It seems that inevitably class discussions follow an ornery pattern: as time gets short, they get really really interesting. This places me in a bit of a bind: shut things down so that we end on time, or let them run even at the cost of exceeding our scheduled boundaries. This gets even more pressing when the course in question is a night class, and "running over time" means that students are filing out of the classroom close to 11pm.
Okay, that doesn't happen every time. But it did on Tuesday evening, when we had the best class discussion we'd had thus far this semester -- and about Kant, of all people. Maybe it was the week off for Fall Break, or maybe it was my repeated warnings that Kant is Very Heavy Drugs and has to be consumed slowly with lots of food and water and really deeply pondered, or maybe it was the excellent student presentations that began the class session -- or maybe it was all three -- but for whatever reason the discussion was going very well indeed. We didn't have to spend too much time on first-order ("what is the author saying? what's the argument?") questions, but were able to leap fairly quickly into the second-order ("does the author's claim make sense? do I buy it? what's at stake in accepting or rejecting it?") issues that are the really fun part about discussing philosophical works. Relativism vs. universalism; idealism vs. pessimism; whether there is a real conflict between theory and practice -- heavy stuff for a Tuesday evening, but precisely where I would have wanted us to go had I been able to choose it.
So we were bopping along, collectively wrestling with core issues, when BANG -- 10pm. I know that we need a break (since we've been going since 8:10), and after the break I need to talk for a few minutes about next week's reading. So going to break means the end of the discussion. But it's going so well…so I let it go. Until about 10:15. Then we break, and then I give my mini-lecture…and then it's 11:00pm. Oops.
Part of my rationale for making podcasts out of all of my mini-lectures for that course is that next year I won't have to spend scheduled class time delivering the lectures -- I can just post them someplace, let students download them, and use the time saved to really allow the discussion to flourish. In my experience it takes about an hour or so for things to really get revved up, and a well-timed break about an hour and a half in can give people a chance to recharge and regroup -- making the second half of the session even better. Dropping the mini-lectures, or rather, externalizing them onto a website someplace, makes it possible for me to actually do that in the future. And then I can facilitate those great discussions without holding people on campus until 11pm.
19.10.05
17.10.05
Management Lessons
Phil Garner, manager of the Houston Astros, gave a press conference the day after the epic 18-inning game that the Astros won last week over the Atlanta Braves. During the course of the questions, he was asked about his managerial style, and in particular whether his making of particular decisions was "a seat of the pants kind of thing . . . a gut feeling." Garner's response is instructive, both because of the ground that it covers and because of the place where it ends up. I think that there are some lessons to be learned here, lessons with applicability beyond baseball -- dare I say it, lessons about what social science is for and how it relates to social practice.
"Without knowing exactly which moves you're talking about it'd be hard to say," he began, noting from the outset that particular moves have particular rationales and implying that no single kind of decision-making captures or explains all of the choices that one makes in the course of managing a baseball game.
"I do -- sometimes by the gut, but most everything's calculated." Here Garner introduces two specific grounds for making particular decisions: gut instinct, and rational calculation. He is honest about the fact that some moves that he makes are simply the product of instinct; presumably this instinct stems from experience, so it's not entirely random or mysterious, but it's not directly capturable in rules or procedures. Contrast this to rational calculation, which is a type of decision-making based explicitly on rules and procedures -- what works in situation X and what doesn't.
If everything stemmed from rational calculation, then there'd be no point in having a manager at all; a book of procedures would suffice, and if there were someone called a "manager" involved at all his job would just be to look up the situation in the book and apply the appropriate response. Any agency that the manager has would disappear, as he would become merely the throughput for a set of factors over which he exercised no influence or control. Indeed, in such a situation the manager's only effective exercise of agency would involve ripping up the book, going off course -- acting on instinct rather than according to the rational plan.
The conventional Social Science Project, I think, involves making as much as possible calculable, eliminating the element of uncertainty that comes from not really knowing what the result of some move or decision will be. Garner's abstract comments to this point remain within that conventional project: social science would be the "calculating" part, leaving only the manager's "gut instinct" to serve as a ground for going off the planned course.
But when Garner starts to describe concrete particular moves that he made during the course of the game, this absolute opposition between instinct and calculation vanishes in favor of something else: Garner's specific knowledge of what his team can and cannot do.
Could this decision-process be automated, and replicated by a machine -- or by an abstract decision-making procedure, in accord with the conventional Social Science Project? It could probably be simulated, certainly. And we could probably build a baseball-managing machine that would apply formal rules to situations and arrive at outcomes similar to those that Garner arrived at. But I'm not at all certain that doing so would prove that Garner was really making rational calculations all the time that he was on the field. Just because I can retroactively narrate some situation in particular terms doesn't prove that the situation was really that way; it just demonstrates that we can describe that situation in certain ways. Period. We could describe Garner's decisions as entirely calculated, as he seems wont to do himself, but in so doing we'd miss a lot of the way that those decisions are being produced -- and the subtle ways that Garner keeps redefining "calculated" as he discusses situations.
This is nowhere clearer than in his conclusion, in which he explicitly denies having put Chris Burke in the game in order to hit the game-winning home run that he did hit in the bottom of the 18th inning:
So: three grounds for making decisions, and no simple formula for integrating the three in specific situations. In the gap between these different logics we have agency, understood as the capacity of the manager to have done otherwise than he in fact did. We have responsibility, because Garner can't deflect what he did onto any more solid or objective grounds than his own actions. And we have the subtle combination of art and science that makes baseball such fun to watch.
In this case, what is true of baseball is most likely true of other areas of human social action too. Rules, instincts, and identities concatenate in unique ways in every instance to produce particular decisions; reducing a decision to any one of these three deprives the actor in question of effective agency, as well as making it impossible to meaningfully attribute responsibility to her. If one is going to analyze decisions -- which is not something that I usually do in my work -- or if one is going to make decisions -- which is something that I like everyone else do all the time -- one should keep Garner's comments in mind, and work to develop all three of these capacities.
"Without knowing exactly which moves you're talking about it'd be hard to say," he began, noting from the outset that particular moves have particular rationales and implying that no single kind of decision-making captures or explains all of the choices that one makes in the course of managing a baseball game.
"I do -- sometimes by the gut, but most everything's calculated." Here Garner introduces two specific grounds for making particular decisions: gut instinct, and rational calculation. He is honest about the fact that some moves that he makes are simply the product of instinct; presumably this instinct stems from experience, so it's not entirely random or mysterious, but it's not directly capturable in rules or procedures. Contrast this to rational calculation, which is a type of decision-making based explicitly on rules and procedures -- what works in situation X and what doesn't.
If everything stemmed from rational calculation, then there'd be no point in having a manager at all; a book of procedures would suffice, and if there were someone called a "manager" involved at all his job would just be to look up the situation in the book and apply the appropriate response. Any agency that the manager has would disappear, as he would become merely the throughput for a set of factors over which he exercised no influence or control. Indeed, in such a situation the manager's only effective exercise of agency would involve ripping up the book, going off course -- acting on instinct rather than according to the rational plan.
The conventional Social Science Project, I think, involves making as much as possible calculable, eliminating the element of uncertainty that comes from not really knowing what the result of some move or decision will be. Garner's abstract comments to this point remain within that conventional project: social science would be the "calculating" part, leaving only the manager's "gut instinct" to serve as a ground for going off the planned course.
But when Garner starts to describe concrete particular moves that he made during the course of the game, this absolute opposition between instinct and calculation vanishes in favor of something else: Garner's specific knowledge of what his team can and cannot do.
We have interchangeable parts, moreso, I think, than most of the teams in the playoffs. We have a guy -- Bruntlett -- that can play every position, so if I take any one guy out, and I want to maneuver around the lineup in some way, I have him that I can just keep moving to any position on the field. And he'll play a great defense. And he's actually probably saved three games for us because he's made phenomenal defensive plays. Not to mention the couple he's won with his bat for us in the course of the season.Here we see a subtle combination of calculation and instinct at work, as Garner is able to derive possibilities from his experience with particular players on the team and to formulate different strategies as the game unfolds and the situation changes. The relevant basis here is not rule-based knowledge of which move belongs where, but the kind of practical wisdom that allows the expert manager to grasp conditions of possibility and then work to actualize them. And doing this doesn't mean that one abandons calculation or advance preparation, as Garner's discussion of one of his other moves makes clear:
The other day in our 18-inning game, [Brad] Asmus goes out from behind the plate because I wanted to keep both catchers in because, in case we get into a drawn-out affair and I had to bring Clemens in I want Asmus to catch Clemens, so it predicated a move to keep him in the ballgame at first base and put Chavez in and then flip-flop the two when Clemens came in. But that's not a difficult decision. I'm confident with both of them playing out there because both of them do a good job, and they practice it all the time: they take ground balls, all year long. And I even put Brad at shortstop one game, and first base -- or second base one game I believe it was -- in preparation for something just like this. So they're mostly all calculated."Calculated" has subtly shifted its meaning by the end of this example, and now means "based on experience" rather than "in accord with an abstract specification of rules." Because Asmus and Chavez have practiced taking ground balls at first base, Garner knows that he can put either one of them there and expect that they'll do a good job, but there's no necessary line from this fact about the two of them to the observed outcome. Instead, something else intervenes: Garner's experience-based sense of what he wants to accomplish and how he might best accomplish it, given the resources available to him.
Could this decision-process be automated, and replicated by a machine -- or by an abstract decision-making procedure, in accord with the conventional Social Science Project? It could probably be simulated, certainly. And we could probably build a baseball-managing machine that would apply formal rules to situations and arrive at outcomes similar to those that Garner arrived at. But I'm not at all certain that doing so would prove that Garner was really making rational calculations all the time that he was on the field. Just because I can retroactively narrate some situation in particular terms doesn't prove that the situation was really that way; it just demonstrates that we can describe that situation in certain ways. Period. We could describe Garner's decisions as entirely calculated, as he seems wont to do himself, but in so doing we'd miss a lot of the way that those decisions are being produced -- and the subtle ways that Garner keeps redefining "calculated" as he discusses situations.
This is nowhere clearer than in his conclusion, in which he explicitly denies having put Chris Burke in the game in order to hit the game-winning home run that he did hit in the bottom of the 18th inning:
I would say that there are some things that I feel good about, some things that I don't feel good about but I feel like I have to do -- I didn't want to take Berkmann out of the game the other night, but figure this one out for me: Everybody in the world would say, why would you take Berkmann out 'cause he's the guy that's gonna win the ballgame for you, and the guy I replace him with is the guy that hits a home run to win the ballgame! Now I didn't figure that was gonna happen. But I figured, based on Atlanta's outfield, if we get a base hit there, they're aggressive, they all have good arms and they're accurate, and if we don't take a chance to score I'm not gonna like myself very much the next day, so you gotta do things, in my opinion, that way. So most of it's calculated.Note the sudden emergence of a third ground on which to place decisions: a logic of identity, based neither on instinct nor on calculation. "Because I am X, or because I want to be X -- because I think of myself as X and want to continue doing so tomorrow -- I need to make certain moves, take certain chances, go in certain directions." Here we have a kind of active self-crafting, in which Garner basically produces his identity and his team's identity by going in one direction rather than another. The removal of Berkmann from the game flies in the face of rational calculation, but it isn't an instinctual move -- it is instead based on Garner's sense of who he is and who he wants to be. "I'm not gonna like myself very much the next day" isn't a preference held by a fully-formed rational actor; it's what John Shotter would call "knowing from within," sensing the potentials inherent in a situation and acting on those potentials in such a way as to craft a certain sense of oneself. I get the feeling that if the Astros had lost, Garner would be defending the decision in very similar terms: it may not have worked out quite right but at least we gave it a shot, played our kind of baseball, kept our integrity intact.
So: three grounds for making decisions, and no simple formula for integrating the three in specific situations. In the gap between these different logics we have agency, understood as the capacity of the manager to have done otherwise than he in fact did. We have responsibility, because Garner can't deflect what he did onto any more solid or objective grounds than his own actions. And we have the subtle combination of art and science that makes baseball such fun to watch.
In this case, what is true of baseball is most likely true of other areas of human social action too. Rules, instincts, and identities concatenate in unique ways in every instance to produce particular decisions; reducing a decision to any one of these three deprives the actor in question of effective agency, as well as making it impossible to meaningfully attribute responsibility to her. If one is going to analyze decisions -- which is not something that I usually do in my work -- or if one is going to make decisions -- which is something that I like everyone else do all the time -- one should keep Garner's comments in mind, and work to develop all three of these capacities.
11.10.05
Why I blog, and why I'm not about to stop
Dan Drezner, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and one of the best-known of the current crop of academic bloggers, was denied tenure last week. His very dignified and professional reporting of the fact has apparently touched off a minor panic in the blogosphere, and even made it into the mainstream print media. Suddenly many academic bloggers seem to be wondering whether they should keep doing what they're doing -- whether blogging is, in effect, a bad career move.
The debate is perennial, and it isn't just about blogging. Academia is an odd profession in that there are few if any clear expectations about how one should allot one's time on the job; there are also very few clear signals about whether one is doing a good job or not. Tenure decisions are cloaked in mystery, and pre-tenure reviews are most often written in language that is suggestive but not binding (perhaps so as to prevent lawsuits if someone expected tenure and didn't get it). I have no idea what things are like on the other side of tenure -- I am myself in the same boat as Dan Drezner was until last week, anxiously awaiting a judgment on the massive tenure file that my graduate assistant and I assembled and submitted for review back in September -- but speaking from the Assistant Professor position I can certainly say that I think I've been doing a good job but I have less confidence in that assessment of my performance than some of my friends in non-academic jobs do in theirs.
So the question "should I blog?" is in that way little different than "should I consult?" or "should I protest?" or "should I make a lot of media appearances?" The answer is: I don't know, nobody knows, and it all depends. Depends on what? Well, to be blunt, it depends on your research productivity in the first instance, and on your not pissing people off too much in the second instance. Publishing books and articles in highly-rated places is the central factor in just about every tenure decision at every research university (teaching colleges are different, by definition -- teaching matters much, much more than it does in research universities, even relatively teaching-centric ones like mine). So the basic decision rule for a tenure-track Assistant Professor goes something like this: does doing X take away time from my getting another article or book out there? If yes, then don't do it.
[Obviously, that rule isn't always absolutely followed, since taken to an extreme it means that one shouldn't eat or sleep or go to a baseball game…but the categorical character of the basic rule probably helps to explain why Assistant Professors as a group walk around with very high anxiety levels and nagging feelings of guilt when they're doing almost anything but publishing. It's like being a graduate student, but you get paid more and you get/have to teach classes too. I never maintained that going into academia was a rational decision.]
As for the second decision-rule, well, let's just say that Assistant Professors have to be kind of careful not to really annoy senior colleagues. It's no different than any other profession in that respect; what is different is that there are so many more opportunities to do something that confounds someone's expectations, because those expectations are often idiosyncratic and almost invariably tacit rather than explicitly articulated.
How does blogging stack up in terms of these two criteria? I think that Dan Nexon got it right when he pointed out that blogging doesn't take away from research-and-writing time, but constitutes a part of recreation-and-relaxation time. And lately my wife and I have been sitting down after the kids are in bed to watch the Yankees play, computers on laps, surfing the 'Net, trading observations, and blogging; that time wouldn't be spent in research-and-writing anyway. In addition, there is the fact that the things that I post to my blogs [yes, plural -- this one, Duck of Minerva, and more rarely on Progressive Commons; still trying to figure out exactly what kinds of posts belong where] are both extensions of and elaborations on my scholarly research and my pedagogical practice. Ideas that inform my scholarly writing get floated and debated (for example here and here), so at least some of my blogging is directly related to my research productivity. And I often blog here about science fiction, which is directly related to the "Social/Science/Fiction" seminar I offer once every couple of years.
So blogging doesn't detract from my output as a teacher and a scholar, and might actually enhance it. How about the other criterion? Obviously a blog gives one more of an opportunity to say something publicly that annoys someone else; the blunt nature of the blogging genre, combined with the lack of editorial screening, makes such an occurrence perhaps pretty likely. But it's possible to annoy someone in a faculty meeting, or a public lecture, or while chatting in the hallway, to say nothing of the potential for annoyance involved in allowing oneself to be publicly identified with a political program or agenda. Once again, blogging is no different.
So why are people so concerned about it? Might it be the generally technophobic character of academic practice? As we can see from the resistance to the use of digital projectors, e-mail, IM, and even computers in general by many many members of many many university faculties around the country, academics are a pretty conservative bunch when it comes to their research and teaching practices. (The politics of academics themselves are a wholly separate issue.) Blogging might be getting caught up in a general skepticism about information technology. I can't tell you how many times I've been told that I should cut out the flashy tech and just make presentations the standard way, me alone in front of the room speaking from notes…no, literally, I can't tell you that, because I've only ever heard those comments from senior colleagues and as I said before, rule #2 of getting tenure is Don't Piss Anyone Off Too Much. [I will only say that "colleague" is an expression that refers to any academic, not just to those at one's own institution. And my university is big on teaching with technology, so I face few if any obstacles around here. You do the math.]
So I'm going to keep on blogging. And I'm even going to try to blog in this space more regularly, so keep a watch -- or, better yet, subscribe to the rss feed.
The debate is perennial, and it isn't just about blogging. Academia is an odd profession in that there are few if any clear expectations about how one should allot one's time on the job; there are also very few clear signals about whether one is doing a good job or not. Tenure decisions are cloaked in mystery, and pre-tenure reviews are most often written in language that is suggestive but not binding (perhaps so as to prevent lawsuits if someone expected tenure and didn't get it). I have no idea what things are like on the other side of tenure -- I am myself in the same boat as Dan Drezner was until last week, anxiously awaiting a judgment on the massive tenure file that my graduate assistant and I assembled and submitted for review back in September -- but speaking from the Assistant Professor position I can certainly say that I think I've been doing a good job but I have less confidence in that assessment of my performance than some of my friends in non-academic jobs do in theirs.
So the question "should I blog?" is in that way little different than "should I consult?" or "should I protest?" or "should I make a lot of media appearances?" The answer is: I don't know, nobody knows, and it all depends. Depends on what? Well, to be blunt, it depends on your research productivity in the first instance, and on your not pissing people off too much in the second instance. Publishing books and articles in highly-rated places is the central factor in just about every tenure decision at every research university (teaching colleges are different, by definition -- teaching matters much, much more than it does in research universities, even relatively teaching-centric ones like mine). So the basic decision rule for a tenure-track Assistant Professor goes something like this: does doing X take away time from my getting another article or book out there? If yes, then don't do it.
[Obviously, that rule isn't always absolutely followed, since taken to an extreme it means that one shouldn't eat or sleep or go to a baseball game…but the categorical character of the basic rule probably helps to explain why Assistant Professors as a group walk around with very high anxiety levels and nagging feelings of guilt when they're doing almost anything but publishing. It's like being a graduate student, but you get paid more and you get/have to teach classes too. I never maintained that going into academia was a rational decision.]
As for the second decision-rule, well, let's just say that Assistant Professors have to be kind of careful not to really annoy senior colleagues. It's no different than any other profession in that respect; what is different is that there are so many more opportunities to do something that confounds someone's expectations, because those expectations are often idiosyncratic and almost invariably tacit rather than explicitly articulated.
How does blogging stack up in terms of these two criteria? I think that Dan Nexon got it right when he pointed out that blogging doesn't take away from research-and-writing time, but constitutes a part of recreation-and-relaxation time. And lately my wife and I have been sitting down after the kids are in bed to watch the Yankees play, computers on laps, surfing the 'Net, trading observations, and blogging; that time wouldn't be spent in research-and-writing anyway. In addition, there is the fact that the things that I post to my blogs [yes, plural -- this one, Duck of Minerva, and more rarely on Progressive Commons; still trying to figure out exactly what kinds of posts belong where] are both extensions of and elaborations on my scholarly research and my pedagogical practice. Ideas that inform my scholarly writing get floated and debated (for example here and here), so at least some of my blogging is directly related to my research productivity. And I often blog here about science fiction, which is directly related to the "Social/Science/Fiction" seminar I offer once every couple of years.
So blogging doesn't detract from my output as a teacher and a scholar, and might actually enhance it. How about the other criterion? Obviously a blog gives one more of an opportunity to say something publicly that annoys someone else; the blunt nature of the blogging genre, combined with the lack of editorial screening, makes such an occurrence perhaps pretty likely. But it's possible to annoy someone in a faculty meeting, or a public lecture, or while chatting in the hallway, to say nothing of the potential for annoyance involved in allowing oneself to be publicly identified with a political program or agenda. Once again, blogging is no different.
So why are people so concerned about it? Might it be the generally technophobic character of academic practice? As we can see from the resistance to the use of digital projectors, e-mail, IM, and even computers in general by many many members of many many university faculties around the country, academics are a pretty conservative bunch when it comes to their research and teaching practices. (The politics of academics themselves are a wholly separate issue.) Blogging might be getting caught up in a general skepticism about information technology. I can't tell you how many times I've been told that I should cut out the flashy tech and just make presentations the standard way, me alone in front of the room speaking from notes…no, literally, I can't tell you that, because I've only ever heard those comments from senior colleagues and as I said before, rule #2 of getting tenure is Don't Piss Anyone Off Too Much. [I will only say that "colleague" is an expression that refers to any academic, not just to those at one's own institution. And my university is big on teaching with technology, so I face few if any obstacles around here. You do the math.]
So I'm going to keep on blogging. And I'm even going to try to blog in this space more regularly, so keep a watch -- or, better yet, subscribe to the rss feed.
10.10.05
Serenity
On Friday evening my wife and I went to see the best science fiction film I have seen in a movie theatre in a very long time -- possibly since the first Matrix film came out in 1999. [Yes, I am well aware that Revenge of the Sith came out this summer; no, I don't consider any of the Star Wars films science fiction, for reasons detailed here.] The film is a spectacular piece of storytelling, much as you'd expect from Joss Whedon, and I'm happy to report that the film also extends the television series (Firefly) on which it is based in intriguing ways. After the shoddy treatment that the series received from the idiots at Fox who ran the episodes out of sequence and then refused to even air them all, it's nice to see a little vindication.
[Of course, the vindication is more artistic than commercial, since the film has only made about $18 million and is currently at #8 on the box office gross chart, having been at #2 the previous weekend but losing about 47% in the intervening period. Why more people aren't flocking to see this film is completely beyond me.]
Whedon is a magnificent writer and director -- he can tell a story primarily through dialogue without getting wrapped up in needless explication or didactic delivery. He's not really a visual director, although there are some visually stunning sequences (particularly the close combat episodes). Instead, what is most compelling about Whedon's art is the way that he develops his characters; he draws you in to the lives of the quirky people he depicts, and manages to sketch their portraits quickly with just a few turns of phrase. The early exchange between Mal and Jayne about taking grenades on a job, combined with the later allusion to that situation near the end of the film, tells you almost everything you need to know about their relationship. Zoe's professionalism and her firm deference to Mal suggests the back-story without having to explicitly go into it. And so on.
The most interesting thing for me -- besides the fact that the movie was basically a chance to go and visit with some people on screen I hadn't seen for a while, and whose lives and fates had become quite important -- was watching Whedon basically wrap up the unfinished first season of the series with the budget and script control that he really needed. Given Whedon's penchant for single-season arcs, I suspect that he would have done something like this if the series had been able to continue, answering some of the questions about River and leaving a few things to be developed later on. I found it pretty satisfying, abrupt deaths of main characters aside . . .
It's also interesting to me that both Whedon and Lucas were grappling with similar themes (the problems of a politics oriented towards an absolute ideal) in their films this year, but going about it in almost opposite ways. Lucas, telling an epic, mythic story, focuses on the fall of a particular individual; Whedon, telling a character-driven story largely about a small group's struggle to survive, ends up focusing on a large impersonal set of forces and institutions. We meet none of the perpetrators of the great idealistic project in Whedon's universe; we get an impassioned speech from Mal, but there is no corruption arc in the same way that we see in Lucas' epic. In the end both films take the same (anti-idealist) side, but they get there in very different ways.
There are rumors of more films set in the Serenity universe. I really hope that they get made; I want to see what happens next!
[Of course, the vindication is more artistic than commercial, since the film has only made about $18 million and is currently at #8 on the box office gross chart, having been at #2 the previous weekend but losing about 47% in the intervening period. Why more people aren't flocking to see this film is completely beyond me.]
Whedon is a magnificent writer and director -- he can tell a story primarily through dialogue without getting wrapped up in needless explication or didactic delivery. He's not really a visual director, although there are some visually stunning sequences (particularly the close combat episodes). Instead, what is most compelling about Whedon's art is the way that he develops his characters; he draws you in to the lives of the quirky people he depicts, and manages to sketch their portraits quickly with just a few turns of phrase. The early exchange between Mal and Jayne about taking grenades on a job, combined with the later allusion to that situation near the end of the film, tells you almost everything you need to know about their relationship. Zoe's professionalism and her firm deference to Mal suggests the back-story without having to explicitly go into it. And so on.
The most interesting thing for me -- besides the fact that the movie was basically a chance to go and visit with some people on screen I hadn't seen for a while, and whose lives and fates had become quite important -- was watching Whedon basically wrap up the unfinished first season of the series with the budget and script control that he really needed. Given Whedon's penchant for single-season arcs, I suspect that he would have done something like this if the series had been able to continue, answering some of the questions about River and leaving a few things to be developed later on. I found it pretty satisfying, abrupt deaths of main characters aside . . .
It's also interesting to me that both Whedon and Lucas were grappling with similar themes (the problems of a politics oriented towards an absolute ideal) in their films this year, but going about it in almost opposite ways. Lucas, telling an epic, mythic story, focuses on the fall of a particular individual; Whedon, telling a character-driven story largely about a small group's struggle to survive, ends up focusing on a large impersonal set of forces and institutions. We meet none of the perpetrators of the great idealistic project in Whedon's universe; we get an impassioned speech from Mal, but there is no corruption arc in the same way that we see in Lucas' epic. In the end both films take the same (anti-idealist) side, but they get there in very different ways.
There are rumors of more films set in the Serenity universe. I really hope that they get made; I want to see what happens next!
Sympathetic magic
The fact that today is Columbus Day, so the university is closed -- coupled with the fact that today the Board of Trustees is meeting to (hopefully) make a decision on the fate of President Ladner -- have allowed/encouraged me to stay at home today. (Untenured junior people should not, IMHO, be on the front lines of faculty protests involving the Board or the higher levels of the administration. Self-interest? You betcha. One of the things that goes along with tenure is a certain freedom and flexibility, and with those a certain responsibility, to take the lead on things that one's junior colleagues cannot. Bravo to those of my colleagues who have really stepped up the plate over the past couple of weeks.)
One of the nice things about staying home is that I can try my damnedest to do my part in helping the Yankees win in Anaheim tonight, and thus advance to the ALCS against the White Sox. What's my part? Well, like any fanatic, I believe (with the completely a-rational part of my brain) that by dressing the part I can help to pull my team to victory. I mean, why else would they sell all that merchandise? It's for focusing the sending of positive energy to the guys on the field, right? ;-) So my wife and I are dressed to the hilt in Yankees gear today; I'm typing in a Mike Mussina jersey (Moose pitches tonight, and he's one of my favorite modern Yankees and favorite modern pitchers, so my clothing choice is completely overdetermined today), ball-cap firmly on head, while my wife puts away groceries while wearing a "2003 AL Champions" t-shirt and a blue Yankees hooded sweatshirt.
Yes, even professors (perhaps especially professors) have their irrational streaks.
And the worst part about the whole thing is that we're not even really in the baseball season anymore. It's the "post-season" now, and the modern post-season is nothing but an emotionally manipulative carnival in which our loyalty to particular teams, nurtured and tested and developed over the course of a long season, is mercilessly exploited for a series of contests that bear very little resemblance at all to regular-season baseball. I mean, the regular season is long enough that random fluctuations, by and large, get filtered out, but the post-season is so short and each individual game matters so much that a pair of errors and a bad start by a pitcher can pretty much doom you.
If regular-season baseball is a marathon, the post-season is a long-distance sprint. But a fan can't not watch, can't not care how her or his team is doing; team loyalty doesn't just turn on or turn off as the conditions of the game change. So even though rationally, intellectually, I know full well that the post-season is basically a crap shoot and the best team rarely actually wins in the end, it'd still be terrible to be eliminated by the Angels and not go on to play the White Sox -- and ultimately to play in the World Series. (Because, you know, I'm somehow a part of whatever happens to the team. So "we" are playing in Anaheim tonight, and "we" will go on to play in Chicago tomorrow, and so on…)
I feel emotionally exploited, but you can bet I'll be glued to the television tonight. First pitch, 8:19 EST.
One of the nice things about staying home is that I can try my damnedest to do my part in helping the Yankees win in Anaheim tonight, and thus advance to the ALCS against the White Sox. What's my part? Well, like any fanatic, I believe (with the completely a-rational part of my brain) that by dressing the part I can help to pull my team to victory. I mean, why else would they sell all that merchandise? It's for focusing the sending of positive energy to the guys on the field, right? ;-) So my wife and I are dressed to the hilt in Yankees gear today; I'm typing in a Mike Mussina jersey (Moose pitches tonight, and he's one of my favorite modern Yankees and favorite modern pitchers, so my clothing choice is completely overdetermined today), ball-cap firmly on head, while my wife puts away groceries while wearing a "2003 AL Champions" t-shirt and a blue Yankees hooded sweatshirt.
Yes, even professors (perhaps especially professors) have their irrational streaks.
And the worst part about the whole thing is that we're not even really in the baseball season anymore. It's the "post-season" now, and the modern post-season is nothing but an emotionally manipulative carnival in which our loyalty to particular teams, nurtured and tested and developed over the course of a long season, is mercilessly exploited for a series of contests that bear very little resemblance at all to regular-season baseball. I mean, the regular season is long enough that random fluctuations, by and large, get filtered out, but the post-season is so short and each individual game matters so much that a pair of errors and a bad start by a pitcher can pretty much doom you.
If regular-season baseball is a marathon, the post-season is a long-distance sprint. But a fan can't not watch, can't not care how her or his team is doing; team loyalty doesn't just turn on or turn off as the conditions of the game change. So even though rationally, intellectually, I know full well that the post-season is basically a crap shoot and the best team rarely actually wins in the end, it'd still be terrible to be eliminated by the Angels and not go on to play the White Sox -- and ultimately to play in the World Series. (Because, you know, I'm somehow a part of whatever happens to the team. So "we" are playing in Anaheim tonight, and "we" will go on to play in Chicago tomorrow, and so on…)
I feel emotionally exploited, but you can bet I'll be glued to the television tonight. First pitch, 8:19 EST.
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