Researching with Zotero

I’ve started reading for my thesis research, and I’m using Zotero to organize everything. Zotero is a Firefox extension that enormously simplifies your life. Download Zotero here. It’s free. My friend Will taught me about Zotero. Thanks Will.

Basically, if I’m using an online library database—finding peer reviewed articles, say—I click on an icon that pops up, and Zotero saves every detail of the citation. I can do the same for any web page on the internet. And best of all, it does the same for books. I use the library database to find any book in the world, click the icon that pops up, and all the bibliographic information is stored to Zotero automatically.

So, I end up with a permanent list of every single site or article or book I might be interested in, and if I copy and paste the text from a site or a news article or a peer reviewed publication into the annotation box in Zotero, or, if I write up a word file and paste the text as a note, that’s all searchable.

So, here’s how it works out: I’ve got a list of books, sites, academic articles, and even links to various advertising photographs with written descriptions. Each of the internet sources is linked to the original location, but I also copy and paste the text into the notes. Then, as I read a book, I make notes like this (the numbers are pages):

39 puritanism, shame, guilt

43 stats, poll

44 comcast, VHS,  Hotels, pay per view,

46 Civil war and pornography

The end result is that I have entire books indexed by keywords, and it’s all completely searchable. If I need to find all the stats about hotels and pay per view pornography sales, I type “hotel” into the search field, and my database shows that I have information on “hotel” or hotels in chapter 2 of the book Pornified, and in Forbes.com article “Porn goes public,” and on one wikipedia site I’ve saved. I click my note for Chapter 2 of pornified, copy and paste it into my word processor, do a search for hotel, and find that Pornified talks about hotels on page 55. This takes about 10 seconds total.

I only have about 20 items in my library right now, and I think that after I have 200, this will be quite useful for me.

The weakness is that Zotero doesn’t highlight the word ‘hotel’ within the note — so I have to copy and paste it into a word processor to find what page it’s on. Does anyone else have a better solution? I could consider making a note for every single page I’m interested in, especially once I’m using books where I only need a chapter or two (right now I’m reading these ‘overview’ books that are useful cover to cover). Then, when searching for ‘hotel,’ instead of showing me “pornified chapter 2″ it would bring up the folder for pornified page 55. Of course, with many topics, I’ll have to re-read the entire chapter anyway—I don’t know. The particulars of research are so complicated. I like systems. Who has a better system? Let me know.

Searched for pornography all afternoon in the library

I’m writing my thesis, tentatively, on the influence of pornography on culture. I know that story has been written a few times before, but I still think there is plenty more to be said.

This does get a bit interesting when I’m in the library computer lab researching for peer-reviewed articles on all things pornography while people walk past and whisper, or when  I hand the checkout desk a stack of 11 books with titles like “Pornofied” and “Pornography in America.”

Wendy, head librarian at USU, was helping me find some books and telling me about how a couple students were writing short papers critical of pornography this semester, and how she’d been helping one of them find sources on the internet and then basically shouted in a moment of epiphany: Search for ‘erotica!’ —and then everyone in the lab was either giggling or horrified.

Looks like I’m in for about two years of jokes that will get old fast. But not yet.

This taboo surrounding even the word pornography in conservative culture really plays into the stuff I’m most interested in writing about. Why was Utah the number one state for paid-for internet pornography use? The Harvard study that indicated that about Utah says nothing, really, about porn consumption in Utah (it surely is indicative of the fact that in Utah people are more likely to pay for porn on the internet than buy it in public, or maybe that people in other states are better at getting porn for free), but it is nevertheless intriguing.

You can use Google Trends to see which places are searching for particular words. Google Trends brings up not your usual search results, but the PLACE that is searching the most for that term (in the entire world, or in specific regions if you choose). I just ran several searches on ‘soft-core’ words, limiting my results to the USA, to see which locations are are the chief searchers for those terms. The following means pretty much nothing at all. But it sure is interesting.

Search term:

“Girls Undressing”

1.	Salt Lake City, UT, USA
2.	Richardson, TX, USA
3.	Orlando, FL, USA
4.	Tampa, FL, USA
5.	Boston, MA, USA
6.	Seattle, WA, USA
7.	Philadelphia, PA, USA
8.	Minneapolis, MN, USA
9.	Irvine, CA, USA
10.	St Louis, MO, USA

*

“Nude Girls”

1.	Salt Lake City, UT, USA
2.	Louisville, KY, USA
3.	Tampa, FL, USA
4.	Richardson, TX, USA
5.	Orlando, FL, USA
6.	St Louis, MO, USA
7.	Irvine, CA, USA
8.	Las Vegas, NV, USA
9.	Los Angeles, CA, USA
10.	Reston, VA, USA

*

“Girls Gone Wild”

1.	Salt Lake City, UT, USA
2.	Louisville, KY, USA
3.	Oklahoma City, OK, USA
4.	San Antonio, TX, USA
5.	Houston, TX, USA
6.	Detroit, MI, USA
7.	Irvine, CA, USA
8.	Orlando, FL, USA
9.	St Louis, MO, USA
10.	Richardson, TX, USA

*

“Girls in Underwear”

1.	Salt Lake City, UT, USA
2.	Rochester, NY, USA
3.	Cincinnati, OH, USA
4.	Elmhurst, IL, USA
5.	St Louis, MO, USA
6.	Pittsburgh, PA, USA
7.	Columbus, OH, USA
8.	Richardson, TX, USA
9.	Reston, VA, USA
10.	Denver, CO, USA

*

“Breasts”

1.	Salt Lake City, UT, USA
2.	Portland, OR, USA
3.	Reston, VA, USA
4.	Rochester, NY, USA
5.	Seattle, WA, USA
6.	Richardson, TX, USA
7.	Newark, NJ, USA
8.	Minneapolis, MN, USA
9.	Cincinnati, OH, USA
10.	St Louis, MO, USA

Teaching Critical Thinking—Or Teaching Leftist thinking?

If I’m a moderate, it’s only in the sense that I attempt to communicate moderately face to face, and am genuine in my attempts to understand opposing arguments. Other than that, I’m quite radical—politically, theologically, and in my general thinking.

This presents a problem when teaching 44 college freshmen in northern Utah. Chances are that about 75% of them are conservative—politically and theologically. I do not think they have thought critically about a lot of issues—and this is partly based on my own experience, as many of them remind me of myself as a freshman, and partially based on the surface approach I see them take in some of their arguments. Some of my students are brilliant writers. I have many students who are far ahead of where I was as a freshman in writing ability. But nearly all of them fail to think very critically about issues (the clear exception being my older students).

I believe these students need to learn to think critically. If they do not, their college education has been useless. But, I feel I am absolutely the worst possible person to introduce them to critical thinking skills, to get them to examine their views, to get them questioning their closely held opinions. Were I a moderate, I could effectively argue both sides; as I am not, I believe my students would react very stubbornly to me attempting to teach them to examine their views. I feel paralyzed, as well, by my belief that on current political issues, I am right, and they are wrong.

Monday  was the first time we’ve discussed anything of a very political nature in class, and it’s the fourth to last class of the semester:

First, I list ten or so things on the board: spiritual beliefs, gender, age, health, political views, family, marital status, etc. Then I had the students fill in the info in their notebooks while I did this on the board. This is the first time my students learn that my Spiritual Beliefs are different than theirs. I can hear the air leaving their lungs. I suspect they already know I’m politically left. I describe these as lenses through which we look at issues and the world (this Cultural Lens thing was taken from theorists Meeks and Austin, according to my notes), and ask the class for a pressing issue we can examine.

“Healthcare.”

Good. Someone knows. This is two days after Reid maneuvered his bill past a filibuster.

I write “Health care reform” on the board, and then make a cross, and ask the class to explain to me what the perspectives are on the right and on the left. This wins me a twenty second round of silence from a generally responsive class. I add the words Republican and Democrat to the sides of the cross, in case that’s the issue. Now I get one taker—the usual suspect, a girl who tends to speak quite emotionally, and has a lot of ideas, even though they are occasionally young and developing as she speaks (she’s like me and speaks too soon).

“I know I’m not in favor of it.”

“Of what?” I ask.

“Health care.”

“Health care reform,” I say, nodding my head, just to be sure she’s not actually against health care altogether.

“Right.”

I want to steer this back to where it was headed. “Can you tell me the views of the democrats or republicans?”

“I know the democrats want to make it like Canada, and the republicans don’t want to. And I know that all the doctors are against it too.”

So, immediately we have a problem. She’s now stating as fact things that are false. What do I do? I decide to nod, and ask her if she knows what the republicans want to do, but she doesn’t. So I go to the board and start writing things.

And here’s my second problem.

The republican’s plan almost sounds like a joke. In my best efforts to describe it, it sounds as bad as it does when the republicans describe it. “They are against a public option for people younger than 64, but they are additionally upset about the possibility of taking away funding for a public option for people over 64. But,” I pause, thinking, how can I make these republicans not sound absurd? “they don’t see it like that — see — they…” I pause again. “OK,” I tell them. “Here’s the problem. I can’t describe for you the republican’s plan, because I am on the other side. I’m far left, and anything I tell you about the right will be untrustworthy. You will have to find it out some other way, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t describe it without my biases.”

At this point, I have them write for five minutes about how three of their cultural lenses influence their perspective on these issues. I select my spiritual beliefs, my family, and my class (upper middle — and I explain to them that despite our low-incomes as college students, it’s most realistic to consider our class as the same as our parents). And I spend the time writing on the board, filling it from left to right. This is something I’ve been doing all semester, as it seems to help them see how freewriting works. I think I write extra bad, illegibly, on purpose, so no one freaks out when I articulate that my belief that there is no justice in the universe aside from what humans can provide, no afterlife of rewarding the poor and the needy and humble, compels me to argue for justice and diminished suffering for all in this life, regardless of income, and thus, I support universal health care.

I ask for volunteers to read, and the same girl wants to read. She says her sister will die if universal health care is passed. I ask her to elaborate on this. We know, from before, that her sister is somehow disabled — I believe both physically and mentally. “If my sister has a problem,” she says, “and everyone has health care, then we go to the emergency room and what are we supposed to do if everyone is there? It will be too busy, and my sister will die, because they are all in there.”

I couldn’t even begin to touch this one, because my student was seconds away from tears. I cut her off just to keep her from breaking down. It was, I suppose, due mostly to her fear of losing her sister. I can’t help but suspect, though, that based on the way she said they—those undeserving in her imaginary emergency room—some of her emotion was over anger at the thought of this scenario. I wished I could probe her opinion and perhaps get her to think about it—for example, might the current state of health care in the US contribute to higher emergency room use than one in which everyone had access to primary care doctors? I also wanted to ask if she thought it was reasonable for me to wish for women to be stripped of their right to vote so I could stand in line for less time next November? What is this quality of worth that makes some people more deserving of timely care than others? I would have liked my students to consider such a question. Is it wealth? Race? Family? Religious affiliation? Gender? Employment status? For as long as we do not have equal access to health care, we are using something as a gatekeeper. What is it? Does it make any sense?

Instead, I tried to feel the girl’s concern. I attempted to be genuine and said, “I can understand how you feel, actually. It sounds like you have a pretty enormous personal stake in this. It sounds like “Family” is probably the lens through which you are viewing this issue. And to be honest, that’s one of my biggest as well.” I turned to my chicken scratches on the board, because in addition to spiritual beliefs, I’d written about my family lens. “See,” I told her, “I have a similar family stake.” And then, reading from the board, “Without government funded health care, my wife dies.” I turned and shrugged my shoulders. “Perhaps all political views really come down to that — our own personal stake. Maybe, no matter how much I think I’m fighting for justice or whatever, it’s just personal self-interest.”

Then, I did add, “You should check into that thing about doctors not favoring health care reform. My wife’s doctors have written letters to the editor about how important universal health care is. And I thought the majority of doctors actually supported a public plan. So look into it.” She nodded, still looking close to tears, but didn’t seem to feel I’d stomped on her or her family.

The last thing was a boy who read what he’d written, about supporting the republican view, but then looked up and said, “See, but I grew up in a republican house, so like you were saying, I’ve never had the democrats view described correctly.”

OK, maybe that’s a small victory. I don’t know.

But looking back on this, it’s very upsetting. It’s upsetting, because I fear my student didn’t actually hear what I said. I don’t think she actually considered that there are others who fear losing their friends and family members — that there are 40,000 people who die each year because of our current policies. I heard what she said. And I’m still thinking about it. How do we solve her problem? It’s as important as mine, or any other of the tens of thousands of families who will lose loved ones every year because of lack of health insurance. Did she hear what I said? Or is she somehow able to continue believing that all death, all suffering, is not equal? That they do not deserve to live as much as she or her family does?

It seems the first step would be for her to think critically. And yet, even writing all of this, I double back, fearing that my moralistic leftism is blinding me from something. Am I missing something?

Winter Break Reading List

The key to a successful reading list is to keep it manageable. I have five weeks of winter break to use. In addition, the following things are in need of accomplishment over winter break:

1. Moving a few blocks — This means several days of packing, cleaning, loading, unloading, cleaning, unpacking.

2. Holiday cheer — Maryssa and I will have our obligatory New Years Eve fight. Last year I was driving around town looking for her when she was back at the apartment the whole time. The year before that—well, never mind, seriously.

3. Revising my fiction pieces to the best of my ability and sending them to about forty journals.

4. Finishing the essay I started two days ago. I’m aiming it at Tin House.

5. Finding and proceeding to cook a duck.

So, given all of this excitement, what reading quests might I accomplish?

First priority is researching for the essay I plan to write in the spring. Second priority is reading some John McPhee, because I haven’t. Third priority is reading as many back issues of Harper’s as I can, because that’s where I’m aiming to publish the essay I’m writing in the spring. Crazy, I know.

The List:

1. Mormon Thunder: A Documentary History of Jedediah Morgan Grant, by Gene A Sessions.

Dr. Sessions has included photo copies of tons of original primary sources in this exhaustive book on my great great great grandfather, captain of one of the first waves of plains-crossing Mormon Pioneers, first mayor of Salt Lake City, aggressive preacher of Blood Atonement, husband of seven wives, and father to Mormon prophet Heber J. Grant. I can hardly wait.

 

 

2. Radical Origins: Early Mormon Converts and Their Colonial Ancestors, by Val D. Rust.

A look at the Puritan ancestors of early Mormon converts, like Jeddediah Morgan Grant. I’ll only need to read a few chapters.

 

 

 

 

3. The Founding Fish, by John McPhee.

McPhee has written so many books that I can hardly decide where to start. This is a recent one in which he tracks the historical significance of a particular fish he loves to fish for. That’s something I’d like to write; I’m curious to see how he makes this interesting.

 

 

 

4. Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee.

This is McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize wining compilation of his previous works on the geological history of the US. I’ll be reading a fraction of the 700 page compilation of four books and an essay. I want to see the way he deals with science and geology in literary nonfiction prose, because I have a specific interest in geology.

 

 

 

5. Harper’s.

The USU library has every edition 2005—present bound and available for two day checkout. I’m looking for the articles that strike me as non-current-event features. Last night I read two articles from 2008, one about a craps (gambling) course and the tendency for humans to want to control uncontrollables, and one about the Magic Olympics.

 

 

 

6. The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, by Christopher Cokinos.

I started this book before the semester began and haven’t been able to get back to it. Chris is my friend and the professor who assigned the essay I won the Norman Mailer Award with. He’s also likely to be my thesis chair.

 

 

 

 

 

I think that’s all I’ll get to, if that. In the event that I accomplish these feats of reading, I’m going to read Gessner’s Sick of Nature and Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is one of those books I talk about like I’ve read but HAVEN’T!!

 

 

“It’s very Kafkesque.”

“Yeah, that’s because it’s written by Franz Kafka.”

—From The Squid and the Whale, when the main character is describing the end of the book he has not yet read.

Reading lists, anyone? And what book do you love to talk about despite the fact you’ve not ever actually read it?

Teaching First Year Composition

I’m coming to the end of my first semester of teaching freshman composition (two sections of 22 students each).

Notes for next semester:

1. Begin syllabus by listing WAYS TO FAIL MY COURSE

2. Under that heading: A) send me repeated emails asking what you missed in class; B) miss 19 classes; C) sign your emails in which you ask what you missed in class after your nineteenth absence with “Thank you for your patience and understanding;”D) abbreviate the word “minute” as “min” in a formal essay (and without even using a period to signify the abbreviation); E) start paragraphs with “So” and start sentences with “Like, basically,” in a formal paper.

3. Continue syllabus by stating, in bold print: THIS CLASS IS HELD AT 8:30 AM. AT NO POINT IN THE SEMESTER WILL THAT FEEL ANY DIFFERENT THAN IT DID THIS MORNING. AT NO POINT THROUGHOUT THIS SEMESTER WILL YOU WAKE UP FEELING BEAUTIFUL, RESTED, OR HAPPY TO BE ALIVE. IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS, PLEASE FIND ANOTHER SECTION.

4. Continue syllabus by noting: If you email me asking what you missed, I will send you false information.

5. Make sure students are aware that over the course of the semester, I will bestow them with an inordinate amount of bad luck. My classes average four root canals, a rollover, one dead grandfather and two dead grandmothers, one grandmother who needs to be driven to California for a quilting convention, one mother who insists on the aforementioned grandmother being driven to California for the aforementioned quilting convention, several instances of sudden fracturing of families, two love triangles, six broken body parts, one thousand diagnoses of swine flu, and forty empty printer cartridges.

Just kidding, It was fun.

Essay to be Published in Creative Nonfiction (Magazine)

Good news: I’ve received official notice that “Final Cascade” has been accepted for publication in Creative Nonfiction (Site Wikipedia). Creative Nonfiction “was the first and is still the largest literary magazine” devoted exclusively to nonfiction. It’s founding editor, Lee Gutkind, has a great interview published in  The Writer’s Chronicle‘s Oct/Nov edition. Gutkind founded the first nonfiction MFA in the country and I think he’s a big part of the recent-decades uprising of creative nonfiction in academia. Paradoxically, he recommends against jumping right into an MFA program. (Drive a truck and write, he advises in that interview.)

Two really cool things about publishing at CNF:

1) When I open lit journals, I must admit I sometimes skip the poetry, or I’m just looking for nonfiction, or just fiction. Often, especially as a busy student, the genres I’m not looking for go unread. I have a couple Tin House magazines that I’ve not read anything but the nonfiction in. But when someone picks up CNF they are looking for nonfiction. CNF has a circulation of 4,500, and it’s likely that many of those who pick up the journal will not skip over my piece. This is all very unscientific, but it makes sense to me.

2. They are a big nonprofit organization, not just a magazine, and they believe strongly in the nonfiction genre, as I do. Their recent developments include a complete makeover for the magazine: Instead of a small, paper-back sized journal, as of March 2010, they are publishing in a larger format. I prefer to read larger formats, and they seem to have more popular appeal to me. CNF is also moving from a 3/year publication schedule to a quarterly publication schedule, which is really saying something considering how frightening the publishing and literary mag world is right now.

The other bit of really good news is that I’ve been offered literary representation by an agent at ICM New York who contacted me after reading about me in the New York Times. I’m not sure about author-agent etiquette, so I think the extent of the info I’ll publish on my blog right now is that ICM is one of the largest agencies in the world. Very lucky, very fortunate, because they don’t accept unsolicited submissions, they find writer clients through their contacts and, apparently, through reading the arts section of the Times. I’m very excited to move forward with this.

This is all like I’ve played a huge poker tournament and won. You must play well to be the winer, but critically, you must catch the cards, and you must beat Aces with Tens a few times to get there.

This is a photo of the sunrise over Bear Lake, an hour into my 3.5 hour drive one morning this past February. I got to the High Uintas by 9 ish, rented a snowmobile, and took a day hike for part of the essay I was beginning work on. It became “Final Cascade.”

 

I think one of my favorite poems would be a fitting addition. It’s G.E. Patterson‘s “Autobiographia” from his collection Tug. When asked my favorite poem, I always think of this.

Autobiographia
G.E. Patterson

I had everything and luck: Rings of smoke
blown for me; sunlight safe inside the leaves
of cottonwoods; pure, simple harmonies
of church music, echoes of slave songs; scraps
of candy wrappers — airborne. Everything.
Mother and father, brother, aunts, uncles;
chores and schoolwork and playtime. Everything.

I was given gloves against winter cold.
I was made to wear gloves when I gardened.
I was made to garden; taught to hold forks
in my left hand when cutting, in my right
when bringing food to my mouth. Everything.

I had clothes I was told not to wear outside;
a face you could clean up almost handsome;
I had friends to fight with and secrets, spread
all over the neighborhood; the best teachers,
white and colored. I’m not making this up.
I knew that I had everything. Still do.