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This is sort of a cheating blog post (we’re allowed one or two of those from time-to-time, right?). And I do actually have a few post ideas in my brain if I could just but come up for air from under a ton of marking and other mid-semester work.

Today is, according to this tweet from the Smithsonian, the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe publishing “The Raven” in 1845.

Poe’s “The Raven” was published today in 1845. But, when Poe wanted to escape literary fame, he went to the Bronx http://t.co/BmMhSOvGl3

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) January 29, 2014

This was, of course, just a few short years before his rather early death.

This poem is the ultimate Ode to the Corvidae – orders of magnitude greater than anything I’ll ever be able to accomplish – and I thought it would be great to post it here on it’s anniversary, in the dead of winter when many of us are spending time with these glorious birds. So, if you have the time, feel free to take a few minutes to read. You can also access a nicely formatted version of the poem here, as my WordPress template doesn’t seem to be poem-format-friendly.

Oh, and there’s also a LEGO version of it here, if you’re so inclined.

—–

The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe, 1845)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door-
Only this, and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;- vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow- sorrow for the lost Lenore-
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore-
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
“‘Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door-
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;-
This it is, and nothing more.”

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”- here I opened wide the door;-
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”-
Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice:
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore-
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;-
‘Tis the wind and nothing more!”

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door-
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door-
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore-
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door-
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as “Nevermore.”

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered- not a feather then he fluttered-
Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before-
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said, “Nevermore.”

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore-
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never- nevermore’.”

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore-
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee- by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil! –
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted-
On this home by Horror haunted- tell me truly, I implore-
Is there- is there balm in Gilead?- tell me- tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us- by that God we both adore-
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore-
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

“Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,” I shrieked, upstarting-
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted- nevermore!

Back for 2014… more bytes! Crunchier too.

It’s not actually cold, we’re just wimps

The cold snap that gripped the nation, says Borenstein, wasn’t even that cold. It’s just that, thanks to climate change, we’re now so used to above-average temperatures that one little blip of a return to what used to be known as “winter” has us all riled up.

 

But, still…

On Thursday, Environment Canada forecasts a 90 per cent chance of freezing rain, an 80 per cent chance of being sprayed with slush by some asshat in an Odyssey, and a 100 per cent chance of regretting the life decisions that have kept you here. Later in the day, the freezing rain will change into rain, followed by snow, followed by the urge to snap your shovel in two, curl up in the fetal position on the driveway and softly curse your forebears for not having carried on to California. As dawn approaches, expect the arrival of a thick, sentient ice fog that will stalk and devour us all, never stopping, never pausing until every soul along this cruel, frozen hellscape we call a country is consumed. Dress warmly!

 

Avoid the cold, hit the mall

The market is where I find my friends and feel my history and values reinforced; yet how can I not be troubled that everyone here is white? Some weekends I hear French or German spoken, but never Cantonese or Punjabi. The “ethnic” food stalls are Italian or Polish. True, an Eritrean family has opened a stall, a neighbour arrives with her adopted African-American son, and last weekend one of my former students showed up in the company of a Chinese-Canadian man; but the market remains overwhelmingly, unrepresentatively white. There are women in starched Mennonite bonnets, but none in hijabs. I know from experience that among the people who surround me are agnostics, atheists, crystal-worshippers, lapsed Catholics and members of the United Church of Canada, but few practising Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Evangelical Protestants. Those people are at the mall.

 

Field journals in class, a great idea (by @cmbuddle)

Perhaps my biggest surprise was how the students expressed their creative and artistic abilities (note: students in the class are majoring in biology). Most journals included drawings of plants or animals, and expressions of wonder and curiosity. We are all multi-talented, and I would argue that one of the drawbacks of many (most?) biology degrees is that creative expression is not embraced. A typical biology degree forces students to become proficient at memorizing facts, reading scientific literature, learning anatomy and physiology of plants and animals, writing formal term papers, etc.. These are all important things, but do not allow students to express the creative sides of their personalities, and perhaps dissuade these kinds of expressions.

 

The internet and a (Canadian) poetry revival

Every time Starnino posts a poem on his blog, I see about a dozen references to it in social media. It just magically appears on my screen a dozen times. It used to be that if we wanted to see a poem, we would first have to decide that we did (a rare thing for most), and then decide what kind we wanted to see, and then go and seek that out, in a library or in an obscure bookstore. And good luck to you if you didn’t live in a university town. And now poems just appear before you, in the mixed daily stream of media, alongside the news from Syria and the latest Lady Gaga video.

 

2013: “the year of the plagiarists”

In poetry, at least, everyone agrees it’s not about the money. “One of the hardest things is that the stakes in poetry are not very high,” Kocher said. “I’m not a rocket scientist. I’m not going to cure cancer with one of my poems. I don’t get paid an extraordinary amount of money, and I don’t have any great notoriety outside of the writing community. So to take something that most people engage in as an act of joy and sully it this way—it just seems one of the most egregious offenses.”

Thanks, today, for the shout out from Terry McGlynn. He also posts a ton of great weekend reading links (and is typically more punctual than I am) at Small Pond Science.

Without further ado, here are my weekly half-dozen picks:

We don’t know enough about earwigs

But what the PhD student found particularly surprising was the fact that a “fine sort of mist” was continuously present in the air space around the earwigs.

“It’s like a cloud surrounding them and protecting them against microorganisms,” she said.

 

Do away with the term paper?

We don’t have to assign papers, and we should stop. We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure. The baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma: abjectly necessary for any decent job in the cosmos. As such, students (and their parents) view college as professional training, an unpleasant necessity en route to that all-important “piece of paper.” Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utter waste of their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers. It’s time to declare unconditional defeat.

 

A “green” search engine?

Ecosia is a search engine that donates 80% of its income to a tree planting program in Brazil. By searching with Ecosia you can help the environment for free!

 

Is it really rude to be “that guy” with the smart phone?

Last weekend in the New York Times, Sherry Turkle wrote about putting our lives “on pause” in order to tweet, text, or take a selfie: “When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.” A few months ago, also in the Times, Nick Bilton wrote that we’re all so busy capturing moments, we’re not living in them.

This is a false choice. You can live in the moment and capture it.

 

Laughed until my side ached (via Nikki Reimer)

When a phisher contacted Vancouver writer Steven Galloway to tell him he’d won a truck and $100,000 in cash, the bestselling author of The Cellist of Sarajevo decided to have a little creative fun at the scam artist’s expense. Notorious prankster Galloway teased the phisher — who was impersonating one of Galloway’s contacts — by promising to provide his Facebook password and $5,000 in cash. He recorded the exchange until the scammer eventually gave up, and then Galloway posted all 26 pages of their hilarious and absurd conversation on Facebook.

 

Requiem for a nest – by Wanda Coleman

following her nature she flitted and dove
for whatever blades twigs and mud
could be found under the humming blue
and created a hatchery for her spawn
not knowing all were doomed

A few days late, but not a single dollar short… because it’s free, as always.

The hazards of field work (via @Cerabilia)

Eventually, I was able to flick the latches and dislodge my backpack which enabled me to shoot out from underneath the boulders, and was taken down a few more rapids, getting hammered against the rocks. Finally, I saw a log sticking out of the bank, grabbed it, and shimmied up it to the shore. I woke up on the ground about two hours later. It was dark, and I didn’t have any gear – no light and no radio – nothing. Just me.

 

Tardigrades (via @Mozziebites)

Tardigrades have been experimentally subjected to temperatures of 0.05 kelvins (–272.95 degrees Celsius or functional absolute zero) for 20 hours, then warmed, rehydrated and returned to active life. They have been stored at –200 degrees Celsius for 20 months and have survived. They have been exposed to 150 Celsius, far above the boiling point of water, and have been revived. They have been subjected to more than 40,000 kilopascals of pressure and excess concentrations of suffocating gasses (carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, sulfur dioxide), and still they returned to active life. In the cryptobiotic state, the animals even survived the burning ultraviolet radiation of space.

 

Boycott Nature, et al.?

Schekman said pressure to publish in “luxury” journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.

 

Some winter poems

 

One of my favorite winter poems, by William Carlos Williams

Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

 

A Canuck existential crisis

If I told you that I had never had a cup of Tim Hortons coffee, what would you conclude about me? That I am a left-wing, pacifist peace monkey because I do not drink the brew that fuelled our soldiers in Afghanistan? That I am a pretentious yuppie whose knowledge of Italian actually extends no further than Vente and cappuccino? That I condescend to the hard-working folk of our rural communities who are the backbone of the country? That I am, in a word, un-Canadian?

I am teaching a graduate course in the winter semester. The course is called NRES 704, and it’s a typical “graduate seminar” course. In fact, that’s the course title – Graduate Seminar.

The course description is as follows:

The purpose of this graduate seminar is to develop and sustain an interdisciplinary approach to graduate education. Students will be given the opportunity to present ideas pertaining to their research proposals, or the overall research design, methodology and results of a thesis or non-thesis project. The seminar will encourage interactions, mutual support and sharing of ideas to assist in the advancement of each student’s research program at UNBC.

As you can see, it’s a pretty broad mandate. And from what I can tell, there’s a fair amount of variation in how it’s taught as there seems to be a revolving door of professors who teach it from semester to semester.

Along with the fairly traditional and useful components in a course like this – having students attend weekly departmental seminars, present their work in class, and also attend and participate in the annual graduate student conference at UNBC – I plan to include a weekly blogging assignment (stay tuned for details) and to spend quite a bit of discussion time on the shifts (and non-shifts) in scholarly communication.

Here’s where I’m asking for your help. I have published a draft schedule of topics, along with links to articles that should inform our discussion at this link. I would love it if some of you would take a look at my topics and links and make suggestions. Suggestions such as other topics or subtopics to include or links that would be particularly useful are very welcome.

In the latter case, if you have written something that is pertinent to a particular topic, I’d love to hear about it so that I could consider putting it into the mix for class discussion.

I’m really looking forward to teaching this class. I suspect that the way I’m planning on running it will make it into something that’s not really your grandpa’s graduate seminar course… or at least I hope it isn’t. And I’d love to have feedback to make it as relevant and interesting as possible.

(Note: I’ll be updating the web page linked here as I receive comments, etc.)

(Another note: As I mentioned in the comments below, I figure that I’ll have about a half-hour to “cover” any one of these topics. I’ll be looking for pre-reading from the students, and then some active discussion, hopefully providing some tools/ideas/topic for further investigation.)