mouseworks

I got an email from the Border Welfare coordinator saying that she'd gotten a phone call and Kit was playing nicely with his new Border Terrier buddies. I think I made the right decision for Kit as I'm not sure how chaotic my life will be for the next couple of months. Dragging him down to Nicaragua in the hold of an airplane was going to be drastic; dragging him back was even more problematic.

After I left him in Hume, Virginia, I came home and made dinner, called the camera store where I'm selling the last Hasselblad and the lenses and backs and got a confirmation on that sale, then went to bed (apparently in my clothes since they're still on).

Need to get the rest of the paperwork in motion.

I'd planned to take Kit with me to Nicaragua but the whole thing seemed more and more impractical. I've got far too many things to deal with in disassembling the house and also feared that he'd be too stressed with the flight. And there are money issues.

So, a Border Terrier Welfare fosterer will take him back. Most of these little guys don't make it beyond 14. He's 13. I'm taking him to the vet tomorrow to get a health check up. The fosterer asked about his eyes, so I'll have those checked.

I'll be donating $200 to Border Terrier Welfare. If anyone else remembers Kit fondly, or not, a donation to Border Terrier Welfare on his behalf would be welcome.

Sometimes, I'm reminded that men and women live in two different worlds -- the men sigh for the old day where they made women safe by keeping them protected from doing things like taking a six weeks tour of Europe as a single 24 year old woman who'd just finished college. My niece did what would have been unthinkable to many people when my mother was that age, though even then, women took those trips alone. She was in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Spain, staying in hostels mostly, and even couch surfing at a commune in Switzerland in the middle of the yurt owner's girl friend problems. In Amsterdam, she and a gay guy she met at her hostel went walking in the red light district.

There are still men who'd be afraid for her because now is so much less kind than the past days when women were protected so much more. She didn't even carry a dog, much less a gun, and she walked ten miles alone in Rome.

I trust what women say to to what men say about relative safety of places. Women tend to be more sensitive to how people see throwing your money in their faces as a slight, even if they don't steal from you. (Generalization -- my father is very sensitive to this and one sister is oblivious to the point of rudeness).

Men seem more ready for the conflict that having more might bring on -- more thinking about security in depth, more electrical fences, guns, dogs. Asking if people needed the stuff is a whole different way of looking at the issues.

My friend who'd lived in Honduras said also that expat men tended to have more serious issues than expat women, to go for the young girls. Nicaragua has a minimum age of consent that seems to be honored in the breach. Marriage to a ex-pat with money may be a deal for a young girl in those cultures given everything else, but I'm not convinced that ex-pat men on average are significantly less likely to be abusive of women than Spanish-speaking men. The abuse rates I've seen quoted for the US are something like one in four over a lifetime, twenty-eight percent over the time of a relationship (different surveys); Nicaragua's are one in two (sample in Leon), but the the ex-pat men are more likely to be looking for women who are more compliant and submissive than women in their home countries. Other studies show ranges closer to US ranges:

The official Demographic and Health Survey (ENDESA) for 1998 indicates that 29% of all women in Nicaragua who have cohabited with a partner have suffered some kind of physical or sexual abuse.

The increased safety for the Nicaraguan women becoming involved with or marrying ex-pats is possibly there, but not as extreme an improvement as the ex-pat men who marry young Nicaraguan women claim. Unions where women had little say in household matters are more likely to be abusive. What protects a woman is her natal family's attitude toward domestic abuse -- if they're against it and indicate that they'll back her and protect her, the rate of violence goes down. The age discrepancy is positive for violence; the presence of the girl's family in the area is protective.

I'm getting most of this from Domestic Violence in Nicaragua: The Roles of Individuals, Families and Communities in the Cessation of Abuse.
Kiersten Johnson. A quote from the summary:

Men's demographic characteristics don't matter, and neither do things like having a family history of violence or living in an urban or rural area. Instead, the characteristics of the women are what matter most, and the degree to which the women are immediately empowered: if they have a white-collar job, if they have family support, if their husband is generally sober, if they participate in important household decisionmaking, if the father of their children is a legal husband, if the household in which they live with their children is not poor – these are the characteristics of women who have a degree of social and economic autonomy and are thus empowered to negotiate an end to domestic violence in their homes once it has begun.

Another paper said that the difference between Nicaragua and Russia, both with high abuse rates, is that Nicaragua has an active women's movement and the government sees the issue as something that needs attention.

Della Giustina, Jo-Ann. "Domestic Violence Policy and Independent Women’s Movements: A Comparison of Nicaragua and Russia" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY, Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Atlanta, Georgia, Nov 14, 2007 . 2010-06-07 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p188045_index.html>

Any marriages of women under 18 are in breach of Nicaraguan law. One can argue that this is too high for the prevailing culture and that women in most world cultures marry shortly after puberty.

Are the women who marry European or American expats who came to CA to marry young girls significantly safer than they'd be married to Nicaraguan men? I suspect that the incidence of abuse among those men isn't zero and that any significant safety would depend on the girl's family.

I was reading about poverty levels in Central and South America, which are rather sobering, but I think we forget how recently, similar conditions prevailed in much of Europe. Interesting reading about France.

Found this today in the comments section of ethnography.com

Culture studies broadly outline various groups and label them as Latino or Hispanic, African American, Asian, etc… I’m not going to pretend that I know exactly what is taught about these groups in every program, but merely demarcating and conflating nationality, ethnicity, race and geographic region, sets up students to think that these amalgamations are solid groups. They don’t fully reveal the massive internal variation in these groups, or they tend to over sell the degree of variation between groups. I admit this is an assumption on my part using third party information. The degree to which they do or don’t do this, really determines how closely they would align with modern cultural anthropology.

For example, in any US city the single group of “Hispanic” is comprised of various interest and socio-cultural backgrounds and experiences, which can be at odds with each other. The fact that there is no actual term for this supposed group of people that can accurately define them is problematic. If they Hispanic, then they are European. If they are Latino, then they are defined as Spanish speaking, which is tantamount to calling every English speaking person English. The fact is that these groups are largely defined by existent social networks which can be measured. Some of these groups have more in common with groups that would be defined as “White,” than other groups labeled as Hispanic. They also tend to push the dubious notion that people with less skin pigment in the US comprise a single group, with shared values and experiences. This group is either labeled as “Anglo,” (even though Anglos are a minority in the US; there are far more people of German and South European decent in the US), or they are labeled as “Caucasian,” which is an old race term, and would be exactly like calling Blacks, Negroids, or Asians, Mongloids, which are the terms used for these groups on the same list that Caucasian, or Caucasoid, is on.

I'm somewhat reminded of the people who kept trying to define Appalachian. It's basically an identification imposed by people who weren't from the region on an radically diverse bunch of country people: creoles from the tidewater, Africans, American groups of various kind and amounts of purity, German religious refugees, escaped indentured servants, Quakers missionaries, Italian and Cornish miners, and 19th Century British and Portuguese people who thought Maine was way too cold. All that in one county of with a population of 14,000. Identifications are victimizations unless they're self-identifications.

And most people's word for themselves is people.

A couple of years ago, I was looking at house prices all over Europe and in especially the UK that would be equivalent to houses in the US. It seemed that house prices in that range were close to equivalent transnationally.

I'm suspecting that house prices on the lower ends are also relatively flat, that what you got for $110 a month in NYC in 1975 is more or less the same as what you'd get for $110 in Jinotega, Nicaragua, that the prices for these things have also been affected by international travel, costs of non-locally produced plumbing parts, copper wire, and all that. I knew people in NYC who had rent controlled apartments, very tiny studios for $45 a month. A room in a house in Jinotega now goes for about that. There's been considerable inflation in house prices in the US, but I suspect that the lowest end in the more economically depressed areas in the US would be comparable to prices in Jinotega. The difference with Jinotega is that more people than not are part of the renter pool at this rate. The better off Jinotegans are not 100 times better off than the average.

Seeing someone with four times the local pay for school teacher as rich would also require me to see college tenured professors who made four times what I made as rich. I didn't. I don't think people in Jinotega who knew what I got in Social Security would think of me as rich. Rich has a certain power to it over other people's lives.

Most of the people coming to try their back to the lander schemes weren't rich, either. Rich is owning the factory.

Jinotega didnt' have the load of Gringos that Esteli had -- or necessarily the radical difference between the factory owners and the rest of the population. Esteli had the cigar factories.

My income has varied by a multiple of around three during the last decade. I've never felt that I was rich when it was high, just that I didn't have money problems then. I've never made as much as six figures, ever.

And even that's not rich, really.

The other things that make Nicaragua cheap is not having to heat and in some places, not having to run an a/c. In the places that don't require cars, there's that savings (but many Gringos buying land tend to also need cars to get to their land and a car in Nicaragua costs more to run than a car in the US from what I've read).

For better or worse, the old style hand-craft textile home textile production in Nicaragua is gone to the point of not seeing handspun and woven cloth in handicraft shops in Esteli. People still make boots and shoes by hand in both Jinotega and Esteli (I really want a pair of handmade boots).

The surplus from world cloth manufacturing ends up in the markets of Jinotega. Suzanne, the gringa who was showing us around, had a North Face jacket she'd bought for a couple of cordobas. I got a pair of light sweat pants for maybe fifty cents or a quarter.

Food is cheap enough, but growing crops for export pushes the home food production onto less useful land. I didn't see any signs of malnutrition in Jinotega (have seen it in Patrick County) but this may be because Jinotega is a market town and has the money from the various service and professional work (lawyers, doctors, government agencies, banks, etc.) to be able to afford the food. Nobody seemed particularly prosperous; nobody seemed in dire straits. The usefulness of government patronage jobs complicates the political life but that is also true of small town politics in the US.

Just a theory, tossed up. We basically have three major languages in the Americas -- and I've heard that Portuguese spoken is mutually comprehensible by Spanish-speakers. We're all mono-lingual travelers. The Nicaraguans were recommended Ometepe Island, which again is a geological curiosity. I wanted to see Jinotega because it's mountains. There's a strong strain of going to see things ("Jinotega muy bonito" the Nicaraguan woman on the plane told me) -- the botany, the biology, the volcanos (our guide recommended Cerro Negro, the newest volcano).

My encounter in front of the cathedral in Esteli was probably with another monolingual tourist -- would a resident of Esteli actually be out on a Saturday taking photographs of a common landmark when the next day, one would be seeing all the mothers and families on Mother's Day (Spanish Catholic Mother's Day)?

Europe would have many languages between Ometepe Island and Annandale -- Spanish comes up to Annandale in places and English goes down spottily through Miami.

From Alaska to Terra del Fuego, two major languages. And I see the Spanish-speakers visiting Skyline Drive.

Kinda sad in one way, that the other languages lost out for the most part, but interesting that many of the other language speakers are multi-lingual.

Geology is so much of who we are in the Americas, whether the tectonic plates were generous or not. Volcanos and lakes, basin and range, Appalachia mountains pre-Grevillian, all of Nicaragua younger than anything in Virginia except the coastal plain and the rare Miocene volcanos.

The less lyrical observation -- Nicaragua is poor. The cost of living is cheaper because in some places, there's no need for heating and air-conditioning, and no need for heating any place. The hotels aren't out of main sequence costs with US hotels at about the same physical states of repair. What makes living there cheaper than the parts of the US off the coasts is the same thing that made the Lower East Side cheaper in the 1960s -- it hasn't been rehabbed at this point. The other factor is being able to grow food all year round, of having some very fertile soil due to recent volcanic activity. If the comparison is between life in a suburb of a major US coastal city and there, then Nicaragua is a fantastic deal. If it's between an inland US city or small town and Nicaragua, not so much.

Land frenzies happen all over the place -- I remember reading a passage in A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul where the narrator realized that the land people had been speculating in was bush and would be bush for a long time. They're particularly problematic in areas where the local economies don't generate the same incomes that world economies generate, and where the land, once bought by speculators, generally has to be taken by adverse possession to put it back into productive use for the local economy. Most local places have traditions of using places owned by absentee landlords -- Patrick County did, Honduras did. We had lumber poaching.

There's a dream that we can find a place where the locals are good enough, where their basic values are high enough that we can trust them not to do this. I suspect that the place is called Switzerland rather than Nicaragua. One American woman's neighbors ate her smaller stock (probably didn't eat her horses because horsemeat doesn't appear to be a Nicaraguan preference). Expecting all poor people to ignore the vacation homes left vacant weeks on end, the timber on land that the owner hasn't seen in years, all that, is to want people to be completely beyond envy. The Nicaraguans told the woman we stayed with that the prevailing national fault is envioso.

The guys in the compound with the cement wall so high that nothing was visible except the razor wire at the top understood this. The people in Esteli with the guard dogs on every terrace and the armed guards in front of the houses understood this.

The Japanese girl who was attacked at the top of the mountain path leading to a lighted cross didn't understand this.



My niece is touring through Europe, a post college graduation present from her mother's family, I think. She said of Switzerland that the cities were beautiful and safe and had excellent public transportation, all probably due to being in a rich country. And a rich country that has avoided the major European wars since the 19th Century.

I don't know if the Swiss exported all their poor centuries ago or what, or if my niece was just seeing selected cities.

Nicaragua is safe for people who go where there are other people, who are reasonably careful about what they eat, who speak as much Spanish as they can. It's not particularly safe for getting rich off the development of the place, leveraging first world money against third world land prices.

I suspect that if someone wanted to grow their own food, certain parts would be excellent if the people doing this learned about best practices for composting toilets and recycling gray water.

Jinotega seemed more possible than Esteli though I'm not sure I'd find as many interesting people, Nicaraguan and ex-pat, to talk to. The feeling on the street was different than the feeling on the street in Esteli, but the very thing that made Esteli feel more familiar, the more urban body language, the more exhuberant speech patterns, also meant that everyone in Esteli was more part of the global media exposure than those in Jinotega, and with that, comes other things -- drugs, bigger awareness of the differences between us and them, and all that. Jinotega had nice houses next to places that were crappier, without the gunmen and dogs.

We get used to things -- when I lived on Mott Street, I got used to being hyper cautious walking home at night, to dealing with the fence and after hours operator who lived downstairs, to dealing with the street cunt-calling. I loved New York and felt the trade-offs were worth it.

Didn't get an immediate sense with either place that it was the place. Guess I need to keep looking.

I used to wonder, when I lived in rural Virginia, how people could have a vacation house next to someone who was living in desperate poverty (I was working with a social services agency visiting one of the people, trying to arrange medical care for her that wouldn't get her beaten up by her husband for being in a car with another man).

And when did tourism change from going to places better off than our own, the Elizabethan Englishman in France or Italy, to touring poverty?

Nicaragua is very poor. The people are friendly, but it has a feeling of not meaning anything personal. That rent and food would be cheaper enough that I could live a lower middle class life -- um, I don't think for me that this is enough. The country is very beautiful, but overpopulated for the resources it has. In the areas we saw, the grazing was damaging the lands, not like areas where cattle have grazed for centuries without the damage.

Jinotega didn't have the guard dogs on terraces or the armed guards in front of better private houses, but a Japanese tourist had been attacked on a mountain trail a day or so around the time we were there. Safe if one is in town. Esteli had the armed men in front of the better houses in town, the guard dogs on the terraces, the walled compound for the upper middle class surrounded by a high wall and razor wire. Our Miraflor guide, Aldo, had an uncle lived there.

For me, not an immediate love. I think to live there would be to believe that one's own good fortune was absolutely due to one's own superiority and that one deserved the better life. The foreigners weren't smarter than Aldo who was working for $20 a day.

A woman who'd been there before me has a friend who works as a researcher at a station at Lake Apoyo. She'd said that she felt a person would have to be a missionary or doing something similar to live there, talked about all the vacant time shares in developments near the lake.

She said, "When I first traveled in Mexico, I thought it was poor. Then I went to El Salvador and it made Mexico look positively middle class. Well, Nicaragua makes El Salvador look well off. Nicaraguans to go El Salvador to look for jobs."

Some non-locals are good for a place, the same way that people who've been away and came back can be even better, bring in different perspectives, new ideas, capital for projects. There are enough of them in Nicaragua without me, I think.

It's poor; the people dress surprisingly well from surplus donated American stuff sold in the local markets (I found a pair of Jones NY pants in Jinotega). Some people still ride horses for transport, not entertainment, and plow with oxen. My traveling companion and I saw horse carts in Managua and ox carts in the country side. Other than those, people rode bicycles and motorcycles and drove twin cab four wheel drive trucks. We didn't see much non-commercial traffic on the road between Managua and Jinotega.

I get the impression that machismo is deprecated by the younger educated generations, but that even that of it which does exist tends to be less obnoxious than the cunt-calling of NYC. Women are different from men in different ways, but the US hasn't ever had a female commandante Number Two, and hasn't yet had a female head of the FBI, much less a female general. The culture seems to have an undercurrent of something that's not European.

http://www.manfut.org/jinotega/rafael.html is about a small mountain town about 15 miles or so from Jinotega, which compares interestingly to http://www.mindspring.com/~tjepsen/civilwar.htm on American telegraph operators.


Women are desired; there's a certain amount of street flirting, but it's very low key, at least in Jinotega which seemed to be full of people hustling in various ways to put together livings (kids selling avocados door to door, women selling fruit in the street, medics running hotels, various lawyers and doctors), but not begging. We did see some begging in Esteli, but then a backpacker hostel and its associated restaurant seem to be an obvious target (one night in the four that we were there).

Every one is wired in the cities. Young girls were in the cybercafes in pairs, possibly on social networks though I didn't look too closely. An hour of time costs about seventy cents. Cell phone towers are prominent landmarks.

Fair number of people were working below their levels of education and we heard that even more people were, too. Most of the people (as in 99.9 percent) don't speak English and what education in English they've had seems to be rather perfunctory. They expected me to speak and understand Spanish, possibly because they assume anyone with dark hair and eyes is local. (I had people in Miami in the airport addressing me in Spanish, too).

The old style of tile roofs are being replaced by locally made metal and synthetic roofs and don't look quite so adorable, but don't seem to collect the bromeliads at the same levels, either. There were bromeliads of the genus Tillandsia on the electric wires, too.

Universities now use contingent faculty rather than tenured faculty to fill most basic classes in the university. One of the thing contributing to this is the move to mass education of people who are permanently never going to be the peers of the people teaching them. James Dickey didn't remember the name of a student he'd just minutes ago examined in orals. Those of us who were TAs at SUNYA knew that many of the professors around us considered us incapable of anything scholarly by virtue of being in a Doctor of Arts program. I was told to my face that the class I was teaching for Judy Sherwin on Emily Dickinson was likely going to be my last literature class. The professor who said this was not one of the few actual working scholars in the Department.

One of my s.f. writer friends said that he wrote at least one master thesis for pay (this was not Robert Silverberg, by the way). Googling finds a site that will "help" you with a doctoral dissertation now.

I suspect that one of the problems comes from the faculty that's happy to teach graduate students regardless of their actual ability to direct graduate work. As my own graduate director said, "It was a win/win situation for us. We got to teach graduate students and we didn't have to teach intro courses."

Do we actually have fewer tenured professors per capita than before the BA became a required credential by most businesses for any administrative or supervisory job? The credentialing institution isn't the same as the institution that is involved with the more complex forms of education useful for writers and scholars.

The issue of plagiarism seems to have made at least one Valve contributor very angry and very much in denial (whether or not my source was lying, and I don't think he was, people can very obviously buy considerable chunks of dissertations on line).

I've talked to one person who cheated on his liberal arts courses and didn't on his technical courses. He saw the liberal arts courses as basically getting his ticket stamped, took them as cynically as they were given, but saw his technical classes as teaching him useful skills.

The classically Marxist position is to assume that contingent faculty are a group that needs to be organized, but the organization is as cynical as the graduate programs these people came from. It may get better pay for the contingent faculty, better benefits (or people may decide to offshore basic comp classes to India), but it makes people teaching the classes a permanent underclass rather than considering adjunct and contingent status as stages toward a tenured position.

Thing is those classes are generally a product of the expanded role universities welcomed, even as some people within academia were concerned that the BA would be considered job training rather than life enhancing (as though universities haven't always had a job training component to their missions). The people doing the more classical work in the liberal arts -- scholarship and training future scholars in various forms of apprenticeships -- preferred not to teach non-majors.

Teachers colleges were what expanded to fit the new role of the university as job training and job screening institutions. Those had always been focused on job training and their students were never going to be the equals of their professors unless they went for graduate degrees. Some of the traditional private colleges didn't expand their enrollments at all -- Davidson in NC hasn't.

The Normal schools became the new public universities.

The people teaching in the expanded programs still were expected to do scholarly work. As the numbers of graduate programs expanded, students were expected to continue on for Ph.D.s.

One of the academics at Albany introduced Louis Simpson in a way that typified the difference between what was happening at elite schools and what was happening at the former normal schools turned university. A passage in Simpson that had been about the respect the Columbia faculty had for their undergraduates became an example of faculty contempt for undergraduates. The SUNYA guy finished this off by saying that Simpson and Hall hadn't edited an academic poetry collection, but one that wasn't the one they edited.

Simpson took it out on the graduate student poets who came to his workshop. In all honesty, none of us became major poets and the ones who became notable enough minor poets were publishing and had reputations before entering the program.

I don't know if there's ever been a pure Ph.D. program, with the ideal being "gladly learn and gladly teach," but I'm more than somewhat cynical about the people who want to blame the contingent faculty problem on the college administrators. If there's a transcendent value to scholarship, then the graduate student isn't just another one of the people passing through who is fodder for one's own job.

One of the things that struck me about what I saw of UPenn's undergraduate creative writing concentration was that even the better freshmen writers were included in the after reading dinners. They were the potential future of the field. UPenn, Princeton, Yale, all have first rate writers working with undergraduates and don't have MFA programs.

The other, more practical problem with treating ones graduate students as a buffer between one's real work and teaching non-majors and basically not paying enough attention to the graduate students to know their names ten minutes after their oral exams is that those students are in a position to treat the whole thing as hoops to be jumped through for one of the better rewards the culture has for people who want to have job security and a reasonable income. The odds on getting a tenured job after finishing a Ph.D. are something like fifty-fifty. This is far better than the odds on an MFA writing enough best selling work to make $60,000 a year for life.

If we had small classes for those basic comp classes, our students would find cheating harder as we would have time to pay more attention to them personally and not be forced to use cheating detection software. For the students who love doing research and writing, we provide job opportunities. They don't just write their own papers; they write papers for their fellow students. My brother did this. One of my foreign students did this. Another foreign student found that his ghost cribbed too much from on line.

People teaching basic courses often find themselves in an arms race with their students over plagiarism. The students need As to get into medical school, business school, and the basic courses are in the way.

I don't know how much plagiarism there is in graduate school, but I doubt places would be advertising on line if it was zero.

If the graduate programs were following the traditional practice of seeing their students as their potential future colleagues, and if the faculty themselves were working active scholars , then the graduate degrees would be more meaningful. If the faculty was working with students and knew from their own work and the work of their colleagues what was significant work and what wasn't, then the students would get pleasures of scholarship beyond the mere credentialing, the publications as valuable only as they got their authors job advancement. Some people love scholarship and would do it without having an academic position.

People who quit working when they get tenure tend to be the least interested in working with graduate students on their own projects -- it's too much like the work they've finished with now that they have tenure.

The good ones don't necessarily stop working even after retirement.

As long as being graduate faculty is so highly prized and teaching ill-prepared non-majors is so boring, then the forces that created the contingent faculty lines will have willing collaborators among the tenured faculty. And as long as publication matters whether the work ever shows that it's contributed to scholarship (i.e. the 90 percent of work that isn't cited by other works) or not (the things that aren't read again after approval like so many master theses and doctoral dissertations), then the system may reward mediocrity that publishes often over people doing work that matters to other scholars.

But I don't think the problem can be fixed in any kind of classical organizing sense. Individual people have to save themselves as they can.