Because women making media is important. Take the Superbowl ads, for example. It’s great that Twitter allowed us to point out the stupid stereotypes en masse, but the next step is to  get women making some ads of their own. Advertising is still 97% male and apparently disinterested in listening to the people it pays to give advice on how not to be terrible. Q.E.D.: We need women doing the writing, producing, directing, and decision-making.

Ditto for every other male-dominated media industry; as Sarah Silverman has noted, women have to stop complaining about the stories and start writing some of their own. And ditto for Tina Fey. One of my favorite parts of her book is the list of real-life lessons learned from improv, particularly the part about MAKING STATEMENTS instead of only asking questions:

In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. We’ve all worked with that person. That person is a drag. It’s usually the same person around the office who says things like “There’s no calories in it if you eat standing up!” and “I felt menaced when Terry raised her voice.”

Or the person who wants to argue about the definition of “narrativity” instead of writing effective stories. No matter. The point is, media-making is way more fun – and empowering – than media-talking-about ever was, and I’d recommend it to anyone — and if you agree that women should listen to Tina Fey instead of Cosmopolitan, please do pass it on.

It was a hoot listening to an hour’s worth of stories about Ann Richards. Slater and Stekler had worked with Richards. Taylor had only met her once, but had meticulously researched Richards’s life for her play, to universal acclaim.

And really, it was a discussion of doing history. Taylor talked about the need to take diverse sources and synthesize them into a character; Stekler talked about the similarity of this process to editing footage; and Slater told some great stories about accompanying Richards on the campaign trail. All of them talked about falling in love with Ann Richards.

Audience questions made this an interactive event, and that’s when things got really interesting. The first woman in line announced that as someone who wanted to get into politics, she was frustrated by the fact that they kept talking about Richards’s accomplishments as a woman, because she (the asker) wanted to know about Ann Richards’s accomplishments as a politician. I thought it was a fair question; there had been a bit much of the “what women bring to politics that men don’t” talk, involving the dread “empathy” point.

The panel’s reaction was not happy. Stekler started to man-splain to the asker, essentially implying that she just didn’t get how important and revolutionary Ann Richards was. Taylor joined in, so maybe it wasn’t man-splaining.

The asker politely pressed again, saying “I already know how to be a woman. I want to know what made Ann Richards a great Democrat. I want to know what we can learn from her that way.” Then and only then did they throw the question to Slater, who gave a really good answer about Ann Richards’s policies. He talked about governing for the sake of the weakest; voicing strong opinions (“remember when Democrats did that?” ); and being willing to disagree with other, more conservative Democrats. Good answer.

Then Slater, Stekler, and Taylor all agreed that it was Ann Richards’s character that made her a great politician, because people voted on character, not issues. Another fair point, and they seemed to be implying that this was the reason they were talking so much about her as a woman. I don’t think that was quite true, but it allowed them a dignified exit, and by the end they admitted that Ann Richards would have supported anyone’s right to challenge them on the issue.

After the show, the audience around me seemed as displeased with the question as the panel had been. So I found the asker and tapped her on the shoulder, and told her I was glad she asked twice because having to do so was pretty much standard for women, still.

I then spent the better part of the evening trying to bridge the generation gap, explaining to several people that the asker’s attitude was very typical of Gen-Y feminism,  and that we shouldn’t assume this approach is based on ignorance of the past. Also, telling people they just don’t get it rarely works, unless you’re using a finely tuned form of sarcastic pedagogy, face-to-face. But of course as a historian I understand the concern that people just don’t understand what things used to be like.

It strikes me that oral history is the same as any other history. You always go to the primary sources to ask questions; when the sources happen to be human and still alive, they’re fiestier than dead pages, canvas, or parchment. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask the questions. Even if you have to do it twice.

No, I’m not darkening my website. To be honest, I’m not sure what that’s supposed to achieve other than making it harder for millions of Americans to dick around during work – oh, but wait, Twitter and Facebook are still up. So maybe it will force students to type out their plagiarized assignments, like kids did in the old days.

I can already imagine a world without “free” knowledge; I’m old enough to have lived it. Before the internet, you just walked to the goddamned library, which had thoughtfully purchased those expensive tomes. Actually, it was free, except for the cost in energy and motivation.

Free? Then why are you begging me for money? Oh, I see, you've just discovered nothing is free, after driving down the price of information? Fuck you very much.

Now, it’s obvious that old-school lawmakers have been complete, head-in-the-sand morons about the realities of the internet. Look at my footer. It was inspired by several moments in my internet career – such as when, back in 2005, I called the copyright office to ask about internet publication, and they gave me what was obviously a canned answer equating to “We don’t know if writing appearing on the internet counts as publication yet.”Okey-dokey, I thought, it really is the Wild West out here.

But then started I teaching media literacy in my classes, and found out that certain entities did count the internet as publication, namely large media corporations (they weren’t people yet). Because of them I couldn’t use the audio-visual materials I needed in class, at least in any convenient online fashion.

What they were preventing, in fact, was audio-visual citation.  Once, just as an experiment, I tried copying the video snippet and putting it YourTube with full and correct citation and attribution, as well as commentary and a fair use clause. Just like I’d require in, say, a paper. Just like I’d be required to do if I worked for anyone other than the Huff Post. But no, I got slapped by Google/YouTube/Fox and of course the citation just made it easier for them find. Yes, Fox was being a dick – but so was Google.

Where have I heard that before? Oh, right, large corporations..er, people.

So I don’t want to hear grandiose statements about information being “free.” It’s never free, as Wikipedia’s begging campaign and Google’s data mining demonstrate. As much as we all like to think we’re fighting for a cause, this isn’t Cowboys and Indians. It’s a messy issue, and all of us are still struggling to adapt to the new era of information and what it all means.  Sure, it’s annoying that  lawmakers how the internet works, but it’s also annoying that Google and Wikipedia are trying to paint themselves as the “good guys.” They’re doing nothing more than looking out for their corporate interests, just as much as the media companies are looking out for theirs. Everybody has an agenda.

Here’s mine:  I want the right to cite audio-visual material, online, for commentary and analysis. That’s a basic principle of fair use (one that even dinosaur legislators should understand) and muzzling it is a really good way to prevent people from acquiring critical media viewing skills. Think about it. If you’re a media commentator, you’re still left explaining visual scenes – which are effective because they’re fucking visual - like some Film Studies grad student.

It really makes me think George Carlin was right – they want you to be stupid. All of them.

Anyway, although it’s totally obvious that nobody’s without an agenda in this fight, I support Google and Wikipedia’s right to lobby, just as the other large media corporations do. And punishing unauthorized online reproduction is both unenforcable and, when practiced as selectively as it is now, philosopihically objectionable. And it’s true that deciding to pursue this legislation would both break the internet and the bank, so I don’t support it – not because anybody’s got an unassailable  moral ground in this fight, but because I’m a pragmatist who thinks nostalgia is not a good basis for legislation.

I may have to adapt to the Brave New World. Hell, I may even be good at it. But that doesn’t mean I have to throw a party for it.

–Richard Feynman

It’s been a helluva couple weeks, but I’ve been meaning to report on the January Dionysium.

Our theme was science, and Richard Feynman in particular. Right off the bat, Dr. Carl Feierabend gave us a brief history of action, from Aristotle to the present day. Then actor Jason Liebrecht read Richard Feynman’s 1974 Cal Tech commencement address, “Cargo Cult Science.” Fireworks followed as two physicists, Dr. Eamonn Healy and Dr. Todd Krause, debated whether God plays dice with the universe. Next came Dionysium President L.B. Deyo’s report on the new graphic biography, Feynman, and Lance Myers’s presentation of Céline Desrumaux’s Countdown cartoon - and look, you can skip my blather, but you really should watch the cartoon. It’s at the bottom of the post.

Exhibit one: visual learning aid courtesy of our fearless leader, L.B. Deyo.

In the spirit of my previous post and given my interest in edutainment,  I’ve been thinking about how this event compares to a traditional lecture. One example that springs to mind is sound check, probably my favorite moment of the evening, when dueling physicists were accompanied by the Golden Arm Trio warming up – where else are you going to hear that?

Including “Cargo Cult Science” was my idea. I’m a huge fan of Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and primary sources in general. Having a professional actor deliver the speech was a far better means of conveying information than when I, a rank amateur, used to read things aloud in class.

L.B. makes a groovy Flash slideshow for every part of the show – and Flash, by the way, is what he does for a living. Same goes for the cartoon and the music: Lance is a professional cartoonist and the members of the Golden Arm Trio make music for a living. And of course, the two physicists present were professionals and it’s not unusual to see academics duking it out – but both were mindful of the debate as performance. They weren’t just physics experts, they were teaching/performance professionals.

So, instead of the one-man-show model that dominates traditional teaching, our event was an abstraction on the theme of science, incorporating the talents of many people. I suppose it’s not proper education in that you couldn’t use a standardized test to measure the results – but that’s sort of the point. And I’m not saying it’s feasible to include the talents of so many professionals in every single classroom lecture, of course. I am saying, however, that online classes, which claim to have an edge in multimedia mental stimulation, do just that. And we should recognize that it’s ludicrous to ask already-busy educators to magically absorb the all the skills needed for a good presentation.

We always end with a cartoon (a bit of honey to make the medicine go down) and Lance always curates really cool stuff from around of the world. Even if you couldn’t be there, you can do the next best thing and end with the cartoon. In reality, Blastoff is itself a curation of touchstone images from the history of space travel and the cartoon has been covered in the Atlantic. See how many you recognize, and contemplate the act of visual citation and improvisation.

Last month I helped a client who needed a website, STAT. The business was going to be mentioned in an industry publication, and we had three days.

To me, this was nowhere near an emergency. The information architecture was straightforward, the organizational demands not terribly taxing. It was basically like being told I had to prep a new multimedia lecture in three days – not easy, per se, but doable.

I don’t say this to demonstrate my personal awesomeness, I say it to highlight what academic life looks like to normal people. Even though I feel much more at home with my new life, there’s no escaping the previous ten years of crazy workplace fun.

This can be a benefit. As it turns out, the real world thinks I have an unusually high tolerance for “difficult”, “stressful”, and “time-consuming” work, because all of these are relative. My previous job description (running two classes and writing two articles and researching one book and coordinating countless meetings etc. etc.) means that if you want me to consider your project “complex” it had better be the Large Hadron Collider.

On good days, coming from a culture where you get complicated shit done, without asking for any help, without complaining, and without recognition, means I look like freaking genius while simultaneously appearing totally humble. (Neither of those is true, obviously, it’s an optical illusion.)

That’s after I get the job, though. Interviews can lead to bad days.  It’s not polite to say, “You think this job will be challenging? HAHAHAHAHAHA.” Also, people keep asking me how I prefer to work and what framework I like to use, which strikes me as hilarious because my attitude is, “I actually don’t care because I’m not the boss. Why don’t you tell me what you want done and how you’d like me to do it, and I’ll do that and if I haven’t used X software to do it, I’ll learn how.” I’m finding that doesn’t go over well, either – the problem being that when I think something is hilarious, it kind of shows.

Anyway, for the benefit of anyone in transition or thinking about transition, I thought I’d document some of the more interesting comparisons, in random categories you may or may not care about.

Number of Jobs and Your Chance of Getting One

Real world wins big time. Granted, I’m in the right industry and Austin is an employment hotspot – but, because so many people are moving here, the market is pretty darned saturated. No one’s getting a job right away, or without working at it. I had to network my ass off for the better part of a year, which wasn’t exactly my favorite thing in the world.

Still, there are new jobs posted every day on Craigslist. Companies are hiring. It’s competitive but doable, and the hiring timelines are nowhere near as ridiculous as the academic ones.  Plus, no one’s asking me to move to Idaho for a wage that is literally not enough to live on.

Working at Home

The real world is still kind of stuck on eight-hour days and a lot of bosses are uncomfortable with employees working in places that aren’t the office. Most developers, on the other hand,  just want to be left the hell alone while doing their programming, hence the interesting paradigm shift that’s going on right now, and the rise of co-working spaces.

I admit, when you tell me I’m going to be productive while spending hours in an office teeming with spastic twenty-year-olds, it’s hard for me not to laugh out loud at you. And Garann Means wrote a great post on why your office isn’t the “magical productivity land” you think it is, no matter how many soft drinks you offer.

So – surprise! – academia wins in this category; it’s been running a meetings-based, work-at-home culture for centuries. NB, real-world employers, it’s totally possible.

Work/Life Balance

This one’s very subjective. A half-hour commute each way plus lunch can make a typical office job ten hours a day. That seems pretty ridiculous to me, and to a growing number of people (see above). And sadly, academia is on the forefront of what big companies are doing anyway, demanding ever more time and tasks from salaried workers. For me, the real world still wins, though, for one reason:

Talking About Things Other than Work

Sure, if you go to a developer meetup everybody wants to talk about work crap, but that’s why I don’t go to “social” events which are actually more work. Because of that, in the last year I’ve met more varieties of people than I met in TEN YEARS of academia. Also, the people at work talk about movies and other stuff that isn’t work. Go real world.

Pay and Other Rewards

Because of the oversaturated market and tons of college graduates, Austin’s jobs pay a little lower than the national average. In a year, I’ve got from being offered 40k to 50k (or the equivalent hourly rate), which together averaged out to what I was already making in academia after seven years of training and five years of work. And if you head towards finance, marketing and advertising, you’ll find salaries are generally higher, whatever your job title. And even the lowest-paying social media jobs run about 30k. Granted, there’s a growing reliance on part-time, no-benefits jobs – once again, academia is ahead of the curve – but at least we’re talking just enough to live on, unlike most adjunct postitions.

As for the non-financial rewards, I enjoy helping my clients and making things work for my co-workers. Unlike my students, they’re actually asking for help and therefore are more likely to listen to whatever advice I’m giving them. And they pay me for it. And I’m sorry, but after ten years and negligible 401k, it’s far more rewarding than lecturing bored students who don’t want to be there.

Tolerance for Marketing of Self and Others

This may seem like a weird category, but I once got accused of “prostituting” the humanities so it’s an area of concern for me. I am happy to report that in the outside world, PR and marketing are fine. So fine, in fact, that personally I think we’ve moved into the danger zone where advertising now thinks it’s providing “information” to consumers. But at least the all the favor-giving is far more blatant, whereas in academia there was a need to pretend it wasn’t happening at all. (Because we all know meritocracy works there.  HAHAHAHAHA.)

Overspecialization, Pigeonholing and General Problem of “Not Looking” Like…

This is a tie, for reasons that I find hilarious. Academia prizes overspecialization, on the one hand, insisting that you focus solely on Post-Dynastic Hessian rugmakers and getting huffy if you try to “study” anything else. But at the same time, you’re expected to be a classroom manager, training specialist, author, researcher, proofreader, editor, user experience designer, public speaker, graphic designer, etc. etc. whatever your current situation demands, ASAP, no questions asked. Like if you turned The Running Man into a DIY Network reality show.

The outside world claims it prizes generalists – every job wants soft skills, claims it wants people to think outside the box, and talks about “wearing many hats.” Yet even companies who claim they’re hiring for “talent” can’t deal with this in reality. It usually comes down to whether you’ve already had experience with their specific kind of software or whatever; they may claim they want potential, but it’s rarely true.

So both are lying through their teeth. Also, I don’t, apparently, look like a developer any more than a professor. Oh, well.

Overall Happiness

I won’t lie to you, transitions are hard. There have been many points in the last year when I’ve been freaking out about money, which sucked - after grad school, I swore I’d never do that again, but it’s really just unavoidable when you simultaneously change locations and careers. On the flip side, I’m choosing the place I live, the people I work with, etc. I don’t regret it for a moment, and I’m definitely, qualitatively happier than I ever was in academia. Which is all that matters, really.

Dear teachers and parents:

 Are you guys seriously only asking for Dads?

Is lifting done with a penis?

Thoughtfully yours,

- Karen

It’s bad enough that she got in trouble for using the word “penis” but I noticed several comments that, while agreeing the initial call for dads was sexist, questioned whether making a joke was an appropriate response. One commenter even suggested that this was not a “direct” means of communication.

The hell it isn’t. Jokes are communication. Full stop. And Freud’s with me on this one. There is no way that people didn’t “get” the joke, whether they thought it was funny or not. And all that crap about being “appropriate” is just more social oppression. Not following social expectations is one of the main sources of humor, which is why it it can be such a powerful force for change. And (surprise, surprise) the gender of the joke-teller matters, and women telling jokes are far more likely to provoke offense – and this is why we don’t have enough women in comedy. Yet.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that Karen Mangiacotti’s joke was great on every count: well-written, effective, and (to me) funny. And to anyone who thinks jokes are an inappropriate forms of communication? I think her thirteen-year-old son had it right: “Screw them.” Keep ‘em coming, Karen!

Ah, it’s Christmas, and time for every network in America to start its annual run of sappiness. Ugh. And don’t even get me started on It’s A Wonderful Life. I’m incredibly happy to have left my cold, gray home state, and here’s that damned movie telling me an Explorer pin is better than the real deal? Aw, hells no.

To me, a good Christmas movie is one that lets me know I’m not the only one rooting for the Grinch. This list isn’t about loving Christmas, nor is it limited to movies, because there weren’t enough I liked. It’s about entertaining me, a self-confessed curmudgeon and misanthrope.

10. Love, Actually

I admit I was very much on the fence about this one, because it’s incredibly guilty of promoting the holiday sentimentality I so despise. I’m including it for one reason and one reason only: Bill Nighy as the rock star Billy Mack, who has to admit he loves (platonically) his long-suffering manager Joe (Gregor Fisher) when they spend Christmas together.

I love Bill Nighy. Actually.

That story almost makes up for the rest of the movie, which is basically a collection of rom-coms — except for Harry (Alan Rickman) and Karen (Emma Thompson), whose rocky marriage is one the best-written and acted mid-life crises on the screen. So there’s that: some realistic pain mixed in with all the stupid romance. Watch at your own risk.

9. TIE: A Very Sunny Christmas; Futurama, ‘Xmas Story’

The Sunny Christmas special is one of the few things that makes me feel like a holly jolly soul. The mom-sleeping-with-Santa trope (also found in 30 Rock) is at its least classy here. And while I don’t get into the cute kids for their own sake, the producers did a bang-up job finding little versions of the current cast – right down to Mac’s trademark hair. And of course, messed up riffs on Dickens and the classic Rudolph animation. If you think throwing rocks at trains is a good holiday tradition, this special is for you!

As for Futurama, what would Christmas be without a dystopian urban myth about where Xmas came from? Also, it has evil robot Santa. ‘Nuff said.

Baaaaad to the bone....er, mainframe?

9. Home for the Holidays

A lot of people bitched and moaned about this one when it came out in 1995. Some thought it was too precious; some thought it was too bitter to be a real holiday film. But give this ahead-of-its-time movie some credit. It was trying to take on sentimental family crap before that became cool, so we can forgive it a few sitcom-y elements. Also, it’s Jodie Foster’s directoral debut and it’s got a fantastic cast. Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning as the parents! Holly Hunter, Robert Downey Jr., and Cynthia Stevenson as the believably messed-up siblings! And who can forget Aunt Glad (that’s Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie’s daughter!) and her uncomfortable speech at dinner?

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relatively believable family unit!

8. Elf

This one has a few too many kids for my taste. But after being forced to see it, I had to admit it was funny and (more importantly) ironic enough not to be vomit-inducing. So it makes the list. Zooey Deschanel’s voice is sublime throughout, and who knew there could be such great chemistry between that lovely lady and Will Ferrell? Also, James Caan makes an awesome Grinch-like father.

Cutest elf ever, obviously.

7. Family Guy, ‘A Very Special Family Guy Freakin’ Christmas’

Of course I had to put some FG here. But it’s not just out of obligation. I love it when Stewie’s Christmas pageant performance turns into a philsophical speculation on the inherent evil of human nature. And the fish attack. And the ‘Kiss Saves Santa’ special. But most of all, I love Lois’s rant when it all falls apart: ‘You think Christmas just happens? It falls out of my holly jolly butt!’

Kiss Saves Santa!

6. Just Friends

This is IMHO the sweetest movie on my list – but that’s okay, because the sentiment is built right into the genre! So, just to be clear, if you hate rom-coms, this is not going to be an exception. On the other hand, if you hate rom-coms — let me guess, you find them  ”unbelievable” and “predictable” —  you should by all rights hate pretty much every Christmas movie, so I’ll assume we’re okay here.

Yup, that's Ryan Reynolds on the left.

Like Home for the Holidays, the movie plays on the fact that you can’t escape where you came from, nor can you avoid acting like a five-year-old around your family — but unlike Home for the Holidays it revels in a few more ‘awww’ moments, without apology. It doesn’t hurt that Ryan Reynolds is willing to wear a retainer, fat suit, and crappy sweater, the better to look nerdy, and that Chris Klein plays a horrible person. Good writing and a likable cast make this a lot better than your average rom com. There’s sassy Amy Smart, Anna Faris playing a psycho variant on her usual ditz, and they even got Airplane’s Julie Haggerty to play the ditzy mom. Awwww.

5. TIE: M*A*S*H, any holiday episode; Will and Grace, ‘Jingle Balls’

Say what you want about M*A*S*H, but it had good writing. There are also plenty of holiday episodes to choose from. “Dear Dad” and “Dear Sis” are straightforward episodes set during Christmas. You can try “Death Takes a Holiday” if you’re craving that special 4077 brand of maudlin, or “Twas the Day After Christmas” if you want something a little more fun.

I could have chosen the Will and Grace episode where Will, Grace, Karen, and Jack have to go to four Thanksgivings. It’s an early predecessor to Four Christmases, and let’s be honest, that conceit is only good for a half hour. That episode also has the wonderful Blythe Danner. But ‘Jingle Balls’ has Parker Posey as horrible store manager Dorleen. And it mocks those (like Will’s new boyfriend) who are just too into the holiday spirit. It’s also good fun when Grace puts up a Christmas window display to save Jack’s butt, and he of course attributes it to Santa. But it’s Dorleen’s comment about the window that makes the episode for me: “It’s dark, it’s sad, it’s glam — it’s Christmas.”

3. Scrooged

I don’t think I need to say much about this update of  Dickens’ Christmas Carol. I mean, it’s got Bill Murray in it. And it’s kind of a paean to 80′s corporate greed in its own right. And you’ve probably already seen it, and it’s on a lot if you have cable, so really you just need to not switch if off.

Bill Murray gets his ghost on.

2. Trading Places

Moving into the realm of thouroughly grown-up movies, this chestnut holds up well. Elmer Bernstein did the music, giving it an impressively classy feel for a movie about bums and hookers. Dan Akroyd’s drunk Santa had to an inspiration for Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa. Jamie Lee Curtis owns the ‘hooker with a heart of gold’ role — Julia Roberts should weep with shame when she watches Curtis’s performance. This movie captures the pre-sappy eighties better than any other, and there’s even a little cameo by now-Senator Al Franken at the end.

I'd totally spend Christmas with these guys.

1. Bad Santa

C’mon, you had to know that this was gonna be my favorite. When I saw this movie for the first time, I knew I wasn’t alone in the world. I fangirled out on the writers at film conference, and told them what I’ll tell you: this movie has gotten a lot people I know through some bad times. What more can anyone ask for on Christmas?

Myself, I think it’s fitting that John Ritter’s last performance was here, and the late Bernie Mac also gives it his best; and if you only know Lauren Graham from Gilmore Girls you’ll either be pleasantly surprised or horrified. Also, this film’s use of music deserves an award in and of itself; its classical themes, especially, are used in wonderful counterpoint to what’s going on. Just be warned, though: if you love Christmas, you will probably hate this movie.

The king of holiday movies.

I keep seeing this “Shit Girls Say” video on Facebook and Twitter:

I am apparently the only person on earth who doesn’t find it funny. I find it mostly boring and predictable, with a smidge of irritating.

To be fair, no one’s claiming that this is groundbreaking comedy. It’s a pretty simple conceit — men imitating women — and it’s literally thousands of years old. Aristotle was down with the simple act of mimesis (his fancy dead-Greek word for imitation) as a form of entertainment.

I know many women do this stuff in real life. I do some of it too. I apologize when there’s no need. I ask for things in a maddeningly indirect manner and find my voice creeping unconsciously into that goddamned tonal upswing at the end of factual statements.

So I’m not trying to invalidate the fact that people find it funny. I understand the “Oh my god, I totally do that!” and “Oh my god, women totally do that!” reactions, and could even give you a bunch of theory on it if you wanted.  (You don’t.)

It’s fine. It’s just that my own response is more of an enraged Omnicronian one: “I know I do that and I kind of hate myself for it and it’s something we should all work to change and your mere act of male observation is not helping.” In real life, my own behavior angers and saddens me, because it’s not really a decision, it’s a socialized habit. In fact, I make deliberate efforts not to do this crap, and tell other women not to do it, because it pretty much guarantees that no one will take you seriously.

The video is potentially funny because it’s true. But it’s not the capital-T Truth, which is that gender roles are so fucking arbitrary it is both laughable and cryable. It’s a trite variation on the  ”guys do X, girls do Y” jokes you hear from comedians all the time. And again, no one’s saying this video is trying to change the world. It’s not. It’s pretty clearly trying to cash in on the Twitter-feed-as-cash-cow idea. Fair enough. I just have insanely high standards for comedy because I’ve seen the power of what it can achieve. (Richard Pryor in the White House, anyone?)

Interestingly, one of my favoritist moments from Parks and Rec is almost the same joke. Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) is covering for a co-worker and has to make up an implausible story:

Whenever I see this clip, I think fondly of a theorist named Boskin. Boskin suggested that if an actor played a stereotype but simultaneously expressed his/her disbelief in it, the resulting humor was actually an effective means to challenge the validity of the stereotype. It’s a pretty sophisticated form of humor in that it requires the actor not to commit fully to the role and to do so deliberately enough that the audience understands it’s not just bad acting. Sort of like sarcasm, where you mean the opposite of what you say, on crack.

Here, the extremely smart Amy Poehler is playing the extremely competent Leslie Knope who is (momentarily) playing an idiotic girl. It’s some serious meta-humor, which is why it’s awesome. It makes fun of the stereotype, the people who believe it (why does the ranger find such implausible explanations so very plausible?), and the women who act like it. Granted it’s very exaggerated,  but that’s part of what makes it so funny.

And I think what’s at the root of my irritation with the “Shit Girls Say” video. It’s not meta-humor. It’s not exaggerated enough to be funny. It’s just a dude dressing up as a woman, imitating a wide swath of annoying (if often true) behaviors. A dude making fun of women — which matters, just as it matters when, say, white people imitate black people “humorously.” And I don’t think he’s trying to undercut the stereotype, so it sort of feels like he’s buying into essentialist notions of gender? A little? And I feel like they threw Juliette Lewis in there as a token woman, a tacit sign that women are okay with this, precisely so that people couldn’t make the kind of criticism I’m making right now.

Obviously, it’s funny to a lot of people, and there’s no arguing funny. And I don’t even feel strongly enough to call it sexist. Mostly, it’s easy. Easy in only the way that a two-thousand-year-old joke can be. Easy in that it doesn’t provoke any new thought processes. And easy because it doesn’t go for Truth with a Capital T.

Anyway, I’m gonna go download Louis CK now, because I feel it’s a better feminist/humanist thing to do.

The theme of next week’s Dionysium is  comic books, and everybody’s geeking out in style.

The poster, designed by fearless leader LB Deyo. For more fun posters, check out the {link:http://www.dionsyium.com}slick new website{/link}.

Though I’m not directly involved, I’m a happy spectator to the curation process. In preparation for his lecture, “50 Years of Comics in 10 Books,” Graham Reynolds crowdsourced that sucker on Facebook. After a day, he had 56 items (and about as many comments) submitted for consideration. As you can imagine, there was fierce debate about which books deserved to be on the short list, though everyone understood that making lists is a heartfelt and tricky business. Graham noted that he had “some severe editing” to do, balancing the crowd’s preferences, personal taste, and how influential/genre-changing the work is. Would that my students had understood the principle so thoroughly!

My previous field, Classics, never went in for top ten lists — none you would care about, anyway — because the most important works have already been collected for you, into the great, non-negotiable Canon. If you picked an “indie” (read: unimportant) author to study, you had to justify it with some lame pretense; it was about working “outside the canon” rather than rewriting it. Boring!

As the recent brouhaha over Siri’s traitorously lousy woman searches  – and its blog-NYT-Colbert path to fame – show, curation isn’t about the end product, it’s about the people who create the “final” information. That’s all I ever wanted my students to understand from their research projects. There’s no “right” answer to a top ten list. The best sources will vary with your question, and that’s not the point anyway. The point of curation is to do your own editing, make your own choices; if everybody puts in the effort, there will be some common ground to have an interesting discussion about it.

And multimedia sources are good. As is creative research, the only equivalent the humanities has to “new” knowledge (if we must prize that above anything else). Next Wednesday, we’ll be treated to the world premiere of a Sandman-inspired musical piece by PK Waddle, who also curates a series on music/literature synthesis (cf. his upcoming Hemingway event). Pretty classy stuff, huh?  But at our last staff meeting our fearless leader, L.B. Deyo, was telling me about some theorist who argued for a total elimination of “high” and “low” art categories. I forget the name, because I don’t have to remember that stuff anymore, but I’m sure he’s right.

So online education and uptight canons can suck it. This is what real multimedia learning looks like. It’s fine by me if curation and debates and art are inspired by comics, and it will also be fine by me when they’re inspired by science, or robots, or whatever else comes our way. Yet another reason I find prefer an eduaintment setting – i.e. the best classroom ever.