Patricia S. Bowne

Forget ‘Wellness,’ let’s Do Stuff

Posted on May 1, 2016 by Pat Bowne

Here’s an interesting article about debates on the concept of ‘wellness’ from the latest Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, behind a paywall!) One of the things I like most about it is that the author welcomes vigorous debate about the underpinnings and worth of ‘wellness’.

Intellectually, the arguments of wellness skeptics excite because they question our most dearly held assumptions: What do you mean, healthy isn’t superior? How can a focus on wellness suggest social malaise?

The arguments she points out include that wellness diverts responsibility for people’s welfare from society onto the individual, adding health maintenance to an endless list of tasks that government could help with but has instead foisted onto us; that the people promoting wellness are often insufficiently trained and their maxims unreflective and self-contradictory; and that it’s faddish, classist activity for those with extra time and money.

I’m surprised that none of the people criticising wellness seem to have raised the critique my father always made – that it was “a G-d waste of time.”

My father did more exercise than ten other men. When he was in his sixties he could out-work men half his age. Not because he believed in wellness; because he believed in Doing Stuff. Yarding wood all summer, cultivating a two-acre vegetable garden, collecting wild food along the highways and byways, mowing the lawn with a hand scythe and raking it with hay-rakes; building log-cabin sheds and corduroy trails, hand-splitting fence rails, bringing groceries up the hill in a pedal-powered car, snowshoeing out into the woods to drag home Xmas greenery on a toboggan; even, for a brief but unforgettable period, hand-milling the family’s flour. I get a real hit of nostalgia, watching the losers’ punishments in Hell’s Kitchen.

Doing Stuff and Exercise were opposites. Doing Stuff meant that you ended up with Stuff! Exercise meant that you ended up with wasted time and nothing to show for it. It was acceptable as rehab, but the point of getting rehabbed was that you could then finally quit the exercise and go Do Stuff.

Coming out of this worldview, I see corporatized ‘wellness’ as just one more way we’re encouraged to make peace with the fact that society does not want most of us to be Doing Stuff for ourselves. All kinds of laws forbid us from Doing Stuff in our communities. We’re supposed to pay licensed people to Do Stuff for us, or buy our Stuff from corporations. And to make up for the fact that we no longer get to Do Stuff, we pay to pedal on the exercycle.

In her article, Dr. Petrezela points out the advantages of wellness activities for building social groups, supplementing inadequate medical services, empowering the overlooked. Yeah, I think, I suppose so, but where’s the Stuff? Does this kind of empowerment result in any real change? Or does it distract, for just a little while, from the fact that so many avenues for Doing Stuff have been closed off? When I read about more and more people in our country chronically unemployed, getting depressed, getting addicted, committing suicide, I can’t convince myself that what they need is Zumba.

What if in the end, for human flourishing and well-being, there is really no substitute for good old-fashioned Doing Stuff?

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Not to be Politically Incorrect, but…

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Pat Bowne

There’s this thing going around on Facebook. Some guy posted a whole mess of his opinions under the heading: “I feel the need to drop a little truth on y’all. So buckle up…I’m about to be politically incorrect.”

You can read it if you want, I’ll wait.

Back? Yeah, I know, that took a while. But tell me, is there a single word in that post that is not politically correct to the nth degree? So why does the poster label it as ‘politically incorrect’?

While this irritates me on one level, it cheers me on another. It tells me that at least one person doesn’t want to be politically correct. Good! However, the answer is not to just call our politically correct opinions ‘politically incorrect.’ The answer is to actually challenge parts of the big list of politically approved opinions, when we feel they aren’t adequate, and to take the flack that comes with doing so.

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Sin is a Puppy That Follows You Home – a modern Hausa novel

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Pat Bowne

I just read what’s supposed to be the first book translated from the Hausa into English: Sin is a Puppy That Follows You Home by Balaraba Ramat Yakubu.

CORRECTION: Carmen McCain, author of the articles I linked to below, tells me that there have been several other Hausa novels translated – though this one may be the first one by a woman to be translated into English.

I enjoyed the book in the same way I enjoy Victorian-era novels like Pink and White Tyranny. It was obvious from the first sentence who the good people were and who the bad people were, and that the bad people would come to grief.

Marked you not how retribution, like a poisèd hawk, came swooping down upon the wrongdoer? Oh, it was splendid! (W.S. Gilbert, Patience)

The real thrill though, wasn’t what seemed familiar but what was completely new to me. In this novel, a man who wants to marry an additional wife brings the current senior wife a bag of gifts and makes the announcement. If he decides to divorce one of his wives, he simply gives her a letter with his declaration written three times in it. There are no legal battles over child custody; the bad husband tells his wife to take their nine children away with her, while the good one brings his divorced wife’s children back to his house one at a time, giving them to the current wife to raise.

Then, the things the characters had to pay for or not pay for. I recognized the divorced wife’s need to stay in her children’s school district, and sympathized with her selling off possessions to pay for the older childrens’ boarding schools. But when she told her eldest son to attend University because it wouldn’t cost anything, I did a double-take. Free higher education! And when the bad husband ends up in hospital, there’s no mention of who will pay his bill but much discussion of who is bringing him his meals. I recognized this from a visit to a hospital in Tanzania, but had not known a similar system applied in Nigeria.

Marriage negotiations amazed me. The book follows a good marriage through the lovers’ first sight of one another on the street, the proposal at his first visit to her house, the formal visits from female relatives (during which the bride-to-be stays modestly hidden in another room), negotiations and gifts, the furnishing of the wife’s room. All of it new and fascinating to me, but obviously routine to the author and her target audience.

What I liked most about this book is that it did not cater to me at all. It was not written for Western eyes. For maybe an hour I was in a world where the opinions of people from my country simply didn’t exist, being given moral advice that went contrary to many of my assumptions and values. This is just the kind of challenge I want from literature!

So how much of what I think I picked up about Nigerian culture from this book is accurate? I have no way of knowing. But the book is itself a part of Nigerian culture, and I picked it up… I can say no more, except that I wish more books from this gigantic body of literature had been translated into English, and I will be watching for them!

Here’s an article about the author’s life and work

Here’s one about the Hausa-language literary tradition from the 1300s to the contemporary littatafan soyayya novels (of which this book is an example).

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The Anatomy of a Jack-ass Argument

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Pat Bowne

My students were analyzing a case study and I went over to bother them, the way you do. “Here’s my hypothesis,” one of them said.

I recognized my own words coming out of her mouth.

I ask students to form hypotheses rather than theories. I do it as lip service to an argumentative strategy from my discipline that I think is bullshit, inane, counterproductive, and deserving of scorn; but I also think my students did not sign up to be cannon fodder in my personal crusade, and ‘hypothesis’ is a perfectly good way for them to sidestep the whole nonsense.

The argument I refer to is, of course, the ‘Scientists don’t mean what you mean when you say theory‘ argument for evolution. This offensive demand that English speakers reinterpret what they mean when using their own language has been trotted out for far too long as if it were going to convince somebody of something, some day, if we only said it often enough.

Back in the ’80s, when a whopping 48% of USians rejected evolution, I was in grad school studying evolutionary biology. So I got to be in on alarmed discussions in the field, and was taught this foolproof argumentative strategy.

Here’s how it went:

Creationist: Evolution’s just a theory.

Evolutionary Biologist: That’s not how scientists use the word theory! We use it to mean something that’s established by multiple lines of evidence. After all, we call gravity a theory too. You don’t think that’s in question, do you?

Creationist: I know what ‘theory’ means. I’ve been speaking English my whole life. You can pretend it means whatever fool thing you want, but I know my own language!

Well, this has been going on for thirty-plus years, and I’m happy to report that the percent of people in the US who disbelieve in evolution is now … 33%. Our side is winning at the rate of 0.5% per year. Which is, frankly, better than that argument deserves.

I’m an evolutionary biologist, but my sympathies lie entirely with the creationist in the dialogue above. Re-defining people’s language to make it mean what you want it to mean is not cool. It’s arrogant jackassery. It was arrogant when evolutionists tried to redefine theory to mean ‘something we’re sure of,’ it was arrogant when economists tried to redefine rational to mean ‘self-interested,’ and it’s arrogant when social scientists try to redefine racist to mean ‘breathing in a biased society’.

If you think a concept is really important, you’ll create a language that allows you to talk about it precisely. Like metastasize, or atherosclerosis, or eutrophication. Those are examples of working language, used by people who want to accomplish something other than messing with folks’ heads and picking fights. And they are the kind of words that will eventually get into the public vocabulary on their own merits, be recognized as describing something important, and actually change people’s opinions and behaviors.

Or hey, we could all just call whatever we’re working on virtue, truth, and beauty. We’d feel good about ourselves, have lots of invigorating fights with the public, and move maybe 0.5% closer to our goals per year.

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OMG CSS! And what does it mean for teaching?

Posted on March 12, 2016 by Pat Bowne

It’s taken years, but I’ve finally come around to cascading style sheets.

I was introduced to them in the absolutely worst way, when a Dreamweaver update suddenly refused to accept half the commands I was used to putting into my web pages. I couldn’t just make a word bold, I had to define bold in a different pane and then apply it to the word. Half the stuff I wanted could be coded through the html panel, and half through css. I had to search around to find a way to accomplish things that used to be simple.

Who were these invisible commisars interfering with my established dreamweavering? What was the point of defining bold, when I would have to do it all over again on the next page? Where were those definitions even stored? How were they related to templates, and why did my templates never apply to any of my pages anyway? I wrestled with all this for a few months, and then basically gave up using Dreamweaver.

My brother came to the rescue. He taught me what css was over Xmas vacation and showed me how to design my fiction website with it, coding in notepad. That was neat, but didn’t solve my larger problems – that the whole of my academic website, with hundreds of tutorial pages, had been made in Dreamweaver and now seemed impervious to any rational analysis.

Then this year, the light finally dawned. I can keep the site’s look stable by setting it up in css! I can keep the shared content for each tutorial — page titles and footers — in tutorial-specific css ‘after’ commands! (This is discouraged by css police, but I don’t care). I can keep commonly used hyperlinks in php files! I can call other people’s css files online (eg Bootstrap) and use their coding for tricky stuff like popovers! It’s become a game to see how much of a page’s content I can outsource to a css or php file. I can’t wait to start rewriting the site this summer.

Learning how to code isn’t my business, though. Teaching is my business. So what can I learn about teaching, or not teaching, from the fact that it took me six years to learn how to code in css in spite of the fact that I spent time coding in css during every one of those six years? Why did I not learn to do what I was learning to do?

After all, students do this all the time. They perform an analysis in the first hour of class and then look at you big-eyed, like so many plates of fried eggs, when you ask them to do it again in the second hour.

Here are some of the reasons that Dreamweaver failed to teach me about css.

I already had a perfectly good way of doing what I wanted to do, and it introduced css as an impediment.
It never explained what the css definitions were for — that what I defined on one page could be applied to any other pages. This isn’t uncommon. The folks writing documentation for such programs usually take the purpose of their procedures as given, never bothering to explain it to the lumpenusertariat.
It solved a problem I didn’t know I had. It wasn’t until 4 years later when I got a wide monitor that I realized my web pages kept changing width, and that I needed to correct something on every single page.
It did the interesting work for me. I couldn’t see the css file, where it was, what it was, or how to apply it to a page. I couldn’t tweak the css and see how it affected the page. I could just enter mysterious stuff into the black box and hope the gremlins inside would allow me to design a web page.

I applied some of these insights to my class on heart failure this week.

Students already have a pretty reasonable understanding of heart failure, so why should I complicate it? Instead of my usual focus on distinguishing lots of different kinds of heart failure, I admitted that RHF and LHF would lead to one another. We defined those two types and how they led to congestive heart failure.
I need to make clear what problem the new categories solve. Instead of introducing systolic and diastolic heart failure right away, as categories students need to understand for some unstated reason, I introduced them after CHF as ways to tell whether a patient will benefit from one treatment or another.
Am I doing all the interesting work for them? Instead of telling students what murmur would be heard during what valve defect, I just gave them case studies — patient with CHF and preserved ejection fraction has diastolic murmur over mitral valve. What’s going on? Then I had them write their own case studies – choose a valve defect and predict what would happen with the patient. Next week we’ll work on the further consequences of the valve defects they chose, and flesh out those case studies.

I knew these were better instructional principles. We all know that. But we drift away from them, over and over again. That’s why faculty should, every now and then, try to learn something that challenges us from people who aren’t particularly good teachers — to remind ourselves of what we need to do and why we need to do it.

Otherwise we, like everybody else, fail to learn what we’ve been doing all along.

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Christ in the ears

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Pat Bowne

I don’t post much religious stuff on here, but my church has been using hymns by Richard Bruxvoort-Colligan this lent. We tend to use the same songs and texts for many weeks in a row, so I’ve had a chance to sing ‘Oh, Christ Surround Me’ quite a lot.

Yesterday I was struck by the last verse.

Christ in the eyes of all who see me,
Christ in the ears that hear my voice,
Christ in the hearts of all who know me,
Oh, Christ surround me.

Christians are usually exhorted to see Christ in the people we meet, treating them as if they were as important as he is. That puts us in the position of ‘doing unto,’ which can be a little self-inflating. But these lines put me in the position of the person being done to, hoping for charity in those who hear and see me.

This verse makes me think about people being silenced, scorned, or having the worst possible constructions put on their words. Or of people who actually have done shameful things. What are we Christians being asked to see and hear in those people?

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Subversion Junkie

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Pat Bowne

Pathophysiology is about things going wrong. Every day I focus on things going wrong, from the moment I open feedly and scan my articles to the last student assessment I put down on my desk to the next doctor’s appointment I keep. It leaks into every aspect of my life; as I read literary criticism this morning, coming across the word ‘subversion’ in every second paragraph, I realized that pathophysiology is essentially about subversion, and that my attitude toward subversion in pathophysiology probably explains a lot about my attitude towards it in literature.

I think subversion is cool, I must admit. My response to a new disease mechanism is always “Cool! I mean, I’m so sorry that happened to you, that really sucks, but — cool!”

The problem with liking subversion for its own sake, as an intellectual exercise and a frisson, even when it’s killing somebody … well, as soon as you add that last clause, the problem is obvious, isn’t it? Subversion is an amoral concept. The thrill of intellectual challenge has no correlation with whether that challenge helped you solve a problem, cause one, or just sit on the sidelines eating popcorn. Subverting a noble cause is just as big a thrill as subverting a horrific cause. We subversion junkies are nobody’s allies.

So, literature. Subversion of conservative tropes has been the flavor of the week since I was a pup, and that’s a long time for the flavor not to change. Culver’s has gone through every conceivable ice cream flavor three times in that period and finally resorted to chocolate strawberry walleye, or so Facebook tells me. Evolution is changing faster than literature is; bacteria do new stuff every week, brand new diseases have risen, killed, and moved on, but literary critics are still applauding people for ‘subverting’ tropes from the 1950s.

This simply cannot meet my need for constant thrills. I want books that will subvert CURRENT pieties, challenge TODAY’S conventional wisdom. When my authors’ group does writing exercises, I’m the one asking for stories in which the rebel is wrong, or the traditional approach turns out to be grounded in fact, or the [insert under-represented group] character is actually the villain. It’s not because I disagree with current morals or hate diversity; it’s because I am BORED BORED BORED with the literary consensus of the day.

I am bored with the fact that there IS a literary consensus of the day. For heavens’ sake, there are people out there voting for Donald Trump! There are people who never heard the word subversion, people who don’t read, people who raise bees and carry out honor killings and build machine guns. What business do writers have forming a consensus, when the world hasn’t?

I feel so alone in SFF. Everything in the political scene of current SFF is against the subversion junkie. On the one hand we have a huge group of people trying to redefine subversion as ‘criticism of 1950s tropes,’ to keep the cutting edge from slipping out from under them. On the other hand, we have a bunch of people trying to dodge the whole question of subversion and celebrate good ol’-fashioned blood and thunder.

It’s a sad, sad situation when I can find more subversion in IFL Science than in speculative fiction. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe I need to subvert my assumptions about speculative fiction. After all, has it ever done more than follow where science leads?

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Interview at J. Patrick Allen’s blog

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Pat Bowne

Because of my story in the From The Dragon Lord’s Library Vol. 2 anthology, I was interviewed by J. Patrick Allen. Find out what I want on my tombstone (and a bunch of less morbid stuff about me) at his blog, https://jpatrickallen.com/2016/02/04/patbrownint/.

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Stuff That Enrages Me, and Why I Read It

Posted on February 6, 2016 by Pat Bowne

Pearl oyster (Pinctada fucata martensii) in Suma Aqualife Park. Used under a creative commons license.

The story is that one of my favorite Victorian writers, Charlotte Yonge, used to submit all her manuscripts to her father before she sent them to publishers. He would then ruthlessly excise anything which was improper, making sure that the final product contained nothing that would bring the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty — that is, that it accurately reflected all his opinions.

I’m reminded of this every time I get another article in my feedly telling me how to make my fiction feminist enough — basically, how I can make it accurately reflect the writer’s opinions. Now, why would I want to make my fiction reflect anybody’s opinions except my own? Where do all these people come from, who think that fiction writers should care about reflecting their opinions? Charlotte Yonge’s father was at least giving her room and board and free Latin lessons.

You’d think I would just purge my feedly of these earnest sheeple who don’t realize that the world does not need post 10,001 about how to write politically correct ideological fiction and that writers don’t as a group, really want to serve as unpaid propagandists. But I don’t, and this is why.

Every time I read one of these earnest screeds by someone who has apparently never had an original thought, I get enraged. I wonder how I could rebel against these impertinent echo-chamber jackasses and self-appointed guardians of fictional virtue, and vow to let the non-feminist characters in my books have freer rein. I write much of Linus Ukadnian’s and Teddy Whin’s dialogue when in this state of mind. Linus openly scorns feminism as special-pleading, and Teddy began as a parody of it. Yet … Linus and Teddy evolved into some of my better characters, people I sympathize with and who have skills I admire. I ended up giving Linus the house of my dreams and Teddy one of the only happy-ending romances in the whole series.

The fact is I need to read things that infuriate me, because I develop characters from a place of irritation. When I am really pissed off at some entitled online virtue-signaller, call-out artist, or identity policeman, that’s when I will send my characters off to do interesting things. Left to my own placid life, they would read and garden; but when I’m boiling mad, they fight with dragons. They consider becoming avatars of the Blood God, or diss banshees, or burn everything they own and wade right into big oozy demons, or insult a bar full of vampires. Then I have to back-calculate from this and figure out what’s really going on with the characters and why they would ever do such things. Then I have a story.

I’m writing a character right now who initially communicated only in aggressive social justice tweets. (#racistmuch? #chkyrpriv) When I asked why a character would do something like that, though, she developed a backstory and a problem and now is the center of the whole book. She no longer communicates solely in hashtags. Instead, she punches out total strangers in bars and accuses innocent students of sexual harassment. She’s actually a lot of fun.

I think I’ll give her kittens.

Save

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Why does Higher Ed = Humanities?

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Pat Bowne

Another day, another article about the parlous state of Universities and the lack of respect afforded to faculty, the ‘Disneyfication’ of the curriculum, grade inflation, the embattled professoriate and students’ inability to handle difficult topics without puppies and balloons.

Not one word is relevant to me, or to my colleagues who are preparing students for the MCAT, the NCLEX, to keep actual human beings with actual illnesses alive. But we don’t count, apparently, to the authors of these plaints. The facts that everybody knows students would not pass the MCAT or NCLEX without us, that we obviously take them from I want to help people to Those values indicate acute renal injury, what’s his Potassium like?, that the same outside groups who might sneer at a French Literature prof go ‘Ooh’ when I say I teach Pathophysiology, do not apparently make us worthy allies in supporting the academy. They make us part of the problem, if not allies of the enemy.

Because in the world of academic lament, the University’s real purpose is to shelter and protect the humanities. Those of us whose work meets the criteria for Higher Education in the eyes of conservatives, businesspeople, or even (gasp) republicans are just diluting the message about liberal arts.

I still sympathize with these plaints about the state of Higher Ed, but less each time I read one in which I don’t appear. Perhaps instead of ignoring the part of Higher Ed that everyone respects, folks interested in protecting the academy should be looking at what we do and how they could build on it. At the very least, perhaps they could stop writing articles that leave us out entirely.