What a difference a decade makes

So, taking a break from the Spring Break Bargain Box Bonanza over at He is a Thark, I'd like to present a little mystery - or rather, what might have been a mystery but actually turned out not be one at all. The circumstances revolve around this book:

I have long been a fan of Steve Saylor's Gordianus the Finder mysteries, and while Saylor does not have a story in this collection, he did write the introduction, so I gave it a whirl. It has some fine yarns in it, and a few clunkers, but overall it has been very satisfying. The editor has arranged the stories by historical chronology, so in addition to the variety of mysteries, murderous and otherwise, there's a bit of a stealth history lesson going on. 

Our potential literary mystery surfaced on page 321:

So, a story that was published in a 1966 mystery magazine and then again in a 1978 anthology had an unknown origin? And the editor printing it once again in 2003 not only still didn't know its provenance for sure, but cast doubt on its authenticity as an authentic Victorian-era story?

Unpossible, I said, and decided to do a little digging.

I looked for a phrase that I thought would be unique to this story and settled on the beginning of the sentence "Septimius laughed, half good-naturedly..."

I launched a Google search for the phrase in quotation marks:

And in less time than it takes to type it, Google returned two hits and two hits only. The first was from Google Books and it was the exact same story:

Our centurion went missing (or in the original title, escaped) in the May 23, 1863 issue of a periodical called (unimaginatively but I would presume accurately) Once a Week.

Google's scan was of a bound copy of the issues from December 1862 through June 1863 which is part of the collection of the library of the University of Michigan.

And there was another hit - this one was a PDF file from the website Old Fulton Postcards. The site is apparently dedicated to preserving the ephemera of old upstate New York and not only has in its files copies of the Albany Evening Journal from 1863, but has had them OCR scanned and made searchable. At any rate, the same story turned up there as well:

Whoever Anonymous was - and neither source names the author - he seemed to have gotten double-duty out of this story 150 years ago.

I guess what I am thinking after all this is how far we seem to have come so quickly. In 1966, 1978, and even 2003, the origins of this legionary escapade were presumed lost to mists of time. Just ten years later, the now-vast machinery of our information age and culture has not only found that source and archived it, but has made it accessible not just to scholars but to a casual reader with nothing better to do on spring break than waste a few minutes with a search engine. I mean, I can't take credit for any sleuthing or even researching: this fish just jumped into the boat. 

I am reminded of an observation that has currency among us teachers of research writing and the librarians who work with us: teaching research is no longer so much about helping students find information; that keeps getting easier. What students need to learn is the critical ability to assess sources, to separate the wheat from the chaff, the basement blogs from the scholars, the crackpots from the curators.

As the flood of information continues to stream towards us, that skill is what's going to be vital.

Dragged, dropped, and done

So, I am playing around with iMovie* the other night and my Mac is running slow. Then it starts telling me that I'm running out of room. I check my hard drive and sure enough, there's less than one GB of space left on that used-to-feel-so-big 60 GB drive. Time to fiddle around a bit.

So, fiddle I do, to include copying some stuff to thumb drives. I find a nice 2 GB folder of gaming pdfs (it would be a whole library of books, I guess) and drag them onto a half-filled 8 GB Data Traveler. The transfer takes a couple of minutes; I check that it has been successful, drag the now-transferred folder to the trash, empty the trash, and check the drive again. Some memory has opened up, but it looks like the folder is still there. I check a few files, and confirm that indeed it is. Confused, I go back to the source folder. It only takes a glance to see what has happened.

I have deleted the wrong files.

You see, I had two sub-folders in "Gaming" folder. One was called RPG Source Material; that was the one I moved on to the thumb drive. The other was called RPG Desktop; that was the one I actually deleted. (Serves me right for naming them so similarly. I was always opening the wrong one when I was looking for a file; I should have known.)

Anyway, as Wonder Wife came into the room, I realized what I had done. There was no way back, no un-do, no return trip: this was "no backsies" as we used to say when trading baseball cards or bottle caps. Three or four years of my slightly OCB record-keeping of the roleplaying games I had participated in (or planned) was gone: the character sheets, maps, backstory narratives, illustrations kiped from here and there - all manner of gaming flotsam, painstakingly filed and labeled and stored - all of it vanished with one click of the mouse.

My reaction: meh.

Seriously, you can ask Wonder Wife: there were no screams of anguish, no shouted curses and obscenities, no wailing and gashing of teeth and rending of garments.  I mean, I was disappointed, of course; I have a penchant for almanacking and gazetteering and taxonomizing, and besides the archival material, there were some files in there that would have been useful in planning new campaigns. But seriously? C'mon. It was hobby junk.

No one was going to die, or lose their job, or go to jail over this. No one was going to be denied human companionship or be forced into servitude or be driven from their homeland. No one would miss a meal.

I have seen pictures of people standing in front of what used to be a home before a hurricane or tornado or earthquake had had a go at at. Everything a person owned had been reduced to flinders and rags, valueless, useless broken bits and bobs of a life, and been strewn across the landscape. It would be hard to deny that that was a real loss, but still, in the end, it was just stuff. Life goes on, and people do too, with or without the Things that We Used to Have.

Me? I had lost some files. Ephemera, really. Hemingway's wife lost a whole suitcase full of his drafts and look what happened to him.

Thirty seconds after the incident, I was back in iMovie, working away. Three or four years from now, a newly-renamed file will once again be bulging with schemes and plans and drawings and maps and characters and ideas.

Maybe I'll delete it on purpose then.

*For what I was playing with, tune in to He is a Thark tomorrow!

Brave New Essay

So, I recall teaching a summer composition course some quarters back, one that I inherited from a teacher who had pulled out of the class at the last minute. I had been stuck with her theme and books: “Conscious Evolution,” explored through some classic science-fiction texts such as Brave New World. I tried to discern what she intended with the theme, and pulled together a syllabus that incorporated her books and supplemented them with a couple of movies and some episodes of the old television series Twilight Zone. I was transparent with students from the first day about the jerry-rigged nature of the instructional plan, and this awareness helped to form (and inform) our development as a community of learners who were reading and writing and talking the summer days away, trying to consciously evolve into something.

The impromptu syllabus seemed to work pretty well, and the students engaged fully with class discussions and participated meaningfully in the writing exercises. The class was the second of a two-course sequence at this school, and the course outline called not so much for the introduction of new skills or genres but for a deepening of the content from the first composition course. In this vein, the final project was to be an analytical paper of considerable length, and I made clear in the lead-up period before the final weeks that I would set the bar for its assessment high.

As the students began their preliminary planning, one fellow came up for some assistance in determining his theme and approach. He was a non-traditional student – an older, married student who was taking some time off from work to finish his education for career advancement – and he was unsure about getting past a surface analysis of any of our source materials.  We talked about different ideas for a while, and then I recalled a scene from one the TV shows in which a woman willingly complied with the casual request of a man for the keys to her car so that he could drive. I asked the student if he wanted to try something dealing with the agency and objectification of female characters.

For me, those were just grad school buzz-words, something to start intellectual play.

For him, they were they keys to whole new world.

To his everlasting credit, the student's first response was to say, without pretense or shame, “I don’t know what that means. Explain it to me.” That led to a vigorous conversation about philosophy, psychology, feminism, and literary analysis; I pointed him to a couple of sources for further background. His reaction was one of wonder: he had literally never thought of understanding relationships and behaviors in this way, and he was excited at the prospect. He went on to draft and revise a pretty darn good analysis of the presentation of women characters in the works we had examined, and the ways in which those presentations contrasted with the purported high-mindedness of their themes.

I felt rewarded by this whole interaction, since it demonstrated so well the power of teaching. Not only did this student gain the skills he needed for immediate outcomes – writing at the level that the course demanded – but he gained a whole new way of thinking about Story, as well as a way of thinking about Thinking. But perhaps most importantly, I like to believe that he gained a level of social consciousness that he had not had before: that this lowly composition class had not only given him the tools to become a better student or better employee, but also a better husband, father, neighbor, and citizen.

Pretty good conscious evolution, that.