Being Wrong (but not about the iPad; it kicks @$$!)

I haven’t had a chance to get back to my blog mash-up series for over a week now. I have been thinking a lot about it, but not necessarily in productive waysmaybe I am letting it simmer too long. Honestly, I have spent the past few hours (and some of yesterday too) trying to figure out what to write and where to go with it. The kids are out of school and I started another blog project with STA. I am also struggling a little as I try to negotiate the different writing styles required for blogs and academic journals. Oh well.

I am now taking a break from it for the rest of the day. Time for some fun writing. A few days ago I purchased my very first iBook for the iPad: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz. I found out about this book in a New York Times review. I was drawn to it because of my serious interest in troublemaking (and the trouble that being wrong and failing to be right causes). To me, being wrong seems a lot like being uncertain, which is also a lot like staying in trouble. To be wrong is also to come up against one’s limits of knowing what to do or how to do it. This reminds me of Foucault and his discussion of the limit attitude in “What is Enlightenment?” Now, I don’t think Foucault would describe this as being wrong, which seems to be a judgment, always made in relation to its opposite: being right. However, I think Schulz’s ideas about the value of wrongness do share some similarities with Foucault and his promotion of limits and problematization (or problem posing). But, in the interest of keeping this entry on the light side, I won’t get into those similarities right now. I am trying to work on the value of problem posing in relation to repair and care for my mash-up and I am still struggling with it.

Check out a few passages from the book (and what I have read so far) on:

the value of being wrong

Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error [as failure] might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world (12, in iBooks version).

the pedagogy of being wrong

…however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are (12).

the connection between being wrong and imagination

We already say that “seeing the world as it is not” is pretty much the definition of erring–but it is also the essence of imagination, invention and hope. As that suggests, our errors sometimes bear far sweeter fruits than the failure and shame we associate with them. True, they represent a movement of alienation, both from ourselves and from a previously convincing vision of the world. But what’s wrong with that? “To alienate” means to make unfamiliar; and to see things–including ourselves–as unfamiliar is an opportunity to see them anew (35).

So far, I am really enjoying this book. I want to spend some more time thinking about the ways I agree and disagree with her assessment of being wrong. For right now, I am happy to be reading a book that sees value in erring or, as Schulz eloquently puts it, “fucking up.” Cool.

I’m reading this book on my iPad. I really like it. Let me list just a few reasons why:

  • It turns the page like a real book. I know everyone mentions this feature. There’s a reason why they do; it’s pretty damn cool. Not only does it look cool, but it feels cool and makes it really easy to flip back and forth between pages. It’s like a “real” book, but better. And much better than kindle books (yes, I have the kindle app too).
  • It has a useful bookmark feature. Sure, many people complain about how the bookmark feature doesn’t bookmark anything (unlike the Kindle). Instead, it highlights text. While I agree that calling this feature a bookmark is rather strange, I happen to like that it highlights (and in at least five different colors!). I used it to keep track of the passages that I cited above. I anticipate using this feature a lot during the semester.
  • It can download books instantly.
  • It lights up so that you can read in bed. I don’t have a bedside lamp right now and I have been lamenting the fact that I can’t read much at night. That is, until now. I can read the iPad all night if I want to (which I don’t) and, if I’m feeling considerate to STA (which I usually am), I can dim the light a little so that I can still read without blinding them. While I have never used a Kindle, I’ve been told (and have read) that it doesn’t have its own light. What’s the point, then?

But, of course, the iPad and iBooks aren’t perfect (not even close. But, if you have been reading this entry you will hopefully recognize that I don’t mind when things fail or when things go wrong). Here are a few things I don’t like:

  • As others have suggested, the iBooks selection is pretty pathetic right now, especially for academic books. Does it have any books by Judith Butler? No. Sara Ahmed? No. Jasbir Puar? Yeah, right. Michel Foucault. Just one: Abnormal. If the selection doesn’t change in the next few months, I won’t be using iBooks for my classes at all. Now, the Kindle app for the iPad does have quite a few choices. Several Butler books. One by Ahmed. Tons of Foucault. While I don’t like the Kindle app experience quite as much, I do appreciate their selection of books.
  • You can highlight text but you can’t take notes in iBooks. At least, I don’t think you can. I know that you can on the Kindle, but I don’t see how in iBooks. Any iPad users out there?

In reflecting on being wrong, I can’t help but think about failure and the seemingly ubiquitous internet meme, FAIL. I know that this has been around for years, but I have never taken the time to explore its origins or meanings. Thank goodness I don’t have to; youtube as done it for me. Check it out:

Speaking of memes, I must present my own FAIL. I recently posted a clip called “The Dramatic Chipmunk”. Well, I knew it was old and had gone viral some time ago. But I didn’t realize it was three years old or that it was the dramatic prairie dog (okay, I knew it wasn’t a chipmunk; I was torn between thinking it was squirrel or a hamster). My bad (and how old is that phrase?). Here’s a youtube video that exposes my (epic?) fail:

Blog Mash-up #1: Troublestaying-as-care and Feminist Ethics

Over the past year, this blog has been incredibly helpful in enabling me to process, work through and archive my critical reflections on troublemaking and troublestaying. It has also enabled me to make productive connections between seemingly disparate topics: Eminem and Socrates; The Brady Bunch and Habermas; Hannah Montana and Judith Butler; Laura Ingalls and Bourdieu (hint: only briefly in the note at the end), just to name a few. When I began this blog last year, my plan was to use it as a writing tool. Here’s what I wrote about it on my about this site page:

The most important way that I am using this site is as a WRITING TOOL. I have been thinking and teaching about troublemaking for several years now and I thought that it was about time that I started actually writing about it (okay, I have written about it a little). I have talked for a long time (over a decade, sometimes) about certain ideas/theories/topics that would make a great article or book chapter. Life (kids, moves, PhDs, illness) got in the way and, for that matter, is still getting in the way. So, I thought trying out blog writing might help to get me writing again, especially with the limited amount of time I have (did I mention I have two very young kids?).

It has worked. I write a lot now. And on this blog I have stockpiled a large number of ideas, many of which are just waiting to be converted into articles (and maybe books?). So far, I have resisted this process. Academic writing tends to be boring and painful. And it takes time away from the writing that I enjoy; the writing that moves my spirit and that inspires me. But, I believe that I need to change my assessment of formal writing. This summer I need to take my ideas and do something more with them. I need (and not just for my cv) to write some articles and get them published. And I want to use the blog to help me do this by documenting my writing process (what I’m working on, what I’m stuck on, etc) and by posting parts-in-progress for review by others. I also want to use what I have already written, my archive of mini-essays on troublemaking and troublestaying, as the foundation for my manuscripts. In particular, I want to combine several entries, with similar or complementary themes, to create an academic publication-worthy essay. I have decided to call these essays blog mash-ups. I will write and submit as many of these mash-ups as I possibly can this summer.

So, here’s my first mash-up, all taken from the tag, “care”:
what does it mean to care? + defining care + horton the caring elephant who not only makes trouble but stays in it = an awesome article on feminist ethics

So here’s a summary of each entry:

what does it mean to care? In this entry, I critically assess how care is understood and articulated in a children’s book, “We Care, ” that is about a third grade class’s successful efforts to help/care for people in a homeless shelter. While I appreciate much of what the book is trying to do (encouraging students to care and linking care with specific and repeated practices), I ultimately argue that the book presents the reader (aimed at a 3rd grader) with a limited and problematic view of care. I suggest that the students are not encouraged to ask questions or think critically about why the shelter (or homelessness) exists and what kinds of care strategies and practices are most effective. I also suggest that the failure of the story to include the actual residents of the shelter (as characters or even as illustrations) reinforces a very problematic division between the care-giver as subject (student) and the care-receiver as absent object (shelter residents). My main point in this entry: this book offers a insufficient and ineffective definition of care, one that has potentially troubling consequences for readers as they develop their own moral vision of the world and how to treat/exist in the midst of others.

defining care: In this entry, I describe Joan Tronto’s definition of care as it is outlined in the fourth chapter of her book, Moral Boundaries. I also highlight her four inter-related yet distinct phases of care: caring about; taking care of; care-giving; care-receiving. I plan to use her definition as the starting point for my description of a feminist ethic of care. Throughout the entry, I ask questions about her phases and her definition of care. One question I ask is this: are trouble staying and curiosity-as-care only about paying attention? Do they offer other forms of care? Are they only valuable because they make us aware of a problem/need for care?

horton as troublemaker and troublestayer: In this final entry of the three, I write about how Horton, from Horton Hears a Who is a troublemaker who engages in productive troublemaking/staying not just because he pays attention to the voices on the speck that are crying out for help; he is a troublemaker/stayer because he refuses to ignore those voices, even when he is repeatedly told not to, that he is imagining them, and that he will suffer dire consequences if he continues to listen. The care he gives is focused on connecting his attentiveness to the world with his passion for social justice. In concluding this essay, I attempt to link Horton’s speech to the Sour Kangaroo (the “a person’s a person, no matter how small” speech) with a passage from Michel Foucault’s “The Masked Philosopher.” I really like this entry and I think it does a nice job of exploring the possibility for expanding what we mean by care/caring about and how it connects to trouble, both making it and staying in it.

But, wait. As I am writing this, I realize that I should add one more entry into this mash-up: another feminist response to horton hears a who: why is it always the mother’s fault?

In this entry, I discuss how the story (moreso in the recent movie, yet also present in the book) relies on the very problematic trope of the smothering mother: the mother who wishes to continue tradition/the status quo at all costs. The troublemaker (troublestayer) is pitted against the ultimate enemy: the Mother who sees change, curiosity and wonder as threatening. I like the idea of adding this in as well because feminist ethics of care is usually so closely linked with mothering and the mother-as-care-giver. In my own version of trouble-as-care, I am interested (as in J Tronto in her vision) in challenging this entrenched idea and of rethinking what care from a feminist perspective could mean.

So, there you have it: the key parts to my mash-up. Now I have to think through how to connect them, to mash them up, if you will. [Note: STA felt it necessary to remind me that mash-ups are played. I responded: Of course they are, they just had an episode about them on Glee! Regardless of how out-dated mash-ups are (and regardless of how ill-fitting they are for describing what I am trying to do with this blog and writing), I still want to use them. So there!] More on how I will use them in an upcoming entry…

I just spent a couple of minutes on youtube attempting to find a mash-up that I liked. I couldn’t find anything great…yet. I will keep looking. Any suggestions? In the meantime, here is the girl’s mash-up from Glee:

iPAD note: Because I have had some trouble in the past with the WordPress app, I decided to write this entry the old-school way: on my MacBook. About halfway through I realized that I liked how the app on iPad lets me see more of the entry at once while I am writing. So I switched to the iPad. I wrote the rest of the essay, switching back and forth between the two. Not ideal, I suppose. I will keep experimenting. Hey, have I mentioned that I love my new iPad?

Being Beside Oneself with Grief

I am continuing to document and archive the writing process for my manuscript on grief, loss, and my mother’s death from pancreatic cancer. This is entry four. So far I have written about the title and posted fragments of the essay and my thoughts about it. In this entry, I want to offer up a few more fragments and describe how I will organize the essay. Before moving onto that discussion, I want to document some other details about this process:

It is a beautiful day. Mid-70s, sunny, with a slight breeze. I am listening to Regina Spektor. I began this morning, with my daily latte, writing in the backyard. I used my iPad. Now I am inside the house, in my office. I tried writing this entry on my iPad, but I am having some issues with the WordPress app (by issues I mean that I clicked out of the app briefly to refer back to my manuscript, which was in Pages, and lost my entire entry). As I type these words, I am using my MacBook. Perhaps I just need to get used to the WordPress app, but I can’t be bothered with that at this moment.

Is this more detail than you would like? Or, maybe not the right kind of detail?  I am experimenting with how to document my writing process–what to include, how to insert myself as a person-who-is-writing into this post. What do you think?

So, onto the manuscript. I plan to organize the heart of my essay around two different meanings for beside: a. to be beside oneself with emotion and b. to be beside someone else, keeping vigil and taking care. Right now I am working on (and struggling a little) with the section on being beside oneself. Central to this section is Judith Butler’s ideas about being beside oneself with grief and her valuing of grief/coming undone as “one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearing and find our way” (Precarious Life, 30). Butler argues that being in a state of grief (being overcome with grief, overwhelmed by sadness, losing control, being vulnerable, coming undone) reminds us how we are always already, by virtue of being human, “in the thrall of our relations with others that we cannot always recount or explain,” or, I might add, control/shape/determine (Undoing Gender, 19). For Butler, to be undone by others is a central part of the human experience and grief is one of the primary ways in which we are aware of/experience that undoneness. To fail or refuse to acknowledge that we are undone is to miss something really important (I mention this in entry two here).

While I agree with Butler’s assessment of grief, having experienced coming undone by grief too many times in the past four years, I find it to be lacking. Grief is not the only resource we have for making sense/being reminded of our vulnerability. It is not the only way in which we are beside ourselves. While Butler agrees, and briefly mentions rage and passion in her discussion, she focuses almost exclusively on grief (read as sadness and loss). Some attention needs to be given to these other emotions and how they are not merely additional resources (ones that exist besides grief), but they are resources that exist in the midst of (beside) grief. Here’s another emotion/feeling/affect that I want to add: joy/laughter. In my experiences of being beside the Judiths, my mom and even moreso my daughter have undone me with playfulness and laughter. They have caused me to beside myself with joy as I marvel at the beauty of life instead of the sadness of death. Now, my ideas here are not necessarily in opposition to Butler’s. She has a different project and is placing her ideas of grief and being undone in a different context. Instead, I see my inclusion of joy as another example of beside–I want to place my thinking about being undone in terms of joy/laughter next to Butler’s.

I am still working through how to articulate joy. Somehow I want to connect it to the idea that vulnerability can and should be understood in relation to death. However, it should also be understood in relation to life. Our experiences of grief and joy are not in opposition to each other and don’t occur at different times. They interrupt each other in unexpected ways. Grief/death may interrupt life (and our comfortable, in-control living of it), but life can also interrupt grief/death. Here are a few narrative fragments I want to weave into this section of my essay.

First, one about joy/life unexpectedly happening:

The social worker told us–me and my sisters–that we needed to let our mom know it was okay to let go. We needed to tell her that she had our permission to die, that we were okay with it. My sister planned a big dinner for mom and the three of us readied ourselves for the painful conversation. Just before dinner I turned on some music–The Sound of Music, one of my mom’s (and my) favorite musicals. Spontaneously I, sometimes with my sisters joining in, performed the entire musical. At one point, maybe when I was singing “The Lonely Goatherd” I realized that this was one of those big moments in my life. My mom may have been dying, but she was laughing too. Well, at least her eyes were laughing. And we were all having a lot of fun. At the end of the album, when Mother Superior sings “Climb Every Mountain,” I hit the high note! I mean, I really hit the high note–vibrato and all. We laughed and laughed and then brought my mom her dinner, forgetting all about “that conversation.” Sometimes life interrupts grief, not the other way around. Our best intentions of properly grieving are undone. Our attempts at making sense of how grief is supposed to be are troubled by life’s persistent refusal to stop happening.

Second, one illustrating how life continues, and is not thwarted by, death:

My mom was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in mid-October 2005. I was around 18 weeks pregnant with Rosie. A few days before I drove to Chicago to see her, maybe for the last time, I had an ultrasound. I found out that my baby was a girl. When I arrived at my parent’s house, I told my mom that she was going to have another granddaughter named after and in honor of her: Rosemary Judith. I was fairly certain that my mom would never meet her; the doctor had indicated that she might only have six weeks left. Six months later, my mom took a break from chemotherapy to visit us and meet her new granddaughter.

As I mentioned above, I’m still not sure what to do with these fragments. In particular, I think there’s more going on in the second one that I readily convey–something more than just the juxtaposition of life with death.

Oh, in case you can’t remember the high note at the end of “Climb Every Mountain,” here it is. And yes, I really did hit it:

Did I mention that I love my iPad?

In a happy coincidence, my iPad arrived on the final day of my classes for the spring semester. Feeling adventurous, I decided to try grading some of my final papers on it, using Aji’s iAnnotate. This app enables you to get pdfs from your laptop, annotate them (with highlighting, underlining, post-it notes, free-writing mark-ups), and then upload them again. I read 5 of my student’s papers on my iPad and was able to highlight their text and make comments via annotated post-it notes. Then I uploaded them back to my computer and sent them as a attachments to the students. While I haven’t heard back from the students yet (I just sent them out last night and this afternoon), I found the experience to be very helpful. Actually, I love reading and grading papers this way. I think it will allow me to engage even more with the student and their writing/ideas. Once (and if) I hear back from students about their experiences getting feedback this way, I will write a follow-up post (or a comment on this post).

Here’s their description of what iAnnotate can do:

And here’s a brief example of my annotations on a document:

I don’t think I will ever read articles the same way again…

Word count: 200

I Love My New iPad

I am writing this blog entry on my new iPad and I love it! I hope to experiment all summer with ways of using it in my writing and teaching. Any suggestions? I can’t wait to play around with the iBooks and the Kindle apps. I am hoping to store a lot of my articles/pdfs here so that I won’t have to print them out anymore. I also am looking forward to experimenting with drawing apps. I just found one thing that I won’t be able to do on this iPad: it looks like I can’t upload images and post them on here. Oh well, I am sure that that is not the first limitation I will find.