I am Dr. Herbert West, from "Reanimator."
I'm right. You're wrong.


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This will probably be my last post about the Kelly Ritter article; that seminarnival never did seem to take off, huh? Anyway, recently Prof. B. posted a To-Do List for September. The whole post is great for its general agenda-setting, but I was struck by this part for another reason:

coming up this week, Congress is still going to vote on permanently repealing the estate tax. Also on the agenda: cutting capital gains and dividend taxes even further, and cutting entitlement programs. The fiscal irresponsibility here is just mind-boggling: we're running a huge deficit, we're fighting a war, and we've just had one of our major cities and several minor ones wiped off the map. And they still want to cut taxes?!?!? Call your congresspeople and send them letters telling them (politely, but firmly) to get their heads out of their asses and run the country responsibily.

Here's Landismom's letter re. the estate tax, if you want a template.

To refresh your memory, Ritter points out the use of the terms "template" and "model" in everyday practice, using teaching materials as an example (p. 614-615, emphasis in original):

In my own discussions of teaching materials and research findings with colleagues, particularly those new to the teaching of first-year composition, I often hear queries such as "Can I steal that assignment?" or "Do you think I could use that syllabus as a model (or a template)?" In creative-writing courses, teachers often encourage students to "mimic"canonical authors so as to internalize traditional styles and to understand the value of voice and poetic form. These are only select examples of how the creative, collaborative notion of intellectual production in the humanities often leads to "borrowing" ideas back and forth, between complicit and entirely well-meaning individuals.

Remember that last part of B's post: "Here's Landismom's letter re. the estate tax, if you want a template." Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Activist organizations offer templates for us to edit and send to our representatives all the time: at NARAL, NRDC, the Sierra Club, and the Feminist Majority Foundation, just to name a few. In fact, you can go to just about any advocacy organization's site and click "Take Action," which is usually on the main menu of links, and it'll take you to a template letter like any of these. You're welcome simply to sign your name at the bottom and click "send," or to make a few changes to the template, or erase all the text in the box and write your own letter.

When I was six years old, my parents were watching a documentary on public television that showed men with clubs beating baby seals. They were so cute, with white fur against the white snow, but then when they were beaten, splotches of red spread out over the snow. I was absolutely inconsolable. I cried and cried, on and on until my dad, who I imagine was really at a loss here, said, "Well, write a letter to the governor!"

The governor at the time was Fob James, a staunch conservative who probably cared not one jot about baby seals but whose staff was obviously touched enough by my letter, scrawled in my six-year-old hand with crayon ("Dear Fob James. Tonight I saw baby seals getting killed on TV and it made me cry." etc.), to write an personal reply to me which is now in my parents' safe deposit box. When I go home next week, I'll see if I can get both letters out and scan them.

I said all that to say this: In a representative democracy, writing letters to elected officials is one of the most meaningful rhetorical acts one can perform, at least as important as writing an essay for a composition course*. Yet what essentially amounts to plagiarism -- passing off something someone else wrote as one's own -- is perfectly acceptable in such letter-writing for expediency. No one so much as bats an eye at it. Students do get mixed messages about authorship; the same teacher who'd turn a student in for plagiarism if he or she used someone else's essay as a template wouldn't think twice about using one of these templates for an action letter. I'm not teaching this academic year, but Ritter's article has given me so many ideas for illustrative cases to bring into the classroom to discuss authorship and plagiarism in a more sophisticated way.

I'll end with Using virtual lectures to educate students on plagiarism, by Laura A. Guertin (via Tracy). She makes a case for using these virtual lectures, which didn't seem that compelling at first, but in the article she points to the fact that with prerecorded lectures, students get a consistent message about plagiarism that's the same no matter how many times you replay the lecture. Sure, no one can anticipate every problem that may arise, and I doubt I'll try this in my own teaching, but I still think the article is worth a link.

* And yes, I know audience is a factor here; those template-driven electronic action letters rarely, if ever, actually get read by elected officials, or even by interns. If we're lucky, they at least get counted.

For those of you who've created accounts at other Drupal sites, like Kairosnews or Love from the Sun, would you mind trying to login here with those usernames (Example -- user: yourkairosnewsname@kairosnews.org password: yourpasswordatKnews)? I've been trying to login here using my Kairosnews username, and it WILL NOT work. It doesn't recognize my name and password, and I get "Error -32700 : parse error. not well formed."

If you're able to login successfully, will you leave a comment here? If you can't login, will you email me? I'd appreciate it.

UPDATE: The post above is a test of Drupal's quote module.

UPDATE: Well, the quote module is pretty underwhelming. The only difference between it and a regular node is that it has a special field for the author of the quote's name, and then it automatically puts a blank line between the end of the quotation and the author's name and puts a dash right before the author's name. Plus, maybe I didn't install it correctly, because it altered the formatting of the whole page. Eh, no big deal. No reason you should miss out on the quote, though! It's a good one:

8. You meet the perfect person. Romantically, this person is ideal: You find them physically attractive, intellectually stimulating, consistently funny, and deeply compassionate. However, they have one quirk: This individual is obsessed with Jim Henson's gothic puppet fantasy The Dark Crystal. Beyond watching it on DVD at least once a month, he/she peppers casual conversations with Dark Crystal references, uses Dark Crystal analogies to explain everyday events, and occasionally likes to talk intensely about the film's "deeper philosophy."

Would this be enough to stop you from marrying this individual?

--Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.

A good friend of mine who manages a MAC store in Nashville told me that one of the MAC stores in Houston is accepting goods for hurricane survivors if anyone wants to send stuff (she mentioned clothes, shoes, accessories, and toiletries). The address is:

MAC
Houston Galleria/Training Room
5015 Westheimer Rd #3325
Houston TX 77056

And I know I'm late in responding to those Barbara Bush remarks, but still: Yeah, this kind of living arrangement is probably what they've always dreamed about; I know I would LOVE IT!

Look at the whole set.

UPDATE: An email from a professor/administrator at LSU.

UPDATE: It's not about Baton Rouge specifically, but you MUST READ this post by Miss Alli at This Is Not Over. Exactly, yes, perfect, precisely, eloquently put. Please read it now. Via a comment at blackfeminism.org.

Last night I received another update from Baton Rouge (here's the first). Brief excerpts removed to protect my friend's privacy:

Well, things have sort of gotten back to normal here (I use the term loosely). BR has doubled in size and roads the grocery stores can't keep up with the demand. I had a choice of lemons or cucumbers in the produce section yesterday. But classes did resume today. Everybody tried to pretend that the largest field hospital ever wasn't in the assembly center and that there weren't bodies filling the makeshift morgue in the gym. No one mentions the many missing students who filled the desks 2 weeks ago, but rather try to welcome the 1200 new students from NO schools who are now at LSU. It's weird trying to go on as if the devastation didn't happen.

On another note, I learned yesterday just how much the people from BR and NO dislike one another. The people from NO think BR is a small conservative town with little to offer and bars that close at 2 am instead of staying open 24/7. The BR folks see those from NO as bohemians from a dirty city and were not in the least surprised by the violence that took place last week. For most locals here, NO is a place to visit and wash off as soon as you leave. As the living situation isn't likely to change anytime soon, the tension is sure to increase.

My houseguests took off for San Diego today and plan to fly back here when people are allowed back in NO. Both lost their homes and have no intention of returning to Louisiana to live.

[. . .]

Thanks to all of you for your warm wishes. With I-10 pretty much destroyed from Mississippi east, looks like I'll make it back to [a state in the east] for the holidays at the earliest. And phone service is still pretty crazy, so I'll return those calls when I can get a line out.

The 1983 Solid Gold Dancers:

Probably some of you have been reading The Interdictor by Michael Barnett (if not, you should; he's blogging from New Orleans). Via digg, I found a podcast featuring an interview with Barnett. If you want to go straight to the interview, it starts at nineteen minutes, thirty seconds, so fast forward to there.

Got this today from a friend in Houston:

Houston has about 25,000 additional residents now, thanks to Hurricane Katrina. I am sure the official # is much much higher, but this is what the media has reported. I am sure most of you have been watching the news and seeing the footage of the evacuees, and it is incredibly depressing.

Being RIGHT HERE, I felt that I had to do something. In addition to all of the Shelters and the Astrodome, there is not a single hotel vacancy in the area. As you drive around the city, you see Louisian plates everywhere. Some families are just hanging out in the hotel parking lots waiting for other families to check out. Friday, some of us from work pitched in to buy pet food for the SPCA, which is housing roughly an additional 1000 animals.

Yesterday I went to drop of donations of all of [her 2-year-old boy's] old clothes and Volunteer at the Astrodome. The Police were turning away volunteers and sending us to other shelters, which is probably best because the stomach problems and diarrhea are epidemic in the astrodome now. Apparently, whatever is in the water in N.O. takes a few days to start messing up your system.

We ended up spending the day at the George R Brown Convention Center, setting up the shelter there and helping with the evacuees. I have to say it was amazing to see how many people showed up to help.

We spent the first few hours sorting all the donations and setting up the "store" so that the evacuees could get fresh clothing in the right size as they arrived. The amount of clothing donated is phenomenal, we barely made a dent (there were probably 100-150 of us sorting clothing), and they were still receiving donations when we left last night.

After that, I went to serve food, and I have to say that everyone I met was so gracious and nice, and just thankful for everything that was being done for them. No one really was talking much, for the most part I imagine everyone is just exhausted at this point. But every single person made a point of saying "thank you for helping us."

The Convention Cetner set up is really cool. They have created activity areas with all the stuff that has been donated for all of the children that are displaced. The parents bring them up, sign them in, and then mom or dad can go take a nap or have a hot shower or adult conversation and know that there children are safe.

I spent some time in the "Library/Quiet Activities Center" to be with the kids. They told us that alot of these children are extremely angry and may or may not want to talk about what has happened, but most of them i saw did not want to talk AT ALL. I played a few games of Connect Four and colored in some coloring books, and generally got to play with the kids. I think it's good for them to finally interact with people that aren't stealing from them, or hurting them and God knows what else, or sticking a microphone in their faces and asking, "Johnnny, your 7. How do you feel about all this?"

I think the children will have the most problems emotionally and health wise in the long term. But it did feel good to at least help start that recovery, and begin to teach them its okay to trust again.

Anyway, I hope all of you are happy and healthy and safe. Please do what ever you can to help. I didn't have money, so I gave my time and what things I already had that these people need. Which is EVERYTHING. As I volunteer more, I will post pictures so you can see what I have seen first hand, and that these people are not all the bad things you are seeing on tv.

I'll post the pictures when she uploads them to MySpace.