QotD: Forlorn Hope Edition

An ongoing theme at this blog deals with the challenges facing the liberal arts and humanities in the coming years. I’ve said on numerous occasions that I have serious qualms about recommending grad school in the humanities, even to my best and brightest, including one of my current advisees. She’d be willing to vouch for the fact that I’m telling her that such programs are only slightly better bets than a lottery ticket these days, and that a lot of very bright people are being exploited by the corporatized higher ed industry.

Part of the problem, of course, stems from the fact that a lot of academics have spent their entire careers in academia, and are consequently somewhat blind to other career paths. (Another more cynical part of me occasionally thinks that a lot of grad programs don’t much give a damn what happens to the grad students after a while, as long as there’s always a fresh crop of T.A.s and seminar audiences. It’s Marc Bousquet’s “Ph.D.-as-waste-product” theory.) And there’s also the notion that a fair percentage of grad students have absorbed the idea that the academic life is the only life of the mind (a position I suspect may be associated with the business of grad student shame). This is nonsense on stilts, of course — my dad didn’t get his B.A. until the year before I left high school, but a more lively mind you are unlikely to meet. Still, a lot of bright kids fall for it.

But there are other games in town, and it would serve us well to recognize that. To that end, articles like one that ran last month at the Times Higher Education page may be of use. It mentions that a number of tech companies have a real interest in working with humanities folks. For example, a speaker from Google mentioned that upwards of two-thirds of its hires in the next year (4000-5000) will come from the humanities/liberal arts.

Why? Well, that brings us to the QotD:

Developing user interfaces, for example, was at least as much about knowing how to observe and understand people as about pure technological skill, [Google VP Marissa Mayer] added.

Ms Mayer’s Stanford BA in symbolic systems, which included philosophy and psychology, had proved as useful as her MBA in computer science to her work at Google, the executive said. Even programming was fundamentally about communication and often came more easily to humanities graduates than mathematicians.

[...]

[Google's director of engineering Damon] Horowitz drew on his own experience to explain the value of humanities PhDs. Ten years ago, he recalled, he had been “a technologist, with a high-paying technology job, doing cutting-edge artificial intelligence work, and generally living the technotopian good life”.

Yet he had come to realise that “the artificial intelligence systems I was building weren’t actually that intelligent” and amounted to little more than “a bunch of clever toys”.

This led to some major philosophical questions and then a PhD, which Dr Horowitz described as “a personal intellectual transformation” and “a rite of passage to intellectual adulthood”.

It had also made him “a better technologist than before”.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive: Fathers’ Day Edition

In my previous post, I mentioned that Mrs. M and the Spawn had found a Fathers’ Day card my dad made for my grandfather 55 years ago, and that the Spawn replicated her grandfather’s work for my Fathers’ Day card. I further mentioned that would include images when possible.

Through the courtesy of Mrs. M, I found the necessary images in my inbox this morning, so here you go. Thanks again, ladies — and Dad, a long time ago.

Exterior of the card, with cartoon by my dad.

Interior of the card — cartoon by the Spawn, lettering by my dad.

Fathers’ Day

My trip to HeroesCon with the Spawn last week was my primary celebration of Fathers’ Day, but today did not pass without observation. Mrs. M and the Spawn went through batches of old photos and scanned a number of pictures, from when Dad was a baby until just a few years back. Here’s a sample:

Clan Mondo, ca. 1973.

 

Dad and the Spawn

 

But the coolest bit was something I’m trying to figure out how to display on here. In 1958, my dad was a 15-year-old who liked to draw. He drew an odd cartoon-card for his father for Fathers’ Day. The Spawn used a scanner to create a replica, and then drew her own version of the cartoon on the reverse, with a signature and date that paralleled where my dad had put his 55 years before. I’m looking at it right now, and enjoying the ties between generations — which is really what I guess today is about.

Hope your day is going that nicely as well.

 

In Which the Spawn Observes a Flaw

A few minutes ago, the Spawn said, “You know something that annoyed me?”

“There are things that don’t?”

“Well, yeah, but I had a test where the last two choices were — in this order:

D) None of the Above.

E) All of the Above.”

Silence. “Yeah, that would be problematic, wouldn’t it?”

 

Four Years Later

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of my parents’ murder, and today is the fourth anniversary of when I got the news.

Because the house was a crime scene, we were told that we should probably wait a couple of days before we got there. We needed access to the house to look for insurance papers, wills, and other such items, but the police also let us know that we should probably wait until the scene had been cleaned up. They told us that my parents’ homeowners insurance would likely cover the cleanup, and that the insurers would refer us to a cleaning service. Mrs. M made the appropriate phone calls — she handled many, indeed almost all, of these details as I moved and thought in slow motion, trying to gather facts.

I had been teaching two classes that summer term, which my colleagues graciously agreed to take over, so I went to my office and sent out syllabi, lecture notes, copies of my old exams, and assignment specifications. When I got back home, Mrs. M had laid out a wide variety of family photos to take to the visitation. I looked at the pictures of Mom and Dad on trips, at Christmas celebrations, and the like, and smiled as I wept. I leaned against the doorframe between the hallway and the living room, and room, and said, “[Mrs. M], are you trying to break my heart?”

“Do you not want to take the pictures?”

“Oh, yeah, I do. It’s just — it’s just everything.”

A phrase that came to me many times during those early days was “It is what it is.” I know a lot of people hate the expression, but I used it a lot anyway. I meant that the essential facts — the deaths of my parents, the rupture in my life, the shock and horror — were immutable, beyond my control. All we could do was accept those facts and get through to the best of our abilities, and hope we made it out the other end. At that point, however, my abilities were slim indeed.

We drove to Eastern Kentucky on Sunday, dropping the Spawn off with her surviving grandparents, my wife’s family. Mrs. M spoke to one of her brothers, whose son is near the Spawn’s age, and they agreed to bring the Spawn to Lexington for pickup when it was time to drive to Nashville for the funeral. From there, we went to a hotel in Northern Kentucky, where Mrs. M and I met and were interviewed by two of the detectives.

Among other things, they told us that we probably shouldn’t go into the house right away. The scene had not been cleaned, of course, and there were still investigators working elsewhere in what had been my family’s home for nearly 31 years. And their searches were thorough. We were told the place would be a shambles — closets emptied, things moved around in other rooms, that sort of thing. We told the police where we thought the papers we needed were. Ultimately, we figured out that we could have access to my parents’ bedroom — the crime scenes were in the kitchen and the stairwell/downstairs area, and the bedroom could be accessed out of the lines of sight of either, thanks to a sliding glass door my father had installed from the bedroom to the back deck. While we looked around in there, the police would bring any files they found from the locations we requested.

We agreed to meet at the house the next morning, and got there about the same time as the police and a ServPro cleaning van. A detective entered the house and let us in through the sliding door. The first thing I noticed was how cold the house was, and I figured out why. The second thing I noticed was that the radio was still on the local public/classical station. And I sat on the edge of the bed and wept again.

After a bit, a deputy brought us a drawer full of folders from Dad’s downstairs office, and we hunted through them, looking for the papers we needed. Other drawers were brought in — from a china cabinet in the living room, from a kitchen drawer, and we finally found the insurance information. Again, Mrs. M started to make phone calls so we could have access to the money we’d need for the funerals. (We finally got the call telling us we’d have use of the insurance money as we were driving to Nashville. Mrs. M wept with relief.)

We spent a couple of hours in the bedroom, as the sound of the cleaners at work filtered from the stairwell and the other end of the hall. Eventually, they were done, and they asked Mrs. M to take a look and make sure the work was satisfactory. Some carpeting had been removed, as had a bit of wood tile from the kitchen. There were things, they said, that they just couldn’t save.

We understood.

Meeting Allison

I did something today that I haven’t done in quite a while. I held a 3-month-old baby, the daughter of two of my former students. She is a fine example of the breed — bright eyed and lovely, sufficiently small and dainty enough that I was as nervous as ever while I held her. Years ago, my dad told me that what he really hoped for from me was that I would be “not necessarily a gentleman — although that would be nice — but a gentle man”, and I try to be. But because of my size and awkwardness, I’m always a little nervous around babies and delicate objects, and whenever I hold either, I flash on either Karloff’s Monster with the little girl or Lenny Small. That never happens, of course, but I get nervous all the same.

But the baby seemed to like me. Indeed, she typically seems very happy in the pictures I have seen of her, and she lived up to that today. She smiled a lot, listened patiently to the enormous hairy stranger, and even seemed to pay attention when I read her a Middle English poem written to a long-ago woman with the same name — there will be time later for her to understand the words, but I’ve always liked the poem.

Allison and her mother have gone on their way for their daily errands, and I have my work today as well, with papers to grade for my summer course. It’s a little hard to get motivated to do that, as tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the murders, and the week weighs on me. Still, I can appreciate a moment of beauty when I see it, and I’m grateful to my student for swinging by and letting a large, awkward, middle-aged man hold someone as lovely as her daughter. Those moments help me remember to try to be gentle.

Sympathy for the Devil

Maria Bamford used to do a bit about a boyfriend who was “a musician, so you already know he’s sleazy.” Rock and rollers aren’t typically known as models of domestic stability, and of course, that’s part of their appeal in a lot of ways. Perhaps most impressively, Screaming Jay Hawkins apparently sired so many children that a data registry was set up for the sole purpose of tracking his offspring. (Hey, I didn’t say it was a positive accomplishment.)

A similar rock and roll sperm donor was Brian Jones, co-founder (and arguably the best musician) of the Rolling Stones. Unlike most of the band (whom Lemmy recalls as having worked to cultivate “an air of disrespectability”), Jones apparently was considered a genuine bad boy, and according to Allmusic, had several children while he was still in his teens.

Unsurprisingly, this behavior didn’t stop when he became a rock star. Of course, in the 1960s, there was considerably greater stigma attached to illegitimacy, and when Jones impregnated a woman named Dawn Molloy in 1964, she was paid £ 700 for her silence, and when she gave birth to a son in early 1965, the child was put up for adoption. His biological father was unnamed on his birth certificate, which identified him solely as a musician.

The child was adopted and grew up as John Maynard, and after fathering two children of his own, he researched his parentage. His story may be found here, and despite the fact that it’s in the Daily Mail, it’s worth checking out:

‘I met some people last summer and was invited on to their boat.

‘It turned out they were the biggest Stones fans, so I had to listen to Paint It Black and Sympathy For The Devil and so on, while they jigged around and talked about the Stones. I didn’t say a word. What’s the point? It’s almost as if I’m silenced too.’