tanyaclement.org

Ah, the joy of teaching XML. Susan Schreibman of MITH at the University of Maryland is teaching a workshop here and I’m “helping” (mostly by sitting in the back of the room and reading my e-mail and fielding occasional questions, but also by teaching DTD basics and writing the documentation for do-it-yourself XML and CSS practice). It’s bizarre. I learned XML by doing, and then learned the theories. So, sitting here (mostly in the back of the room), it’s hard to believe that people are picking this stuff up, but they are. And then, the worst part (and this is what happens when you try and explain what you *DO* at a dinner party) is that people probably think it’s kind of boring or tedious. But it’s not. So, after encoding all one afternoon, we have them do document analysis where THEY have to do some of the decision-making for one document (about the equivalent time frame in terms of a project would be months and months). Then they see the intellectual difficulties, the challenges, the creativity.
I feel like I have a brilliant child who won’t speak and I have to convince the committee to take her into the drama club.
And, then you realize you have to let her speak for herself . . . even if she won’t.

I’m sure others have seen this, but Daypop is a pretty cool site. You can look up blogs on any subject. It also ranks the most poplular blogs, the articles most cited on blogs, etc. Pretty interesting. Although, ‘palms’ doesn’t seem to be listed there. Perhaps I should change the name to ‘stickypalms’. Then I might get some hits.

A *very* good friend of mine is a a lawyer, an associate at a firm of which the main focus is technology transactions. He spends a lot of his time on projects in New York with older partners in said firm. They spend all day in meetings with CEO’s and in-house lawyers and such like company, and at the end of the day, my friend and his partner (that’s what I like to call the ever-like, ever-changing older white man with whom he dines, his “partner”) go to a nice candlelit dinner and unwind. (I’m getting off point here in the details–this isn’t a story about a clandestine affair, I’m just usurping an interesting bit that my friend tells me for the bearing it has on all affairs technological.) So, over their martinis and fancy shiraz, the rack of lamb and savory breads, they discuss quite often the downfall of the written word. The partner bemoans the fact that no one will read memos anymore (ah, the memo, the lawyer’s art piece, his/her creative gem, his/her foray into the world of language and it’s frustrating limitations). The partner LIKED memos, liked writing them, liked better to have them read, hates having to explain something over and over and over again that should have been written up in exquisite detail in a memo, read once and studied again and again. The culprit?
Powerpoint. Turns out that my very good friend spends an inordinate amount of time whittling down complex ideas into bullets, into graphic representations that will fit on one large format screen. CEO’s don’t like ot spend the time reading. They want to be bulletted with information.
The result? Seems as though the powerpoint requires more meetings, less time reading, almost like teaching a semester of material to a group of students through lecture, no readings, no homework, watch the presentation and go.
One good thing for the lawyers (who still study memo-writing and write briefs in law school and still seem to spend, at least in my friend’s experience, editing others’ contracts), most business people can’t (or won’t) write.
So, hail to Powerpoint, so that the rest of us may eat . . .

I made a resolution at the beginning of this new year that I would write more in my blog. Two problems immediately introduced themselves–one on Christmas day, the other daily since, both related.
On Christmas day, my father announced to the room that “Tanya has a blog. I read it all the time. I enjoy it so much.” (He forgot to mention that he also writes me an e-mail, then calls me to let me know that he’s written me an e-mail about having read the same entry in my blog twice, and by the way, who is Jason? Who is Kari?) My older siblings, my older cousins (everyone in my family is older than me except my husband and the new generation), my grandfather look at me blankly. My father is still looking merry, and somehow, simulataneous with his public reaction, secretly pleased. I feel like I’m in high school and Dad has just mentioned the fact that he’s been sneaking peaks at my journal again.
Come the new year, I didn’t write in my blog.
Then my birthday came, and John (my aforementioned younger spouse) was reading the other wordherder blogs and wondering why I wasn’t more involved in this interesting community, and I promised myself that my birthday was an excellent time to start writing in my blog. That was a week ago.
The second thing happened. My brother sent me a link to an article in the New York Times , “My So-Called Blog”, which discusses the blogging phenonenom in high schools, how teenagers catalog the banal experiences of their every day lives. Now, I’m fairly certain my brother has never read my blog and probably didn’t read the article (just sent it along because he thought it might interest me), so I’m not persuaded he was associating me with a high school blogger, but the discomfort I felt in the association was telling to me. One paragraph in particular touches on my reticence in blogging:
A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence — a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and personal confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer — has been made public. Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.) But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy — a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.
I mean, for goodness sake, if you grew up writing your innermost thoughts and secrets in a journal and your father would sneak little peaks (sorry, Dad, I know you’re out there reading this–see how this perpetuates?) and you lived in a constant state of flux between NEEDING to write in the darn thing and FEARING that your older siblings would also get their hands on it and tear your heightened self-consciousness to further threads, wouldn’t blogging strike fear in your heart too?
But, I’ve decided to face my fears with this new year’s blog. Because, really, as the “My So-Called Blog” author points out:
As the reality-television stars put it, exposure may be painful at times, but it’s all part of the process of ”putting it out there,” risking judgment and letting people in. If teen bloggers give something up by sloughing off a self-protective layer, they get something back too — a new kind of intimacy, a sense that they are known and listened to. This is their life, for anyone to read. As long as their parents don’t find out.

It’s not a popular thing to go to church these days. In fact, I don’t know that many people my age (certainly not more than one of my friends in the DC metro area that I know of) go with any consistency. It’s hard. There seem to be, when involved with some churches, so many inconsistencies or hypocrisies with a more liberal perspective on life and social mores. I am glad to say, though, that I have felt good being part of the Episcopal Church, lately.

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It’s bad enough that I constantly feel like a pop-cultural leper, because I have so little time to watch t.v., to wax and wane on the latest reality show, or to surf the internet for interesting tidbits of up-to-date celeb gossip or for that hilarious site that everyone else seems to have been hitting for months before I even catch wind of it, but that when I do forage into the muck, I seem to hit the trash I found today.

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I was thinking, if I were somebody else, that it would be a great idea to write a dissertation on the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writer’s Project and the American Guide Series, a series written as guidebooks to the individual states in the 1930’s by thousands of writers, some famous (Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison), others not so famous. I mean, what a slice of life! But someone’s already done it. And, besides, I couldn’t figure out how to do it digital (they’re not out of copyright yet). Plus, I’d probably have to GO to each of those states, which I wouldn’t mind at all except for the fact that all the places in the guidebook would probably be (gone) difficult to find. And, of course, since it would be digital, considering each state would probably have to take up my whole life’s work, and I’m trying to live in the here. (I’m not sure DC had a guide).
By the by, there’s an excellent look at the project in Florida at the Library of Congress.

Growing up in Florida, I was always in love with a good hurricane. I say this lightly, not because I’m not aware of the destruction and heartache such cyclones can cause, but because I never experienced it. Strangely enough, even though I lived on the west coast of Florida for 20 years, I never witnessed or lived through a seriously destructive storm. In fact, the first hurricane that really scared me happened during the summer of 1995 when I was working on Fishers Island off the coast of New York. There, trees were blown down and boats were upended and overturned along the beach. It just seems strange to have a hurrican coming to DC–DC seems too civilized . . .
Here’s hoping that everyone is safe and well . . .
Speaking of Florida hurricanes, Marjory Stoneman Douglas has a really interesting account of the 1935 hurricane that dessimated the keys.

I’ve started to think that I want to pursue follklore and textuality as an academic interest, combining that pursuit with a related interest: orality and literacy. I’m taking Barry Pearson’s class ENGL629A Readings in Folklore and Folklife, and while I’m interested in the stories, I’m mostly interested in how these stories come to be represented to the general public. For example, in the case of Zora Neale Hurston and her work for the WPA (nice segue to grandpa’s log below)–what the heck was going on? Who had influence on how she collected and how she presented it? The Library of Congress? Franz Boas, her Columbia anthropology mentor? How about the Lippincott company who published her book Mules and Men?
While I find these questions interesting, the thought of actually going out and collecting folklore sounds daunting. It feels like a violation in some respects, like that horrible feeling of going door-to-door selling candles for the swim team or thin mints and do-see-dohs (sp?) for the good ole Scouts of Girls. How much theory would you have to muddle through and contemplate all the time to not feel like you are (a) taking advantage of someone else for your own perceptions of “good stuff” and “what the world needs to hear/know” and (b) misrepresenting that “good stuff” for the same reasons? Too complicated for me. I’ll stick to collecting family stories and leave that field work out there for the braver team members. Then, I could come in and critique what these outfielders have caught and how they tally the stats.
Collecting folklore sounds as frightening to the introvert as teaching English 101 for the first time . . . wait a minute . . .

In December, 1997, I went over to my grandfather’s house for a couple of recording sessions. I just wanted to know his history in his own words. My grandfather had had an active career in many respects, and it seemed that none of us were clear on its details. This was my attempt to get the “facts” straight. This oral, face-to-face encounter was markedly different than the short chronology sent by my father. My mother’s father and my father are singularly different men.
Is it on?
I went to flint high school and graduated in 1926. Then went to Princeton University and took an AB course there and graduate in 1930. I then went to U. of Michigan and got a JD course in law and graduated there in 1933. I had it in my mind that I’d be an attorney and Mrs. Dort and I drove around the country, all around the country, looking at different cities and towns that we thought might be a good place to live and enquiring, talking to judges and attorneys, enquiring about practicing in those areas and finally, uh, decided not to do that. In the mean time, a friend of mine who was the right-hand man to Harry Hopkins, who was Roosevelt’s right-hand man in 1933, gave me a letter to this man Corrington Gil, who was assistant administrator of the Emergency Relief Organization, and introduced me to him. We had lunch, and he said, “Why don’t you hang around a few days?” I thought I’d just be down there in all the excitement and look around and then maybe go back into looking about law. Two or three days later, he said, “Well, let’s have lunch again.” He said, “Why don’t you stay around for a while. There are a lot of things to do.” He says, “I’ve got a lot of telegrams out here that I don’t have time to answer. Why don’t you do those?” So, I did those and stayed seventeen years in Washington.
I had no intention of staying there when I went. I had various positions in Emergency Relief and the Works Project Administration. One of my jobs was investigating graft and corruption in the Emergency Relief. I learned about that by reading the paper one night in which I read that Mr. Hopkins had appointed me as his chief investigator without letting me know about it. And, the charges of graft were being brought about by senator Bora and were in all the papers. So, I arranged a meeting with him, and I arranged a meeting with him and there was quite a lot of fuss about that. It was in all the papers. I said we’d investigate the matter. And Senator Bora said, “Well, I’ll give you all of my charges.” And, then set up an investigating organization that had branch offices throughout the country. We were in charge of investigation charges of corruption or improper doings in the Relief and Work Progress Administrations. I was then in charge of what they called the Project Control Division, which reviewed and approved all the Work Projects that came in from over the country. Then, after that, became assistant commissioner of the whole organization in charge of administrative matters of budget and personnel and procurement and renting offices and the whole administration of the organization. I was rather proud I cut the administrative budget from 92 million to 54 million the next year. I went up to congress for an appropriation of 54 million. The senator said, “This si impossible. You’re the only man that’s ever come up here asking for less money than last year. So, I felt pretty good about that.
Anyway, as clouds of war came in for World War number 2, I was appointed by the President to come over to the office of the President in charge of what they called the Office for Emergency Management. I was in charge of what they called the Central Administrative Services This organization performed administrative services for all the 18- 20 emergency war agencies that had been set up like the Office of Price Administration and the well, there were a whole lot of them for emergency functions. Our organization helped develop there budgets and hired people, did all the administrative work for these organizations. I had nothing to do with their programs. But it was very difficult for them on an emergency basis to do all this administrative works, so we were set up to do that. We disregarded all the government regulations, said we’ll end up playing poker in jail afterwards, but we’ll get the job done–which we did, I thought.
By then, I went over to the State Department. Dean Acheson, who was then the assistant Secretary of State, hired me in the economic area of the State Department. I was working primarily on emergency relief to our allies and ultimately to the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe. I was involved as the American representative on the board of UNRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Organization and got to know some very interesting people around the world, especially Fiorello La Guardia who was the head of that organization. I traveled with him and have some interesting stories about him.