Brian Greene in the June 1, 2008 NYTimes makes some very important points about science education. Those in turn have some important implications for thinking about science and how scientists present it to the world, some of which Greene makes explicit and others of which warrant some amplification.

When I was shelving some journals today (yesterday, now), I stumbled across a special issue of English Language Notes (v. 45 no. 2, Fall/Winter 2007) entitled Queer Space (and there's a special issue of Social Text that I want to look at, too, called What's Queer About Queer Studies Now?). Richard Hornsey's piece "After the Bathhouse; or, In Praise of Awkwardness" raises some interesting questions for me. As I start writing, I've read about 7 of 12 pages. I will put summarizations of Hornsey's points in regular text and my own comments and reactions in italics.

Epilogue, or, whatever you call it when a smart mentally-ill student who has issues with authority and with deadlines, and who is fed up with dragging zhirself along like this, totally cops out and doesn’t put nearly as much work into zhir final paper as everyone else in the class, because zhe’s pretty sure zhe can get away with it with this professor (just don’t tell zhir dean), but wants to justify zhir brattiness somehow (and how distracting were those third-gender pronouns I made up for myself?).

 

[this space represents the traditional academic paper which I am fully capable of writing, but which I simply could not be bothered to do.]

Spent a day trapped in my own head, relieved by one brief phone conversation, and no writing. It is extraordinarily difficult to care about tactics in academic writing, when one is so utterly self-centered. I’m in some kind of waiting room, metaphorically speaking, and only a very narrow slice of the rest of the world exists to me. Audience, what audience? The writer is alive and kicking (and crying, and going for walks at 3 am, and at 6 am, and spending whole days getting nothing accomplished, and playing with hot wax, and setting up a printer, and getting to the grocery store ten minutes before it closes, and fooling around with the Tarot, and

 

May 21, 2008

(The last line makes me laugh. No, no, don’t skip ahead. But speaking of genres. And if you don’t think it’s funny, it’s because of all the things you don’t know.)