Book Quiz: Which book are you?

From my friend Karine, a link to a book quiz.

My result:

You're Prufrock and Other Observations!

by T.S. Eliot

Though you are very short and often overshadowed, your voice is poetic
and lyrical. Dark and brooding, you see the world as a hopeless effort of people trying
to impress other people. Though you make reference to almost everything, you've really
heard enough about Michelangelo. You measure out your life with coffee spoons.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Business cards!

Sure they'll only be good for two years (hopefully only two years), but I now have spiffy new business cards identifying me as a PhD Candidate. Yay! Just in time for conferences and networking. Yay!!














And, like my Gauntlet News Editor cards, once I'm a full-fledged PhD and no longer in need of business cards that say "PhD Candidate", I'll have about 75 handy bookmarks.

Because we all know the camera adds ten pounds

Select Hewlett Packard digital cameras now come with a Slimming Feature, an artistic effect that makes a subject look thinner. No, really.

My reaction to this news oscillates between incredulity and furious giggling.

On the one hand:
1. As if people don't have enough issues with body image, even our cameras are now telling us that we could be thinner.
2. The two examples in the HP flash ad are average-sized women (not men) who definitely do not need to be slimmed down further (and seriously, if you're going to tuck a man's shirt into your jeans, of course you're going to look larger). Sure, there's a photo of a man in the more detailed explanation further down the page, but that's just his face.
3. This effect does acknowledge the fact that no one really likes how they photograph. But is that the camera's problem? Or is it a problem of self-perception? Or the angle from which we are photographed?
4. This leads me to my ultimate point, which is that no matter what we do to our photos in this age of PhotoShop, all images remain mediated. In the beginning, it was about the type of chemical used on the film, now it's the conditions with which one shoots, as well as the settings of the camera itself. Everything is mediated already; taking a picture on the "Auto" setting is never going to convey the full effect of actually being there and seeing the subject in person.

On the other hand:
1. According to what I can see in the demo, the Slimming Effect can be adjusted to not only make someone look thinner, but also to make them look fatter by moving the little indicator down the bar!
2. The other Artistic Effects include Retro (huh?), Soft Glow (like, soft focus? Or pleasant sunset?), Vintage (sepia tone!!), and Sky Colour (beats me). What I'd love to do is apply ALL these features to one photo and see what we get. Mediated reality indeed.
3. Imagine applying the Slimming Effect to objects, not people. Would skyscrapers be thinner? Trees and flowers (I always suspected sunflowers were morbidly obese)? What about applying the anti-Slimming Feature to books to make them seem more impressive? If you can't see the forest for the trees, would it help to make the trees thinner? Would that be considered deforestation?

Okay, enough silliness for one night. I'm disappointed that this post was in list-form (as opposed to paragraphs). I read my inability to write argumentatively in complete paragraphs as a sign that I'm still recovering from the cumulative exams process.

Bear kills fish

Teddy bear kills thousands of fish

Has anyone told Stephen Colbert?

O Humanities, Where Art Thou?

Received the Fall 2006 U of C alumni magazine today and against my better judgement I read it, including a feature about "40 Students to Watch" whose only redeeming quality was that it was shot by former Gauntlet photog extraordinaire, Aaron Whitfield. The students were a mix of undergrads, grad students, and professional students. As I flipped through, I noticed that the Faculties of Law and Medicine were well represented, as were the faculties of Science, Education, Nursing, Social Work, Communications and Culture, and ... holy missing faculty, Batman! Where's Humanities?

Indeed, it looks like U (the magazine) has lost its faculties—I mean, a faculty. When even Fine Arts gets three (three!) students, it really stings when the only Humanities representation lies in an undergrad student doing a joint degree in English and Computer Science (you know, that last bastion of humanist values). Was the Dean of Humanities out of town the day they asked him for the names of some students to watch? The feature proports to "showcase the amazing breadth of today's student population." How can it do that when it barely includes a student from a significant faculty?

This really bugs me. Humanities doesn't get much respect on the best of days, but you'd think an alumni magazine would be more sensitive to showcasing all aspects of a university's offerings. Unless, of course, they think that Humanities grads aren't paid enough to make significant financial contributions to the university. In which case, this feature isn't going to help.

Party till we get kicked out

I held a welcome-back party for the department's grad students (yes, I sent the invitation out on the listserv) last Friday. It was my first big party, and was in fact so big that the manager received "several noise complaints" by 11:30 (p.m.! on a Friday night!) and everyone had to leave. So we took the party to a nearby dive-y bar (ah, the Garneau, how I won't miss you).

Among the highlights was Christopher dancing on two folding chairs (I guess the coffee table wasn't good enough) and people laughing at/admiring my Jane Austen action figure. One bonus of getting shut down: all the leftover beer in my fridge. I'll take the 1516 and the Steamwhistle, but I'm giving back the Budweiser and the Black Cherry Smirnoff Ice.

Pictures here. Yes, it was as much fun as it looked. Thanks to Anna, who was visiting, for taking most of the photos.

Oedipus Veg!

Oedipus Rex with vegetables! Violence! Sex! Prophecies of doom! And Oedipus is a potato, which gets really funny when you remember what he does to himself at the end.

This post rated Aarrrgh!

For Immediate Release:

Tues., Sept. 19 is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. More info here. If you need to brush up on your pirate-vocabulary, go to A Word a Day, which is featuring a list of pirate-themed words this week.

If you need some inspiration, check out this bit from earlier this summer:

Book Meme, Austen and Non-Austen editions

Busy and tired this week, as I try to finish and send off a couple of conference paper proposals for one conference and then write the 20-page conference paper for another (if I submit it by Sept. 25, it will be considered for publication). As I am lazy but still want to keep my blog fresh and interesting (for you! dear reader!), I am importing a book meme from a post in the wittily named book blog The Valve: A Literary Organ.

1. One book you have read more than once
Austen answer: I have read all the novels more than once. The novel I've likely read the most is Pride and Prejudice because I've taught it twice. What I've read only once are Austen's letters (though they are worth revisiting) and some of her juvenilia. Also, I must heathenly admit that I've read her prays only once.
Non-Austen answer: Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.

2. One book you would want on a desert island
Austen answer: It always alternates between Emma and Pride and Prejudice. The pragmatist in me would go with Emma, which is about 50% longer, but the part of me that would need cheering up because I was on a desert island would go with the sparkling Pride and Prejudice.
Non-Austen answer: Cervantes' Don Quixote, because it's long and because I haven't read it yet.

3. One book that made you laugh
Austen answer: It's not a book, but the funniest work of Austen's I've ever read is a short piece written once Austen had started publishing. In "Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters", Austen combines all the suggestions of well-meaning family and friends into a hiliariously unrealistic story with a heroine so faultless that "Wherever she goes, somebody falls in love with her & she receives repeated offers of marriage". She is also "now and then starved to death" even though "Throughout the whole work, Heroine to be in the most elegant Society & living in high style".
Non-Austen answer: John Cleland's 18th century soft-core porn novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure for its absurd situations and the number and variety of euphemisms used to describe genitalia.

4. One book that made you cry
Austen answer: None have ever made me cry, but I do find Capt. Wentworth's letter to Anne Elliot in Persuasion very touching. You pierce my soul, indeed.
Non-Austen answer: During the last three decades of the 18th century in England, sentimental novels (tearjerkers) were very popular. I read some of them as part of my exams, and I have to admit that Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story did indeed elicit some tears—while I was in a coffee house, no less.

5. One book you wish you had written
Austen answer: All of them. D'uh. But if I had to pick one, I'd go with Emma. If I had to go with a critical work on Austen, then I'd pick Claudia L. Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, an excellent feminist new-historicist work that's well written and still relevant today even though it was published in 1988.
Non-Austen: Zadie Smith's White Teeth. Tour de force storytelling, rewards readers who keep slogging. Also, she wrote it before she turned 25, increasing the envy factor.

6. One book you wish had never been written
Austen answer: Some of the Austen biographies are rather lacking, whether it be in research/sources (Valerie Grosvener Myer's Obstinate Heart) or in biographical objectivity (John Halperin's vitriolic biography). Also, Marilyn Butler's very important 1975 study Jane Austen and the War of Ideas is still the only academic book that I've ever thrown across a room, for a blatant misreading of a passage in Emma.
Non-Austen answer: There are many books that I didn't care for, but none that I can think of that I ever wished out of existence.

7. One book you are currently reading
Austen answer: Mansfield Park, on which I am currently writing a conference paper.
Non-Austen answer: Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. On deck: Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and, well, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (all 1500 pages), for chapter 1 of the dissertation.

8. One book you have been meaning to read
Austen: D.A. Miller's Jane Austen and the Secret of Style
Non-Austen: Of the long, long list (no one has to-read lists quite like English scholars), I would have to say Cervantes' Don Quixote. Unfortunately, it's not a book to be polished off over the weekend.

9. One book that changed your life
Austen: Pride and Prejudice, the first one I read, the one that got me hooked.
Non-Austen: I find it highly problematic now for its perpetuation of stereotypes, but Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club was a great discovery for the eighth-grade me. It blew my mind to read a grown-up novel about being Chinese in a white world and was an important moment of self-validation.

10. Now tag five people: Nope. But feel free to add your comments or import this meme into your own blogs.

Candidacy: Passed!

Today was not the day to have set my alarm for p.m. instead of a.m. My candidacy exam was at 2 p.m., but I had planned to attend the Film Studies lecture at noon. Unfortunately, I woke up at 12:53 in the afternoon, giving me just over an hour to shower, eat and get to school. I did manage to grab a coffee as well, and got to the oral exam just in time.

The oral itself was "very good", the phrase that my committee members kept using. It was two rounds of questions. I was nervous for the first 30 minutes, but then I settled down and got stronger as the exam progressed. Most of the questions were reasonable and thought-provoking, though sometimes a little rambling (trying to extract the question from the rambling was a bit of a challenge). I'm not entirely satisfied with all my answers (struggled with concept of historicity, a question that was asked about four times by four people), but they were definitely good enough to pass. I finished in 1 hour 45 minutes, and then after a few minutes of debate and consultation when I was out of the room, I was welcomed back with a "congratulations!"

Went for beer afterwards with my committee at Sugarbowl, where I ran into Laura and Theo. After the committee members left I joined them and we called some others and had more beer. Not sure what I'm going to do tonight at home. It is a little evil to watch Team America: World Police on the fifth-year anniversary of Sept. 11?

Paper Mills: Not all they're cracked up to be

Very interesting article in the New York Times this weekend about the quality of papers you get when buying an "original" essay from a paper mill. While the websites of these companies claim that buying an essay is not plagiarism because the essays are all original, universities also define plagiarism as passing off someone else's work as your own, not merely copying and pasting from a bunch of articles and websites. It's disingenuous to claim that it's not plagiarism, especially when it's very clearly cheating.

The essays themselves are a hoot, and demonstrate the lack of quality control at paper mills. The essay topics requested are also pretty banal and (in my opinion) would produce weak essays even if a student honestly worked on it just because they don't give students (especially first years) enough direction or a place to start.

In the past, I've wondered who actually works at paper mills, how much they're paid, how they're recruited/hired and why they do it. Suffice it to say that most people who would consider writing papers for other people don't have much respect for English literature, and would probably not excel at it. However, there are also more unusual cases, such as the former sessional instructor who wrote English papers to order for U of A students. Last year, a local TV station caught him selling a paper to a student in a sting operation at his usual table in the Students' Union Building. He seemed to have a steady stream of customers (some of whom were getting legitimate tutoring help) and even though campus security escorted him off the premises, he had set up shop at the public library downtown the following Monday. After all, what he was doing wasn't illegal, although it sure as hell was unethical.

The story of "Peter the Paper Peddlar" made me very angry, but it also made me wonder how someone could become so bitter that he would undermine his former employer like that. I hope that I never never never feel so bitter that I would resort to helping students cheat. I'm always hurt whenever I catch a student plagiarising. I take it personally, and the discovery always taints the rest of the papers I mark and makes me unfairly paranoid about other students' work. I think students need to realize that when they plagiarise, it hurts more than just themselves.

Candidacy Dream

My candidacy exam (essentially an oral exam on my project) takes place Monday afternoon. I've been purposely occupying myself with other work this week to take my mind off it, but last night my subconscious got its revenge. I had the oddest dream about the candidacy, in which my supervisor informed me that in order to fulfill all the requirements of becoming a full-fledged PhD candidate, I had to take two classes that I was missing: Gym and undergraduate chemistry. I distinctly remember having to go pick up my gym shoes (ugly white runners) from Carolyn, the woman in the English office who deals with supplies. The shoes were already paid for--it was merely a matter of trying them on for size.

At least it's not as bad as fellow student and Film 200 TA Orion (yes, his real name), whose sublimated stress about his exams next week has resulted in his dreaming about his love life. Rest assured that I did not ask follow-up questions when he told me that today.

Exam 3: Done

Today's exam went fine. Nothing to panic about, but nothing to be too excited about, either. Overall, I'd say that I could have been better prepared, but was definitely prepared enough. Afterwards my head was spinning as I processed the thought that my written exams were over. To be honest, I don't think I've fully processed it yet.

This weekend, I intend to do NO WORK AT ALL. There will be shopping. There will be movies. There will be walks outside to enjoy the nice weather, and reading magazines on my balcony. There will be iced lattes and gelato and sleeping. Lots of sleeping. Tonight there will be sushi with friends.

Thanks to everyone for all their support. Oral exam on Sept. 11.