We’ll see how this goes.  Years ago, when we were naming the children, we recognized the long-term problem of all these names.  My husband’s idea was that, after a few generations, you’d just generate an acronym and start over.

Mother-in-law

Well, we did it.  I’m a mother-in-law now. The wedding was Saturday and it all went really well, despite being thrown together at the last minute.  The snow ended early enough that the roads were in good shape for the wedding. The day began with my husband going across town to the reception site to take delivery on the dance floor and help with set up. The woman who has cut my children’s and my hair since they were “sitting on horsies and watching cartoons” while they got their hair cut demanded to “do” E’s wedding.  She came to the house and grabbed and “did” the hair and make up of everyone she could catch, including visiting relatives.

The wedding was lovely and sweet and very much my daughter’s own. Guests had been encouraged to come “in garb” and there was a wide variety of clothing, including one friend who wore a mask dressed as a fairy.  The groom lit candles in honor of his deceased parents.  They processed to the music from the final awards ceremony in the first (i.e. episode IV) Star Wars movie and, at the end, recessed to Holtz’s Jupiter, my daughter’s favorite music.  As she insisted she wanted to, E was married barefoot. She wore a red dress made by her friends, a long dressy formal Victorian-looking ensemble worn over a corset with a shiny red under-dress and a slightly darker red jacket with a stand-up collar and gold buttons and a bit of a bustle.  The maid of honor and another friend made it for her, finishing Thursday night.  The maid of honor sewed her into the jacket just before the ceremony.  (The stitches were pulled later in the evening when she took the jacket off for dancing.)  The maid of honor was also barefoot, and wore a flowing corseted black dress — originally part of a vampire costume — that looked surprisingly good next to E.  The groom and best man and father of the bride and ushers wore suits and shoes. I wore a pretty party dress and shoes. E looked radiant and happy.  Her father walked her down the (short) aisle in our church and kissed her on the forehead before handing her over to be wed.  We read poetry as part of the service, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, Corinthians 13, and the section from John Donne’s Eclogue for the Marriage of the Earl of Somerset that closes Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon. The minister, who knew my daughter when she was young, performed a ceremony that was personal, religious, serious and at times funny, especially when she reminded them that their first answers about why they wanted to get married were “to get presents” and “set something on fire.”  One of my daughter’s vows was to tolerate her husband’s hobbies, including those that become obsessions — big laugh. But the other vows were serious and thoughtful and bespoke a couple who had thought about relationship issues. The desire to “set something on fire” during the reading of the Donne — pretests involved a bowl of burning alcohol which produces a spectacular effect, but we ran out of time for fine-tuning just how this would be done without setting off the sprinkler system or cracking crockery — had to be expressed in lighting a unity candle.

At church we had an hour for visiting and the first round of food with the Indian appetizers and coffee and punch — no alcohol allowed at the church.  The reception was at a game store, basically a big shed with Magic banners hanging from the ceilings and plenty of room.  We forgot to put out the guest book — our only major blunder — so we don’t know exactly how many people showed up, but the tables at the reception had been set for 150 and the room l0oked pretty much full.  About 20% of the people at the wedding and 10% at the reception were relatives or my work friends, the rest were friends of the bride and groom, mostly gamers.  A lot of the guests were playing Magic or board games.  The groom’s family provided the liquor, as is customary in this region, and the groom’s sister took care of setting up the bar. The Indian buffet went well and the food was kept hot thanks to my last-minute negotiations with the caterer.  My husband and I had to don aprons to put out the second pan of some of the food and again when it was time to get the food out of the caterer’s pans so he could take the steam tables back to the restaurant for Sunday buffet, as we’d neglected to line up food help, but otherwise things went fine.  The cake was great.  Three tiers, white with white chocolate sprinkles, no decorations.  The game store manager pulled a gold plastic dragon out of the display case and it made a great cake-topper.  Another bigger dragon was put into service (next to the flowers) as a head table decoration. A sociologist friend and her husband and the daughter of another sociologist friend leaped at the chance when I said I needed someone to help serve the cake, letting my sister off the hook.

My daughter loves to dance, mostly West Coast swing. When she got engaged, she said to my non-dancer husband: “And, Daddy, you have to dance with me.”  We’d talked about taking “dancing for weddings” lessons, but that never happened in all the confusion.  So the night before the wedding, my husband was reading up on waltz steps on the Internet — he’s always thought theory ought to get you by.  My husband is an opera fan, and he has passed this love onto the children. I did not recognize the import of the music E selected for the father’s dance and thought he was just tearing up because he dotes on his daughter.  He explained to us later that they were dancing to Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro.”  Now I tear up. Here are the words:

O mio babbino caro Mi piace è bello, bello Vo’ andare in Porta Rossa a comperar l’anello! Sì, sì, ci voglio andare! e se l’amassi indarno, andrei sul Ponte Vecchio, ma per buttarmi in Arno! Mi struggo e mi tormento! O Dio, vorrei morir! Babbo, pietà, pietà! Babbo, pietà, pietà!	O my dear papa I like him, he is handsome, handsome I want to go to Porta Rossa to buy the ring! Yes, yes, I want to go there! And if my love were in vain, I would go to the Ponte Vecchio and throw myself in the Arno! I am aching, I am tortured! Oh God, I’d like to die! Father, have pity, have pity! Father, have pity, have pity!

After dinner and toasts and the initial dances, the dance floor was used alternately for dancing and frisbee games.  At one point, when my daughter was dancing with her brother and the frisbee got in her way, she grabbed it and marched over and put it next to the groom’s grandmother.   But later she retrieved it and played some frisbee herself.  The older generation mostly just sat and visited and enjoyed watching the young people.

Edit: I forgot this part.  In lieu of the local custom of dollar dances with the bride, guests were invited to  pay a dollar to get in one of the battle pods and try to blow up the groom.

The owner of the game store (who donated the use of it as a gift) wanted to be able to go home, so at the end time announced on the invitation, we demanded help from the guests to help get the presents moved and, with some effort, got them to go home.  One group took the rest of the beer keg along for an after-party. We loaded a lot of stuff into the cars and got home by 1.  The next day, my husband and brother-in-law went over to take apart the dance floor, and my sister and I repacked the left over Indian food (which had been chilled in the below-freezing garage).  The kids came over later to pick up my daughter’s car and eat Indian food and take the rest with them, looking pretty much the same as before, except with shiny new rings.

The Bible and Current Events

Bible Study night. Sometimes the Bible seems pretty apt to current events.  From Jeremiah 5:21-31.

²¹Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear. ²²Do you not fear me? says the Lord; Do you not tremble before me? I placed the sand as a boundary for the sea, a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass; though the waves toss, they cannot prevail, though they roar, they cannot pass over it. ²³But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and gone away. ²⁴They do not say in their hearts, “Let us fear the Lord our God, who gives the rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.”

²⁵Your iniquities have turned these away, and your sins have deprived you of good. ²⁶For scoundrels are found among my people; they take over the goods of others. Like fowlers they set a trap; they catch human beings. ²⁷Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become great and rich, ²⁸they have grown fat and sleek. They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. ²⁹Shall I not punish them for these things? says the Lord, and shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this? ³⁰An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: ³¹the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule as the prophets direct; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes?

The OT is pretty clear that the major sin to worry about is oppressing the poor.

Sociology and Spirituality

From Jay MacLeod Ain’t No Makin’ It, third edition, p 504 (the last paragraph of the methodological appendix):

When I visited Chris in prison and he asked me about my faith, I suggested that spirituality can arrest our inertial drift into self-deception.  My faith in a forgiving god allows me to face up to the truth about myself and to deal constructively with my sin.  The United States is even more prone to self-deception than I am.  We are in the grip of denial and resistance to the reality of our social sin, and sociology can help the world work through its ignorance of itself.  Spirituality and sociology have parallel vocations. Spirituality reveals the truth about ourselves. Sociology reveals the truth about our society. Both spur us to struggle for justice, for in the end my redemption is linked to yours.

This resonates for me.

Bibliographic note: MacLeod wrote what became the first edition of Ain’t No Makin’ It as an undergraduate thesis; he went on to be a community organizer and then an Anglican priest.  In case you don’t know the book, the first edition was based on observation and interviews with poor White and Black boys in 1983, the second edition caught up with how they were doing in 1991, and the third edition finds them in 2007.    The popular hook in the first edition was that the “Hallway Hangers” whose lives centered on substance abuse and crime were mostly White, while the “Brothers” who avoided misbehavior and tried hard in school were mostly Black, so the discussion of the impact of class and structural constraints ran against some of the usual grains. The “where are they now” follow ups pull this book apart from most in the genre.  It would be a good book to teach from. Probably the most useful policy implication is MacLeod’s argument that poor youths — and adults — should know the structural constraints they are up against if they are to avoid self-blame, despair, and self-destructive behavior.

Update:  Here is the publisher’s page for the book.  Most of the “hits” for this title in Google are to term paper vendors. Watch out.

Wedding Update

One commenter I don’t know and some friends have asked about the wedding.  So here is a quick update.  B’s father died October 23 after a hard month.  We traveled to his home city on Saturday to meet and express our condolences to his family, and then again on Tuesday for the funeral.  B’s family appreciated our efforts to show that we cared about B and his family.

The wedding is on, it happens December 6.  That’s about 3 weeks from now!!!  Yikes.  The wedding will be at our church, officiated by one of the ministers who pastored my daughter through her eighth grade confirmation year in which she questioned and rebelled against everything and ultimately decided to refuse confirmation.  It will be a religious ceremony, although with a light touch on the religious end.  The minister has done weddings and has given them a nice set of ideas and choices to work with.  As both of B’s parents are deceased, we cannot have a “parents blessing” part without pain, but are talking about whether we can have some kind of family element.  So there will be a wedding, check.

Oh, music.  The most obvious person to ask was Daniel, a gifted pianist and long time family friend who was killed in August.  Another suggestion surfaced at church, a gay man who used to be music director at a Catholic church until he was fired for being gay.  He hasn’t answered yet, we asked again about the contact information and the correct spelling of his name.

Oh, guests!  Whoops.   B & E just published an invitation to their friends via Facebook.  I’ve been scrambling to try to get a list of B’s relatives as well as put together my own list.  I’m going to be emailing invitations today to my list, to be followed with phone calls and paper  mailings to people old enough to expect them.  Have to include an explanation about why this is so late.  No time for fancy engraving or double envelopes.  I’ve been emailing/calling B’s female relatives to try to get a list of names & contact information for the people on his side and calling my spouse’s female cousin to get a list of names & contact information for his side.  (Detect a gender pattern here?)  B’s sister is representing his family in executing his father’s desire to make the groom’s family’s contributions to the wedding events, so she and I have been emailing pretty intensely about possible arrangements for alcohol, rehearsal dinner, etc.  Although last night, as I was emailing back and forth with her and we were discussing what B would want, I realized B (who had come by and was using my spouse’s computer across the room from me) was also communicating via computer with his sister about the same issues at the same time!

Clothing?  It is to be “dressy but fun,” not traditional.  E asked her best friend (an experienced costume designer) to make her wedding dress.  They were here last night working on this: Friend is panicking as there is no fabric and E’s choices of what kinds of things she likes seem to have no common characteristic except that they are dresses.  A trip to the big city to shop seems scheduled.  Another friend will be making B’s outfit; I assume she is panicking too.

Reception will be at a game store, “Indian buffet, dancing, games.”  My spouse and B are in charge of finalizing the food plans.  My spouse is also negotiating with a baker about cake, and he and B will make the cake choices.  Flowers?  That’s getting worked on, and photography.  After sticker shock about the price of a professional (and, yes, I know why a professional is expensive), we are checking with needy friends who have taken photography classes.  Oh, and I need to call the church & the game store to make sure I understand how to get arrangements set up.  I just got reminded last night about rehearsal and its dinner — we’re working on that.  Every woman I talk to asks me about a shower for E: I tell her, “I’m not doing one.  I don’t think anyone else is, either.”  So, not your traditional organized extravaganza. But it will happen.

I’m getting emails from my grad advisees who need letters from me, and comments on theses.  And I’m supposed to be working on a book during my sabbatical.  Oh well.

Don’t expect to hear much from me until this is over.