The Semester Starts

preterite Academia

Saturday was “A-Day” (acceptance day), when new cadets finished Cadet Basic Training and officially became plebes. Upperclassmen roamed the tiny village of Highland Falls in uniform today with their families. Classes start tomorrow, and I’m still busy getting settled in the house and tweaking the syllabus.

On a good note, a cadet from my new home department won recognition from both the military and Congress for his recent paper strongly critiquing the Army’s misguided “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on homosexuality — which, to me, offers a hopeful reinforcement of the stance on academic freedom that I’ve seen at this military institution.

The Grind

preterite Asides

Left to unpack: five boxes of clothes. Thirty-six boxes of books. Four tall boxes of kitchen stuff. Office files. Various components of the scholarly apparatus.

Either missing or still packed in some mis-labeled box by those puckishly humorous movers: my drill, which is a surprisingly inconvenient thing to be without when one moves. Two lampshades. Various cables (USB, power, Firewire, CAT-5) for the computer.

Right now, all my efforts at home are wholly and hugely material, moving boxes around and unpacking them and such. None of my books are up on shelves, and my desk isn’t yet in a workable arrangement: right now, it feels like there’s very little of the life of the mind for me in my off-the-clock time. By contrast, all my activity at The Job (which is a genuinely 8-to-4 experience) is on the intellectual side, aside from the odd helicopter ride or five-hour hike around the Revolutionary War era campus fortifications.

It’s not a split I particularly like. So: today, it’s kitchen stuff and books and the scholarly apparatus, grocery shopping, laundry, and if I’m good and work hard and well, my reward will be that I get to take my stereo out of boxes and put it together. My location — blocked from the north by Storm King mountain and NYC too far to the south — makes it so that the heavy pop rotation MTV affiliate radio station is the only one I can receive clearly, and I so totally miss NPR.

Endings and Startings

preterite Asides

Tonight’s my last night in the old Massachusetts apartment, into which I moved as half of a couple five years ago. My attorney dropped by this evening to spend some time with Tink and Zeugma, muttering dire imprecations and something about separation anxiety. Tomorrow morning I’ll take down the cat tree, scrub and vacuum, pack up the last few household items and the girls, and head four hours south.

And all of this still feels more like an ending than a beginning. I suppose that’s partly because I haven’t yet closed on the new house and I haven’t yet started the fall semester, and so this is a process of finishing things and closing things off, without that emotional sense of the opening-up of possibility.

Last things to put in the car tomorrow? The philodendron. The birdfeeder. And the girls in their cat-carriers.

Government Property, Public Property

preterite Composition Theory, Economics, Writing

The arriving faculty workshop at West Point continues, with an interesting briefing several days ago from USMA’s intellectual property attorney. The primary point of the briefing had to do with contracts and copyright, and it was this: any intellectual property I produce while at West Point in my official capacity as a faculty member, government employee, and representative of the United States Army does not automatically inhere to me as it would under conventional copyright law. Instead, inasmuch it is produced in the service of the United States Government, it is immediately released into the public domain.

Yeah. Wow. And, given my views on intellectual property, I think that’s pretty cool, although the IP attorney’s acknowledgement of the forthright application of institutional hegemonic force was a little unsettling: most of the time around here, they hide the iron behind velvet for civilian faculty.

There are other implications, as well. Ethical regulations make very clear that I can’t use my position as a West Point faculty member to push a book or an essay, which of course would seem obvious until one raises concerns (as I did with the IP attorney) of context and venue: essays published by West Point faculty in Military Review carry considerably different appeal and considerably different connotative freight from those published in Rethinking Marxism.

The thing that’ll be most difficult for me to get used to, however, is that I won’t be able to ask my students — plebe cadets, this first semester — to make a choice about the status of their essays as intellectual property. Anything they write in and for my class is instantly released into the public domain, and they therefore don’t have to engage with the concerns of choice, motivation, and textual ownership that have lately been so important to me.

Unless, of course, we begin to productively blur the line between work performed in an official capacity and work performed in a personal capacity. Like an institution-wide cadet blogging initiative might do.

Hmmm.

My Day at School

preterite Asides

And so flew we did.

Helicopter overflight of West Point.

Helicopter overflight of West Point.

Helicopter overflight of West Point.

Helicopter overflight of West Point.

Helicopter overflight of West Point.

Helicopter overflight of West Point.

Do I love my job?

O yes I love my job.

(Explanatory addendum: a portion of my work day today consisted of a military helicopter overflight of the West Point campus and ranges and surrounding areas. Our point of departure was that helipad on the Hudson, and — as the cockpit view might indicate — we enjoyed some sharp banked turns and low flying, as well. And yes, I don’t think I could have asked for a better bunch of new colleagues.)

PKD, Adapted

preterite Culture

Collin beat me to the review, so I’ll simply say: if you’re a fan of weird fiction, Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is worth your time. I saw it with my attorney as my final Massachusetts art-theater moviegoing experience, and it was very, very good. In fact, I’d say that the movie version pulled together the incoherencies of the original text in much the same way that Blade Runner extrapolated from and pulled together DADOES.

It’s a movie that knows all about drugs, and the tweaks and former tweaks who see it will well appreciate the ethos and deeply paranoid logic with which it constructs its paranoid anti-drug and anti-paranoia theme. I’ve heard some sci-fi fans complain that the movie fails in that it neglects to replicate the suffocating dread and paranoia of the book, but frankly, those fans are missing one of the movie’s big points, and one of PKD’s book’s big implicit points as well:

Drugs. Are. Fun. That’s why people do them.

Which, in and of itself, constitutes the lure of addiction, and its danger. The movie, in following the book’s indictment of the drug culture and its horrible casualties, would be deeply dishonest if it didn’t show why people do stuff like Substance D. (It also nicely encapsulates the reasons why “Just Say No” is an ineffective campaign to attempt to sell to teens: the logic of “Just Say No,” as the movie indicates, actually creates desire.) The comedic and comedic-paranoid moments in the movie, in the way they get you to laugh along and see (and even empathize with) the skewed logic of intoxication, humanize Arctor and his friends, and that’s what gives the movie’s final act its emotional punch.

Check it out.

Regimentation, Part 1

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Politics

I’ll be teaching sections of English 101 — “Composition” is the course title — at the United States Military Academy at West Point this fall. The curriculum is a bit regimented, but it’s surprising in the freedom it offers instructors, as well.

Grading standards are highly explicit and non-negotiable: it’s made quite clear exactly what is and is not permissible, and as one might expect, there’s a strong current-traditionalist influence in the standards’ attention to error. Cadets are expected to “develop the capacity to organize facts and ideas in a persuasive, logical argument and demonstrate … their ability to meet appropriate standards of organization, substance, correctness, and style in writing” (Department of English Mission and Policies). So: an argument-focused course, with the familiar updating of three of the five canons (inventio, dispositio, and elocutio become content, structure, and style), and an unsurprising generational split in faculty attitudes towards error and how to work with it.

Read more

Charlie Foxtrot

preterite Asides

Everything that could go wrong went wrong, in spectacular fashion.

The floor guys neglected to tell the contractor that they decided to go with slow-drying polyurethane varnish rather than fast-drying water-based varnish on account of the fact that the floors are pine, which changed our timeline from today to next week. That, coupled with the knowledge that the movers were coming today with my stuff, was cause for panic, as was the phone call from the bank that they wouldn’t clear to close on account of them not liking what they saw in an old inspection, which the attorney should never have forwarded to them anyway. The refrigerator is broken and the part that I’m supposed to fix it didn’t arrive today, so I’ve got rotten chicken triple-bagged in the rollaway trash can and still stinking up the back yard, with trash day not until Tuesday. And to top it all off, five o’clock rolled around and my household goods never showed up, and since the Army’s civilian offices don’t work weekends, it’ll be Monday until I find out where they are.

Fortunately, I think I’ve got the bank problem resolved — I had my inspector send them an email saying the place is fine.

And, in a weird way, having the stuff in limbo with the movers is sort of a good thing, since it gives the floor guys more time to finish.

But yeah. I was on the phone all day today, frustrated and angry. And the back yard stinks.

Internet in a Box

preterite Asides

O internets how I have missed you.

There have been some, er, unanticipated connectivity difficulties in my ongoing move from Williamsburg, Massachusetts to Highland Falls, New York. Today, I was happily able to remedy some of those difficulties, and put the internets in a cardboard box.

The internet in a cardboard box.

That would be my DSL modem and my wireless base station and accompanying cables in the midst of my contractor’s sheetrock work. A good bit of sheetrock taping got done today, but not as much as I’d like.

The study, with bare sheetrock.

It’s looking like a neck-and-neck race between the contractor getting the sheetrock up and taped and sanded and painted and the movers arriving with my household goods. The finish line is around noon on Friday.

The contractor showed me this weekend that he can hustle when he needs to. Which is a good thing, because Friday’s going to be one charlie foxtrot of a day if he doesn’t. And he knows it.

The dining room, with the kitchen beyond.

And that little slice of yellow wallpaper through the doorway is where I’m camping with my air mattress through all this. My 12 x 12 kitchen, complete with clock radio, laptop, and clothes hung in the pantry.

C’mon Friday.

Where to Find Me

preterite Asides

It was hot and humid in the Hudson Valley this afternoon, but despite the haze, the view was worth the picture.
West Point and the Hudson River, from above

The building where my office is, Lincoln Hall, is circled. (Click on the picture for a bigger, non-circled version.) For scalar clarification: the building is five stories high.

Those buildings off at the very far right edge are the library and, a little lower down, you can just see the edge of some of the cadet barracks. They include a dining hall that seats 4,400.