Cheese: It's what's for dinner.

Front page story on this morning's New York Times: Wisconsin is losing the cheese race to California. By early next year, cheese experts forecast, California will lead Wisconsin in cheese production. Apparently, California's "Happy Cows" have been producing more milk than Wisconsin's "Stoic Cows" for a decade, but the cheese thing really smarts.

I just want to say this: I know I live in California, and yes, I even like California, this is true. But I wish no ill will toward Wisconsin's cows, dairy industry or stem-cell research facilities. In fact, I hold Wisconsin cheese, ice cream, milk, beer and stem cells very dear. I get a surprising amount of shit about this, and I just want to preemptively defend myself: it is not my fault that Calfornia produces more cheese than Wisconsin.

Squalor wins by one!

I haven't played on a softball team since I lived in New York, when I was the Young & Rubicam 3rd basewoman for a season of games in Central Park (I know: an alternate universe). I was jonesing to get out the ol' mitt, so I found myself a Cal intramural team full of political scientists, Squalor's Workstation (I think this name is hilarious, by the way -- the Cal computer shop is called the Scholar's Workstation), and we had our first game tonight: 12-11 Squalies, quite the nail-biter.

One of my favorite things about joining a softball team cold like I did with the Y&R team and now this one is that I have excellent hand-eye coordination for a girl. Of course, the for a girl part is what everyone thinks but doesn't actually say, so guys are always impressed when I proceed to throw and then catch a ball. Easy brownie points. My hitting is kinda 'ehhh,' and I didn't make any glorious fielding moves tonight at 3rd base, but, let's face it: the last time I played softball I was in my early 20s and now I'm in my early 30s. After Monday's practice, the entire right side of my body was sore -- this, despite stretching before and after, icing and dragging out the heating pad. Boy, did I feel old. It's a good kind of sore, though. It's an all-American game kind of sore. Go Squalies!

Next week we're up against "Meta-Shadow Price" (Is that some kinda econ term or something?), 9pm at the field next to Strawberry Canyon for anyone looking for some Wednesday night entertainment...

Serious Topics in Calamity Programming

The only new show I've committed to watching this season is Aaron Sorkin's new baby, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." As I've said elsewhere, put Bradley Whitford on a box of cereal and I'd watch that, so this was a no-brainer. We're two episodes in to the series, and I still can't shake the specter of "The West Wing" as I'm watching it. First of all, every time you round a corner there's another WW regular or semi-regular: it's like Sorkin took all the extras and one-line speaking parts from WW and hired them for Studio 60. Why couldn't he have just spun off the West Wing? That way we could have had Donna back, too. This just in: I think I dreamt about Toby Zeigler last night.

Secondly, I love Sorkin's dialogue, but it is a bit annoying that we're talking about, um, television instead of the political future of our country. I realize that most of the good drama settings have been taken (courtrooms, hospitals, police stations, morgues), but I just can't drum up that much concern for whether a pseudo-Saturday Night Live is boycotted by the Christian right. Maybe this will change. Maybe not.

Matthew Perry is great -- this is an excellent role for him. But, despite the freshly whitened teeth, slightly more subdued hair and black-on-black wardrobe, Bradley Whitford is still Josh Lyman to me.

Also, whatever happened to opening credits? And a decent theme song?

But is anyone reading the text in this class?

Here are two seemingly disparate things that I feel like combining: Stanley Fish and the students in the back of my classroom who clearly aren't doing the reading. Let's see if we can make this float.

Stanley Fish, perhaps best known for his essay "Is There a Text in This Class?" (which is actually a pretty good read, and gives a nice sense of how incredibly difficult it would be to work in the same department as Stanley Fish), gave a talk here today entitled "Why the Composition Course Should Not Be a Transformative Experience." (You have to love Fish titles) Fish explained that at the beginning of his Freshman Composition course, he tells the students that he's not interested in any of their opinions about anything. Period. His is a course strictly on grammar, subject-verb-object, and syntax: It's not about the content.

In theory, I agree with him. Here I am, teaching La Celestina, a 16th-century Spanish novel, to a room full of undergrads, and the point is, according to Fish, that my job is to expand their textual horizons and teach them how to interpret these texts using academic tools. Whether this is useful or not in the so-called real world we'll have to leave to the side for the moment, given that this is my livelihood we're talking about. But what's interesting about this to me is that Fish wants students to stick to the form and function of it all, so that, given the sentence "Helping elderly people cross the street prevents accidents," for instance, they must restrain from discussing the possibility that these elderly people have to cross the street because they're forced to buy their prescription drugs from a shady Canadian black-market Lipitor dealer (or something of that nature). No: Stick to the form.

But then we return to La Celestina, and my current struggle with whether my students are actually reading it or not, and whether they're all sitting there mentally writing horrible things on my evaluation because they're bored of medieval Spanish literature... And what do I do? Well, I put on my monkey costume and talk about whether there was abortion in 16th-century Spain and dig out a Penelope Cruz movie version of the novel and my students put on a puppet show about the Inquisition. We can't possibly stick to the form. We don't get too far off the beaten track, but I can see it happening, just to wake 'em up. I think Fish's ideas could work in the ideal classroom, with engaged students who are simply fascinated with subject-verb-object, but what happens when the material is hard and half the class clearly needs a caffeine IV drip? Bring in the monkey.

Anyway, tomorrow Fish is talking about thesis statements, so I'm totally there. Maybe there'll be some more insight into the undergraduate mind...

Pretty freakin' Berkeley

These are photos from today's How Berkeley Can You Be? Parade and Festival. Sorry, Dave, I didn't get any photos of the naked people, but rest assured, they were there (they're always there). Instead, here are some motorized cupcakes and a couple of my favorite Art Cars. Man, I love the Art Cars...

This Volvo, covered with lefty bumper stickers, is basically every car in Berkeley, taken to its logical extreme.

This is another favorite (and the kids love it, too!): I call it the shark car. I drive past it on my return route from the grocery store (the Berkeley Bowl, which is another Berkeley phenomenon in and of itself).
Also making appearances in the parade? Free-range chickens on stilts, a biodiesel brigade, men dressed as Vulcans (and mumbling in what I can only presume to be Vulcanese?), the mayor of Berkeley (yawn) and a man in a pink bodysuit riding a unicycle (who may have not even known about the parade). Oh, and this banana bike:

It's 9:44 on a Wednesday...

Three streakers just ran past my window: two women and a man. Only saw them from behind, but they were streakers all right. Good, wholesome fun for a school night...

Golden Bear in the Sky with Footballs

A small goal I have set for myself this year: learn the Cal Fight Song. (I'm a fan of marching bands, one, and pride myself on knowing my school songs from elementary school on up, two. Although, come to think of it, did Van Hise have a school song? I don't know that one.). And so here I sit, an hour away from the home opener (against the Minnesota Gophers! Rah!), for which I got free 'staff appreciation' tickets, playing the fight song on my computer over and over and trying to memorize the words. Here, you can do it, too! Listen to the song here.
Now, let's dissect the lyrics:

Our sturdy Golden Bear,
Is watching from the skies,
Looks down upon our colors fair,
And guards us from his lair.
Our banner Gold and Blue,
The symbol on it too,
Means FIGHT! for California.
For California through and through!

OK, I've got this stanza almost memorized, but I don't really understand this business about a bear watching us from the skies. Does that make any sense? At least the rest of it is self-explanatory: it just describes the Cal banner, and lord knows I've seen that plenty of times. I'm not doing as well with the second stanza:

Stalwarts girded for the fray,
Will strive for victory,
Their all at Mater's feet will lay,
That brain and brawn will win the day.
Our mighty sons and true
Will strive for us anew,
And PIVOT! for California,
For California through and through!

Pivot?!? I don't see too many people doing much pivoting these days. Also, there seem to be too many syllabus in the first verse, but that's just me being annoyingly literary, I guess. I'm not sure how many people actually sing this stanza, so I'm not going to worry about it too much. As long as I've got that first one down, I'm good to go!

First Week of the Last Year

A few first-week-of-school observations:

• Classrooms without windows should not exist. It is impossible to establish a jovial, 'let's all do some learnin', whaddaya say?' atmosphere when you feel like you're trapped in a dungeon.
• On a similar note, classroom designers should think long and hard about the placement of clocks: first of all, a clock is very, very important in this age of cellphones -- if you don't have a clock, you can't legitimately tell students to turn off their phones while in class as many of them use their phones as watches. Secondly, if you put the clock above my head at the front of the classroom, students don't seem to look you in the eye ever, and you yourself have to turn around to check it. Likewise, if the clock is behind the students, they do not hesitate to turn around every 5 minutes to look at it, which can really screw up an instructor's mojo. My preferred clock position is to the side, by the windows or the door, where it can be discretely checked by all.
• No matter how far I get from the days of Trapper-Keepers and #2 pencils, I still love buying new school supplies at the beginning of September.
• It is very strange to teach a class that you yourself attended only a few years before.
• Simple pleasures, like a new office with a computer, swively chairs and space to get up and pace (should one want to pace) can do wonders.
• I'm still not sure if wearing flip-flops while teaching a Medieval Literature class sets a "she's cool, she wears flip-flops" tone or a "who does she think she is? wearing flip-flops? what, is she 20?" tone. The jury's still out on that one. I think pretty soon I'll cave and wear jeans, though. I just wanted to look like the teacher for at least the first couple of weeks.