I must have a really dirty mind

At first I thought this was porn and felt happy for the progressive Miami people who place it unashamedly for everybody to see in a store window on Lincoln Road.

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Slavoj Zizek on Freedom

I'm sorry, people, but I will continue bombarding you with quotes from Zizek. His writing is so beautiful and powerful, that I simply have to share it. This is Zizek on freedom and the true meaning of democracy:

"In the same way that (market) freedom is unfreedom for those who sell their labor-power, in the same way that the family is undermined by the bourgeouis family as legalized prostitution, democracy is undermined by the parliamentary form with its concomitant passivization of the large majority, as well as by the growing executive power implied by the increasingly influential logic of the emergency state."

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The Beach

The beach here in Miami is beautiful. And as you can see completely empty. Granted, it isn't very sunny today but yesterday it was, and there were few people as well.

This is what always surprised me about American people on every resort I have visited. They pay a lot of money to go to the ocean and they never actually approach the ocean. Sure enough, they care a lot whether they can see it from the hotel room windows. I can't count the number of hissy fits I have observed or read on Tripadvisor about not getting the ocean-view room. But as to spending time on the beach itself, that happens very rarely. Mostly, American tourists prefer to stay by the swimming pool.

I could never understand the joy of spending hours in the pool filled with chloride and dozens of other tourists. There is never any chance of swimming in the pool, or even walking around because it's filled with people. I don't see the fun standing there for hours in the small space you have carved out for yourself among the other bathers. But I guess that's cultural differences for you.

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Coconuts

I've been wondering, what happens if one of these coconuts falls on somebody's head?

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Zizek on Liberal Self-Flagellation

How is it that one only gets to read clear, engaging, powerful philosophical writings coming from a Marxist and a communist? I am neither but I cannot help but admire Slavoj Zizek, a leading contemporary philosopher, who is both. I'm reading his most recent book "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce" as my beach reading, and here is a fantastic quote addressing those so-called liberals who indulge in endless self-gratifying acts of "examining their privilege":

"We white Leftist men and women [should] leave behind the politically correct process of endless self-torturing guilt . . . [Western] politically correct self-flagellation is an inverted form of clinging to one's superiority. . . The positive form of the White Man's Burden (his responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians) is thus merely replaced by its negative form (the burden of the white man's guilt: if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving others of responsibility for their fate (when a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never fully its own responsibility, but always an after effect of colonization)."

I wish everybody with liberal pretensions had these words put up on their walls. This way, every time they feel like masturbating to the sound of their favorite word "privilege", they might remember that the very use of this word makes them sound like the condescending pricks they are.

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Miami, Espanola Way

So I'm in Miami, FL for spring break. This is my first time ever in this city. My very first impression of the city (after we got out of the depressing airport and were driving to our hotel) was "Oh my God, this is Cuba!" The architecture here in South Beach is incredibly similar to what you see in Cuba.

This is a city where you really need to speak Spanish. Everybody seems to be a Spanish speaker which makes me feel very happy.

Miami is, of course, tons of fun after Southern Illinois. All the stores and restaurants were still open at midnight last night. To my timid question "Do you still serve food?" the waiter replied "Of course" and seemed geninely puzzled by the query. He must not have realized that there are places where eating out after 9 pm is completely out of the question.

The weather has been fantastic, the water is warm, and the beach is beautiful. I feel very sorry for my colleagues who are stuck at home and keep exchanging work related emails.

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Happy Women's Day!!!

If you don't celebrate March 8th - the International Women's Day - think about taking up the great, time-honored traditon of celebrating womanhood and all the women in your life.

Books for Spring Break

I'm going to Miami, Florida on my spring break today. The most important thing to pack for a beach vacation (besides my huge pink straw hat, of course) is reading matter. There should be enough variety in it for all kinds of moods, weather conditions, and activities. On top of my regular subscriptions to newspapers and magazines that I get on my Kindle, here are the books I will be taking with me:

1. I got this book as a free gift from the New Left Review.  Zizek is one of the most important philosophers living today, and I absolutely adore his writings. In case you've missed these posts, I wrote about him here and here. Some conservative journalist (whose name I don't remember right now) referred to Zizek as "the most dangerous contemporary philosopher." So you can imagine how fantastic Zizek's writings must be.

I couldn't wait to start this new book and began reading it yesterday. Zizek's writing is clear and incisive, as always. For now, I'm loving First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. Of course, I will write a review of the book, as soon as I finish it.











2.                                      









Since Spanish mystery novels are my new research interest, I feel completely justified in reading as many of them as I can. So I'm bringing these three to the beach with me.

I love my profession. :-)











3. I just discovered that Louise Penny has a whole series of mystery novels set in Quebec. How amazing is that?? I miss Quebec dearly and will love reading about it during my vacations.

I can even kind of justify reading this novel from a scholarly point of view. I do need to familiarize myself with mystery writing in all languages in order  proceed with my research into Spanish detective fiction.

Hopefully, the university will pay for all these books when our money gets unfrozen.

Comment Moderation

Dear Readers:

we now have a nasty troll who is regularly visiting this blog and leaving disgusting, hateful comments.

As a result, I have enabled comment moderation. This means that from now on, there will be a short delay between the moment you send in your comment and the time when it appears under the relevant post. It's sad that one angry, vile individual who has nothing better to do with their sorry excuse for a life should force us to change the way in which we operate. When a blog's popularity grows, trolls start appearing. This is a reality of blogging, and we need to adapt to it.

Hopefully, the troll would soon get tired of sending in comments that never get published and will go away. Then, we will be able to return to our usual mode of operation.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience!

-Clarissa.

Blagojevich on "Celebrity Apprentice"

Maybe I'm the only person in the world who has snoozed on the weird news that former governor of Illinois will appear as a contestant on Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice." Maybe I should start watching television more often because this just seems way too weird to me.

As everyone remembers, Rod Blagojevich was scandalously removed from his position as governor and charged with trying to auction off President Obama's former U.S. Senate seat. And now he will be rewarded for all that by becoming a TV star.

I used to watch "The Apprentice" in the past but I will definitely be boycotting this season. Come on, people, we need to stop rewarding dirty politicians with fame and fortune. How else can we demand honesty and accountability from them?

Student Missionary

A student came to ask me if he can miss a week of classes because he is going to the beach. But not to have fun (which I would have totally understood and encouraged even in this very weak student). Rather, he is going to "approach people on the beach to talk to them about God." Of course, I let him go and allowed him to write a midterm we will have that week after he comes back from his missionary activities. Far be it from me to prevent students from doing whatever it is they feel they need to do at any given moment in their lives.

Still, I had to wonder, what makes young, energetic, fairly intelligent people want to participate in this kind of activity? Why would they go to the beach not to swim, play, flirt, sunbathe, dance, and drink, but to bother people with religious conversations? I'm going for my spring break to the same area where this student will be proselytizing and I cannot imagine how annoying it will be to be approached by somebody who wants to discuss God in such an inappropriate setting. What is it that these young missionaries are getting from bothering unsuspecting sunbathers and making themselves look ridiculous?

I hope nobody tries to convert me to any religion while I'm on the beach. I think I'll take my Star of David with me to protect myself from unwanted proselytization efforts.

Student Cheating: Any Suggestions?

Fellow educators and pedagogues: do you have any suggestions on how to deal with the following situation? My students were writing a mid-term yesterday. After the exam, one of my students (who is also my most brilliant student) told me that another student cheated. Apparently, she had notes on her Ipod and kept consulting them. I looked at the exam and I believe that the student in question was, in fact, cheating. She is a very weak student and her answers to the questions were way too perfect.

Of course, I felt angry and disgusted. I even had nightmares because cheating and plagiarism always traumatize me too much.

So the question is: what should I do about the cheating student? I haven't caught her in the process because I always trust students not to do these things. But I don't think it's right simply to let it go and give her 100% for an exam she wrote by cheating.

Any suggestions?

Kudos to Mexico City

Fantastic news from Mexico City: yesterday marriage equality won in this city. Lesbian and gay couples can now get married there.

Hopefully, we will soon see gay marriage legalized everywhere in the US as well.

Survey on Contraception

Another sex-related survey shows how little people know about birth control:

-Among people who are in sexually active relationships and want to prevent pregnancy, 19% use no contraception at all. 24% use contraception inconsistently.

-42% of men and 40% of women believe that your chances of getting pregnant within one year while on the birth control pill are 50% or greater (the pill is actually about 92% effective with typical use).

-18% of men believe you can reduce the risk of pregnancy if you have sex standing up.

-24% of American singles believe that using two condoms is more effective than using one.

-25% of young men believe that douching after sex can prevent pregnancy.

-29% of men and 32% of women reported knowing “little or nothing about condoms.” 78% of men and 45% of women said the same about birth control pills.

And 90% believe they have all the knowledge they need to prevent an unplanned pregnancy.

The survey doesn't mention all those really misguided people who believe that interrupting a sex act is a reliable method of birth control. I wonder how many people actually believe that silly myth.
 
Taken together, the previous survey that I published here and this one present a depressing picture of a culture woefully ignorant about sexuality in all of its aspects.

What Counts As Sex: Stupidity or Repression

There is this hilarious study that shows just how profoundly puritanical this society is:

The study, published in the February issue of the journal Sexual Health, randomly surveyed 486 adults, most of them heterosexual, between the ages of 18 and 96. They were asked the following question: "Would you say you 'had sex' with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was [blank]," and then followed more than a dozen "behavior specific items." A press release reports that "two out of ten people did not concur that penile-anal intercourse was sex, and three out of ten said 'no' to oral-genital activity, as did half of the respondents about manual-genital contact." And, while 95 percent classified penile-vaginal penetration as sex (one has to wonder what does count for the remaining 5 percent), that number dropped to 89 percent in cases where the man doesn't ejaculate.

Some bloggers have expressed an opinion that people who were questioned for this study are simply stupid. I believe, however, that this survey reflects the sad reality of a society where people have been told that sex is bad and dirty so many times that now they pretend that many obviously sexual activites don't "count" as sex. I have witnessed many convoluted discussions where people would try to define what should "count" as sex without being able to explain why they have the need for "counting" anything in the first place.

Until there is no stigma attached to a happy and healthy sexuality, we will see these weird results on sex-related questionnaires.

Action to Defend Higher Education

It's nice to know that my former colleagues at Yale are not giving up on their important struggle to defend higher education. I just received this Solidarity Statement in honor of the March 4 National Day of Action to defend Higher Education, called for by faculty, students and academic workers in the University of California system:

Unlike most state Universities, Yale continues to prosper in the current economic recession. Yale's endowment is at $17 billion--up $5 billion from when I arrived on campus a few years ago?its $2 billion building projects are progressing, including the two new residential colleges, and it still enjoys extensive funds from the federal government and private companies. Yet over the past year, the Yale administration has decided to cut staff across the university, reduce graduate departments, and further shift the teaching to part-time adjuncts. Yale is not in an economic crisis, but its decisions--made by a handful of administrators--has serious consequences for graduate teachers, union members, and the New Haven community.
On March 4, GESO alongside its allies in the Yale unions will call on the administration to stop using the global economic crisis as justification for restructuring work at Yale in a corporate model, and instead to use its wealth and prestige to set an example for the rest of the academy and ensure good jobs for all. We are holding a panel with a diverse group of workers, faculty and students, to be followed by a march to President Levin's office to deliver the following Solidarity Statement:
*******
Across the country, university administrators are responding to the current recession by accelerating the adoption of a corporate model, including the centralization of governance in fewer hands and casualization of secure full-time jobs. Yale has invoked the current global economic crisis to justify multiple rounds of budget cuts, staffing reductions, and restructuring of teaching and graduate education. However, Yale is in a fundamentally different economic position than its public counterparts: it has a robust endowment, an influx of federal funding, and the ability to borrow large sums inexpensively. On this national day of action to defend higher education, we therefore call on the Yale administration to use its wealth and unique position to respond to the current crisis in a way that sets a better model. It should open up its decision-making process, expand the number of good jobs on campus, ensure high-quality education by reversing the casualization of teaching staff, and invest in the surrounding community.

The economic crisis has been a dream come true for administrations of many universities who now have a perfect excuse to cut-down on tenure-track positions and advance the casualization of higher education. This process had been going on long before the crisis, but now it has become even more agressive.
I wish I could be marching together with my colleagues at Yale right now.

Asperger's Test

A reader Triin whose blog on Asperger's is located here has been kind enough to leave a link to the Aspie quiz which is a lot better than the short and unreliable Baron-Cohen test. It takes into account the neurology of Asperger's without getting too hung up on the qualities that are often attributed to Asperger's out of simple lack of knowledge about it.

I score 179 out 200, which is really not surprising to me.

College: What IS Our Children Learning?

I just read an interesting article in Harvard Magazine that discusses the frenetic pace today's undergrads set for themselves.

Students today routinely sprint through jam-packed daily schedules, tackling big servings of academic work plus giant helpings of extracurricular activity in a frenetic tizzy of commitments. They gaze at their Blackberries (nicknamed “Crackberries” for their addictive pull) throughout the day to field the digital traffic: e-mail and text messages, phone calls, Web access, and their calendars. Going or gone are late-night bull sessions with roommates and leisurely two-hour lunches—phone calls and texting punctuate meals, anyway.

“They are unbelievably achieving,” says Judith H. Kidd, formerly associate dean for student life and activities, who retired from Harvard last year. “They are always on. They prefer to be busy all the time, and multitask in ways I could not imagine. Students will sign up for three or four activities and take one of them up to practically NGO level.

I have discussed this sad phenomenon with my students both at Ivy League schools and my current public school. They tell me that their lives are, indeed, a frenzy of assignments, extracurricular activities, commitments, cramming, and all-nighters. I routinely end my classes by saying "Have a nice day and don't work too much" or "Have a nice weekend and don't forget to have fun." These statements are always greeted with exhausted sardonic smiles and a litany of everything they need to accomplish before the end of the day (week, month, etc.)

The problem with this frenzied lifestyle jammed with endless activities and assignments is that it leaves no space for thinking and creativity:

The paradox is that students now live in such a blur of activity that idle moments for such introspection are vanishing. The French film director Jean Renoir once declared, “The foundation of all civilization is loitering,” saluting those unstructured chunks of time that give rise to creative ideas. If Renoir is right, and if Harvard students are among the leaders of the future, then civilization is on the precipice: loitering is fast becoming a lost art.

As a result, our graduates know how to follow instructions and work themselves into an utter exhaustion but they have no idea how to think originally or express their creativity. Recently, students asked me for a a study guide for our next exam. "There is no study guide," I said. "You will have to express your own opinions on the texts we read and the paintings we have discussed." "Is there a study guide on how to do that?" asked one of the students very seriously. Once again, the most pressing question for us, the educators, is whether the goal of education is to produce people who can follow orders even at an enormous cost to themselves or people who know how to think and don't need a study guide to express their own opinions.

Often, I would see a student reading and ask them: "Are you reading this for fun?" They would stare at me with a terrified, deer-in-the-headlights look and say: "Oh no, this is for a class. Who's got the time to read for fun?" When even reading becomes yet another unwelcome but stoically survived chore, the future of education becomes very unpromising.

This overachieving streak in today's undergrads has gotten so bad that I always look hopefully at an occasional student who saunters into class late, forgets to prepare for a test and substitutes the answers with some creative personal statements, and to the question "Did you have fun on weekend?" answers with a loud "I'm still too hungover even to remember."

As teachers, we are to blame for this sad state of things just as much as anybody else. Often, university courses set as their main goal stuffing as much information as possible into the students' heads. In practical terms, this makes very little sense since most of the dates, numbers, and definitions that our students are asked to memorize can be easily found if needed through an Internet search engine. The most popular format for tests and mini-quizzes - a multiple choice test - pointedly leaves no room for creativity. Students are given choices and the only thing they are expected to contribute is a tick next to the "correct" choice. As a result, students feel completely lost when the format of a test is a blank page that has to be filled with their own thoughts.

We have to remember that there is no intellectual achievement without ample leisure time. I know I have said it before, but this needs to be repeated as often as possible. You cannot be creative on a schedule. Ideas don't get generated because there is a deadline. Originality of thought escapes from people who routinely go on 5 hours of sleep. Let's stop teaching our students to parrot what we say and start teaching them to think for themselves.

Asperger's and Teaching

Often, people say: "Asperger's? But how can you possibly teach if you have it? It must be a torture!" They are wrong. Many people with Asperger's thrive as teachers. It's the unstructured, unscheduled and unplanned communications that are a struggle. If I can prepare for an encounter and especially if the roles are strictly defined (me - teacher, you - student), teaching offers a welcome release from some of the issues attendant on having Asperger's.

Except on bad days, of course. They don't happen often but they do happen. And when they do, many things become a lot more difficult. Speaking becomes kind of a challenge. Which is not a good thing for a huge lecture class. You start speaking and then you kind of blank out and stand there with your mouth wide open hoping that the words will come eventually. To make matters worse, today I scheduled an observer to come to my class. The colleague who came to observe is a very nice person, and even if he noticed my unexpected pauses I don't think he will mention them in a report. Still, it didn't make me happy to have observation coincide with one of the bad days.

As I wrote before, Asperger's has many positive sides and I would not be without it if you paid me for it. It's not all fun and games, however, and bad days prove that everything good comes at a price.

By the way, it took me almost an hour to write this short post because on bad days my vision also gets impaired and I keep hitting the wrong keys.

Not to worry, though. It usually goes away by the next day.

Did You Know That Ukraine…

This post first appeared as a guest post at Ktravula – a travelogue.

• Is the second largest country in Europe? (If we don’t count Russia, which is located in Asia for the most part, anyways.) Even among my blog visitors, I have had people who refer to Ukraine as “a tiny country in Eastern Europe.” One look at the map, however, is enough to demonstrate that Ukraine’s territory is large and its population is 1,5 times larger than the population of Canada.
• Has the most fertile soils in Europe? Ukrainian soil is so fertile that people have been known to remove the top level of soil and sell it to other countries simply because everything grows and flourishes on it.
• Has a tradition of democracy that dates back to the XVI century? This makes Ukraine a country with the most longstanding tradition of democracy in modern Europe.
• Started a sexual revolution around 1910? While people in the US and Western Europe had to wait until the mid-sixties for their sexual revolution, a famous Ukrainian writer and the future prime-minister of the first independent Ukrainian Republic Volodimir Vinnychenko dedicated his career as a writer to promoting the ideas of sexual liberation, free love, and the rights of women. His books were hugely popular all over Europe in the first half of the XXth century.
• Has a strong anti-imperialist tradition? In spite of being surrounded by fiercely imperialist countries, Ukraine never followed their example and absorbed the imperialist way of thinking. Even when Ukrainian troops would repel the invaders and enter the territory of the invading country, they would turn back and leave without trying to retain foreign territories.
• Had slavery until 1861? Under the name “serfdom”, the tradition of slavery existed and was very wide-spread in Ukraine until 1861.
• Was the site of one of the greatest modern genocides? In 1932-3, over 10 million Ukrainians were exterminated by the Soviet government in an attempt to wipe out any resistance to the imperial subjection of Ukraine by the Soviet Union. Today, the government of Russia is engaged in endless propaganda that denies that Ukrainian Holocaust ever took place.
• Has recently elected a convicted criminal to be its president? Viktor Yanukovich, a recently elected president of Ukraine, was incarcerated for robbery and assault in 1967 and for assault in 1970. It is said that his second crime was a rape that was eventually pleaded down to assault.
• Does not require a definite article before its name? Many people still say “the Ukraine” instead of “Ukraine.” Not only is this grammatically incorrect, it is also kind of annoying.
• Has one of the most melodic languages in the world? According to a study by the French Academy of Fine Arts, Ukraine has the world’s second most melodic language after Italian. I’m not sure that I agree about the entire world, but it’s definitely one of the most beautiful sounding languages in Europe. Sadly, the language is disappearing because centuries of colonial domination and propaganda cause many Ukrainians to be deeply ashamed of their cultural and linguistic heritage.