Wetlands in Southern Iraq

If you've read much about Mesopotamian mythology or political history, you know how much the reed marshes in the south shaped ancient Mesopotamia. Recently, CBS's "60 Minutes" did a segment on the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq and what Saddam Hussein did to destroy their ancient homeland and culture among the reed marshes. For those of us unable or unwilling to go to Iraq, this segment gives a great introduction to the region and its contemporary plight. As the correspondent and engineer in the clip show, the reed marsh landscape still evokes the ancient stories from the region. It's great fuel for the historical imagination. The print story is here. (HT: AGADE listserv). Here's the video:





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Cosmopolitanism according to Appiah

Tomorrow I will be discussing with my freshman seminar ("What Is A Good Society?") Kwame Anthony Appiah's Introduction to his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. I can't speak to the rest of the book because I haven't read it. But his Introduction offers an interesting (and brief) discussion about what it means to be "cosmopolitan." Here are a few representative quotes.

Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsiblities: to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality. The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millenia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.

So there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences. Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life. Whatever our obligations are to others (or theirs to us) they often have the right to go their own way. As we'll see, there will be times when these ideals---universal concern and respect for legitimate differences---clash. There's a sense in which cosmopolitanism is not the name of the solution but of the challenge.

[T]he one thought that cosmopolitans share is that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other.

Cosmopolitanism is an adventure and an ideal; but you can't have any respect for human diversity and expect everyone to become cosmopolitan.

I want to hold on to at least one important aspect of the objectivity of values: that there are some values that are, and should be, universal, just as there are lots of values that are, and must be, local. We can't hope to reach a final consensus on how to rank and order such values. That's why the model I'll be returning to is that of conversation---and, in particular, conversation between people from different ways of life. The world is getting more crowded: in the next half a century the population of our once foraging species will approach nine billion. Depending on the circumstances, conversations across boundaries can be delightful, or just vexing: what they mainly are, though, is inevitable.

There are a lot of thorny issues to be considered here. It would be easy to keep the conversation at an abstract, theoretical level. But hopefully, I'll be able to think of some scenarios to ground our discussion in concrete situations. Thinking. . . .

Semiotics for Beginners

I stumbled upon this site last night called "Semiotics for Beginners" by Daniel Chandler of Aberystwyth University (Wales, UK) and read through a good chunk of his treatment of signs as developed by structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Good stuff. It's perfect for getting an overview of the important theorists and developments in cultural theory. . . . Just sharing.

Ape Accepts Jesus into Heart

Researchers studying the impact of TV on primate behavior at Northwestern Freewill Baptist University were shocked when one of their subjects, JonnyG, speaking through sign language, asked who Jesus was. "It makes total sense that JonnyG would pick up on this. Religious programming is all over the television," said Prof. Jim Johnson, the lead researcher. Thrilled if not entirely surprised that the ape had asked the question, they attempted in the next few sessions to describe to him the story of Jesus in simple terms. The university released a statement just this morning that JonnyG, after much deliberation, accepted Jesus into his heart, becoming the first ape destined for heaven. Implications are still being sorted out. But several big donors to the university have offered to help found a school of missions explicitly for the purpose of evangelizing primates around the globe.

* * *

I thought of this little piece of satire tonight at dinner while we (me, my wife, and three kids) were discussing evidence that animals posit and respond to unseen agents (like we do with gods). One of the key examples was the reaction some primates exhibit to thunder. I'll put the citation up when I can access the book (at the office).

Sharing the Road

I just saw an interesting story in today's LA Times about problems between cars and bikes sharing the road. That's not news. Not to me. I experience this everyday. But the statistics used in the article are interesting and worthy of sharing. According to the research cited in the article, cycling is WAY up (I think it said 43% up nation wide), the benefits of cycling far out weigh the risks (20 to 1), and the average cyclist has a serious accident only once in every 8.7 years. I'm going from memory on a couple of those because I need to be doing something else. But take a look at the article. It's interesting. (And then get on a bike and start reaping the benefits.) Bikes and cars: Can we share the road? -- latimes.com

Ludlul and “Wisdom”

     Whether one chooses to impose a modern definition of “wisdom” upon the ancient data or decides to allow indigenous categorization (as best as we can reconstruct it) to steer one’s approach, whether one chooses to look at “wisdom” conceptually or decides to understand it in terms of literary genre – how one defines the category will determine how one populates it. Like other categories used to organize cultural data (e.g., “religion,” “art,” and “kinship”), “wisdom” does not exist objectively. People, both ancient Mesopotamians and modern scholars, create “wisdom” as a rubric to associate and classify various items in a culture. We do well to keep this in mind as we attempt to understand how the terms “wisdom” and “wisdom literature” have been used in reference to Ludlul.

     Lambert’s inclusion of Ludlul in his book Babylonian Wisdom Literature has obviously influenced a generation of scholars to see the poem as “wisdom literature.”[1] But Lambert is quick to note that he borrowed the terms “wisdom” and “wisdom literature” from Biblical Studies and applied it to the Mesopotamian materials only on account of broad similarities between the contents of his texts and those of the wisdom books in the Hebrew Bible: Proverbs, Qohelet, and Job.[2] (Thus one might reason as follows: because Ludlul and the biblical Book of Job both deal with human suffering in relation to a god and Job is “wisdom literature,” Ludlul is also “wisdom literature.”) This content-based categorization, rooted as it is in biblical scholarship, has its advantages, especially for comparative work. But it is important to recognize (as Lambert does; see likewise Beaulieu 2007, 3) that it is a modern categorizational imposition.[3] Even as this understanding of “wisdom literature” opens interesting possibilities for comparing Mesopotamian and biblical literatures, it also obscures our understanding of Ludlul within its Mesopotamian literary, cultural, and scribal contexts.

     On the same page that Lambert appropriates the biblical terminology for his Mesopotamian materials, he also notes that “wisdom” generally “refers to skill in cult and magic lore” (BWL, 1) in the late second and throughout the first millennia. In fact, all of the ancient scholarly corpora (ummânūtu) – divination (bārûtu), exorcism (āšipūtu), astrology (ţupšarrūtu), lamentation (kalûtu), and medicine (asûtu) – that the Mesopotamian scholars (ummânū) created and preserved refer to themselves as nēmequ, “wisdom” (see Lenzi 2008, 67-104 and Pongratz-Leisten 1999, 286-288, with references to earlier literature). If there was an ancient indigenous body of “wisdom literature” in post-Kassite Mesopotamia, it belonged to these scholars. Given the various connections Ludlul has to ancient scholarship, especially exorcism and medicine, it is not only appropriate but imperative to read the poem in light of it. (Beaulieu 2007 is a programmatic essay in this regard and essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Ludlul as a product of ancient scholarship.) One might even be tempted to include Ludlul among these scholarly “wisdom” texts; that is, one might be tempted to call Ludlul “wisdom literature” as indigenously defined because it looks like it belongs among scholarly texts. Despite, however, the connections our poem shows to this material, despite the way Ludlul draws on the various scholarly corpora throughout its lines, the poem itself is not actually part of any one of them. Ludlul is not an exorcism text, a medical text, an omen text, prayer or lamentation; rather, it is a narrative poem that incorporates ideas and tropes from such texts while it recounts the various experiences of a particular man. From this circumscribed, indigenous perspective of “wisdom,” Ludlul is not “wisdom literature.”

     There are, however, other ways of defining “wisdom” from a Mesopotamian perspective. Denning-Bolle (1992), for example, takes a broader, conceptual view.[4] After surveying various Akkadian lexemes and texts, she concludes that “[b]oth the sagacity gained from experience and the sapiential skill of the magical expert constituted ‘wisdom’ for the ancient Mesopotamian” (67). According to her definition, then, “wisdom literature” in Mesopotamia can be expanded beyond scholarly texts to include the Epic of Gilgamesh (47-48) and Ludlul (59, 62), among others. But one might also argue for an indigenous scribal perspective on “wisdom” that is an even more inclusive category than Dennning-Bolle’s. Since the scribal craft itself was equated with the wisdom of Nabû and the totality of scholarship,[5] one could classify any text that was part of the scribal curriculum as “wisdom literature.” In both of these indigenous classificatory schemes Ludlul is “wisdom literature.”
     To demand a simple, singular answer to the question of Ludlul’s status as “wisdom literature” is to misunderstand the pragmatic and interpretive nature of categorization. According to all but the strictest definition surveyed here, Ludlul is “wisdom literature.” But each understanding of this category, including the one that excludes Ludlul, provides a slightly different perspective for understanding the poem. Each gives the reader a perspective to aide in the task of interpretation and comparison. The reader must decide which one (or some other one) to use in light of their specific interpretive purpose.

---

[1] For a survey of how various anthologies have populated the category “Mesopotamian wisdom literature,” see Clifford 2007. Ludlul is almost always included among such texts.

[2] In the Hebraic tradition, Lambert says, “‘Wisdom’ is a common topic and is extolled as the greatest virtue. While it embraces intellectual ability the emphasis is more on pious living.” He contrasts this with Mesopotamia, where the term “wisdom” designates a “skill in cult and magic lore.” Despite  this difference, however, he explains that the term “wisdom” “has been used [in BWL] for a group of texts which correspond in subject-matter with the Hebrew Wisdom books, and may be retained as a convenient short description” (BWL, 1).

[3] We should also note that this approach treats biblical “wisdom” rather monolithically and therefore fails to appreciate the fact that neither the Bible nor modern biblical scholars is univocal about what comprises “wisdom” (or “wisdom literature”).

[4] See also the rather abstract discussion in Buccellati 1981, where he concludes as follows: “On the arc of progressive differentiation which characterizes the evolution of human culture, wisdom marks the first explicit attempt to gain some distance from one’s own inner self, and to cast the particular in a universal mold which can be described rationally and critically. It is at once epistemology, ethics, ontology, and lyrical introspection. Thus it can be said that wisdom has an internal coherence of its own, but as a dimension or attitude, not as an institution; it is not amorphous, but also it is not organized along systematic lines. It is, we might say, a cultural tradition” (44).

[5] See VAB VII, 4 i 31-33 (with collations from Borger and Fuchs 1996, 16), cited and discussed in Lenzi 2008, 144.

Ludlul SAACT

I got the first test pages of typeset cuneiform this week for the new SAACT edition of Ludlul. Amar Annus and I have been working on this for the last two years. And we're just about done. I don't know when it will be available from Eisenbrauns, but I'm guessing sometime in (mid?) 2010.


Here are the first four lines (click to see the whole thing):

Ain't they pretty?

"Professor" Ranked Third Best Job

CNNMoney.com has ranked "being a professor" the third best job in America. Check their analysis and then look at the comments section to get a dose of reality.

Article on Adda, the Storm God

One of my Classicist colleagues just alerted me to an interesting article about Adda, the Syrian Storm God. The latest issue (Nov/Dec 09) of Archaeology has a nice little piece about Kay Kohlmeyer's excavations of Adda's temple on the citadel in Aleppo. Here's an abstract:

A massive citadel built atop a 150-foot-tall hill of solid rock looms over Aleppo's old quarter. Fortresses have risen above this northern Syrian city since Roman times. But at the heart of the citadel, amid ruins of Ottoman palaces and hidden behind high walls that date to the Crusader era, a team of German and Syrian archaeologists is clearing debris from a large pit that shows this hilltop was significant long before the Romans arrived. Here, amid clouds of dust, a battered basalt sphinx and a lion--both standing seven feet tall--guard the entrance to one of the great religious centers of ancient times, the sanctuary of the storm god Adda.

Kay Kohlmeyer, an archaeologist at Berlin's University of Applied Sciences and the excavation codirector, has spent more than 10 years peeling away the layers of rubble that conceal the rich history of this temple. He's found that it was first constructed by Early Bronze Age peoples, then rebuilt by a succession of cultures, including the Hittites, the Indo-European empire-builders whose domain spread from Anatolia to northern Syria in the 14th century B.C. Through the millennia, as Syrian, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian cultures mixed and blurred at this ancient crossroads, Adda was known variously as Addu, Teshup, Tarhunta, and Hadad. But as artistic styles and languages came and went, the storm god's temple endured.

On a hot April morning, Kohlmeyer welcomes me into the shade of the corrugated roof that now covers Adda's sanctuary. As my eyes adjust to the sudden gloom, I spy a row of stone friezes of gods and mythical creatures still standing in a neat row at the far end of the temple. Their modest size (most are no taller than three feet), clear lines, and almost whimsical subjects--human figures in pointy shoes and hats, a bull pulling a chariot--seem more like a series of three-dimensional cartoon panels than a powerful and magical tableau. Yet even in the shadows, the sharply chiseled surfaces are so fresh they look as if the sculptors just laid down their tools for a lunch break.

Kohlmeyer and his team were not the first to uncover the mesmerizing friezes, which were buried when the temple was abandoned in the ninth century B.C. Trenches that date to six centuries later show that Hellenistic people, perhaps digging for valuables, exposed some of the reliefs. Awed by what they found, and possibly fearful of desecrating an ancient holy site, they left the stones intact. Exposed for a century or so until it was swallowed again by debris, the temple may have been an early Near Eastern tourist attraction. And if archaeologists, preservationists, and Syrian government officials have their way, the site will soon offer visitors the rare opportunity to tread the floor of a 5,000-year-old place of worship.

Andrew Lawler is a staff writer for Science.

Go to the link above for some pictures. The print-version has many more. What is really striking is how similar some of the reliefs (shown in the print version) are to later Assyrian palace reliefs.

RELI 034 Introduction to (the Critical Study of) Religion

Along with a couple of other books I've used in the past (this and this), I've decided to read these two books with my students in Intro to Religion next semester:

Phil Zuckerman's Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (discussed here).

and

Dennis Covington's Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia.

Sort of extremes in the religious spectrum, which is exactly why I've chosen them.

Teller, Magic, and Human Perception

I'm working on a Bulletin Board for my Department of Religious and Classical Studies. We're trying to find well-known people--not just academics--who have a B.A. in Religious Studies or Classics. Anyway, I learned from one source that Teller, the silent half of Penn and Teller comedy team, has a degree in Classics from Amherst. (He actually taught high school Latin for a while.) While trying to verify this fact, I found this, which I think is really interesting. Enjoy.

Apostates, Sub-Human?

If apostates are lost, if they have no chance at repentance, if they are doomed to perdition by their denial of the faith and its power, why bother talking to them? No matter what a believer says to an apostate, there's nothing one can do to bring them back to the fold. All conversation, cordial or impolite, is just useless chatter with no potential to impact the apostate's eternal and certain damnation. And so, according to this logic, why bother with them at all? See an apostate? Just move along. If you have to talk to one to get a seat at a restaurant, fine. But one should realize that these people are essentially the walking damned. They're a lost cause.

Some religions even give their devotees permission to send apostates on their way to Hell sooner than later! And why not? No amount of time is going to change things. Why polish brass on a sinking ship? Kill 'em. God'll take care of them.

Drivel. Idiocy. Evil! This is the kind of stupidity that creates opportunities for religious violence and persecutions. Thankfully, the political system we live under here in the States won't allow such things! 

Why this rant? Well, I discovered via Google Alerts that my name had come up on a blog post about "Talking to Apostates" (I'm not going to link to it. You'll find it if you want to.) The guy who authored the post basically said it was a waste of his time to talk to apostates. At first it seemed like "talking" meant "talking about Christianity" (i.e., "witnessing/preaching" to apostates). But in the comments section, he makes it clear that nothing good can come from talking to apostates in general; so why bother? Others pressed him to define "apostate" and to provide means to identify these nefarious creatures. His confident identification of an apostate makes his comments all the more ridiculous (and scary).

My name came up in the comments section when one responder mentioned me as an example of apostasy. This person, who had a little more common sense and human decency than the blogger, wondered if there wasn't something to my loss of faith. If a person like Lenzi, he thought out loud, could apostasize even though he knows a lot about the Bible, what makes me so sure about my faith? (He learned about my intellectual journey from my Biblioblogs interview last October.)

After reading the ensuing pontifications and elaborations, I have to say that I'm disheartened at the self-righteousness of some of the participants in the conversation, especially the blog's author. But when you have the certitude that only a simple understanding of faith and religion give, it's easy to deceive oneself into calling one's religious bigotry god's banner of truth.

This kind of religious nonsense is why we must maintain the separation of church and state vigilantly. Give someone like this political power, and we may find ourselves living in a nation shorn of its religious (or irreligious) freedom.

Humanities Degree in 3 Years?

I've been thinking about accelerated three year Humanities degrees lately. My interest in the topic originated in a conversation, in which I had to admit my ignorance about accelerated three year degree programs so often that I decided I need to educate myself a bit. So I began nosing around on the web for examples.

One of the first things I found was this very interesting program at Georgetown College (KY). The students in this program do 112 hours in 3 years (compare to the standard ~120 hours in 4 years) to earn their first BA/BS. Then the faculty in the program help students apply to Oxford University (in the UK) so they can do ANOTHER bachelor degree in two (more) years. But the first BA/BS is a stand alone degree. The GC program is pretty selective (see their admittance guidelines at the link) and it has a good deal of flexibility in terms of what one can do after completing the 3 year degree (see "applying for the second BA/BS" at the link). I kind of like the idea, on first glance.

I don't know anything about this program's track record; and I don't know much about Georgetown College. But the program creators seem to have married the breadth of an American degree with the depth of a British one. It seems to me that students who complete both degrees could be very well-prepared to enter a top-tier grad school.

Does anyone know of other 3 year accelerated programs in the Humanities? I'd like to know more about them.

Ideology vs. Behavior

I've been thinking about an article called "'I'm Not Friends the Way She's Friends': Ideological and Behavioral Constructions of Masculinity in Men's Relationships" by Karen Walker (from Masculinities 2.2 [1994], 38-55). We're discussing it tomorrow in my freshman seminar in order to start thinking through issues of friendship generally but also to start thinking about how friendships or expectations of friendship differ or get treated stereotypically in terms of the friends' gender (male friendship vs. female friendship and what men and women think of the other gender's friendships).

Anyway, Walker explores the tension between the ideology of friendship (expectations, stereotypes, etc.) and actual behavior (how people actually live their friendships). According to Walker's limited research (see the article for her data set), some men will say they don't open up to other men or don't call them on the phone to talk about personal things or whatever. That would be too feminine, they protest. "Women talk on the phone to each other about their problems," a man might say. "We guys don't." These self-disclosures usually fall along stereotypical lines. On the other hand, men do sometimes report doing precisely what they say they never do. And when they do report this behavior, e.g., talk about their feelings with another man, they tend to downplay it, joke about it, or interpret it away as something that came up during a conversation that was instrumental rather than personal. A man might say, "Well, I called to ask about the time of the game and he asked how things were going here at home. So we talked a bit. But I didn't call to open up to him." Then the man might mimic a woman talking to her friend on the phone and have a good laugh about it all.

Walker tries to understand how the ideology and behavior gap can coexist. And in her attempt to explain it, she says something that I think could apply to a great many issues in human behavior. Here's what she says:

Sometimes ideology and behavior match---such as when men talk about gender differences in telephone use and report behavior that differs from women's behavior. [Walker finds that generally men don't call friends on the phone to talk about personal matters, though she notes exceptions that men then explain away.] Sometimes ideology and behavior do not match. When there is a mismatch, the interesting problem of how ideology is sustained when behavior contradicts it emerges. I argue that, in the specific case of friendship, specific behaviors supported men's gendered ideologies. Men discounted or ignored altogether evidence that discredited a distinctly [ideological] masculine model of friendship. This occured because gender is a category culturally defined by mulitiple qualities. When men included themselves in the masculine gender category based on some behavior, they tended unreflectively to accept as given the cultural boundaries of the entire category even if other of their behaviors contradicted those boundaries (emphasis original).

If you don't get it, let me simplify. If there are multiple behavioral features that contribute to how one identifies with a particular ideological notion of friendship, as long as one can point to some behaviors that fall within the boundaries of that ideology, all contrary evidence can be or tends to be denied or rejected. It's a kind of confirmation bias. Although Walker is only talking about her research into male friendship, I think the point is generalizable to many other areas of human behavior: we tend to give prominence selectively to items that confirm what we think and then explain away all others that might contradict or refute what we (want to) think. There's probably a mountain of cogi-pysch literature on that issue. But the paragraph cited above is what got me thinking about it today from the particular perspective of male friendship.

I'm kind of looking forward to talking to my students about this tomorrow.

As a postscript, I think Walker's notion of "ideology of friendship" here could qualify as a form of cultural myth: what goes without saying about what "male friendship" ought to be.

Secrets and Myths

I just got an exam copy of this book:

Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé

By Paul Christopher Johnson

Oxford UP, 2005.

ISBN13: 9780195188226

ISBN10: 0195188225

I'm considering it for my class next semester, "Introduction to the Academic Study of Religion." I used the book for my dissertation. But everyone knows that "using" a book is different from "reading it cover to cover." So Johnson's book is finally on my list for "cover to cover" reading. It's a fascinating anthropological study. Unfortunately, I suspect it will be too complicated to adopt for the course. But that's only based on a perusal. We'll see.

I'm sure Johnson's book will be more interesting than my current reading:

Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: 
Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski
By Ivan Strenski
University of Iowa Press, 1987.
Out of Print.

In this book (so far--I'm just half way through), Strenski situates each of the four myth theorists and their ideas about myth into their respective intellectual, political, and cultural contexts. Strenski believes that each of these intellectuals has created their own concept of "myth" in such a way as to validate their intellectual agenda/project, whatever that may have been. And because Strenski can do this with each of them, because he can show that the four different understandings of "myth" arise from a particular historical circumstance, "myth," he claims, does not exist. (I wonder if he'd say the same thing about Newton's and Einstein's "physics"?) In 1987, Strenski's book may have served a necessary ground clearing operation for many who maintained a kind of obectivism in the fields involved. Nowadays, however, it seems that most would agree that "myth" is a constructed category that the researcher uses in order to interpret a culture. Rather than idealism, pragmatism seems to be the current of our day. In any case, I'm learning something about the four theorists he examines.

Grading the Professor's Essay

I had a great idea to help my freshman seminar students get an idea of what goes into evaluating a piece of writing. At the start of class today I gave them a writing sample I had used in another class and asked them to grade it. Using the grading rubric in the syllabus and the writing prompt for the sample essay, each student had to assign a grade to the one page sample. I didn't tell them who wrote the sample. They assumed it was a student (eventually everyone was referring to the author as "she"). I went with this without really endorsing it. In fact, however, I wrote the brief essay. I'd written it to give students in another class an idea of what I was looking for in a good response to an assignment. (You can find the prompt and sample here.) After everyone had a grade on the sample, they then discussed the reasons for their grade in a small group and the group had to agree upon a final grade. We then heard brief reports from each group about what grade they gave and why. The faculty had used this same mechanism, I explained to them, during a summer orientation meeting for faculty teaching the freshmen seminar. We did the exercise in an attempt to address the issue of grade norming across the 42 sections of the class. The sample we had used was quite bad and just about everyone had agreed the paper fell in the C-/D range. The exercise helped us all get a sense of our collective standard---at least for a low C paper. (Grade norming for the seminar, fyi, is a perennial issue; we meet several times every year to discuss it.)

The results from my students were shocking and actually kind of funny.

They gave me mostly C/C-'s. A few were willing to go to B-. Only 2 students, a minority report from one group, put me in the A- range. The two of them just shook their heads as they listened to their classmates pontificate about the poor quality of the essay. The really low graders had rather flimsy reasons in my estimation. But the whole process was a very interesting learning experience.

After they graded my essay, I asked what they thought about the grades I had given them on their first writing exercise. Almost to a person they thought the grades were too generous! (I had told them that I went easy on the grading since it was their very first writing assignment for the class and perhaps for college.) So I told them that I would adopt their more rigorous standard and advised them to start thinking very hard about what they're going to have to do to get an A on the next essay! At this point, several of them realized they had just shot themselves in the foot. That was fun to see.

After it was all said and done, I told them that I felt the paper was in the A range. But I didn't have the nerve to tell them it was my paper. Some of them had said some rather strong things about it. What I would really like to know is this: If I had told them I wrote it, would they have graded it differently? (I'm guessing an affirmative answer to that.)

Anyway, this was a very useful exercise for a writing intensive class.

I ♥ Ouzo

I ♥ Ouzo: that's what the t-shirt at a local Greek festival had printed across the front of it in 10 inch letters. "What's Ouzo?" we inquired of the old Greek grandma watching the vendor's stand. She lit up immediately and waxed eloquent for several minutes about the wonders and delights of Ouzo. As it turns out, Ouzo is a traditional Greek spirit flavored with anise, which gives it a licorice flavor. You can drink it "straight up," mixed with water, or "on the rocks." If served on ice, the clear drink takes on a hazy white appearance. "You should try some!" she exclaimed.

Well, Christy and I don't have much experience with strong drink. But the grandma made it sound like the festival wouldn't be Greek without Ouzo. So we located the beverage pavilion and bellied up to the bar for a taste.

I loved the taste of black licorice as a kid. So as I drank the cold glass of smoky Ouzo all kinds of memories associated with licorice raced through my brain. And as the strong drink went down, I felt a warmth begin to radiate from my chest out to the rest of my body. Wow that stuff is potent! But really good.

After the festival we rented the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. There's a scene in that movie in which Ouzo plays a role. I'm sure we are better able to appreciate this scene having now had a taste of the drink. (Forward to 8 mins. in the clip below.)



I felt the effects after just one. I'm not sure I'd be standing after 3 or 4!

Jean Kilbourne's "Jesus is a Brand of Jeans"

I'm discussing this essay called "Jesus is a Brand of Jeans" by Jean Kilbourne (available here) tomorrow with my freshman seminar. Although there are a number of interesting ideas in the essay, it's main point is essentially this:

[A]ds . . . state or imply that products are more important than people. Ads have long promised us a better relationship via a product: buy this and you will be loved. But more recently they have gone beyond that proposition to promise us a relationship with the product itself: buy this and it will love you. The product is not so much the means to an end, as the end itself.

The idea that most caught my attention was a certain statement she made about myth, an idea that has held my attention for a while here and elsewhere. She writes:

Advertising performs much the same function in industrial society as myth did in ancient societies. It is both a creator and perpetuator of the dominant values of the culture, the social norms by which most people govern their behaviour.

I don't know if she's technically correct, but it rings true, especially if we define "myth" as "ideology in narrative form" as suggested by Bruce Lincoln. Advertisements reflect our deepest ideals and perpetuate / modify them with each new ad campaign. That's an interesting idea to mull around in light of what I've said elsewhere: it may be better to think of "myth" not as a literary genre but a mode of discourse that asserts the authority of paradigmatic truth.

If that wasn't enough, Kilbourne also reflects upon an analogy between religion and advertising. But I'll let you go read about that for yourself.

Icarus Project: MIT Students Picture Space

Two MIT students took pictures of the earth and the edge of space 17 miles off the surface of the planet for only $148. Here's the webpage with the results of their project. These students and their website, 1337arts.com, is, as they say, "dedicated to celebrating the marriage of art and science and promoting the beauty of scientific art." I hope to see more from them. And I hope they encourage others students to explore!

Here they are being interviewed on CNN:

Freshman Writing Exercise

I just read through my freshman seminar's first writing assignment for the year. Wow. We've got a lot of work to do!

So I'm thinking about using the following highly structured exercise for our next formal writing assignment.

¶ [movie Title] is my favorite movie because [reason A: related to setting/cinematography], [reason B: related to character/actor/acting], and [reason c: related to plot/writing/action/stunts].

¶ [movie title] is my favorite movie because [reason A slightly restated from introductory paragraph]. [give three supporting points to show why reason A makes this movie your favorite]. [provide a transition to next paragraph].

¶ [reason B slightly restated from introductory paragraph] is another reason [movie title] is my favorite movie. [give three supporting points to show why reason B makes this movie your favorite]. [provide a transition to next paragraph].

¶ Finally, [movie title] is my favorite movie because [reason C slightly restated from introductory paragraph]. [give three supporting points to show why reason C makes this movie your favorite].

¶ [write a two or three sentence conclusion that summarizes your reasons for choosing the movie as your favorite.]

This kind of writing is boring and formulaic. But this may be the only way to get some of the kids to clarify their thinking and properly support an explicit thesis. It sort of reminds me of the scribal curriculum in ancient Mesopotamia. Scribes had to copy model letters in order to learn how to write new ones.

After I've received a draft from students cast in this formulaic model, I'll have them rewrite it with the explicit goal of making the style more personalized without sacrificing clarity or structure.

I have high hopes that these kids will learn to write yet. . . .