From a report for the AAUP by John Curtis and Monica F. Jacobe:
By the way, 2009 update here.
making connections as both a hobby and a job
I came across an interview with Umberto Eco, while looking for a line he wrote about the good fortune of having your hobby be your job. I’m currently tackling the issue of how there are multiple career trajectories that lead people into nonstandard work, tourism, and how larger forces of deindustrialization and service labor affects the world of the walking tour guide. Anyway, this wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but it’s close and interesting enough. It also gets at why I really believe that walking guides are doing intellectual work in the streets.
TAIJE SILVERMAN: You’re likely in a single paragraph to describe Superman, Santería, California’s wax museums, Communism, and the Middle Ages, and make them all seem effortlessly connected. How do you keep so much information in your head at once? Is your tendency to cross-reference so wildly an intuitive one, or is it more that you are just having fun?
UMBERTO ECO: Well, I know a lot of people who keep more information in their head than me. And live happily forever!
I think the moving element is a curiosity. If you are curious, you absorb what you see and you keep it in your memory. And in learning it, you feel pleasure. Even though it can be tiring. This problem, I know, belongs to the privileged person like me. Many of my fellow human beings work, and then when they are free they cultivate a hobby. For people like me, the job is the hobby. They’re the same thing. So you can work even during the night, and still have fun. I know this is a privilege. A lot of people cannot do it. They are obliged to work, perhaps at an office, making calculations. And then they might read a book.
The other side of the story is that if your job is the same as your hobby, you can, unfortunately, never have the pleasure of sitting down and reading a book. Because even when you read a book, you’re speculating about it as if it were your job. So you lose some of the pleasure which other people might get. But in general, I think, yes: the fact of identifying two sides of your activity is a real fortune.
TAIJE SILVERMAN: Are you constantly making connections between everything?
UMBERTO ECO: [Laughs] No! I spend my time stopping myself from making connections. Trying not to exaggerate.
visual information
I’m getting increasingly interested in unconventional visual representations of data. My old roommate, Ben Stewart turned me on to Edward Tufte, and since then I’ve also become fond of ‘Earl Boykin’s‘ fantastical charts. Flowcharts, however, appear to be the wave of the future. (The first one might need a little more thinking through, since I think that ‘Tell Them’ may or may not need to be connected to ‘Oh Snap!’)
From Flickr, Boing Boing, & the adorable (and available on a t-shirt) Toothpaste for Dinner. But there is also Junk Charts and Sociological Images that are both worth checking out.
summer reading & jobs
As the summer comes to an end, I do feel a lament over the things that I never got to read. I won’t offer a third rate Polysyllabic Spree, but I will say that I was lucky enough to get through Colson Whitehead’s fabulous John Henry Days, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Alan Weisman’s fun, peopleless thought experiment, The World Without Us, Harry Potter #7, and Don Quixote. Quite the mix. I was, however, fortunate enough to stay with my fabulous landlords in Madrid, on the street where Cervantes lived and wrote the latter book (a few blocks from the Prado), to add to the resonance of the experience. Interesting story: Cervantes lived on Calle de Lope De Vega, a street that was named for a famous contemporary of Cervantes. The two of them didn’t care for each other, and Cervantes apparently wrote in dozens of under-the-radar digs on the more upper crust De Vega (who was no slouch,
writing 1,500 to 2,500 plays during his lifetime). The last laugh was on Cervantes, whose name now graces the street that De Vega lived on, whose house we toured. I just squeezed in two last books (yes, on Labor Day): Christopher Hitchens’ Letters to a Young Contrarian and F.M. Cornford’s 1908 Microcosmographica Academica (‘A Study of a Tiny Academic World’). The latter is a short screed on academic life. There are a few nice lines in it, and it’s pretty timeless. Here’s a line about academic posturing and jobs:
This most important branch of political activity is, of course, closely connected with Jobs. These fall into two classes, My Jobs and Your Jobs. My Jobs are public-spirited proposals, which happen (much to my regret) to involve the advancement of a personal friend, or (still more to my regret) of myself. Your Jobs are insidious intrigues for the advancement of yourself and your friends, speciously disguised as public-spirited proposals. The term Job is more commonly applied to the second class. When you and I have, each of us, a job on hand, we shall proceed to go on the Square.
I’ll just post that with only this comment: I find it depressing that Cornford saw this text as a guide to the young academic, and that by 35 one becomes too “complacent and, in turn, become the oppressor.” Alas, it’s almost too late before I’ve had a chance! You can read the entirety–which includes a few nice lines about ‘the principle of the wedge’ and discussions on academic bugbears here.
more academics rounded up
On the heels of German sociologists being taken into custody as suspected terrorists, the Guardian reports that academics are being rounded up in Bangladesh.
the hottest…
It’s with mixed emotions that I can report that I taught at the ‘hottest school for first generation students’ and that I am currently teaching at the ‘hottest women’s college.’
urban ethnographers imprisoned in berlin
Studying urban life in Berlin was one of the formative experiences of my graduate career, and working with Hartmut Häussermann deeply influenced by research, both for my dissertation and my current project on festivals. (It was, in fact his term ‘festivalization’ that got me thinking about the ways in which festivals work as de facto urban cultural policy.)
This is, of course, minor in relation to what got me thinking about him recently: one of his students has been arrested and placed into solitary confinement for supposed membership in a terrorist group. The crux of the argument against him appears to be (or so we were briefed at the ASA by Neil Brenner) that his research on gentrification mimics the writings of the terrorist group. He uses “key words and phrases” of the group and has “access” to university libraries is a part of it as well. Thankfully, a group of fellow urbanists have made the press aware of it. Sign a petition here.