WALLPAPERS(by munawar 9949935350)

Here is an update of the sunflower that I captured earlier in the blog. Quite strange how only half of it is really opening…

You can purchase seeds for these plants here!

Here is an update of the sunflower that I captured earlier in the blog. Quite strange how only half of it is really opening…

You can purchase seeds for these plants here!

Here is an update of the sunflower that I captured earlier in the blog. Quite strange how only half of it is really opening…

You can purchase seeds for these plants here!

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings wants to reform higher education by creating and delivering tests to measure the performance of students around the nation’s universities.  Standardized testing is supposed to combat the perceived decline of the American university (its over expansion or its decline?).  But the effects of standardized testing go well beyond mere sorting of data, into the sorting and assimilating of the humans who compose institutions.  As anyone familiar with the public school system knows already, that sorting can be deadly to the very kinds of serendipity and creativity that nurture the talents of the best students or foster hope in the fallers-behind.  Standardized testing standardizes: it lays waste the creative teacher; it creates universal patterns of education where the least requirement becomes the standard. 

First, a personal anecdote.  The SAT is the universal American standardized test required for undergraduate admissions; the eight subject GRE’s measure learning and performance of undergraduate achievement, and are universally used for graduate school admission, and, in many systems, ranking funding.  Now, as anyone who has read my blog knows, I represent perfect genius with words.  I got a nearly perfect score on the verbal SAT (go me).  Then I went to Harvard, where I studied Latin, Greek, French, and German.  I wrote stacks of essays every week for four years, and turned in a required, and then lauded, honors thesis of a hundred pages for the Comparative Literature department.   By all accounts, my familiarity with language should have improved.

And then I took the GRE, where my scores were disastrous.  My language skills had, by the account of the test, plummetted in four years from the 99th percentile to the seventy-fifth.  One of two things could have happened. One, four years of advanced education actually reduced my command and control of language relative to other educated individuals. Two, four years of advanced education had reoriented my understanding of what was important, and trained me to think rather than perform, to innovate rather than to regurgitate; and both of those tendencies show up, in the standardized test, as a failure.

Did it matter?  Fortunately I had good letters of recommendation, and for the particular departments to which I applied, these mattered far more than the standardized scores. The universities and major funding bodies, however, largely base their financing of graduate students on GRE scores, which allows them to report to their shareholders that they are doing an objective and merit-based job of dispersing funds. As a result, I spent my first years of graduate school teaching heavy undergraduate loads and applying heavily to external funding bodies. The GRE did matter, and it didn’t like me.

Standardized testing, as historian Nicholas Lemann
pointed out in his marvelous study of the SAT’s uses and origins, has
long been a tool of governments to reassure and comfort with promises
of equality and prosperity, whilst subtly picking and shading a ruling
class who look and think exactly alike, and exorcising the demons of
creative thought and serendipitous learning from the institutions of
education.

There’s a lot of valid worry about what the universal requirement of higher education means in America.  The decline of public education and the postwar GI Act combined to launch a generation with virtually universal expectations of benefitting from the university system.  Once a high school degree was enough to launch a young person into a lifetime of entrepreneurship, citizenship, and self-improvement; now an undergraduate degree is recommended even for those applying to be grocery checkers at Trader Joe’s. 

The shift in awareness has had real effects on institutions: the plurality of new state auxiliary university campuses; the extention of graduate school from three to six or ten year degrees in order to supply an advanced corps of professors for these colleges; the trade in online and continuing education degrees online and through the community college system.  Anecdotally the system spells the prolonging of adolescence.  The financial burden of this higher education system, unlike the system of the public schools, falls mainly onto parents. 

Spelling’s plan would pitch the universities into exactly the same quandaries that now plague the public schools, without extending the benefits of the university to more bodies.  The problem is not a want of teachers.  There are thousands upon thousands of overeducated PhDs currently unable to find suitable jobs in the education system; unwilling to downgrade the years of their training to become a professional at the local community college.  These PhDs are overtrained, eager for posts in any serious department of their colleagues, prepared to dedicate an entire lifetime to educating 18-year-olds.  All that they need are departments and university structures willing to pay them to be serious scholars.  This is a problem not in the teaching or the curriculum, but only in the structure of university administration itself.  Correct balances of revenue and expenditure, of research and hiring, can only be solved through entrepreneurial action among university administrators. 

In the best possible case, a secretary of education could nurture that entrepreneurial mindset among the deans of higher education, through seminars, conferences, training programs.  In the worst possible case, a secretary of education could, instead, disband the whole reason for higher education in the first place.  The solution cannot be to treat the most overeducated and underpaid class of professionals in the world with punitive reforms, as if they were sleepy box-packers, as if they needed management to come in, as if mere rating and reproval would increase their output. 

The solution cannot be to treat higher education professionals as if they were public school teachers.  Perhaps the solution might be to treat public school teachers as if they were higher education professionals. 

Technorati Tags: college, university, higher education reform, margaret spelling, bush, education policy, government policy, sat, gre, standardized testing, nicholas lemann, meritocracy, professionals, graduate school, graduate students, phds, training, education,

Technorati Tags: college, university, higher education reform, margaret spelling, bush, education policy, government policy, sat, gre, standardized testing, nicholas lemann, meritocracy, professionals, graduate school, graduate students, phds, training, education,

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings wants to reform higher education by creating and delivering tests to measure the performance of students around the nation’s universities.  Standardized testing is supposed to combat the perceived decline of the American university (its over expansion or its decline?).  But the effects of standardized testing go well beyond mere sorting of data, into the sorting and assimilating of the humans who compose institutions.  As anyone familiar with the public school system knows already, that sorting can be deadly to the very kinds of serendipity and creativity that nurture the talents of the best students or foster hope in the fallers-behind.  Standardized testing standardizes: it lays waste the creative teacher; it creates universal patterns of education where the least requirement becomes the standard. 

First, a personal anecdote.  The SAT is the universal American standardized test required for undergraduate admissions; the eight subject GRE’s measure learning and performance of undergraduate achievement, and are universally used for graduate school admission, and, in many systems, ranking funding.  Now, as anyone who has read my blog knows, I represent perfect genius with words.  I got a nearly perfect score on the verbal SAT (go me).  Then I went to Harvard, where I studied Latin, Greek, French, and German.  I wrote stacks of essays every week for four years, and turned in a required, and then lauded, honors thesis of a hundred pages for the Comparative Literature department.   By all accounts, my familiarity with language should have improved.

And then I took the GRE, where my scores were disastrous.  My language skills had, by the account of the test, plummetted in four years from the 99th percentile to the seventy-fifth.  One of two things could have happened. One, four years of advanced education actually reduced my command and control of language relative to other educated individuals. Two, four years of advanced education had reoriented my understanding of what was important, and trained me to think rather than perform, to innovate rather than to regurgitate; and both of those tendencies show up, in the standardized test, as a failure.

Did it matter?  Fortunately I had good letters of recommendation, and for the particular departments to which I applied, these mattered far more than the standardized scores. The universities and major funding bodies, however, largely base their financing of graduate students on GRE scores, which allows them to report to their shareholders that they are doing an objective and merit-based job of dispersing funds. As a result, I spent my first years of graduate school teaching heavy undergraduate loads and applying heavily to external funding bodies. The GRE did matter, and it didn’t like me.

Standardized testing, as historian Nicholas Lemann
pointed out in his marvelous study of the SAT’s uses and origins, has
long been a tool of governments to reassure and comfort with promises
of equality and prosperity, whilst subtly picking and shading a ruling
class who look and think exactly alike, and exorcising the demons of
creative thought and serendipitous learning from the institutions of
education.

There’s a lot of valid worry about what the universal requirement of higher education means in America.  The decline of public education and the postwar GI Act combined to launch a generation with virtually universal expectations of benefitting from the university system.  Once a high school degree was enough to launch a young person into a lifetime of entrepreneurship, citizenship, and self-improvement; now an undergraduate degree is recommended even for those applying to be grocery checkers at Trader Joe’s. 

The shift in awareness has had real effects on institutions: the plurality of new state auxiliary university campuses; the extention of graduate school from three to six or ten year degrees in order to supply an advanced corps of professors for these colleges; the trade in online and continuing education degrees online and through the community college system.  Anecdotally the system spells the prolonging of adolescence.  The financial burden of this higher education system, unlike the system of the public schools, falls mainly onto parents. 

Spelling’s plan would pitch the universities into exactly the same quandaries that now plague the public schools, without extending the benefits of the university to more bodies.  The problem is not a want of teachers.  There are thousands upon thousands of overeducated PhDs currently unable to find suitable jobs in the education system; unwilling to downgrade the years of their training to become a professional at the local community college.  These PhDs are overtrained, eager for posts in any serious department of their colleagues, prepared to dedicate an entire lifetime to educating 18-year-olds.  All that they need are departments and university structures willing to pay them to be serious scholars.  This is a problem not in the teaching or the curriculum, but only in the structure of university administration itself.  Correct balances of revenue and expenditure, of research and hiring, can only be solved through entrepreneurial action among university administrators. 

In the best possible case, a secretary of education could nurture that entrepreneurial mindset among the deans of higher education, through seminars, conferences, training programs.  In the worst possible case, a secretary of education could, instead, disband the whole reason for higher education in the first place.  The solution cannot be to treat the most overeducated and underpaid class of professionals in the world with punitive reforms, as if they were sleepy box-packers, as if they needed management to come in, as if mere rating and reproval would increase their output. 

The solution cannot be to treat higher education professionals as if they were public school teachers.  Perhaps the solution might be to treat public school teachers as if they were higher education professionals. 

Technorati Tags: college, university, higher education reform, margaret spelling, bush, education policy, government policy, sat, gre, standardized testing, nicholas lemann, meritocracy, professionals, graduate school, graduate students, phds, training, education,

Technorati Tags: college, university, higher education reform, margaret spelling, bush, education policy, government policy, sat, gre, standardized testing, nicholas lemann, meritocracy, professionals, graduate school, graduate students, phds, training, education,

Here is a picture of a butterfly that was taken up in Michigan’s upper peninsula. Amazing patterns on the butterfly! I am not sure what kind of butterfly it is, maybe you know…..

Here is a picture of a butterfly that was taken up in Michigan’s upper peninsula. Amazing patterns on the butterfly! I am not sure what kind of butterfly it is, maybe you know…..

Here is a picture of a butterfly that was taken up in Michigan’s upper peninsula. Amazing patterns on the butterfly! I am not sure what kind of butterfly it is, maybe you know…..

I’ve just been reading Lauren Berlant’s essay, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture.”   I got here by following the literature on emotionology.  The history of emotions has been getting a lot of academic press of late.  It’s a fascinating field (did happiness then mean the same as happiness now?), but most fascinating to me, it overlaps greatly with the literature on the city, every-day objects, and material culture. 

Berlant’s own work is on the emotion of every-day experience.  She has written, for example, on how  Hawthorne uses the close reading of everyday visual objects in his text (the American eagle in the “Custom House,”  the scarlet letter in that novel) to deconstruct the nationalist utopianism they seamlessly symbolize. 

In this essay, she wants to argue for the compatibility of critical inquiry and phenomenology.  For Berlant, analysis of the every-day leads perhaps most intimately to the unpacking of unconsciously accepted frameworks.  Focusing on the everyday is focusing on the purely social and personal, rather the disciplinary or governmental: 

“To talk about the senses is to involve oneself in a discussion of the optimism of attachment, the sociability of persons across things, spaces, and practices.  It represents a turn to the human without resurrecting, necessarily, a metaphysical subject, for sensual experiences and emotions are usually thought about, these days, in contexts of enunciation and experience – the nation, the law, the family, religion, mass culture, or aesthetic ambition, for example.” 448

She wants to validate two paradoxical impulses in the scholarship:

• de-universalizing the senses – the tendency of Miriam Hansen’s work on vernacular modernism and cinema — which is about historicizing perception to a specific place and time
• the affirmative character of criticism, which depends on trusting the senses to convey some objective reality, referred to by Herbert Marcuse as “affirmative culture”.  Thus utopian, avant-garde, or even merely difficult art that seeks to slow down and thus interfere with culture rarely overturns anything, because it reinforces the absorption and consumption of the bourgeois subject.  She’s not the first to have noticed how much twentieth-century criticism depends upon replicating the very distanced, male gaze that it was trying to tear down.  She summarizes the problem deftly: critical theorists experience an “anxiety over critical theory’s own optimism.”

According to Berlant, the way out of this legitimate anxiety is to focus back on the every day, the human, the emotional.  And then to ask questions about the origins of those emotions, of those attachments to material things.  Where did they come from?  What to they mean?  How exactly is the scarlet letter A with its overwhelming, instantaneous message bound up with a world-view or a theology or a sense of individual worth that we as a society have already discarded?

Berlant’s practical solution, then, is to launch a series of feminist cells throughout American cities, where artists and academics come to talk about being depressed, being happy, and how many of those feelings are structured by participation in social forms that they’d rather avoid.

Her “feel tank” investigates “political depression” as an exit strategy to the collective guilt of voting without hope.  By focusing on negative and suppressed emotions like this guilt, they aim to identify and jettison public feelings that don’t belong to them. 

Conclusion #1: think out your depression.  Where’s it coming from? Your depression probably *is* political.  All emotions are, even as language is. 

Conclusion #2: If the big, big gaze from the prospect only helps you see what everybody else is seeing, looking closely at the world around you might be the best way out.  The “close reading” practice of literature scholars is embraced as the first step to the “negative dialectic” of unravelling the norms of one’s own culture.  For Berlant and her peers, the close reading needs to start not merely in the text but also in the material world. The material object leads all the way back into the world of emotions, repressions, social expectations.  Look at stuff.  Wonder how it got there.  Write about it.  Your material world is structured by the same forces that structure your emotional life. 

Read more:
Google Scholar search on Lauren Berlant

Technorati Tags: emotion, emotionology, depression, politics, negative dialectic, herbert marcuse, lauren berlant, material culture, material history, mary poovey, collective guilt, feel tank, happiness, critical inquiry, criticism, close reading, hawthorne, the scarlet letter, miriam hansen, vernacular modernism, cinema, scholarship, academics, literature, culture, the senses, utopianism, every-day experience

Technorati Tags: emotion, emotionology, depression, politics, negative dialectic, herbert marcuse, lauren berlant, material culture, material history, mary poovey, collective guilt, feel tank, happiness, critical inquiry, criticism, close reading, hawthorne, the scarlet letter, miriam hansen, vernacular modernism, cinema, scholarship, academics, literature, culture, the senses, utopianism, every-day experience

I’ve just been reading Lauren Berlant’s essay, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture.”   I got here by following the literature on emotionology.  The history of emotions has been getting a lot of academic press of late.  It’s a fascinating field (did happiness then mean the same as happiness now?), but most fascinating to me, it overlaps greatly with the literature on the city, every-day objects, and material culture. 

Berlant’s own work is on the emotion of every-day experience.  She has written, for example, on how  Hawthorne uses the close reading of everyday visual objects in his text (the American eagle in the “Custom House,”  the scarlet letter in that novel) to deconstruct the nationalist utopianism they seamlessly symbolize. 

In this essay, she wants to argue for the compatibility of critical inquiry and phenomenology.  For Berlant, analysis of the every-day leads perhaps most intimately to the unpacking of unconsciously accepted frameworks.  Focusing on the everyday is focusing on the purely social and personal, rather the disciplinary or governmental: 

“To talk about the senses is to involve oneself in a discussion of the optimism of attachment, the sociability of persons across things, spaces, and practices.  It represents a turn to the human without resurrecting, necessarily, a metaphysical subject, for sensual experiences and emotions are usually thought about, these days, in contexts of enunciation and experience – the nation, the law, the family, religion, mass culture, or aesthetic ambition, for example.” 448

She wants to validate two paradoxical impulses in the scholarship:

• de-universalizing the senses – the tendency of Miriam Hansen’s work on vernacular modernism and cinema — which is about historicizing perception to a specific place and time
• the affirmative character of criticism, which depends on trusting the senses to convey some objective reality, referred to by Herbert Marcuse as “affirmative culture”.  Thus utopian, avant-garde, or even merely difficult art that seeks to slow down and thus interfere with culture rarely overturns anything, because it reinforces the absorption and consumption of the bourgeois subject.  She’s not the first to have noticed how much twentieth-century criticism depends upon replicating the very distanced, male gaze that it was trying to tear down.  She summarizes the problem deftly: critical theorists experience an “anxiety over critical theory’s own optimism.”

According to Berlant, the way out of this legitimate anxiety is to focus back on the every day, the human, the emotional.  And then to ask questions about the origins of those emotions, of those attachments to material things.  Where did they come from?  What to they mean?  How exactly is the scarlet letter A with its overwhelming, instantaneous message bound up with a world-view or a theology or a sense of individual worth that we as a society have already discarded?

Berlant’s practical solution, then, is to launch a series of feminist cells throughout American cities, where artists and academics come to talk about being depressed, being happy, and how many of those feelings are structured by participation in social forms that they’d rather avoid.

Her “feel tank” investigates “political depression” as an exit strategy to the collective guilt of voting without hope.  By focusing on negative and suppressed emotions like this guilt, they aim to identify and jettison public feelings that don’t belong to them. 

Conclusion #1: think out your depression.  Where’s it coming from? Your depression probably *is* political.  All emotions are, even as language is. 

Conclusion #2: If the big, big gaze from the prospect only helps you see what everybody else is seeing, looking closely at the world around you might be the best way out.  The “close reading” practice of literature scholars is embraced as the first step to the “negative dialectic” of unravelling the norms of one’s own culture.  For Berlant and her peers, the close reading needs to start not merely in the text but also in the material world. The material object leads all the way back into the world of emotions, repressions, social expectations.  Look at stuff.  Wonder how it got there.  Write about it.  Your material world is structured by the same forces that structure your emotional life. 

Read more:
Google Scholar search on Lauren Berlant

Technorati Tags: emotion, emotionology, depression, politics, negative dialectic, herbert marcuse, lauren berlant, material culture, material history, mary poovey, collective guilt, feel tank, happiness, critical inquiry, criticism, close reading, hawthorne, the scarlet letter, miriam hansen, vernacular modernism, cinema, scholarship, academics, literature, culture, the senses, utopianism, every-day experience

Technorati Tags: emotion, emotionology, depression, politics, negative dialectic, herbert marcuse, lauren berlant, material culture, material history, mary poovey, collective guilt, feel tank, happiness, critical inquiry, criticism, close reading, hawthorne, the scarlet letter, miriam hansen, vernacular modernism, cinema, scholarship, academics, literature, culture, the senses, utopianism, every-day experience

The rose of sharon is one of my favorite plants to photograph. It comes in a few varieties of colors including red, white, pink and purple. They flower for about two months in the summer. You can check out my plant website for more pictures. Or you can check out my rose of sharon video here. If you have any photos you would like to see on Nature’s Wallpaper just send them to me in an e-mail, and I will post them along with a link to your site.

The rose of sharon is one of my favorite plants to photograph. It comes in a few varieties of colors including red, white, pink and purple. They flower for about two months in the summer. You can check out my plant website for more pictures. Or you can check out my rose of sharon video here. If you have any photos you would like to see on Nature’s Wallpaper just send them to me in an e-mail, and I will post them along with a link to your site.

The rose of sharon is one of my favorite plants to photograph. It comes in a few varieties of colors including red, white, pink and purple. They flower for about two months in the summer. You can check out my plant website for more pictures. Or you can check out my rose of sharon video here. If you have any photos you would like to see on Nature’s Wallpaper just send them to me in an e-mail, and I will post them along with a link to your site.

Apologies to anyone whom I’ve been neglecting… the last chapter (all 168 pages) is finally in draft form, so I’ve been in a semi-reclusive sate for the last several weeks.  Returning to the living any moment now.  Hopefully you’ll hear from me if you want to; if you feel neglected, feel free to ping away. 

Apologies to anyone whom I’ve been neglecting… the last chapter (all 168 pages) is finally in draft form, so I’ve been in a semi-reclusive sate for the last several weeks.  Returning to the living any moment now.  Hopefully you’ll hear from me if you want to; if you feel neglected, feel free to ping away.