Summer writing project (Week Thirteen)

Lately, I've been putting more time into writing these notes than I've spent on the paper itself, so that's a sign that I should cut back on my once-daily thoughts and frustrations regarding my summer writing project (which will probably extend into the winter, at the rate I'm going).  

There's not much to say for this week; most of my working hours have been devoted to teaching and reading student work. This past week was a busy one because we're finishing up one project and starting another. The course seems to be going smoothly, though. I haven't talked with many students (I think I chose the wrong time for office hours), but I've met with a couple of students (virtually) outside of office hours and had good conversations with them.

Talk around the academic Twitterverse has been around the various plans (or lack thereof) concerning how universities will open up in the fall. My school plans to require everyone (vaccinated or not) to be tested once a week if they're coming in at least once a week. I think I like that idea, although I am not eager to go back to campus at this point, with the spreading delta variant on the loose and an unvaccinated first-grader at home to worry about. I realize there are people who need to go back to in-person classes for all kinds of reasons. I just hope that my program and school can give instructors flexibility to do what they need to do, too.

Anyway, we'll be in August soon, and I have a couple of things to do in August (in addition to teaching and preparing to teach in the fall). I probably won't have time to work on my paper for a good long while. We'll see...

Summer writing project (Days Fifty-Seven through Sixty)

"Seventeen years I've wanted that little item and I've been trying to get it. If we must spend another year on the quest... well, sir, it will be an additional expenditure in time of only... five and fifteen seventeenths percent." 

(For years I've been wondering what "five and fifteen-seventeenths percent" means; fortunately, someone explained it on one of the two entries on their blog(!).)

The last few days have been filled with commenting on student work, setting up groups for the second project in my class, a doctor visit, all kinds of errands, and not a whole lot of writing. Time away from a project can lead in at least two directions--primarily, the distance can enable you to think anew about it and have new perspectives on what it is that is troubling you (OK, me) about it. That can either make you/me see a new path toward finishing it, or it can lead to despair over ever being able to do it or the feeling that it's an impossible or even wrong-headed task. 

So now I'm rethinking the whole thing (again). This is definitely not going to be writing my journal article in twelve weeks...

Summer writing project (Day Fifty-Six)

I'm back to doing some primary research--close reading of a text I'm using as an "exhibit" (in BEAM terms) to see if I can use it as evidence for what I'm arguing (or part of what I'm arguing, anyway). Also had a good email exchange with my "virtual writing partner" or "writing accountability partner" (I think I'm going to have to acknowledge him in my paper if I ever get it published!)

Tomorrow is going to be devoted to reading student drafts of their first assignment. Might not get to my own paper. (Not that I'm complaining. Reading their drafts is a major part of my job, after all!)

Summer writing stalling project (Days Fifty-Four and Fifty-Five)

Not much to report here. Yesterday's work grading had to be put off to today because my internet was out all day yesterday.  Also found myself looking wistfully at a different paper I haven't worked on for over a year but is now looking more attractive to me than my current paper. [Insert meme of that guy... you know who I mean...]

Summer writing walking project (Day Fifty-Three)

I did some grading today and then had a little time to work on my paper. So my son and I drove out to Medfield to check out the old Medfield State Hospital, which we've driven by a lot but never visited. Turns out it's a pretty big place! We walked all around the grounds and I took a few pictures. (Unfortunately, I only know one of the buildings: the chapel.)

Here are some of the pictures. I think you can click on them to make them larger.

Here's the chapel.

Poem on the side of a wall.

The porch needs some work...

[Update: This was the female nurses' home.]

I took some other pictures, but I want to go back and take some more, I think. (I'm sure there are millions of pictures of the Medfield State Hospital on the web, though.)

So that's how I spent my day! It was a good day for my son and me to run around, considering it has rained every day so far this month.

[Update: I found this old map of the hospital grounds. And some information from the Town of Medfield about what they're thinking of doing with the property.]

Summer writing project (Days Fifty-One and Fifty-Two)

I was too busy deleting mails from my school's in-box yesterday and neglected to catch up on this. (I was just doing that in between approving students' choices of scholarly articles for their first assignment.) It was interesting reading my school's evolving response to COVID--I'm tempted to keep those emails just for historical purposes.

Anyway, today I had some time to look over my paper. I read through most of it slowly, making comments in the margins. It was depressing in some ways because I can see that there are places where I need to do a lot of work; it goes off in all kinds of directions. But I also see some promising spots, if I can corral the rest of it together. Mostly, I got the sense that it is worth working on, which is a good feeling.

Summer writing grading project (Day Fifty)

Fifty days into my summer writing project and I feel like I've basically given up on it. I've got to do something, though, to try to jump-start this thing and force myself to make some progress on it, even if  it's just a few millimeters. (Did I ever tell about how when I was in elementary school, Jimmy Carter was president and wanted to convert the US to the metric system, so we learned the metric system instead of whatever the other system is called [the 'Murkin system?] So we learned centimeters and milliliters and all that sort of thing. Then, of course, Reagan became president, but I don't think we ever learned the other system in school, so I still don't know how many quarts there are in a mile. Anyway...)

[Update: Ah, I see now it was Gerald Ford who signed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. Well, it was probably expedient to blame the whole thing on Carter anyway.]

Summer writing grading project (Day Forty-Nine)

Today I did some grading and other teaching-related work. It's going to be an intense seven weeks, so I don't know how much writing I'll get done. We'll see... 

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Eight)

I did my presentation today. I found I'm a bit rusty giving conference presentations (just noticed from looking at my CV that before today I hadn't done one since 2015!). I think our panel went well, though I wish I had not talked so much and had given the audience more of a chance to share their ideas. Oh well, next time...

Now the second summer session has begun, so I move my focus to teaching. I will try to work a bit on my paper, maybe trying for a half hour or so a day if I can get up early enough in the morning. Wish me luck!

Summer writing project (Days Forty-Six and Forty-Seven)

Forgot to write last night--today this is going to be short. I'm doing a bit of tuning up to my presentation for tomorrow because I want to make sure I have a clear focus that distinguishes what I'm talking about from what other people whose subjects overlap with mine will have talked about. 

On another topic, I see that my friend and fellow Kerrdashian Yukari Yoshihara has published an article about Kerr in American Quarterly:   

Yoshihara, Yukari. "Postwar American Studies in Asia and Its Prehistory: George Kerr and Taiwan as an American Frontier." American Quarterly, vol. 73 no. 2, 2021, p. 349-354. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/796806.

Be sure to read it!

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Five): Current events and my project

Since yesterday, there's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about one particular "idiom" (chengyu) in Xi Jinping's speech on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party--the line where he says that the enemies of China will find themselves crashing into a steel wall formed by the bodies of 1.4 billion Chinese; he uses the phrase 头破血流, which literally means "head break blood flow." The question in the tweets I've been reading, though, is whether this phrase is supposed to be taken literally (someone, whose tweet I unfortunately can't find now, compared it to idioms like "raining cats and dogs"). Frankie Huang suggests we should take it in the spirit of the famous ST:TNG episode where Picard tries to figure out the allegorical language of the Tamarian ship captain; that is, the broken and bleeding heads are not meant to be taken literally. She goes on, in fact, to suggest that taking the phrase literally is actually a purposeful act of misunderstanding driven by a bias against Xi or, more generally, China. 

This has made me think again about my reaction to some of the postwar Taiwan elementary textbook passages I've been reading, and whether I'm reading too much into them. I mentioned the "urban warfare" lesson in a 1946 fourth-grade reader that struck me (and my wife) as pretty violent, and this all started with a lesson from 1956 that I translated years ago about Yan Haiwen, a Chinese pilot who kills himself rather than being taken by the enemy soldiers. But I'm starting to rethink my response what I'd consider the graphic violence of these stories. Going back to 头破血流, a thread by Chenchen Zhang arguing that the emotional valence (if I'm using that term correctly) of the language of Xi's speech and, I guess, Chinese nationalistic discourse in general, is more important to think about than one four-character chengyu. 

I think with Yan Haiwen, I understood this on a certain level when I wrote about it in my dissertation (and in this paper, if I ever finish it)--I thought about this story in terms of Suzanne Keen's theory of strategic empathizing, where student readers were taught to admire and identify with the feelings and motivations of people like Yan Haiwen. In this case (and perhaps in the case of the urban warfare story), it's perhaps important to turn away from the horror I feel reading about the violence and to the feelings that the writers are trying to evoke from readers. 

That all said, however, I'm resisting the idea that there's one "right" way to read these stories (or the chengyu in question in Xi's speech). Different readers will interpret these texts differently, depending on their positionality. A non-native speaker of Mandarin, for instance, might be properly accused of reading 头破血流 too literally, and it might be said that since I'm not the primary audience for this speech, I don't have the right to interpret it. On the other hand, in our globalized world of instantaneous worldwide communication and immediate translation, it seems to me a bit naïve to think that there's only one audience for any big speech like this. After all, this part of the speech is also serving as a warning to the enemy, so in that sense it's at least partly addressing that potential enemy.* And as Bessie tweeted in response to Frankie Huang's post, for a Taiwanese person, it's hard to assume "good faith" on the part of the speaker when Taiwan is under constant threat of violent annexation by that same speaker. So interpretation also has a lot to do with how you see yourself in relation to the speaker. (I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here.) Even in postwar Taiwan, stories like those of Yan Haiwen might be read differently by Taiwanese students as opposed to Mainlander students. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure how I would be able to test this at this point. One thing I'm constantly looking for is stories of people's experiences of schooling at that time.)

Anyway, this is what looking through Twitter got me thinking about today. It's useful to think about this, and it gives me another perspective on what I've been working on, but it also reminds me of my own place or position in this project I'm working on (and possibly why it's taking me so long to finish it!). 

*Then again, when my son is playing dangerously on the stairs, I sometimes tell him to be careful or he'll fall down the stairs and break his neck. That's pretty graphic...

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Four): The importantce of proofreading!

I just found that 1999 paper that I wrote on doing research on the internet. It was published in a 2000 volume of essays on communication and culture that was edited by the conference organizer. When it was published, I was unhappy with the proofreading because the student worker who did the copy-editing decided (or followed the Word recommendations that decided) that the word "Internet" should have a "The" in front of it every time. So my paper, originally titled "Internet Research in English: Problems and Solutions for EFL Students," became "The Internet Research in English: Problems and Solutions for EFL Students." That's not too bad, but then there were also sentences that ended up looking like this: "What problems might EFL students have regarding research on the English The Internet?" I also had two figures that I wanted to include, but for some reason the same figure was inserted in both places. (By the way, to show you how old this paper is, here's the figure--a screenshot of Infoseek's search results for "computer virus":

Now doesn't that bring back memories? No? Oh well...)

One thing that I can't blame the copy-editor for is this gem of an overlooked placeholder that I left in the final draft, to wit: "'Paper' publishing is a demanding process that involves many people, a good deal of money, and complicated apparatuses of control and stuff." I believe I was referring to print publishing (not sure why I called it "paper publishing"), but I really love the "and stuff." Lucky my language wasn't a bit more colorful...

OK, back to working on my presentation. And a reminder to myself to proofread carefully!

Upgrade (II)

As of today, I am now officially a full Teaching Professor at Northeastern. It's not a tenured position, but there's some job security in that I'm now on a five-year renewable contract. Mainly it means that I can finally order some new business cards...