Of course Walker read the new Percy Jackson book, The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan, the day I brought it home. As soon as he got out of school he picked it up and began reading me the chapter titles out loud (my favorite title is "Nico buys happy meals for the dead." Let me tell you, that chapter definitely delivers what it promises.) Walker also had to read me the first sentence out loud: "The last thing I wanted to do on my summer break was blow up another school." So Walker started reading at 2:30 and despite interruptions to take care of the guinea pigs and then the rabbit, finished at 5:30. "How was it?" I asked him. "It's better than #2 and as good as #1 and #3," he said.
Last night I finished reading it (courtesy of mother's day, time to sit around and read). It was thoroughly enjoyable all the way through. There's a nice mix of new characters and clever plot twists (yeah, they're literal in the labyrinth) with characters as old as myth itself and situations that you can see coming if you've read enough of the myths. Another good chapter title (well, they're all good, let's face it) is "We steal some slightly used wings." Guess whose. (Here's a hint: "'Land!' Annabeth yelled. 'These wings won't last forever.'")
One of the things that interests me about this book is Grover's quest to find Pan. It comes to a satisfactory conclusion, especially in terms of word etymology as an explanation of how the foes of the half-bloods are suddenly overthrown when Grover screams. But the culmination of Grover's search for Pan strikes me as a bit of a seam in this otherwise seamless fictional world. Grover and his friends are advised to take care of some little bit of nature, because the God can't do it anymore. It reads a bit like the usual kid "save the rainforest" propaganda. Don't get me wrong; I'm in favor of saving the rainforest. I gave an impromptu speech on it the other day when a kid came home from school asking "but what's wrong with drilling for oil in Alaska?" But I am not in favor of mixing propaganda in with fiction. Good fiction convinces because of the story, not in terms of something added to the story.
The whole kid conservation movement bothers me, and I'm beginning to be able to articulate why as I continue to read and think about what's currently being called "nature deficit disorder." Wouldn't it do the rain forest more good if a kid learned to value the nature in his own neighborhood and then extrapolate from that love to wider vistas as his power to influence his world grows? Kid conservation encourages them to pay lip service to a problem without being able to solve it. As adults, these kids are going to feel that they did what they could, but it didn't work. Oh well. On to something else.
But what else? I am a supporter of the space program and Robert Heinlein's idea that humans shouldn't "put all our eggs in one basket" (e.g. should find other inhabitable worlds). Have we done that, though? No, we've largely given in to the people who prate about how we shouldn't be exploring outer space when we can't even feed the people on earth who are hungry. And we shouldn't eat cheap hamburgers because they're raised on land chopped out of the rain forest, where medicines we can't even dream of could be available....
We do need someone larger than life, someone who doesn't have to be tarnished by the election process, to get us out of some of the strange loops created by teaching children the "correct" way to treat the earth. We need a Percy Jackson, with wise parents to guide him on a path neither of them can follow.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Friday, May 9, 2008
Animal's People
Animal's People, by Indra Sinha, is a novel that comes close to showing me a side of human nature that I haven't understood before, but it falls short. The cover says that it was "shortlisted for the 2007 Booker prize," and that's the kind of book it is--it's a finalist, but not a winner.
It's the first-person tale of a boy from Khaufpur, India, and is based on the events of the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal. Deformed by effects of the poison, the boy's back is bent so that he has to walk on all fours and is called "Animal," a name he identifies with. His point of view is enhanced by spelling--he calls a journalist a "Jarnalis" and the American company that owned the pesticide factory where the disaster took place is the "kampani." The narrative frame is that he tells his tale into a tape recorder, so the spelling reminds readers that this is not a literate tale-teller. He is "speaking to the mashin."
One place where I almost could see things from a different point of view is this: "Jarnalis, you were such a fool. The best thing about you was your shorts. Six pockets, I counted. Two at the side, two on the front, two on the arse. With shorts like those a person does not need a house."
In fact, part of Animal's price for telling his story to the journalist's tape recorder is those shorts, which he lives in for most of the rest of the novel.
Another place where I almost saw from a new perspective is when Animal is taking an American doctor ("doctress" he calls her) through "Paradise Alley," where the people worst affected by the poison live. She doesn't understand why they won't come for free treatment at her clinic, and Animal can't explain that the man he works for, Zafar, has instructed all the local people to avoid her clinic in case she is gathering medical information on them for the kampani and its lawyers. She says
"These people have nothing. Why do they turn down a genuine and good offer of help? I just don't get it."
Seeing how unhappy she is, I try to find something to say that will make her feel better. "Elli doctress, no surprise or shame. I understand because these are my people."
"So what the hell do I have to do to get through to these people of yours?" She cups her hands to her mouth and shouts, "HEY, ANIMAL'S PEOPLE! I DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND YOU!"
As the title of the novel comes from this sequence, maybe the fact that my understanding falls short is deliberate. It sounds simple enough when Animal tries to explain that "hope dies in places like this, because hope lives in the future and there's no future here, how can you think about tomorrow when all your strength is used up trying to get through today?" But there's more to it than just the simple opposition Animal falls back on when Elli says "Animal, I don't know what such suffering is like, but it doesn't mean we've nothing in common. There's simple humanity? Isn't there?" He calls himself a "cheap lying bastard" and says "no good asking me...I long ago gave up trying to be human."
Elli gives Animal a view of the world that is initially attractive to him, and then he tries to reject it totally:
"The world is made of promises....Think of everyday things. Mail gets delivered. Farmers grow crops. The stores take our dollars, each bill says 'This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private,' which means, you've done a good turn for someone, I promise you something equally good in return....Rocks keep their promises. They behave like rocks. Water boils at one hundred degrees. The sea rises and falls, that's the sea and the moon keeping their own kind of promises. To have the world work for you, you've got to make your own promises right back."
Ultimately, Animal adopts a version of this philosophy for his own use, and "his" people accept some of the help Elli offers them. Rather than being destroyed by the apocalypse ("apokalis"), the people of Khaufpur adapt and go on. "Tomorrow," they say, "there will be more of us."
There's no great revelation. There are certainly no heroics. The ending of the novel is like the ending of many ordinary days--you're tired and not entirely satisfied with what has passed, although it was interesting while it happened.
It's the first-person tale of a boy from Khaufpur, India, and is based on the events of the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal. Deformed by effects of the poison, the boy's back is bent so that he has to walk on all fours and is called "Animal," a name he identifies with. His point of view is enhanced by spelling--he calls a journalist a "Jarnalis" and the American company that owned the pesticide factory where the disaster took place is the "kampani." The narrative frame is that he tells his tale into a tape recorder, so the spelling reminds readers that this is not a literate tale-teller. He is "speaking to the mashin."
One place where I almost could see things from a different point of view is this: "Jarnalis, you were such a fool. The best thing about you was your shorts. Six pockets, I counted. Two at the side, two on the front, two on the arse. With shorts like those a person does not need a house."
In fact, part of Animal's price for telling his story to the journalist's tape recorder is those shorts, which he lives in for most of the rest of the novel.
Another place where I almost saw from a new perspective is when Animal is taking an American doctor ("doctress" he calls her) through "Paradise Alley," where the people worst affected by the poison live. She doesn't understand why they won't come for free treatment at her clinic, and Animal can't explain that the man he works for, Zafar, has instructed all the local people to avoid her clinic in case she is gathering medical information on them for the kampani and its lawyers. She says
"These people have nothing. Why do they turn down a genuine and good offer of help? I just don't get it."
Seeing how unhappy she is, I try to find something to say that will make her feel better. "Elli doctress, no surprise or shame. I understand because these are my people."
"So what the hell do I have to do to get through to these people of yours?" She cups her hands to her mouth and shouts, "HEY, ANIMAL'S PEOPLE! I DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND YOU!"
As the title of the novel comes from this sequence, maybe the fact that my understanding falls short is deliberate. It sounds simple enough when Animal tries to explain that "hope dies in places like this, because hope lives in the future and there's no future here, how can you think about tomorrow when all your strength is used up trying to get through today?" But there's more to it than just the simple opposition Animal falls back on when Elli says "Animal, I don't know what such suffering is like, but it doesn't mean we've nothing in common. There's simple humanity? Isn't there?" He calls himself a "cheap lying bastard" and says "no good asking me...I long ago gave up trying to be human."
Elli gives Animal a view of the world that is initially attractive to him, and then he tries to reject it totally:
"The world is made of promises....Think of everyday things. Mail gets delivered. Farmers grow crops. The stores take our dollars, each bill says 'This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private,' which means, you've done a good turn for someone, I promise you something equally good in return....Rocks keep their promises. They behave like rocks. Water boils at one hundred degrees. The sea rises and falls, that's the sea and the moon keeping their own kind of promises. To have the world work for you, you've got to make your own promises right back."
Ultimately, Animal adopts a version of this philosophy for his own use, and "his" people accept some of the help Elli offers them. Rather than being destroyed by the apocalypse ("apokalis"), the people of Khaufpur adapt and go on. "Tomorrow," they say, "there will be more of us."
There's no great revelation. There are certainly no heroics. The ending of the novel is like the ending of many ordinary days--you're tired and not entirely satisfied with what has passed, although it was interesting while it happened.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
The Latest in YA
YA is such an onomotopoetic acronym, isn't it? I picture 10 to 17 year olds (the target audience for Young Adult books) swinging into the library on vines to return these books, shouting "YA!" at the top of their lungs.
There have been some lively discussions online lately (a summary is available at Bookshelves of Doom) among publishers, librarians, and readers about what should be classified as YA literature and whether adults are embarrassed to browse in that section. I certainly have never been embarrassed to check out the YA section, ever since I found that Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (a book that current college students pick overwhelmingly as "most influential") had moved from the SF section to the YA section. And if you want to read Scott Westerfeld, as anyone who likes books with interesting ideas in them should (the discussions note this), you have to go to the YA section.
I can't believe we missed the first day to buy Rick Riordan's newest Percy Jackson book, The Battle of the Labyrinth. I just went out and found it at a local bookstore this morning. If you don't yet own it or the three that precede it, get yourself to a real or virtual bookstore before the week is out!
I loved Edward Bloor's book Tangerine, and I liked Crusader a lot. He manages to integrate contemporary issues with good writing and plots more complicated than usual in YA fiction. So my expectations were high when I found his newest YA title, Story Time, at the library. Perhaps they were too high. I found the reading of the book tedious, even though the issues (standardized testing in schools is the main one) were worth exploring. I'd like to see someone do it better.
Clare B. Dunkle's brand-new The Sky Inside is one of the best post-apocalyptic YA novels I've read since How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. You get thoroughly involved in the present-day mysteries of how the characters live in their domed suburb before you begin to get any answers to why, and the big picture doesn't even begin to be revealed until p. 192. Finally the apocalyptic events are explained on p. 214, and this is the beginning of the explanation:
Close to a hundred years ago, our nation was slowly decaying. Handhelds and robots had just been invented, and that meant factories didn't need so many humans to work in them anymore. The armies didn't need them either, because war was changing, too. Killing people wasn't important. It was which factories and machines you could blow up, and the robots were getting better at doing that than the humans were. All these unneeded people were crowding up the cities--suburbs, you'd call them--eating food and getting sick and demanding medicine. They cost more to keep than they could earn, and they were fouling up the air and water, too. New people were being born every day.
I'm almost sure that this novel was not written in answer to Michael Moore's movie Sicko (the timing is too tight, for one thing). But it presents a very plausible future, and that makes it powerful. Also it has a satisfying ending. I think that's an important qualification for good YA post-apocalyptic novels; they shouldn't just peter out with the idea. They should resolve the crisis somehow. The author should have some vision for this unsatisfactory world.
There have been some lively discussions online lately (a summary is available at Bookshelves of Doom) among publishers, librarians, and readers about what should be classified as YA literature and whether adults are embarrassed to browse in that section. I certainly have never been embarrassed to check out the YA section, ever since I found that Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (a book that current college students pick overwhelmingly as "most influential") had moved from the SF section to the YA section. And if you want to read Scott Westerfeld, as anyone who likes books with interesting ideas in them should (the discussions note this), you have to go to the YA section.
I can't believe we missed the first day to buy Rick Riordan's newest Percy Jackson book, The Battle of the Labyrinth. I just went out and found it at a local bookstore this morning. If you don't yet own it or the three that precede it, get yourself to a real or virtual bookstore before the week is out!
I loved Edward Bloor's book Tangerine, and I liked Crusader a lot. He manages to integrate contemporary issues with good writing and plots more complicated than usual in YA fiction. So my expectations were high when I found his newest YA title, Story Time, at the library. Perhaps they were too high. I found the reading of the book tedious, even though the issues (standardized testing in schools is the main one) were worth exploring. I'd like to see someone do it better.
Clare B. Dunkle's brand-new The Sky Inside is one of the best post-apocalyptic YA novels I've read since How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. You get thoroughly involved in the present-day mysteries of how the characters live in their domed suburb before you begin to get any answers to why, and the big picture doesn't even begin to be revealed until p. 192. Finally the apocalyptic events are explained on p. 214, and this is the beginning of the explanation:
Close to a hundred years ago, our nation was slowly decaying. Handhelds and robots had just been invented, and that meant factories didn't need so many humans to work in them anymore. The armies didn't need them either, because war was changing, too. Killing people wasn't important. It was which factories and machines you could blow up, and the robots were getting better at doing that than the humans were. All these unneeded people were crowding up the cities--suburbs, you'd call them--eating food and getting sick and demanding medicine. They cost more to keep than they could earn, and they were fouling up the air and water, too. New people were being born every day.
I'm almost sure that this novel was not written in answer to Michael Moore's movie Sicko (the timing is too tight, for one thing). But it presents a very plausible future, and that makes it powerful. Also it has a satisfying ending. I think that's an important qualification for good YA post-apocalyptic novels; they shouldn't just peter out with the idea. They should resolve the crisis somehow. The author should have some vision for this unsatisfactory world.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Everything Bad is Good for You
I'm pretty much the resident Luddite at my house. If we're watching YouTube videos on my laptop, someone invariably unseats me at the keyboard because I'm too slow. The other three play with the whole gamecube/wii/computer network downstairs while I sit upstairs reading a book. So I liked the mental gymnastics involved in Steven Johnson's mind-game, proposed on p. 19 of Everything Bad is Good for You:
Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: video games were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries--and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they're all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:
Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying--which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world fiilled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements--books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new "libraries" that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia--a condition that didn't even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion--you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised oon interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today's generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they're powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to "follow the plot" instead of learning to lead.
Okay, so let's take this game one step further. Imagine we live in a world where some variation of the feed is possible. Obviously, as I've said, the novel Feed presents it as a thing not to be desired, but could we alter it to make it better? Walker says we should be able to turn it off. Eleanor says that instead of hooking directly into your brain, it should be a wrist unit with optional visor and earbuds. Ron says that the difference between using a laptop and having a feed is the "difference between wanting to DRIVE a car and wanting to BE one," but I suspect he would like the convenience of using his electronic calendar, "meeting maker," without having to get out his laptop every time he needs to check his schedule.
What would be the advantage of your modified feed, I asked the kids. You could look up information all the time, they said. You'd never be bored. You could show things to people, or send them links. You could chat without talking (this actually happens in Feed). Walker mentioned the cheating possibilities that chat could open up at school, which is, no doubt, why there is no such thing as school (only School TM) in the world of Feed, and why cell phones are completely banned from our local public schools already.
The most detailed answer I got about the advantage of a feed was about Walker's new game Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Evidently, he goes over to the computer and looks up "moves" and "combos" to use in the game, and then he has to go back over to the Wii and try to remember what the computer told him to do with his fingers to achieve that move or combination of moves. If he had a feed, he said, he could just look this stuff up and move his fingers while reading the information about it.
As a blogger, there would be lots of advantages to having some version of a feed. As Eleanor said, you could keep a "good ideas folder" going all the time. I could make a note about the mockingbird I heard do a convincing meow this morning while I was petting the rabbit, and when I turned around to see what cat was coming up behind me, I saw a bird. But then, maybe I'd never use that idea. Maybe my good ideas folder would get so big, it would be unmanageable. Maybe I'd have so many notes about birds and rabbits and cats that I couldn't keep track of them, and then I'd need more ways to make personal indices of things that interest me, and then pretty soon I'd want a whole education system to help me sort through all the information available to me on the world wide web....and I'd have reinvented School TM, where the only thing you learn is how to use your feed. I've seen several bloggers get to this point lately, saying that they've found they have to limit their "screen time" so they have time for a life. That makes me remember the South Park episode about World of Warcraft, in which people who triumph in the game "have no life" and the makers of the game fret about "how they can kill that which has no life."
I promised pros and cons of Feed, and don't mean to take the discussion back to cons every time. But it does seem that there need to be limits on how such a thing would work, and probably self-imposed limits would work about as well as those parental controls you can put on your tv--but how many people actually do it?
Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: video games were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries--and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they're all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:
Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying--which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world fiilled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements--books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new "libraries" that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia--a condition that didn't even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion--you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised oon interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today's generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they're powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to "follow the plot" instead of learning to lead.
Okay, so let's take this game one step further. Imagine we live in a world where some variation of the feed is possible. Obviously, as I've said, the novel Feed presents it as a thing not to be desired, but could we alter it to make it better? Walker says we should be able to turn it off. Eleanor says that instead of hooking directly into your brain, it should be a wrist unit with optional visor and earbuds. Ron says that the difference between using a laptop and having a feed is the "difference between wanting to DRIVE a car and wanting to BE one," but I suspect he would like the convenience of using his electronic calendar, "meeting maker," without having to get out his laptop every time he needs to check his schedule.
What would be the advantage of your modified feed, I asked the kids. You could look up information all the time, they said. You'd never be bored. You could show things to people, or send them links. You could chat without talking (this actually happens in Feed). Walker mentioned the cheating possibilities that chat could open up at school, which is, no doubt, why there is no such thing as school (only School TM) in the world of Feed, and why cell phones are completely banned from our local public schools already.
The most detailed answer I got about the advantage of a feed was about Walker's new game Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Evidently, he goes over to the computer and looks up "moves" and "combos" to use in the game, and then he has to go back over to the Wii and try to remember what the computer told him to do with his fingers to achieve that move or combination of moves. If he had a feed, he said, he could just look this stuff up and move his fingers while reading the information about it.
As a blogger, there would be lots of advantages to having some version of a feed. As Eleanor said, you could keep a "good ideas folder" going all the time. I could make a note about the mockingbird I heard do a convincing meow this morning while I was petting the rabbit, and when I turned around to see what cat was coming up behind me, I saw a bird. But then, maybe I'd never use that idea. Maybe my good ideas folder would get so big, it would be unmanageable. Maybe I'd have so many notes about birds and rabbits and cats that I couldn't keep track of them, and then I'd need more ways to make personal indices of things that interest me, and then pretty soon I'd want a whole education system to help me sort through all the information available to me on the world wide web....and I'd have reinvented School TM, where the only thing you learn is how to use your feed. I've seen several bloggers get to this point lately, saying that they've found they have to limit their "screen time" so they have time for a life. That makes me remember the South Park episode about World of Warcraft, in which people who triumph in the game "have no life" and the makers of the game fret about "how they can kill that which has no life."
I promised pros and cons of Feed, and don't mean to take the discussion back to cons every time. But it does seem that there need to be limits on how such a thing would work, and probably self-imposed limits would work about as well as those parental controls you can put on your tv--but how many people actually do it?
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Feed, pro and con
Ever since we all read M.T. Anderson's YA novel Feed at my house, we have discussions about what it would be like to have a feed in our own, personal heads. What is a feed? It's a combination of radio/tv/internet that goes directly into a person's brain. It learns to recommend stuff you'll like and it can even continue broadcasting while you're asleep, influencing your dreams.
The novel is written in a snarky, satiric way that makes the feed seem like a pretty bad idea. The characters are driven and controlled by their feeds, except for the two main characters who learn to resist the feed (and one of them learns how to resist only because she got the feed late in life--after toddlerhood, that is, and her body rejects the connection). Here are some of the ways you see that having a feed is a bad deal:
--Having a feed (and possibly living in the destroyed environment of the world of Feed) gives a person lesions. Soon lesions become trendy (one is described as "like a necklace") and cool kids get artifical lesions (that is, artificially created open wounds).
--Because people are living so much in their own heads, they don't notice how they are destroying the world around them. The environment of the world of Feed is so bad that if they want to go in the ocean, they have to wear Hazmat suits. Beef is raised at a place that doesn't have any actual cows, just miles of tissue; there's a steak maze for agri-tainment.
--People are buying stupid things over their feeds, because they think they want them once they see them advertised--things like trendy clothing and fashionable things to eat (pot-stickers).
--Trends last for mere hours, or even minutes. At one point, three female characters go to the bathroom of a club and reappear with new hairstyles.
--Because people can look up anything instantly on their feeds, they don't bother to learn things. They have no idea what the difference is between a democracy and a republic, and even though at one point they wear "riot gear" reminiscent of what was worn at the Watts riot, Kent State, or the WTO riot, they have no idea what sparked any of those events.
How far away are we from this last example? First-year college students could identify the causes of one out of three riots (Kent State) last time I checked. How far away are we from any of this stuff?
Tune in next time for a discussion of the pros of having a Feed, much of it based on Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You.
The novel is written in a snarky, satiric way that makes the feed seem like a pretty bad idea. The characters are driven and controlled by their feeds, except for the two main characters who learn to resist the feed (and one of them learns how to resist only because she got the feed late in life--after toddlerhood, that is, and her body rejects the connection). Here are some of the ways you see that having a feed is a bad deal:
--Having a feed (and possibly living in the destroyed environment of the world of Feed) gives a person lesions. Soon lesions become trendy (one is described as "like a necklace") and cool kids get artifical lesions (that is, artificially created open wounds).
--Because people are living so much in their own heads, they don't notice how they are destroying the world around them. The environment of the world of Feed is so bad that if they want to go in the ocean, they have to wear Hazmat suits. Beef is raised at a place that doesn't have any actual cows, just miles of tissue; there's a steak maze for agri-tainment.
--People are buying stupid things over their feeds, because they think they want them once they see them advertised--things like trendy clothing and fashionable things to eat (pot-stickers).
--Trends last for mere hours, or even minutes. At one point, three female characters go to the bathroom of a club and reappear with new hairstyles.
--Because people can look up anything instantly on their feeds, they don't bother to learn things. They have no idea what the difference is between a democracy and a republic, and even though at one point they wear "riot gear" reminiscent of what was worn at the Watts riot, Kent State, or the WTO riot, they have no idea what sparked any of those events.
How far away are we from this last example? First-year college students could identify the causes of one out of three riots (Kent State) last time I checked. How far away are we from any of this stuff?
Tune in next time for a discussion of the pros of having a Feed, much of it based on Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Words
"I'm afraid of worms, Roxanne." ("Words!")
The builder was asking me about which parts of the door to our new bathroom we would stain, and which parts we would paint. "Will you stain the lintel?" he asked. I looked at him, mind rushing to put an image with the word "lintel." No image came. Finally he had to walk me into the bedroom and point to the lintel, which is the frame around the door. I think of it as "molding," but that's not le mot juste.
I am unused to other people knowing words I don't know. If I had paid more attention to my favorite graduate school professor, Eugene Hammond, I would have learned more words for the frames around doors and windows (he advised that, in the course of advising writers to use details in their descriptions).
With first-year college students, the single most successful teaching technique I have discovered for getting them to understand--and possibly like--a poem is to make them look up the words. (How do you "make" students do anything? You give them a quiz on it. It doesn't matter how little the quiz is worth, in terms of their final grade.)
The poem I think I learned the most about when I looked up the words is "The Emperor of Ice Cream," by Wallace Stevens (from my list of essential poems and a favorite for both me and permanent quivive):
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
The word that illuminated the poem, for me, is "deal." Sure, I got the connotation, that maybe it's where the men left their money for the dead woman, but for years I didn't get the denotation of the word--literally, it's a cheap dresser made of soft pine wood, one that won't last for more than a generation. I've seen a lot of students get the connotation of the word "horny" without getting the denotation, which is "calloused." Is this a measure of the power of the poem? That it can evoke feeling without us even realizing exactly how?
I think the word "concupiscent" might work in such a non-logical way. How on earth can curds, presumably for ice-cream, have "strong sexual desire" (the definition for "concupiscent")? Is it the way he's whipping them that's concupiscent? Is it that desire is like ice-cream, and you'd better enjoy it before it wanes again (is this why husbands typically touch their wives amorously while the wives are trying to finish loading the dishwasher?)
This is a good poem for a spring morning. It's less adult than the finale of Avenue Q, with its decorous "only for now." It's like a kid playing "king of the hill," except that the object of this game is to have an empire of...um, ice cream. Do the rules include whether you're still an emperor if some of your flavors melt? Maybe you're just king of one flavor then, and finally just "dumb," that, is, speechless, probably because your mouth is cold and full.
The builder was asking me about which parts of the door to our new bathroom we would stain, and which parts we would paint. "Will you stain the lintel?" he asked. I looked at him, mind rushing to put an image with the word "lintel." No image came. Finally he had to walk me into the bedroom and point to the lintel, which is the frame around the door. I think of it as "molding," but that's not le mot juste.
I am unused to other people knowing words I don't know. If I had paid more attention to my favorite graduate school professor, Eugene Hammond, I would have learned more words for the frames around doors and windows (he advised that, in the course of advising writers to use details in their descriptions).
With first-year college students, the single most successful teaching technique I have discovered for getting them to understand--and possibly like--a poem is to make them look up the words. (How do you "make" students do anything? You give them a quiz on it. It doesn't matter how little the quiz is worth, in terms of their final grade.)
The poem I think I learned the most about when I looked up the words is "The Emperor of Ice Cream," by Wallace Stevens (from my list of essential poems and a favorite for both me and permanent quivive):
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
The word that illuminated the poem, for me, is "deal." Sure, I got the connotation, that maybe it's where the men left their money for the dead woman, but for years I didn't get the denotation of the word--literally, it's a cheap dresser made of soft pine wood, one that won't last for more than a generation. I've seen a lot of students get the connotation of the word "horny" without getting the denotation, which is "calloused." Is this a measure of the power of the poem? That it can evoke feeling without us even realizing exactly how?
I think the word "concupiscent" might work in such a non-logical way. How on earth can curds, presumably for ice-cream, have "strong sexual desire" (the definition for "concupiscent")? Is it the way he's whipping them that's concupiscent? Is it that desire is like ice-cream, and you'd better enjoy it before it wanes again (is this why husbands typically touch their wives amorously while the wives are trying to finish loading the dishwasher?)
This is a good poem for a spring morning. It's less adult than the finale of Avenue Q, with its decorous "only for now." It's like a kid playing "king of the hill," except that the object of this game is to have an empire of...um, ice cream. Do the rules include whether you're still an emperor if some of your flavors melt? Maybe you're just king of one flavor then, and finally just "dumb," that, is, speechless, probably because your mouth is cold and full.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
This is on my list of essential poems, but few people seem to have read it, maybe because it's newer than some. I got up thinking of it this morning, because it's one of those days when I have about 50 little things to do, none of which I look forward to. As an underemployed person, I can't just say "oh, I'm too busy today; I'll do that later" (in fact, I've drifted through this week in some sort of preoccupied feeling of abstraction already, which is why I need to do the 50 things before 5 pm today). Just as a sample, some of the things include: calling the local guy who sold me vinyl flooring to inquire about how it should be glued down, and then relaying that information to the vinyl flooring installer who will be here tomorrow, canceling an American Express-sponsored credit card I got when I told the check-in person at a Westin Hotel "sure" when she asked if I wanted their Starwood Preferred Guest card, approving time sheets for my student workers, who are leaving for the summer and some of who failed to submit the time sheets for my approval by the deadline set by Accounting, returning something I bought from a catalog that didn't fit right, baking a birthday cake for a family friend's birthday party tonight, putting flea drops on the cats, hanging up everyone's laundry, etc. I think it's the laundry that made me think of Richard Wilbur's poem this morning. I'm wishing that I had woken up with the feeling he evokes:
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''
I woke up, as I think mothers often do, with a full awareness of everything I "was about to remember...the punctual rape of every blessed day." It would take more sleep than I got, and probably a feeling that more things had been done than still needed doing, to produce the kind of sleep that lets you wake up with the initially drifting feeling of this poem.
And yes, I do know the grammatical rule about using "whom," but I don't advocate the use of the word and won't use it myself, lest I become an even fiercer pen-wielder in the spirit urged on us by the writer of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
Six words to describe me today: fierce, hungry, under-appreciated, running, yearning, singing
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open windowThe morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveyingThe terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinksFrom all that is about to remember,From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''
Yet, as the sun acknowledgesWith a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''I woke up, as I think mothers often do, with a full awareness of everything I "was about to remember...the punctual rape of every blessed day." It would take more sleep than I got, and probably a feeling that more things had been done than still needed doing, to produce the kind of sleep that lets you wake up with the initially drifting feeling of this poem.
And yes, I do know the grammatical rule about using "whom," but I don't advocate the use of the word and won't use it myself, lest I become an even fiercer pen-wielder in the spirit urged on us by the writer of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
Six words to describe me today: fierce, hungry, under-appreciated, running, yearning, singing
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