The Electronic Girl

1/18: The Day I Didn't Use Facebook

2012-01-18T20:26:00.001-05:00

Unposted 1/18 Status #1:

I'm re-reading < 3 Huckleberry Finn < 3 but having trouble pushing through the ending because Tom Sawyer is an insufferable jackass.

Unposted 1/18 Link: I would have posted link to the Bittman Twinkie piece, which I think is awesome because he blames the company for failing to observe and react to the changing marketplace and keep themselves profitable. It's an argument not made often enough. Who is to blame for the sinking of the American auto industry? The jackasses who kept cranking out the cars of the past instead of pursuing the cars of the future. Twinkie. Pontiac. Tomato. Potato.

Unposted 1/18 Status #2:

Watched my kitty play with his mousy toy for half an hour thinking, aw isn't he the cutest? before I realized IT'S A REAL MOUSE.

Unposted 1/18 Status #2 Follow-Up:

1. Made Brian clean it up and throw it away.

2. Made Brian vacuum the entire room too.

3. Oh, Wally, thou murd'rous beast! Why, why, why?

4. Don't you dare lick me with that guilt-stained tongue, kitty. :-\

Unposted 1/18 Link: I would have posted this news story on Brian's wall (or "timeline" what-evs), because he's always concerned that the Alzheimer's that runs in his family will ruin the later years of his life. I like any discovery that puts more of our fate in our own hands. Also this seems to justify all the long walks through the snow we've been making lately.

Uposted 1/18 Status #3:

I have gear that effectively keeps every part of my body warm in a snow storm except for my cheeks, nose, and eyes. I think I have to start walking to work in a blast shield.

Blast Shield Down.

And of course I would have posted this story, about the issue that has me, like so many people, not using Facebook for a day. Looks like the good guys are winning this one. Woohoo!

Now I'm going to publish this blog post, which will send it to Twitter, which will send it to Facebook, but that's not really posting on Facebook, at least not by the logic of the Shabbat Elevator, or some similar form of BS-logic, and by the way, that link to the Shabbat Elevator won't work until Wikipedia finishes its protest tomorrow, which somehow makes me feel even more justified in posting something that I know will eventually end up on Facebook before midnight. =D

Is English a Discipline?

2012-01-04T15:29:00.002-05:00

Since coming to Drake, I've twice heard someone say that English doesn't really have a subject (once by someone within the English department, once by someone outside it). I found this curious but welcome, since I too have long wondered at the undefined borders of my "field." But I've tended to look at it the other way around -- that English is too large and sprawling a discipline, that its subject is everything. Perhaps these are just two ways of saying the same thing.

English departments are, as the name implies, interested in a particular language. And so our realm seems to begin with a specific combinatorial set of symbols deemed to have meaning when arranged according to a certain set of rules. But this study isn't possible without the study of other languages, since the roots of English lie in other languages living and dead, and since comparisons between languages are a basic and vital core of understanding language itself, and since translation as an art and as a universe of theory depends on a knowledge of these transitional spaces.

So before we've left the small-scale study of the symbols themselves, "English" as discipline has already crossed into Linguistics, Grammar, Communications, Psychology, Foreign Languages, and Translation.

But Translation is a form of writing, an art, which opens the "English" discipline even further: it is Writing, Rhetoric, Composition, and an endless universe of Aesthetics subject to Cultural values and customs.

And Translation is just one form of writing -- original writing in English is of course a major natural concern of English study. But the study of texts in English is a incomprehensibly vast field. It is necessary to break it down by era or genre or theme, or in some cases by author.

But each of these specializations invites the scholar to become an expert in an area that itself overlaps tremendously with other areas: one cannot be a Shakespeare scholar without becoming quite the expert in British Royal History, not to mention the History of Theater and Drama, the sartorial customs, the intra- and inter-state European conflicts, the slang, the medical and biological dangers of the day, and so on.

And any study of story structure will invite the scholar into the universe of myths (and theories about monomyths, and theories of religion...) not to mention the study of the human mind (and by extension, brain) and how it reacts to various stimuli.

I could go on with this, but you get the point: English studies starts with the clever combinations of symbols going back to the Phoenicians (or perhaps earlier) and ends up swallowing the world and, bigger still, the mind.

If you're a writer, you live this ouroboros. Writing is the only art that is customarily discussed using the medium of the art itself. There is no discipline called "Paint" -- there is a discipline called "Art" and "paint" is merely one of many possible media which is discussed by the discipline "Art" using language. But for a writer, the medium is his or her language, English in our case. And while a painter can leave the paints behind and discuss his paintings using language, a writer, a language artist, can't discuss her art using anything but the very material of her art, language.

It's a bit of trap. You can't ask a fish to analyze water until he's broken through the surface and seen it from above. We need distance to see. We need perspective to understand. Yet language is in many ways the matter of the world -- it is, at least, the matter of our comprehension of the world. So how do we see language?

It seems, whether this is the best possible solution to the problem or not, that we try to see language, its purpose, its function, its meaning, by running desperately away from it, hoping that we will be able to jerk our heads back for a quick glance and finally see the thing we've been after all this time. Which is why, I believe, English departments come off as loose associations of people madly running away from their own subject in 100 different directions.

When I was a kid I used to lay in bed at night and try to think without language. I realized that I'd have a thought in words, but that before the words came into my head, I knew what I was about to think. I would lie there and try to skip the part with the words, and just know what my thoughts were, without language.

I'm fairly convinced that if I hadn't spent all those hours doing that, I wouldn't be a writer today.

And I'm fairly convinced that you can't have an English department that doesn't spend most of its time focused on History, Culture, Philosophy, Linguistics, Psychology, Brain Science, Rhetoric...

Quick, LOOK! Did you see it? ;)

2012-01-02T21:55:00.000-05:00

Today I finished reading Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It took me about three months: I read slowly, the better to mull over and digest the ideas in this remarkable book. Over that time, I also had plenty of time to notice how controversial this book is, and how odd the controversy: this book isn't controversial because of the things is says but rather because of the things people think it says (that we live in a happy fun-land and war and violence are a thing of the past), or in some cases, think it implies (that serious crimes "don't really matter").

Pinker, to his credit, anticipates these criticisms and addresses them both throughout his book and outside of his book. He has a page on his site devoted to "frequently asked questions" about Better Angels, and, having just read the book, I can tell you that his answers are simply taken from it, and usually contain a page reference. For example:

How can you say that violence has declined when we continue to murder millions of unborn babies?
As I discuss on pp. 426–428, the rate of abortion worldwide has been in decline. I also discuss the question whether people perceive abortion as a form of violence, given the evolving understanding of the locus of moral value over the centuries.

What about all the chickens in factory farms?
I discuss the chickens in a section on Animal Rights in chapter 7, pp. 469–473.

What about the American imprisonment craze?
As unjust as many current American imprisonment practices are, they cannot be compared to the lethal sadism of criminal punishment in earlier centuries (pp. 144-146). For a discussion of the causes and effects of today’s imprisonment binge, see pp. 121–123.

I sympathize with Pinker's situation; in a weird way, I've experienced it for him. He introduced some of these ideas to the cyberpublic with a 2007 TED talk titled, "The Myth of Violence," and I used that video in my Advanced Exposition course at Florida Atlantic University last year and the year before. My course focused on Classical Rhetoric in modern contexts, and I chose his video not particularly to advocate his thesis, but to give my students an example of a speaker who must advocate an unpopular position, who must therefore genuinely persuade his audience to consider something they are disinclined to consider. His argument is tightly organized and based upon explicit reason and copious evidence. Other speeches I showed them had a more emotional bent, more showmanship -- Pinker's speech was our example of a solidly logos-based approach.

When I chose it, I didn't anticipate that my students would have a bit of a meltdown over it. They couldn't articulate why, but they were just sure he was wrong. And they were so short-circuited by their angst over his argument that analyzing it became very difficult for them. They were emotionally driven to prove that he was "wrong" at all costs, and were unwilling to even acknowledge that he'd done anything right -- and they even, sadly, descended into ad hominem attacks, asserting that they couldn't take Pinker seriously because he's stiff and has funny hair and says "um" a lot.

I came to the conclusion that even though Pinker's speech is a great example of a certain kind of persuasive argument, it's also an example of how such arguments fail in the face of the human animal. Ideally, we would be a race of beings who were primarily driven by logic and reason, but we aren't. Reason is a big part of who we are, but we are driven more strongly by our emotions and our loyalty to certain cultural norms. And one of the strongest, most abiding, most universal, and most pervasive norms is the belief that the past was better and we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

This...

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

...is attributed to Socrates (~400 years BCE), and the Ancient Greek myth of the "Golden Age" seems to sum up the problem: once upon a time, long ago, men were made of gold. Then, they were made of silver. Then they were made of bronze. And finally, today, men are made of soft and worthless flesh. Had Prometheus not crossed the gods to give us fire, we'd all be dead by now.

The myth is a metaphor for what all people at all times come to believe: the past is a better, simpler, more noble and meaningful time. The politically conservative version of this dreams of a pastoral heyday of order and authority -- "and you knew where you were then, girls were girls and men were men..." the comfort of a small country town, conformist in-group rules. The politically liberal version goes back even further to dream of Man in a State of Nature, living rule-less but cleanly and in harmony with his environment, all noble and wise and peaceful.

Cut from fantasy past, meanwhile, the present is a chaos, as a learned dinner guest in Candide (1751) says,

"I find that all in this world is set the wrong end uppermost. No one knows what is his rank, his office, nor what he does, nor what he should do. With the exception of our evenings, which we generally pass tolerably merrily, the rest of our time is spent in idle disputes and quarrels, Jansenists against Molinists, the Parliament against the Church, and one armed body of men against another; courtier against courtier, husband against wife, and relations against relations. In short, this world is nothing but one continued scene of civil war."

As for the future, we can only imagine some kind of dystopia, for what else could result if the world is run by these half-witted young'uns? Or worse, an End Times scenario. We imagine our "great" forebears would roll in their graves if they knew what a mess we were making of things. Humans have been experimentally shown to suck at imagining the future with any accuracy, but we suck just as hard at imagining the past: we can't smell London and Paris before plumbing, and when animals were slaughtered on city streets. We can't imagine enduring the minor pains of life without aspirin or novocaine. We know that when we are hungry or have a stubborn back-pain that it makes us irritable and unpleasant for the short time we must endure it, but we fail to imagine how an entire planet of people who are hungry and pained and unable to find any lasting relief would behave.

The reason people are responding so badly to Pinker's book is that his book sets out to prove that the past was far more violent than the present; this is a reversal and a violation of a cherished cultural norm. We don't have many taboos left in the Western world, but this is one of them.

Perhaps if his methods weren't so logos-based. The Daily Show managed to make a much lighter version of the same point through comedy, but they only explored backwards in living memory -- they show the psychology of it, the theory: of course I remember the 1970s as a peaceful happyland, but that's because I was no older than 4 years old in the 1970s. If you were an adult then, you'd recall a violent and chaotic and desperately polluted world, near-hopeless and plagued by wars, riots, hijackings, gas lines, deep and hate-soaked divisions between the various demographics, and leadership associated with words like "tricky," "crook," and "malaise."

So Steven Pinker comes along with his facts and his figures and his documents and he shows you that this goes far, far beyond just living memory. The past just keeps getting more and more violent, the further back you go. Whatever is wrong with our world today, we should be grateful that we live now, and not any time in the past, for now is more peaceful. How dare he? Does he not take seriously the wickedness that is so clearly in our midst? Does he think the world is perfect now? That we are inevitably marching towards a utopia?

There's a second part to the psychology that the Daily Show didn't tackle: as the world has become less violent, we've become less tolerant of violence, and so every instance of violence we see makes us react strongly -- we are genuinely alarmed, go into emergency mode, and feel we have to do something! Or, all will be lost! We feel it. And that sense of emergency is what motivates us to act, and when we act, we make the world even safer, and this safety-feedback loop probably shouldn't be sabotaged by the knowledge that past people saw far worse far more often and didn't care half as much.

As just a random example, in 2009 a teenage boy was brought to trial in Miami accused of being a "cat serial killer" (he was aquitted when it was scientifically determined that at least some of the cats had been killed by dogs). It was international news (that link is to the UK Guardian). So think about that: in 2009 one boy in one city believed to be killing cats is worth, to our society, the expense of a trial, and the attention of people around the world. For most of human history, killing cats has been considered completely okay, a mainstream entertainment.

We should acknowledge we live in the better world.

But does acknowledging that we live in the better world now make us less likely to keep pushing for a safer, less cruel and violent future? I think with many people it probably does. And I believe this sense of Pinker-as-saboteur-of-the-Good is what motivates a lot of the negative reaction to his ideas. We sense that he's going to undermine our desire to make the world a better place by convincing us that it's "good enough."

And I think that lies at the heart of most people's problem with this book: we are afraid that if we're not always screaming as though the handbasket ride to hell is a breath away, we're doomed. That might be right. Pinker gives a lot of external reasons why the world has gotten less violent, but internally, non-violence breeds non-violence, and people raised in a more peaceful world have higher standards of peacefulness, a "new normal" that they're willing to fight to maintain. They want animals slaughtered painlessly or not at all. They want children to get a "time out" instead of a spanking. They want criminals to get fines instead of whippings. They don't want their children sent off to fight in wars.

Personally, I think that the truth is an inherent good, and so worth the risk. But not everyone will come to the same conclusion.

I also think that we should take account of the successes of the past the better to repeat them. Learning from History isn't all just learning from mistakes.

Most importantly, though, I think that we should be careful of living in crisis-mode all the time, especially when that crisis-mode is combined with a false nostalgia: if we're erroneously convinced that the past is better than the present, we may foolishly attempt to re-structure the present to make it look more like the past. (Consider how many political positions are structured "we should go back to..." -- in economics, education, everything.)

The arrow of time points in only one direction -- we can't go back to the past. More importantly, we shouldn't want to. The past is a hell, and the handbasket is nostalgia. If we want a better world, we're going to have to keep working for it, but we need to push ourselves into the future, not the past.

PS: I recommend this book.

2011

2011-12-30T20:02:00.003-05:00

It's the time of year when people "look back," and I'm afraid I'm no exception. 2011 was an eventful year for me: among other significant events, I got married, took a position as a college professor, and moved to Des Moines.

All of those are really one event: accepting the professor position meant moving to Des Moines, and moving to Des Moines while staying partners with my one true love Brian without condemning him to the immoral abyss of the uninsured meant getting married. We'd previously agreed that we had no interest in getting married until marriage was equally available to our gay & lesbian friends -- being part of an institution that's about love sounds great; being part of an institution that's about perpetuating archaic hetero-normative traditions sounds like total bullshit that can go fuck itself. But allowing my one true love to risk living without insurance again wasn't acceptable.

He and I have both been there: in 2004, my last full uninsured year, I had a dripping, painful ear infection. After a month of hoping it would go away, I had to spend $100 to see a mystery doctor at a walk-in clinic who couldn't help me and couldn't refer me so she prescribed me a $200 course of antibiotics that did nothing. Out of money, I was screwed. So in 2004 and early 2005 I lived life with constant pain and a constant stream of pus oozing out of my ear, unable to do anything about it.

In the Fall of 2005 I got a job that came with insurance and went to a doctor ($15) who sent me to a specialist ($20) who found a tear in my eardrum and fixed it on the spot, then prescribed me a course of antibiotics to clean up the residual infection ($25). My ear hasn't bothered me since, but if I hadn't gotten insurance through that job, this year would probably mark my 7th year of stinky pus constantly dripping out of my ear. I'm sure I would've eventually lost some hearing too. And that's just a little eardrum tear. Imagine if something serious had happened.

Tying health insurance to employment is moronic. It's like separating toilets according to sex: we do it because it has always been done that way, not because there's any good reason for it, and we should be smart enough and original enough to do better. I found this quote recently for Brian, for an essay he's working on: "It ought to be the first endeavor of the writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right from that which is right only because it is established" (Samuel Johnson, The Rambler #156).

Not just writers!

But we don't get to make the world we live in. Letting Brian go without health insurance when I could do something about it wasn't an option; we married. And that marriage was also our farewell and adieu to a South Florida full of dear friends and family. In our six years in Florida we met some amazing people and had some amazingly good times. It's pretty hard to go from a place where you are constantly surrounded by love and fun to a place where you don't know anyone -- I'm meeting people every week, and have no doubt that I will, over time, make great friends in Iowa too, but people are unique, not interchangeable. Thank goodness for Facebook. :)

This is of course one of the perils of a life in academia: you don't exactly get to pick where you live. I got incredibly lucky, because Des Moines is a perfect place for us: a medium-sized city with lots to do (and, significantly for a person moving from South Florida, virtually no traffic!). There are no good bagels here, but holy frijoles what these people can do with hashbrowns! It's also pretty laid-back, open, walkable, and small-business-oriented, at least downtown. And it's really interesting to be in the center of the country after living most of my life at its extreme South-East tip. I've gone from living in a place where it took 10 hours just to get to Georgia (nowhere else in the US, just Georgia), to a place where in just a few hours I can be in eight different states. That's different.

The biggest transitional shock from South Florida to Iowa will be the "Continental" climate, which includes extreme temperatures, Arctic winds, and massive snowfalls. So far, it hasn't come. I like to think that I dragged a little Florida up here with me, and that, while it probably won't last too much longer, for now the winter weather is warded off by the power of my tropical blood! In the meantime I'm collecting winter clothes: coats, sweaters, socks... I started from near-zero. I feel like 90% of my wardrobe was spaghetti-strapped sundresses. Maybe 80%. It was a lot.

Then of course there's the transition from "Instructor" to "Professor." At my old FAU job, they treated us pretty well. I was teaching 8 classes a year for 30k, which was too much for too little, but I can't complain about the working conditions. On the whole, I worked with really wonderful people, had great students, and I found the classes I taught to be rewarding and challenging. Now that I'm at Drake, I find that I'm working with different really wonderful people, have different great students, and still find my classes rewarding and challenging, although in different ways.

FAU students are extraordinarily diverse and people are individuals first and foremost, so it's hard to generalize meaningfully, but (salt grains flying) Drake students are on the average much more "advantaged." I don't think that's necessarily a money thing -- but I do think that they have, on the whole, benefited from real, robust support systems, be they financial or emotional or civic (solid public school systems with small classes and involved teachers, for example).

There are a lot (not all, but a lot) of students at a university like FAU who are there against all odds. They have had hundreds of bad breaks, and have fought their way to where they are; for them, success looks like FAU, because they have had to work like hell just to get where they are. We live in a society were someone with every advantage who sleeps through four years of Yale on "gentlemen's Cs" and graduates to run gifted-business after gifted-business into the ground can become president, while someone whose life from 14 to 25 was a horror show of hardships and instability, who gets back into school and works her way through college on smarts alone will be lucky to land a job as a grade-school teacher. And heaven forbid she got through any of it by stripping, she'll be morality-policed out of running for School Board, let alone anything higher.

Working at a school like FAU puts you in real-time contact with some of the most heroic and inspiring stories you'll ever encounter. At Drake I'm seeing something pretty different: it looks like "talent," but I think we are all born creative geniuses and the only question is whether we are subjected to a life that beats it (or just discourages it) out of us, or to pressures that pervert our creativity into strange containment. The students I've had so far seem to me to be examples of what is possible when we take a precious new-born creative soul and don't fuck it up. If these students seem to be a barrel of shinier apples, it may simply be that they are the apples who haven't been bitten, bruised, and left on the ground for the worms -- they are the apples that were cared for.

This isn't to minimize how wonderful they are. Despite their relative lack of real-life experience, I'm encountering students who by study and/or empathy and/or imagination have tremendous insight into the world. For them, being at Drake may not be the same kind of major life success, but they have dreams of bigger successes "out there" -- and let's face it, the shiny, unbruised, intact fruit are going to do far better at the marketplace. These students have not had their talents blunted, they have not had their ambitions delayed, and so they are not only "capable of" doing great things, they're getting a leg and a push on the way there. They're going to see their dreams made real, a lot of them. Being a part of their educations is, as I said, rewarding and challenging... just in a very different way.

The ups and downs of my own non-traditional life path certainly incline me towards the amazing students I used to teach. But these new students are working on creative projects far more in tune with what I want to do. It's probably not worth laboring the comparison. Before I did that, and now I'm doing this.

And this is me talking about something I've been exposed to for three months -- a single semester. This, for me, is the start of a new adventure, and there's much more to discover. And that's what 2011 has been: a bunch of changes, a new start. Year (two thousand plus ten plus) One. :) Happy New Year!

PS: Thanks, Mom, I'm sure you're the only one who read this far. ;) Love you!

#KlingonXmas -- A Klingon Christmas Carol

2011-12-19T17:28:00.003-05:00

If you act quickly, you can see the familiar Christmas Carol in the original Klingon at the Greenhouse Theater in Chicago this year -- of course, if you miss it this year, there's always next year: it's in its second year in Chicago (it played for a few years in Minneapolis before that), and it's sure to return as it is incredibly popular, and with good reason.

Here on Earth, we tend to regard the "original" version of this story as the one penned by Charles Dickens in 1843. But we're not particularly married to the original. A Christmas Carol has been adapted a remarkable number of times, and is probably one of the most adapted stories in all of stage, film, and television history. Last year's Doctor Who Christmas Special was a version of A Christmas Carol that included a crashing space ship, cryogenic chambers, and flying sharks (it also included time travel, but with "ghosts" of past, present, and future a de rigeur part of most productions, combined with the entire time-traveling premise of Doctor Who, it's hardly worth mentioning...) The "Scrooge" theme has become such a part of our storytelling culture, though, that when I first watched it, I actually missed that it was an adaptation of A Christmas Carol at all (yes, yes, the title: I didn't look). I discovered it was an adaptation of Dickens's story only when a student pointed it out to me.

Anyone familiar with the Star Trek universe knows that the Klingons are an aggressive people who take what they love by force. This is why you haven't truly experienced Shakespeare until you've read it in the original Klingon (2:55 if you want to skip to the toast), and this is also why the Vulcan who narrates the Klingon Christmas Carol refers to this production as the predecessor of the Dickens version. To do otherwise would be to challenge the honor of an entire Kronos-full of Klingons and no good can possibly come of that -- or, at least, it would be harder to get around to the actual play, what with all the oaths and bat'leths and bloodshed.

More important than "who came first," though (and I admit, if any Klingons are reading this, that the Klingon version surely came first), is the remarkable adaptability of the story itself. Abstracted from its cultural specifics, it's a story of an old person who has fallen so far from the values of his people that he has become something alien, something between a joke and a monster. Through an examination of his own past, the present of those who know him, and of the future world without him (in which no one has a good thing to say or a drop of respect for the rotting heap that once he was), this old person is renewed, and finally (and joyously) connects with the others of his kind: he reaches out to them, and in return they love him -- whether with toasts and kisses or toasts and sparring.

Whether we particularly value "generosity" (Humans) or "honor" (Klingons) is almost beside the point. The Scrooge (or SQuja') cannot connect with his own people until he sets aside his desire for financial (or physical) security and parts with some of his money (or safety). What is really valued is not the generosity or the courage, but the willingness to change oneself to become a part of the larger group, the community. (What great Klingon warrior once said, "no man is an island...?")

It's hard to imagine a time and place where the specifics don't ring true: Dickens's 1843 Scrooge asks why the poor children can't all be sent to prisons and workhouses. The Klingon SQuja' suggests that the children of fallen warriors can be sent to Rura Penthe. In 2011 Newt Gingrich thinks poor children should be set to work as janitors. In 1793 Marie Antoinette suggested (or didn't) that they just eat cake, and today I've heard there's also a man with equally reasonable advice for "poor black kids." In other words, being a jackhole knows no time and place. But this story, unlike any other, holds out hope that even the most unredeemably repulsive fool could come to understand his culture's values, and be redeemed.

To a person who values his own wealth above all, Scrooge's actions at the end of the story are foolish -- he throws his money around, and at people who he knows (for the ghosts have shown him) talk bad about him and make fun of him when he's not around. To a person who values his own health above all, SQuja' is just as foolish: an old man, hunched and weak, he willingly throws himself into a fight he can only lose terribly. Rather than continuing to lie, he admits he never truly passed his rites of ascension, and goes through them again beside (tiny) TimHom -- he admits, in short, that he is a child. But this is the only way he can become anything more.

He must lower himself in order to rise.

This isn't a particularly Christian or English belief -- it's universal. It's so universal that, far out beyond the stars, across the starry expanses of our galaxy, each year on the Feast of the Long Night, Klingons too celebrate in part by reminding themselves of this story of a man called SQuja', who was a coward and liar, without honor, who sat counting gold like a Ferengi while his wife died in glorious battle, who continued counting while others sang her songs, who did not seek out her deserved revenge, who was, in short, no Klingon at all -- and yet, to him Kahless came, three times during the night, and given this chance to redeem himself, he did.

There would have been silence upon his death; now, the warriors will howl.

--

Next year, the Commedia Beauregard is producing Bard Fiction: Pulp Fiction translated into Elizabethan English. :)

We're talking to signs

2011-10-16T18:56:00.004-04:00

If you're a blog-reader or social networker, you've probably noticed an interesting trend that's cropped up in the wake of the Occupation of Wall Street and the numerous worldwide protests, marches, and occupations it has inspired (an account of a recent march in Des Moines by me & Brian Spears is here): people are posting what they think in the form of "signs" -- usually photographs of themselves holding their own hand-written signs. Many of these signs are in support of the Wall Street Occupation and the movement it has inspired, others are opposed. But it's not the black-white oppose-support part that's interesting. What's interesting is how moving these signs are -- no matter what "side" they come down on, there is something so genuine-seeming about these artifacts of our shared humanity, you find yourself lingering upon them whether you "agree" with them or not.

Which has led to the most interesting phenomenon of all: we are talking to each other's signs. We're not all just shoving our own thoughts out there into the vacuum; we're presenting our thoughts to a entire planet of thoughtful, interested people, some of whom take our signs very seriously and reply. This is perhaps my favorite: the "Open Letter to that 53% Guy." But even before I read it I had saved the following image to my desktop and put "really look at that sign" at the top of my to-do list.

This one struck me for a number of reasons. First, she (I see a bracelet and what appears to be a dress, so I'm going to assume this person identifies as a "she") is a college senior. This is a heart-breaking position for her to be in. Anyone who reads the news knows what she is in for, even if she were an Ivy-league high achiever: disappointment and humiliation. As someone who teaches college students, I'm particularly sensitive to this issue: they spend their entire lives "doing everything right," then graduate to discover the "prize" they've been promised does not exist. So my heart goes out to her from the very start.

She says that she is about to graduate completely debt-free. This is wonderful for her. Federal statistics show that just over half of all college students today end up taking out some amount in loans, so she is in the more fortunate half -- good for her! That will definitely be no small advantage when she must navigate a future of reduced opportunities, reduced income, and low-to-no job security -- and every advantage helps!

She adds that she pays for all of her living expenses by working 30+ hours per week at minimum wage. The federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour, though in some states it is higher: in Florida it's $7.31/hour; in California it's $8/hour. We don't know where she lives, but we can guess that her pre-tax income is about $250. After taxes, that would be closer to $200. That means she pays her rent, buys food, soap, clothes, medicine, haircuts, gas for her car, coins for the laundromat, everything, for about $800/month. We don't know where she lives, but the average cost of an apartment in America is $650/month, so even if she's got a great deal -- say, paying $500/month for an efficiency with all utilities included -- she's clearly been living a very, very austere lifestyle.

She tells us that she "chose" a "moderately-priced in-state public university." Good! I'm a big believer in public higher ed. And it's a great deal for the students. The last university I taught at was a public university. Its operating budget is about $525.5 million and it has about 20,000 students, which means if it were a private university, students would be expected to pay at least $26,000/year in tuition (just for the U to break even). The brilliantly socialist system of public education radically reduces that cost to the student by having the millions of taxpayers of the state each contribute a little through their taxes so that a more educated populace can benefit the state as a whole. So good "choice" in my opinion!

This detail also allows us a greater insight into that austere lifestyle she leads: my last teaching job was at Florida Atlantic University, which is a moderately-priced in-state public university if ever there was one: tuition at Florida state schools is the lowest in the country for in-state students, and FAU doesn't even have the additional fees the flagship state schools, FSU and UF, have. So even though the odds are she's going to another, more expensive, school, let's use FAU as our model for her: at FAU the in-state tuition is just over $5000/year. Huh. Wait, what's her budget again?

That can't be right. Let's keep reading. Oh, good: she has two scholarships that cover 90% of her tuition. That means her education, if it were at FAU, would be costing her a mere $500/year. Very low. Good, especially considering that her books (according to FAU) will cost her around $900/year. Maybe she earned enough while she was in (presumably taxpayer-funded) high school to cover all four years of college? Could she save up $5600 working during her last two years of high school? That would be great if it were the case, because she is incredibly poor, and really doesn't have the money to spend.

I mean, clearly, she is a very vulnerable person: if it were not for these government and other external supports (the tuition relief of a state taxpayer subsidized school and wherever those scholarships came from -- someone's paying for that), then it seems this poor girl would not be able to go to college at all.

And yes, I know that her college education will not, in today's economy, mean a good job for her. But education for it's own sake certainly can't hurt her.

Let's see, what else does she say: she's bragging about her GPA (mine was higher, though, lol), and how she doesn't own very much -- but we'd already figured how austerely she must live when she said she supported herself on minimum wage. Her clothes must also be cheap and/or old. Her furniture is probably made up of curb-side discards. Pots, pans, dishes? She must have had them donated to her by a charity. I mean, really, for someone living in the wealthiest country in the world, this girl is poor.

She implies on her sign that she believes having debt at all is a de facto bad decision, which suggests she's not majoring in business or a related field, or at least it suggests that she doesn't understand the advantages of capitalism, of spending flexibility in a real economy. Smart, well-off people use debt all the time to their great advantage, and it is very often a brilliant decision. Maybe after she spends 30 years saving up for a house, she'll get that.

The next sentence says she's saving for the future -- WOW. Really? Girl, you are amazing. Super-human. You earn $800/month. Seriously, even if you live in a depressed area your rent is at least half that, you owe $1400/year in tuition and books, and you're paying all your own expenses yourself. How do you do that? And that doesn't even get into the inevitable and sudden expenses of everyday life: does your old car (she says she has no "new" car, implying she has an "old" one -- how'd she afford that, by the way? Even if it was only a few hundred dollars, really, when and how did you squeeze a car out of this finite supply of cash?) -- anyway, does your old car never get driven, does it never break down?

I've read several other responses to this particular sign. Pretty much everyone's a little amazed that she is so unaware of her own privilege. Being able to work and go to high school at the same time implies an enviable employment (jobs for high schoolers were available in her area) and family situation (what she earned did not have to go to the household expenses, but could be saved) that not every teenager is blessed with. To benefit so heartily from her fellow citizens' tax dollars yet insist that she has done it all herself and expects nothing to be handed to her means she's pretty blind to how things really work -- indeed, how they have worked, for her.

But what saddens me is not the blindness to her own privilege. What saddens me is the sense of entitlement -- ironically the exact thing she seems to be arguing against. Her sign says that she believes all this work is going to pay off, that she will not be a part of the 99% (that she will be a member of the 1%, the financial elite). This is nothing short of delusional. The nation's highest-achieving students are currently graduating from the Ivies and finding very little is out there for them. She, as someone who went to a "moderately-priced in-state public university," is in a far worse situation than all the Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, Ann Arbor (etc.) students who will go out into the world and out-compete her handily for whatever little is there to be had. She's in for the same rude awakening that I have witnessed class after graduating class endure for the past several years. Joy and expectation turns quickly to confusion and anger as they realize that their hard work has -- whatever else they gained from it -- not resulted in financial gain.

But none of this was my first reaction to this sign. I will be honest. I will tell you, since you've read this far, what my true first reaction to this sign was. I thought: wow. This poor girl thinks she's doing everything right. Me, I did everything "wrong." I made every mistake. I took every risky choice. I lived for the here and now. I enjoyed myself. I didn't finish high school (not the traditional way). I ran the streets. I traveled. I married. I divorced. I partied. I went bankrupt. I worked more than 30 jobs by the time I was 25. I was an undocumented worker in a foreign country. I drove across the USA five times: I slept in my car, and brushed my teeth in the snowmelt rush of the high Colorado. It took me 8 years and 5 majors to finally get around to finishing that undergraduate degree -- in an "impractical" field: English/Creative Writing. In short, I didn't try to play or win this game she's playing: I lived, and never willingly deprived myself of anything -- even if I occasionally "went without." And today, I'm better off for it in every imaginable way, including financially.

My first reaction to this sign was, Yes, maybe that's "how it's supposed to work," as you say. But it's not how it works. The economy is not just, is not fair. You, who have worked so hard and been so diligent, will not be rewarded. Others, who have laughed and played far harder than I ever did, are rewarded beyond what you or I could dream. You, I want to say to her, believe in fairness. So do I. The difference is, you've been fooled into believing it already exists. I know it doesn't. But I believe it should.

The only difference between this girl and the people marching in cities all around the world is that she still believes the fantasy: that she will be rewarded for all her hard work; the people marching are simply not that naive: we know that she will not, that no one is. And we feel sorry for her, for what she's about to go through. And we'll be here to welcome her to our cause, afterwards. Because we all believe in fairness, and want to see a hell of a lot more of it in the world.

The Problem with Stairs

2011-09-10T18:52:00.000-04:00

Stair-steps are brilliant. Through their power, you can put human habitats right on top of other human habitats, and, rather than having to climb a rope or ladder or something that our longer-limbed ancestors might have recognized, you simply elevate the upright-walker's savannah-surface one "step" at a time, just high enough for the foot to clear and press and bipedal up.

I've always admired them.

But I've mainly admired them from a distance. I'm not sure I encountered a single set of stairs until I was six or seven years old and my parents took us to visit family in Ohio, where my grandparents and aunt had basements. I found the basements fascinating as children do: it was a secret world where everything smelled different and sounded different. But it was the journey, those stair-steps, the bridge between the two worlds that most amazed and delighted me, a tomboy who loved to climb trees. The stairs themselves were a thing to play on -- up and down, stop in the middle and look around -- and I did, until I (inevitably) fell down all the way from the top to the floor of my aunt's basement. I remember the fall seeming to last forever. I remember how I tumbled backwards and how my head and back and arms repeatedly fell on the steps, like running a gauntlet and being pummeled.

Fortunately, it was not a trauma I had frequently to re-live. We returned to Florida where stairs were rare, where basements do not exist and the construction of two-story houses is a folly almost never repeated since Hurricane Andrew quite efficiently removed everything above 10 feet. Florida does have some tall buildings: beach condos, for example. But these are buildings where stairs are for emergency use only, where the architects anticipate such a high percentage of arthritic knees among the inhabitants that elevators very often are shared only among a few families, and will take you directly from your personal parking spot right into your own foyer. There are some more modest apartment buildings in Florida that are 2 or 3 stories, but usually you climb that only once or twice a day, on your way out or your way home, not every time you have to take a pee, or find a pair of scissors, or pull something out of the dryer.

I can't even count how many times I go up and down in a day.

It's led to some anxiety -- though I think the anxiety is probably a good thing, something to keep me on my toes. Because the fact is, walking up and down stairs does not come easily. But even as (rightly) nervous as I am, my mind still wanders, I still slip, I still fall. Most of the time I'm holding onto the banister, so when I fall it's really more like I "swing" down onto my arm. But I'm worried the day will come when both foot and hand slips, and then I'm done for.

I'm not receiving much sympathy about this from the locals. Mainly I think they have no idea what I'm talking about. I even suspect they think I'm lazy. But it seems to me that we train our bodies to do certain things when we're first learning to walk, and if walking up and down stairs is a part of that, you internalize it -- until, without having to think about it, you can walk forward even though the ground is rising or dropping with each step.

I don't have to think about walking, or running, and I'm still good at climbing and hopping over fences and tables -- no problem, barely a thought. Because I learned all those things when I was small. But stairs? I have to consciously inform my leg with each step that it must go high-high-higher in search of footing, or reach-search-lower (a toe scans about) in search of the next step down.

And it really is much better to learn this stuff when you're small. If you're small and you fall, the potential for injury is much less. (For example, when I fell down my aunt's basement stairs as a little kid, the damage was almost 100% to my psyche -- and pride.) But Brian slipped from a bottom step while carrying a heavy box, and we've been waiting weeks now for his broken arm to mend. I tripped at the top of the steps a few days ago, and the bottoms of "roast beef" and "wee wee wee all the way home" split open in the impact, forcing me into bandages, double-socks, and closed-toe boots before winter's even arrived.

I've decided that when we look for a house to buy, we're going to try to find one that's one-story. It's going to be hard, considering what's on the market, but we have to try. There's no way we can avoid stairs all the time and everyplace, but by reducing the number of times we go up and down them at home, we may actually avoid the tumble that takes away our mobility or our lives.

Who knew Des Moines would be dangerous? :)

xo

Amy

Life Changes

2011-08-26T15:11:00.000-04:00

The Electronic Girl has been on extended hiatus as I experienced the most hectic and crazy and rewarding and wonderful few months of my life.

The biggest of all these events (if you exclude Brian and I getting married on June 4th) is that I was offered and accepted a position at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. I am now an Assistant Professor of Fiction and New Media, teaching 3 classes each semester at a small liberal arts college whose students are high-testing, high-achieving, very ambitious go-getters, or so say the stats and my first impression of them (as of today I've completed one week of teaching).

For six years I was an Instructor of English at Florida Atlantic University, an enormous state school that still has a large population of non-traditional and commuter students despite the administration's "strategic plan" to chase those students away and replace them with the supple-of-skin and carefree sort that live for football rivalries and Greek weeks.

I'm not a big supporter of that kind of "strateegery," because I believe the mission of public higher eduction should be meritocratically inclusive. After a hospitable environment and nutritious food, education is the key to individual and societal success, and the smart and capable but underserved and non-traditional students need a good place to go to learn without feeling like they're unwelcome.

But one of my life changes seems to be that while I still believe in that mission, I'm no longer a part of it. 12 years ago, when I was first applying to graduate school, my favorite professor warned me: you don't go into academia to choose where you live, or work, or really anything, actually. And he was speaking the absolute truth: we go into this profession knowing that we end up where we end up by the spin of a wheel. Right now I feel like the luckiest woman in the world, because I'm living in a great city, working at a great school, and my first impressions of everything are as positive as can be, even though I could never have predicted landing here.

Look for lots of new work in the coming months, especially to Forking Paths, my branching blog, which will be growing, expanding, and interlinking quite a bit more than in the past year.

It's an exciting time, and now that I'm (mostly) unpacked, I'm ready to jump into it. :)

Defying Genre

2011-04-16T09:28:00.001-04:00

There is one thing I've written/made that is on my CV multiple times under different categories: "Universal Translator."

I originally conceived it as a performance: I would speak in an alien language while the audience sees (what seems to be) a computer struggle to translate my words. This in turn tells an evolving story.

I then realized that, just by recording my voice, I could make it a stand-alone video. The "performance" is basically the same, except I don't have to be there! I could submit it to journals, post it on the internet... Oo! :) I showed this piece as a performance at a reading at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts last year.

Then I see in my inbox a call for submissions to a themed (Sense of Sound!) art show at the 18Rabbit Gallery that made me think: could this be an art installation? I submitted it, and Leah Brown, who curated the show, definitely thought it was an art installation! The piece hung on the wall of the 18Rabbit Gallery running on a loop for a month (the duration of the Sound Art show).

And then my boyfriend, who happens to be the poetry editor for the Rumpus, told me he'd like to include it in the Rumpus's 2011 National Poetry Month Project.

My boyfriend, the poet Brian Spears, has been curating the Rumpus's NaPoMo offerings for three years and he's never tried to publish something of mine. Why would he? I don't even consider myself a poet (I've published 3 poems in my life), so I would never even think of him publishing my work, but he said that he wanted to push the boundaries of "what is considered a poem" with this year's lineup, and he felt that my piece could be cataloged as poetry.

So this one video has been a performance, an installation, and a poem.

I consider it a story.

I also consider it a great example of how genre is sometimes (not always, but sometimes) a pretty poor describer of our work. I know that some people do sit down and say, "I am going to write a short story," or, "I am going to write a poem" -- and some people probably sit down and say, "I am going to write something that can't be categorized in a genre!" -- but a lot of us just experience these welling (churning, spinning) ideas that have to be translated into something concrete (lest the madness comes!) -- and the form that they take once they manifest is not a conscious part of the process. They just take the form they must. My work doesn't "deny" genre -- genre is real. But I feel like sometimes it "defies" genre -- or maybe becomes the Captain Jack Harkness of genre, hopping from one flavor to the next like a proper 51st Century gentleman.

At any rate, I love the "Universal Translator" -- and I love the reaction it gets from people. It's fun and it makes you think. It's about language and conflict and struggling to understand. It's about the realities of survival and the limitations of machines. It's about our fantasies and how more-real versions of our fantasies are still fantasies. And, for me, it's about that morning a couple months ago when I woke up with all these ideas spinning in my head, and saw the concept start to solidify before my imagination's eye -- a bright and sweaty alchemy, a mystery as delightful to me as the space between stars.

Genre, category, was not a part of it.

Proposal for American Education: Start Over

2011-04-06T13:29:00.006-04:00

I teach at a university now, but I didn’t finish high school. Halfway through the 10^th grade I insisted that my mother pull me out of school so I could take the GED and start college.

This was 1990, before standardized testing had completely taken over the schools, but even back then, high school was dull school. It was no place for smart, creative students – or, should I say, students whose intelligence and creativity had not atrophied according to schedule.

Because if I was smarter and more creative than some others, it is only because of my contrary nature. I did not aim to please. I was stubborn and independent. I didn’t want to fit in and be like the others. I did not respond well to authority. So I resisted what they were trying to do to me.

98% of people are geniuses at divergent thinking in Kindergarten, which means I started school, in Kindergarten, surrounded by smart, creative people just like me. By the time I left Elementary school, most of them had had their brains sucked out by the system.

The problem of American education is universally acknowledged, but we rarely consider how absurd it is to expect an education system designed for the Industrial Revolution to be of any value in the 21^st Century.

It's no accident that it trains people’s creativity out of them. It's by design: it prepares them for stable lives working for single companies where they are expected to sit in rows performing mechanical tasks repetitively and reliably.

You can change the teachers and the tests and a million other things, but the school system, at its core, will still be a machine to turn minds into widgets, and it will continue to do so, even if we don’t need widgets anymore.

The question we should ask ourselves is this: if no education “system” had ever existed, and we wanted to design one from scratch, what would its goals be? And what shape would it take in response to those needs?

I have a few ideas.

First, most students, even students whose creativity has been drummed out of them, are not stupid, but neither are they cynical enough to believe that they would be prompted to jump through meaningless hoops for sixteen years with no reward. Those that graduate from college are convinced that – though they may have learned very little, though they may have little to no skills at all – they’ve done the jumping and so deserve “a job.”

The first thing we need to prepare our students for is this: there is no job. We don’t know what the global economy will look like in 2 years let alone 20, but we can reliably predict that there will not be scores of beneficent employers looking to hire cookie-cutter cadets from today’s dullschools.

The student of today is the free agent of tomorrow: she will need to be able to adapt to circumstances faster than they change, to catalog and market her ever changing and expanding set of skills, then transform those skills into the money she needs to live a good life.

She will expect to spend some time working and other time looking for work. She will need to think of her worth in terms of the money she needs not just to live comfortably “this week,” but how to save and support herself between gigs. She will probably be in a creative profession, because creativity is what computers and machines fail at.

Computers and machines have “jobs.” People, on the other hand, have ideas. And people do not wait until they’re 25 and holding a bachelor’s degree to start having them. People have ideas right from the start.

That idea might be a way to make money or a way to make beauty; it might be a way to discover something or a way to communicate it. But whether school is helping students to start a business, or put on a play, or catalog insects, or build a website, school should be a system of support for experimental and experiential creative ventures: student-conceived, student-managed, student-presented.

Young people should enter remunerative adulthood not with a transcript of grades, but a CV of accomplishments: a list of the projects they participated in, detailing their roles in each one. And of course all of this should be documented and recorded online for the world to see.

It’s easy to conceive of 3 or 6 week “project terms” after which students gather at a central location for several days to present their work and learn from one another. Some students might put on a show, others might demonstrate an experiment, still others might build machines, or hold a debate, or launch a product – the point is that their work will have value to others, and their reward will not come in the form of a ranking assigned by a petty authority; their reward will be the applause and interest of their peers and society at large, and the sensation of genuine creative accomplishment.

They will not learn basic skills in a conceptual vacuum, where all is abstracted and seemingly meaningless, they will learn them in the context of discovery. The most important skills to our future, it seems to me, are Recall (the ability to remember what has been read/seen/heard); Empiricism (the ability to distinguish fact from opinion, understanding how to test evidence, etc.); Focus (the ability to think about an idea or problem for an extended period of time without being distracted); Logic (the ability to turn premises into conclusions, or to analyze the premises and conclusions of others for faults); Empathy (the skill of basic human connection, of working well with others, but also of learning and understanding); CreativityTask Management (the ability to organize and perform multiple tasks as necessary to achieve a goal).

Each of these skills can come into play during any project imaginable, and the role of the teacher will be, in large part, to make sure they do.

Teachers today have a schizophrenic double-role as both tutor and gatekeeper: the person who must help the students learn is the same person who must reward or punish them for learning or failing to. But in this project-based vision of education, teachers will cease to be judges and become genuine mentors who help their students achieve goals. The failure or success of a project becomes a simple matter of whether “it worked” or not, whether others actually do find it interesting and important.

And in this system, failure will be frequent, and it will not be stigmatized, because everyone will know that you cannot do anything great by playing it safe. Only those who tempt failure stand a chance at doing something important. In this system, failures are just as important to learning as successes.

In a project-based system, the mark of greatest success is simply doing something others find meritorious – and there is sometimes merit in glorious failures. Students can show themselves to be valuable in either case, and will then be invited onto new projects by others who value their skills, or they will have no trouble recruiting others for one of their own projects – or for a re-attempt at something that failed.

Teams of older students might invite impressive younger students to work with them on a project if that younger person’s skills will help them, or students from another part of the world might look up distance-participants who have the right skills and experience. Notice that both skill in navigating group dynamics and developing leadership skills are intrinsic to this system, as are communication skills, both written and verbal, both informal and formal, both in-person and at a distance.

Now, if simply impressing a potential employer is what the student has in mind, a history of accomplishment on relevant projects proving her creative value is far more powerful than a handful of “A’s.” But in the best instances, students’ projects will not just point them in the direction of meaningful life goals, but start them on their way. They will have a chance to actually contribute to the knowledge and culture of humankind, which means that “school” isn’t a game anymore – it’s a place where real, important work can be done.

This is my “Square One” vision for a better education system, a system that lets students be free and creative, and productive members of society, and learn.

Book of Light

2011-03-16T15:27:00.004-04:00

How was this made?

White on Black

2011-03-14T21:29:00.004-04:00

I wanted to print something white on black. Using a regular printer, the effect is achieved by blasting the page with black ink to make a fake background and letting the few spots that remain un-inked be the "white on" -- but that's not genuinely white-on-black in my opinion. It's also really expensive since it uses up a whole black ink cartridge at once. Anyway, I specifically wanted white print on real black paper.

There are a few ways I could have gone about this, but I decided to use my manual typewriter and several sheets of "Ko-Rec-Type" (C) 1976. (I had to order these online from a "hard to find business supplies" store.) For those who don't remember these, they are flimsy plastic sheets with a layer of white-out stuff on one side. You slip them in your typewriter between the ribbon and the paper and when you press a key it covers your error with white-out stuff in the shape of the letter you hit.

I used this to tap out a 16 page mini-book, Book of Light, onto black construction paper. Photos follow.

As a sort of extra bonus, the used sheets of Ko-Rec-Type provide an "absence in white" collection of each individual word used in the book. I'm keeping these and will definitely do something with them.

The subject of Book of Light is dark, the death of a child, because that's where the white-on-black took me, at least for this first go around. But I'm planning on making several more white-on-black books, and I'm not limiting myself to death as a subject. Wherever it takes me I go. The book follows. Clicking on any image will enlarge it.

It Takes All Kinds

2011-03-05T12:02:00.001-05:00

"It takes all kinds," barks my anti-union anti-tax racist homophobic Republican-voting Randroid grandfather. He says it with a wave of his hand and a jerk of his chin, the dismissive anger an old man bleeds when he has outlived his era, lived long enough to call his grandchildren "communist" and see them snicker.

He's right: it does take all kinds.

A society made up of only one kind of person would be fatally weak. A society that lacks any particular kind of person is tragically flawed, possibly crippled. Not every person will be or should be, by nature, from early childhood, a money-obsessed entrepreneur, and not every person will be or should be a gifted musician who goes out of his or her way to raise social and political consciousness, but we the human race would be lost without all the different kinds of people. We need a man who turns your household trash into another person's treasure because he desires every dime just as much as we need the singer who stirs our souls in service to wisdom and empathy.

Only blind fools and idealists believe that we should all be one way, or all held to one standard of success. Only a blind fool praises rich businessmen and despises garbage collectors, waitresses, and day-care nannies. The total diversity of us is needed, and to the extent that the total diversity of us is supported, we thrive. A society is a living organism, and each cell of its body is connected to every other: a body needs its heart as well as its stomach. And no human being is born bare-assed to the world and makes it on his own without help.

The most important thing the human race does, above mere survival, is educate the future. Teaching comes after feeding ourselves, I agree. But it comes behind nothing else.

We die: our wisdom turns to dust with us. Those that come after us would always be starting over from zero if we didn't record and pass on our experiences, but records and stories aren't the same as experiences: so we take a few steps back, always, before we can take a few steps forward. We forget, as a whole, that war is made of millions of individual murders, that unregulated markets breathe the havoc of boom and bust, that before social safety nets the aged poor died in the streets like animals, that democracy is a never ending struggle and not a smug July 4th platitude, that workers today are anything more than serfs or slaves because the workers who came before us imperiled their lives demanding safety, liberty, and a decent wage.

Workers unions will always be controversial, because workers united prevent ambitious men who live for the thrill of acquisition from acquiring quite as much as they would otherwise. The world needs a certain number of powerhungry greedheads, and we should not be surprised when they succeed and acquire great wealth and power. But nor should we see them as anything other than what they are. They are not good men. They are not great men. They are greedy men. They will take and take and use and use. We should be ready for them, ready to rein them in and set their limits. NO, you may not risk others' lives to make more money. NO, you may not destroy the environment to make more money. NO, you may not dodge the taxes you owe to the society that made your success possible.

Yes, a condition of employing human beings to your ends will be to negotiate with them like equals.

Powerhungry greedheads hate public education. They don't need it, they don't want to help pay for it, and they certainly don't want it to work. An educated workforce is a hard-to-manage workforce, an un-servile, dare I say "uppity" workforce that sees through lies, shares opinions, communicates, plans, organizes. Out of sheer self-interest, the richest among us feel that if learnin's not job-training, it shouldn't exist. The word "liberal" in "liberal education" or "liberal arts" was originally used to distinguish the educations of free people from the educations of slaves (liber means free in Latin, as in "liberty"); slaves would be schooled in accountancy or some other practical or marketable skill, but they would never be taught History or literature or general sciences, because that kind of general knowledge makes a person the captain of his own ship of life, wiser, freer. Those who value only money will of course see anything that does not immediately lead to money as a waste of time: but there are more kinds of people in the world and more reasons for mankind's continuing existence than material wealth.

Teachers are very different kinds of people from those money-loving entrepreneurs. Teachers in America choose to earn a Bachelor's degree (at least), and then go into a deeply damaged public school system where they know they will be paid less than they would if they went into virtually any other Bachelor's degree requiring line of work. And they know they will be accused, abused, over-scrutinized, assigned more students than they can teach, and expected to tolerate kids raised in an X-treme gross-out culture, who will think nothing of, for example, ruining someone's internet image, or, as one of my relatives recently did (and got expelled for doing), poisoning a teacher (to laugh while she gets sick, you know, for kicks!). Teachers are in fact expected to react to their work conditions not at all: if they even blog about it, they might get fired.

Teachers do not demand what they are worth, and they are worth a lot: a study last year calculates that a good kindergarten teacher adds at least $320,000 to the economy, yearly. Teachers don't ask for that much. Teachers ask for about 1/6th of that -- just enough to remain solidly middle-class -- and decent working conditions -- supplies and small class sizes -- mainly so that they can teach more effectively!

Most people are neither as greedy as the greediest businessmen nor as selfless as the most hardworking teacher. Most people want to be good, giving people, look out for their own interests, fall in love, have some kids, be remembered by someone. And because they are neither intimately involved in the lives of the very greedy nor of the very selfless, they are persuadable. They might hear a rich man say that while he "deserves" his wealth (for "creating jobs" and whatnot), teachers earning 50,000 a year plus benefits are "overpaid" -- that's about the price of one Lincoln Town Car, by the way. I wonder what millionaires drive -- or are driven in?

Among the many "kinds" it takes in a society, clearly, is the mob. A persuadable mass of people with little stake in or understanding of a situation who none the less may be driven to action by a few strong words. Most of us are members of the mob at one time or another. We cheer for Egyptians, knowing less than nothing about Egyptian politics, but still! We do it for fictional things and unconsequential things too: we cheer for the New Orleans Saints, because they're the plucky underdog, or hate on the Yankees. Whatever.

But insomuch as any of us are members of the mob at any given moment, we should remember a few things: that selfless people are particularly bad at defending their own interests, that greedy people are particularly untrustworthy. The human race will never cease to form mobs -- but we should try to become wiser mobs. The "lowest common denominator" IQ can get higher in any given set if all the IQs in the group get higher too.

And good news: IQs are getting higher! Everywhere and always! There's no reason to expect mankind to repeat the dumassery of the past!! But education is a big part of that. If there's a single "sector" or "function" of society that we should throw an insane amount of resources behind, it's education. The coffers of the rich and greedy should be raided to pay for it. The time and energy of billions should be devoted to it. The best facilities should be built to house it.

But even if we can't manage that -- even if we can't manage to make education our #1 priority as a species, we should at the very least defend it from the necessary but potentially destructive faction of ourselves who want everything and everyone to belong to them.

A body needs a mouth. But a body cannot let its mouth eat its feet.

Teachers' Hours

2011-03-03T13:57:00.000-05:00

Every Wednesday around noon Brian and I get out of bed and go to our favorite nearby diner for breakfast. The woman who owns and runs the diner always looks at us askance. She wants to know why we're not at work. She always asks, "what is this, spring break?" "Are you guys off for the holiday?" "No school today?" And so on. It doesn't matter what we answer: her look always says something suspicious and disapproving.

Because I'm there to enjoy a breakfast I'm too tired to cook for myself, I don't grand-stand. I don't explain. And now that teachers are under rhetorical and fiscal attack nationally, I regret that, not just with her but with everyone I've ever encountered. Because there is a lot of misunderstanding out there, and the biggest misunderstanding is the idea that teachers work *less* than other people.

It's our own fault: teachers refer to being in class teaching as being "at work," and being at home as being "home from work." But teachers are always at work. I'm at work on Sunday and Saturday and even Wednesday, the day in the middle of the week I don't teach. I may be physically at home but I'm hard at work doing something that most people cannot do, something that's difficult even with years of practice. I'm working late into the night, sometimes embarrassingly so: more than once have I resisted sending a reply to a student email at 3am, because I want them to think I have normalish hours. But in truth I'm often working in the middle of the night.

I do more than stand in front of a classroom and talk for 12 hours a week. Every lecture I give is an essay I've spent hours researching and composing, one that I'm ready to field all sorts of tangental questions about, and spin off on extemporaneously depending on my students' interests. I also spend hours every week developing materials (visual aids, discussion questions, essay prompts, and so on). And then there's the grading. A well-written 1000-word essay takes about 10-15 minutes to grade. An average essay takes about 20-25 minutes. An essay that has problems takes between 30-45 minutes (sometimes more). At my current job, in a regular semester I'll have about 100 students, and those essay types are more or less equally distributed in thirds. That means I grade from 33 to 47 hours at home roughly every two weeks, on top of all the other work I do. And that's just the essays: there are also quizzes and group work sheets and so on. I spend hours every week meeting one-on-one with students and an unquantifiable amount of time answering their emails -- sometimes just short questions, but very often they send me a section of an essay with questions about how to improve it: that takes thought and time too, 10 minutes or more per email.

There are also other things: for example, at least once every week or so a past student will ask me to write him or her a letter of recommendation. Because I care about them and their futures, I take these recommendations very seriously. I look back up the work they did for me, review my class notes, and make sure that I write something accurate and effective. That takes time too.

Also, I am my own secretary: I have to deal with phones and printing and copying and faxing and mailing and all sorts of mundane details -- including the seemingly endless bureaucratic responsibilities that come with working in any large institution. Any given week there might be a new form or report to fill out in my mailbox (from the department, from the admissions office, from financial aid, from athletics, etc.). And of course once a year I must compile a report on my own teaching, which takes many hours of work, and which I must squeeze in on top of my already full work schedule.

None of that even touches on the reading and research that I have to do to prepare for future classes and to continue my own creative work -- if I did not do the creative work, incidentally, I would not be qualified for my job.

So you see, just because I'm not standing in front of a classroom doesn't mean I'm not at work. In fact, one of the reasons I LOVE the actual teaching part of my job is because for those few hours I'm completely focused on my students, and the Bottomless To Do list fades from the forefront of my mind for a while. It's peaceful. It's nice. It's rare.

But there's more: teachers also themselves refer to having "summer off." That's also misleading: first of all, teachers don't have "summer off" -- teachers only get paid for 9 months out of the year. So teachers are "unemployed" for three months every year. Most teachers I know also teach over the summer because if they did not they would lose their homes and starve. The weeks that they do get off around the fringes (between semesters, etc.) are completely filled by all the catching up they have to do from the previous semester. If a teacher gets 2-3 weeks scattered throughout the year when s/he is truly "off' as in "free" as in "no work to do at all" (and I don't think that happens very often), then that teacher spends that time collapsed in a heap, catching up on sleep, trying to get back to a good mental state for the intense work that will start back up soon.

And that's another thing: mental state. The work that teachers do is 90% mental. We have to be creative. We have to have insight. We have to be on our toes, mentally speaking, and ready to react to millions of possible classroom situations, millions of possible student misunderstandings that we need to correct or come up with a powerful new metaphor to explain. Frankly, this is not stuff that most people can do. A lot of people start teaching and then quit almost right away. People often attribute that to the low pay, but I think it's more than that: people don't anticipate how taxing teaching is mentally, how it possesses you every minute of every day, how everything you see and read and hear is being checked for its ability to help you communicate complex topics to your students. You're never off the clock, in your head.

I'm also always analyzing my classes for successes and failures. Every class is an experiment in what works and doesn't, and I have to keep track. So on top of everything else I do, I'm also my own evaluator, an experimenter keeping stats on myself.

Now all of that said, I LOVE MY JOB. I LOVE TEACHING. I really do. It's a really hard job, but like many difficult things it is rewarding in proportion to its difficulty. I believe in teaching: helping curious people grow their minds is how we make the world a better place. I want to be a part of that. I love being around young people: they are very often really smart and interesting and kind-hearted people who are negotiating the world in fresh original ways.

And I think because I love my job so much, when I speak to other people I put an exclusively positive spin on the work I do. I talk about the good parts. And I don't restrain myself from saying that I've got "summer off" or that I'm "home from work" on Wednesdays -- both of which are really false statements that are badly skewing the public's perception of teaching.

I don't think it will help much if teachers start getting grousier, but I do think that we might make an effort to change our language a little, or just be a little more honest about things: I am unemployed every summer, and that is stressful. I am never not at work, and that is stressful too. I am paid very little considering my education, talents, and the number of hours I work in a week, not to mention the value I add to the economy and how the work I do helps a free democratic society to function.

I work my butt off, even if I am having breakfast at a diner at noon on a Wednesday. Teachers do not keep bankers' hours.

Where Are the Electronic Girls?

2011-02-01T09:38:00.000-05:00

Women do not contribute to Wikipedia at near the rate men do. This should surprise no one who has lived on the planet Earth for any length of time, and the reasons probably aren't worth getting in to (if you'd like to do that, go to google, type in "women, wikipedia" and do a blog search: have fun!).

I suggest another course of action, tho: since the future is far more interesting than the past, and since being the change you wish to see in the world is the only activity worth pursuing, I recommend every woman reading this think a moment about your areas of expertise, even if (especially if) you're expert on something "silly" and "girlish" that society doesn't take seriously, and go to Wikipedia right now and start adding, editing, and balancing that joint out.

On Text

2011-01-01T12:15:00.005-05:00

The Roman Alphabet is beautiful, especially as it appears today, in type, refined by sharp-eyed designers who make the shapes and their in-between spaces a form of art so common we all take it for granted. At least we take it for granted until we see type done wrong: when type is illegible or creates the wrong mood (crowded kerning, a real estate ad in Comic Sans). Then, an aesthetic sense we were previously unaware of bucks and barks and demands satisfaction.

There are other alphabets in the world that are arguably more lovely. Take for example the very flowers-in-bloom of writing, the Arabic alphabet with its dives and dips, or Sinhalese with its swoops and curls:

These scripts are comparable to Roman script, the pretty cursive handwriting you were taught (but probably failed to master) in the 2nd grade, but they probably outcompete it in prettiness, although de gustibus non disputatum, and all that. In every case, though, these are alphabets that work entirely in the abstract. In these systems, the word "house" does not pretend to look like a house, nor do the letters that make it up particularly intend to look like the sounds that build the word and therefore the meaning in our minds. It is a system of abstract symbols, and "A" only means the sound you just heard in your head when you read "A" because you've been taught that it does.

The Asian logographs, which do purport to look like the things they represent, are closer, to my eye, to the nicely organized, almost formal, almost architectural feel of the standard Roman alphabet. For example Japanese or Korean type:

...are both really well-proportioned and have lots of straight up-down strokes. If Sinhalese looks like a lithe dancer spinning across the page, Korean looks like a old man crouched and listening. And I feel that's closer to the Roman alphabet, although I see our type more as a group of people in straight-backed chairs lined up and waiting to get a job done -- perhaps they're all going through customs, or working their way through the DMV.

But logographs come from a completely different idea: that the characters show the thing. This is just one level of abstraction (the symbol represents the thing) rather than the two we use [the symbol represents the sound which (in conjunction with other symbols of sounds) represents the thing]. It's simpler in this one sense, but more complex in the sense that, coming upon a Chinese character you've never seen before, you can't sound it out. Today the sounds of characters are strung together to form words, but that idea at the heart of the system, that the written character is a depiction of the thing being communicated, defines the shapes.

We don't have that, but people (who see faces in clouds and smoke, the Moon and Mars) will see cartoons of life whether they are there or not. We see connections between the shapes and their meanings: who says an "h" doesn't look like a horse? Why isn't an "o" the shape of your mouth when you say "o"? We make these connections because we use the symbols and we live in the world. They're as convenient and meaningful as "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" (although since Pluto isn't a planet anymore, how bout: "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Naan").

It's not ALL random, however: there is something called the Bouba/Kiki effect: a psychologist shows you two shapes and asks you which is "Kiki" and which is "Bouba."

If you are like nearly all people in the world (even people who speak other languages, even toddlers who haven't yet learned "K" from "B"), you name the jagged star-like shape Kiki and the softer blob-like shape Bouba. This suggests that the odds were better than even that a shape like "K" with its sharp angles would end up representing the sound it does, and a shape like "B" the sound it does. (Notice the similarities between the two letters: a vertical line on the left with two protrusions on the right; really the only difference is whether the protrusions are sharp or round.)

So not only do we, through culture and experience, start making connections between the words and sounds we know and the shapes we know to represent them, but in a very abstract way (representing the feel of sounds rather than the appearance of things) they came from non-random sources, too. I say this to validate, perhaps even rationalize the beauty I see in letters, so well-worked and neatly proportioned, so balanced, so rhythmic in their movements across the page.

When I was a child, I liked to sit through church with a Bible and a pen, and draw lines from the top of the page to the bottom, dodging every letter, letting my line flow through the open spaces between them. This is to compliment the Bible-makers: the white space on the page fell down like a waterfall, the letters were the pebbles and protrusions that disturbed the flow, created the separate streams of thought that crashed into thunderous mists of meaning. As it is for many people, those stories are a part of me. Reading them and drawing through them is a part of me. And the appearance of both the ink and the paper was a part of that experience [an experience which, though I am not religious, I still treasure (after all, I am passionate about fiction, and religion is the ultimate fiction)].

Some of my latest fictions use altered typography and unusual text layout. The design of the page is part of the design of the story. I'm straining the proportions of the letters to fit the feelings behind the ideas I'm trying to communicate, and I'm arranging those letters so that the white space around them becomes part of the story. This is what writing workshops call "a risk" in the sense that the story is doing something that a certain number of readers will reject outright, even though another set of readers may find it welcome and exciting. That's fantastic by me, though: the fringes have always been my favored workspace.

My intent is abstract as the letters I'm using. This short piece (an early experiment):

...does not attempt to look like a cat standing in rain; it tries to look like what it feels like when you stop in the middle of your day and through barriers like glass and distance and species and power notice some small detail about life and other creatures living it, and the connections between you and them and the wet cold world and your window and your warm house and your prissy housecats who have a fit if a single drop of water falls on their heads.

How do an assortment of abstract shapes (culturally-coded with certain sound-meanings and in sum to the functions of nouns and verbs and other parts of speech and then arranged into a syntax to give us an image and sounds and feels and other hard to quantify ideas) communicate that? I don't know. But my latest adventure is to figure that out, or at the very least better expose the machinery that makes it happen.

My First Design Credit

2010-12-10T22:28:00.001-05:00

Brian Spears's new book comes out in January, and I get my first ever design credit. Two reasons for raucous celebration!

BBC 100 Books Meme

2010-11-28T14:39:00.007-05:00

You probably already know it's a fraud, in at least two ways:

1st, the meme challenges you by telling you that the BBC predicts the average person has read only 6 of these 100 books; the truth is that the BBC polled Britons to find out their favorite books, and then published the list. No challenge or prediction about the average person was ever made.

2nd, the list that's going around the internet these days (seven years on!) is significantly changed from (some would say its been made "more highbrow than") the list the BBC originated.

I got hit with this meme again earlier today (by my cousin, a librarian in Connecticut), and it suddenly struck me that this is actually a great example of a mutated strain of information: just like the altered molecules in a strand of DNA, these changes say something about the people who messed with the list. Specifically, the changes hint at what kind of people they were and what they wanted their own ideal list to look like.

So I sat down and labeled every change between the BBC's original poll results and the meme I got from my cousin.

A couple things:

1. I don't believe this is any kind of injustice or anything; I didn't go through and label this because I believe there's anything special about the original list or to call "caughtcha!" on the list's changers -- far from it. I tip my hat to each person who read this list, objected to the authors on it (especially if they believed the meme's story, that this was some sort of authoritative list you should measure yourself against) and had the moxie to delete and replace or just move up and down the books according to their opinions. Why not? This is the internet, after all: we're not here to passively receive information, we're here to create it, alter it, make it our own.

2. Only three books on the entire list were unchanged from the original. Those three books? Orwell's 1984, Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (insert confused shrug here).

3. People seemed hesitant to delete books near the top of the list. They were more likely to move them. (The top two books were merely transposed.) At the bottom, though, you see two more radical phenomena: people angrily raising books they love from the pits of the 90s towards the middle of the list (often knocking other books down or deleting them to make room), and, especially in the bottom 10 or so, people deleting books outright to replace them with books they felt unjustly excluded. There also seemed to be an organized effort to remove the books of Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Wilson.

I'd love to hear any other conclusions you draw in the comments. I feel there's too much data here to be sifted through by one person. Any observations you have would be most welcome. Enjoy!!

Re-watching, Re-seeing.

2010-11-26T09:50:00.006-05:00

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest appealed to me, when I first watched it in my young twenties, as a parable of independence, and that's clearly how the film is intended.

And the young mind is inclined to see it that way, because young people who happen to be good readers search reflexively (in my experience) for the message or moral or wisdom or advice -- the part of the story that can be pulled out and applied to their own lives. This may be related to young people's tendency to see everything as being "all about" them, but it's also pretty reasonable: if you're in the phase of your life when you're trying to figure out your life, then you are naturally going to look for "messages" about how to live. Heaven help you if you don't.

Seen this way, Jack Nicholson's McMurphy is a sympathetic everyman who just wants to be free and have a good time; he is a clear-sighted rebel and the vehicle of redemption for a collection of people so damaged by society that their only "place" in the world is to dodder their days away bickering in a mental hospital. In this reading the fish is manhood, the fountain cages the eternal wild spirit of man, the crone (Nurse Ratched) is the corrupt enforcer of a corrupt society, and every damaged man who lives on the ward has ended up here because of the likes of her: wicked judgmental mothers and soul-sapping wives. Even McMurphy is on the ward because of a girl: arrested for statutory rape, which he describes as an injustice because the girl was "15 going on 30." The only man on the ward free of feminine influences is the Indian, "Chief," who only speaks of a father, and who, by playing deaf and dumb, manages to escape the institutional clutches; his escape at the end, when he hurls the fountain through the windows and walks away, represents the irrepressible spirit of McMurphy, who, even though he is dead, "lives on" in the figure of an enormous man who goes on in silent refusal despite the destruction of his people, etc.

It's a good reading of the story, and the camera angles support it, especially the villainous view of Ratched: the way the director steadied on her face as she froze her eyes, the way the pivotal conversation among the doctors was shown with extreme close-ups on their faces so that the camera could, suddenly, land on her (cue horror movie music) to show that she, the wicked one, has even infiltrated here, among the doctors who control the men's fate.

There is also another less general symbolic reading: not just of people subjugated by society, but of men subjugated by women, or of "manly" men subjugated by a feminized society ruled by girly-men and the wicked women who have corrupted them. In this reading we see worthy manhood crippled, criminalized, and ultimately medicalized by unworthy women and feminized men. In this reading, only a couple of the men in the ward are worthy: the violent ones, the frustrated ones. Nicholson's character is worthy, and so is Christopher Lloyd's because he's always trying to scrap up a fight, and he takes Nicholson's bets, and so on. The rest are lost souls who might be "saved" by McMurphy, if he gets the chance, by letting them be "bad boys": if they can just steal a boat and go fishing, if they can just get the shy virgin boy laid, they too can find their manhood and be free.

Although getting laid also seems to be a big part of the fishing boat scene, so maybe in this version you only need to fuck a woman (or be present while one gets fucked) and you'll "be a man."

I would add that there seems to be a racial element in this as well: the three orderlies and the night ward caretaker are the only black faces in the story, and they too are portrayed as unworthy and corrupt, just like the women nurses. The women McMurphy is friends with are exclusively sex objects. They lie down and take it, even when McMurphy tells them to take it from a perfect stranger, or a mental patient she's only even seen once before. Everyone with a soul to save in this story is a white man. The acceptable "other" is the cute girl who submits to the man's will. And the "other" that doesn't, the women nurses and black orderlies who presume to tell a white man what to do, they are "evil."

I'm not at all fond of this second, less general reading, for obvious reasons.

As I've gotten older, I tend to see things not just in terms of their symbolic content, but as human dramas. I search for complexity in a way that I didn't when I was a twenty-some. I tend to think more about who they are, how they got here, where they're going, what their motivations are, what they are forced to do and what they choose to do.

And so upon re-watching, I still saw the first symbolic narrative, and I still saw the second, but I also saw my mind going places it did not when I was a kid searching for something to apply to my life.

Probably the most shocking turn is that I have suddenly found myself very sympathetic to Nurse Ratched. Don't get me wrong: when she viciously shames Billy at the end, when she uses what she knows about his psychology to knock him down, that is a terrible thing. But it is the first and only terrible thing she does, and she does it when she comes into work in the morning and discovers that everything has been torn apart, and the people who tore it apart are giggling and proud of themselves. She's wrong to say what she says, but the pressures that pushed her over that line are clear and understandable. She is, after all, only human.

And that's the key for me: she's human. She's a woman with a career in the mid-20th Century, in charge of a ward of 20 emotionally disturbed but still by-culture "entitled" white men, some of whom are violent, all but one of whom are larger than her. When a man shows up whose only wish is to "put a bug up her ass," who wants only to undermine her authority in her place of work, she has to, as part of her job, try to maintain not just order, but her authority. The film is put together in such a way that we are prodded to reject that she should even have authority, but what is the basis for that, beyond her sex? Her icy unblinking stare looks more to me like courage in the face of challenge than "evil." Yet in our culture, the character's name and face has become synonymous with evil. Imagine if this story had put a male "Doctor Ratched" in charge of the ward. Would he be evil, or the just authority? The question's worth asking.

And also, now that I'm looking at the film with a more mature eye, I see that these characters (of course!) cannot be quick-fixed by some feisty manly-man who takes 'em fishin and gets 'em laid like some absentee father that returns for the world's least appropriate 16th birthday. The story wants us to think he can: when Billy's stutter disappears (upon fucking a woman) and then reappears (upon being shamed by a woman), we are meant to see a real transformation tragically reversed by the evil Nurse. But the boy immediately runs into the next room and tries to kill himself. Young as he is, he has a lifetime of experiences (and suicide attempts) that led him to commit himself to an institution. If getting laid cures your stutter, but a few shaming words makes you try to end your life, you have not been cured of anything: you are too fragile for life, and you probably need to be where you are, or where you were, before McMurphy came along: a safe, quiet, predictable, unchallenging mental hospital.

The meanings of stories change over time. A story that starts out as a warning against loving someone your parents don't approve of turns into a celebration of that same star-crossed love. And a story that starts out defending the manly-manhood of real men whose society interferes with their righteous aggression and woman-subjugating tendencies turns into a study of a time period: a time when a woman's authority in the workplace would be tenuous and routinely challenged, when even mentally damaged white men could still brandish with pride the entitlements of white manhood, when it was perfectly acceptable to let an Indian represent the better part of a white man's soul, or let an educated, working woman trying to do her job represent pure "evil."

It is still and will always be a brilliant, brilliant movie, but the way we see it and re-see it will continue to change.

Beyond Online Education

2010-11-11T15:28:00.001-05:00

College for profit is a bad idea. Even with the best of intentions, it invites the "consumer model" of education, a model that implies that students are "customers" and teachers are "service providers." This conception compromises the other half of the instructor's role, because the instructor is not just the person "helping" the student to succeed, but is also the "gatekeeper" who prevents those who cannot succeed from advancing with those who can. When instructors become tutors and cease to be gatekeepers, the entire system becomes meaningless, because the gatekeeper role is the only thing that makes a degree worth a damn.

There is a congressional investigation going on right now that is very much needed and very much in the right. For-profit colleges haven't undone the entire American system of education, far from it -- in fact, the saddest thing about people being suckered into attending these "colleges" is that, when they graduate, people will not take their degrees seriously. We do not live in a world where people confuse or equate a degree from Kaplan with a degree from the University of Name-Your-State.

But it's worse than that: these for-profit college-peddling corporations are targeting the people most ignorant of what college is, what a degree means, and what it can get you in material terms, and then getting the US taxpayer (you and me and all of us) to front the money, at extremely inflated rates. When the student ends up 100k in debt and earning the same $8/hour a high school diploma merits, we all take the hit. It's appalling.

But it gets worse. Imagine if I got paid according to my students' grades. Imagine: if I had a semester where all my students earned A's, I'd get paid more than if it were a mix of A's, B's, and C's. Obviously that would be a terrible idea. Suddenly it would be in my clear financial self-interest to give up my gatekeeper role and let everyone through with quadruple-gold-stars. This is what for-profit education does, only on a large scale: the teachers aren't the ones with the financial incentives, they're just the ones being bullied (and having their grades changed) by people who DO have financial incentives.

An education is not a commodity, it's a series of trying experiences a person willingly submits to in order to come out the other side a completely changed person. If the only difference between you and a brain surgeon were that the brain surgeon could pay a fee and pass a test, you would not allow her to operate on your brain. The brain surgeon has to actually be a better kind of person, a person who has suffered through and survived multiple tests and trials over many, many years, tests and trials that involved sacrifice and focus and the ability to forgo all pleasures and distractions in service of an abstract goal that is not immediately rewarding. That's not something you can become "on weekends, online, in your spare time!"

Brain surgeon is the most extreme example I can give, because it's a position that puts the person in life-and-death control over the most sophisticated organ in your body, the one which contains your very self, your very being. But if your heart and soul is invested in a company you built from the ground up, you would want anyone you hired as a regional marketing manager to be the "brain surgeon of regional marketing management": in other words, that person must have the same qualities, even if you require them in slightly less intense form. And how do we prove that a person is serious, committed, focused, and able to put work ahead of play for years at a time?

Personally, I believe that everyone should have a chance at an education, and that the society (you and me and all of us) should gladly pay for it through our taxes. I even believe that people who flunk out should be allowed, at 4-5 year intervals, to take another shot at it. That's because a society is only as good and advanced and wealthy as the people in it, because the successes of peers and family members encourage more success, because every invention, innovation, business, or even just full-time-job added to the economy creates more opportunities for other people. In other words, it's in all of our best interests to support the individual interests of everybody.

But the education that gets paid for has to be real. The American Taxpayer's money should be spent investing in the future of the people of America, not funneled into the profit stream of a corporation whose interest in education is somewhere between minimal and none. Colleges and universities serve societies: the business owners who need solid employees, the investors who entrust their money to individual entrepreneurs, the patients who need doctors, the kids who need teachers, the litigants who need lawyers, and the hard-working students who do not want the meaning of their degrees diluted by the for-profit "consumer model" approach.

Personally, I'm a huge advocate of technology in general. I'm looking forward to controlling devices with a chip in my brain, and letting an AI drive me around in a shared car. But there is one technology I cannot get behind, and that is exclusively online classes. I love incorporating online involvement into a class that also meets in person, but a class that's all-online is very bad idea, in my opinion: that's because I believe that an education must be demanding, challenging, and ultimately self-changing. If a course is structured in a way that keeps it from becoming too much of a bother in your life, then the course is structured to keep it from being of value.

I believe that people want to be challenged. I believe that they even want to be changed. Everywhere I look I see people paying for "experiences": why else would we find people in dojos, or yoga classes, or at the end of bungees? Why else would we find Americans in 2010 making their own clothes, or killing their own game, or spending full days slaving over the kind of elaborate meals you rarely find outside of Kitchen Stadium? People want to do things they're not sure they can do. They want to suffer through trials, and they're willing to fail: they know that without the possibility of failure, success means nothing.

Ultimately, an education that means something must be an all-encompassing creative challenge, a daunting experience, something that changes who you are and how you think of yourself. These for-profit, largely online colleges promise to change people's lives materially, they promise houses, vacations, a brand-new Lexus, and they largely fail to come through on that promise. To me, though, it is worse that they don't even try to provide the more important and essential benefit of education, or even tell prospective students about it: that it changes who you are, how you imagine, what you're willing to try, and how you're able to be.

America doesn't need the same old people with online degrees; America needs the kind of creative and motivated actors who know, because they already have in the face of challenge transformed themselves, how to transform a society.

We Live in the Science Fiction, Now

2010-11-01T20:05:00.000-04:00

People say this all the time about our world now: we have iPhones and talking GPS in our cars, and in a few more years, the cars will drive themselves and humans will be leaving Earth forever to colonize other planets.

We think "real life is becoming science fiction!"

Our views of the world are fictions. The structures of our lives are fictions. Our nations are fictions, our religions are fictions, our sports-team seasons, our politics, our economies, our disciplines, our loves, our goals, our lives. This is not to diminish any of these things but simply to acknowledge what they really are: elaborate stories full of symbols, proceeding by silently agreed-upon conventions, full of interlinking narrative arcs, each making its own rules of proper conduct, determining its own hierarchy of values, not to mention determining what "wins" and what "loses."

There are fictions that we know are fictions, because they contain unicorns and gold-laying geese. There are fictions that we "know" are fictions but kind of "believe," because the world they describe has too many connections to our "real" world. And then there are the fictions we participate in, the immersive fictions, the ones in which we play a role, whether minor or vital, the ones we call "real life." All other "suspension of disbelief" is partial and transitory. Our lives take place in a fiction where our suspension of disbelief must be total and unwavering.

But rarely is it total. It wavers.

We've all been there: we lie awake at night and see the world as a cold and grubbing and meaningless collection of matter in the void. Our institutions are bullshit. Our belief systems are bullshit. All the crap people want us to do is bullshit.

And if this feeling goes on long enough, it is "debilitating" from the point of view of everyone in the fiction. The person can't play, anymore. The person has dropped out, ceased to perform his role. We call it clinical depression, now, not demons, not an imbalance of humors. That's one of the signs that our fiction is a science fiction, now.

Fictions are the natural antidepressant of Man, and when our belief in our stories falters so does our willingness to live life. A person can live without religion or politics or career goals or love, but a person cannot live without any story at all -- and so fictions are by far the most important thing to Mankind, and that is why we will fight for them and kill for them and die for them, the same way animals in the wild will fight and kill and die in search of food. We need them to survive.

But our fiction is a science fiction, now. Science fiction used to be the realm of fantasy, far from the immersive fiction we call "real." Over the last hundred years they have gotten closer and closer. Now there is very little "fantasy" left in science fiction--as time goes on, machines are less magic, more mechanism. And the recent past seems more fantastic: Mad Men, for example, has a drug-trip quality about it that Firefly does not. Only aliens are truly fantastic (especially p/muppet-aliens ala Farscape), but how long before they seem just a little "off the mark," like those giant boxy robots lumbering across black-and-white moonscapes of 1960s TV (See Twilight Zone's "The Lonely" for a great -- if disturbing -- exception to that trend!) compare to the comically harmless (near-useless) asimo?

We're not quite cyborgs, but we're getting there -- and we're definitely at the point where we cannot consider cyborg life an impossible fantasy. The last time I was polled I was asked whether I'd be willing to put a chip in my brain. This question was followed with, "would you be willing if it gave you instant access to music?" "instant access to news?" "live GPS"... and so on. It's not a question of if you CAN have a chip in your brain; it's a question of what features would convince you to buy one.

So the story is changing: the global fiction that we each understand, in which we see ourselves playing a part, is changing. Increasingly it's a story about mankind's evolution (including forward, beyond the biological), and our technologies, and necessity of getting off the earth and into space, because we know our sun won't last forever. A lot of people aren't fond of this new story, but it's a compelling and complete one, one we can believe. It's also one that, unlike all the other fictions, doesn't deny the emptiness we sometimes feel, but takes it for granted: the science fiction says, we are matter, we are parts in sum. There is no grander purpose to the universe.

The science fiction must also say, we are animals evolved to understand ourselves as part of a fiction. We cannot live without one. We must believe.

Out of Time

2010-10-10T11:53:00.000-04:00

If I could go back to the Medieval period having fully prepared myself by reading up on Medieval culture and technologies, I would still get there and be a big dummy* when it comes to daily routines and the ordinary tools of living. No amount of reading can take the place of having grown up with certain memes and tools knowing that they are the essential ideas and tools of life (for you in your era)**.

*I love the show Mythbusters, but one of the things that irritates me about that show is when they take on stories about past technologies ("could Medieval people have built a catapult from a tree that would hurl a man over a city wall?"); they always assume that if people living hundreds of years ago could do it, then two model-builders and a roboticist should be able to do it (in a week) easily. This ignores the reality that past craftsmen would be better with the tools and materials of their own time than we future people are (and would have more manpower and more time to devote to the project, too). Coming later in the timeline doesn't make you superior at all things, only superior at your own things. We're better with plastics. They were no doubt better with wood.

**You're not likely to think of this parenthetical; in fact, you're more likely to think that the customs and tools you grew up with are the "right" ones, and anything that comes to replace them must be wicked and wrong and dangerous. That's just human nature.

So even if you could go to 1499, you couldn't be a person who grew up in the 1480s.

I've been thinking about this lately: my place in time. I was born in 1975 and I'm 35 now. My life, like all our lives, is a window of consciousness during which I get to witness and participate in a fragment of human history. Before 1975 I did not exist. After the as yet unknown date of my death I will not exist. But for now I can learn of past things, experience present things, and imagine future things.

I know enough about the past to know I missed a lot, including some things that I wish I could have experienced. For example, it would be pretty amazing to be a part of the generation who lived without television and then lived with it. The rest of us can't have that experience. We can't compare the world of flashing talking screens with the world that lacked that stimulation. Or the world before cars. Being among those who lived a while without automobiles and then saw them arrive would be really interesting. But we cannot be people of other times. The only thing we can do is read stories and novels written in the past by people of those eras and try to get inside their minds.

I grew up in a world where telephones were assigned to households, weighed pounds, were leased from the phone company, and were decidedly located at one place in the house. A ringing phone was a (loud) question mark -- there was no way of knowing who was calling. And if you pulled a seven-digit number from your prodigious mental catalog of numbers and made a phone call (pressing or turning every number, for autodial did not yet exist), you might get a busy signal, because there was no call waiting, and you might just hear it ring and ring and ring, because very few people had answering machines.

Part of my window on human existence has been watching the meaning of "phone" change from a big dumb clumsy box assigned to a household to a clever little gadget assigned to a person. People born in the past 10 years or so have witnessed a very different window. For them, a phone was "a thing they shared" only briefly, only in the embarrassing stage of non-personhood at the very start of their lives. To them, you own a phone because you are a real person who real people would want to talk to and have a relationship with. The phone is a part of the self, the part of the self that connects you to everyone else.

You see where I'm going with this: it's not like the technologies change and we stay the same. We change with them. The kind of people we are and how we see the world changes as the objects change, and as what they mean to us changes. So even if you could travel back in time, you could never be "of" the destination you've traveled to. You would be as useless with past technologies as future ones.

Future ones. And that is the thing, isn't it? We all are time-travelers. We just travel in a way so ordinary we choose not to think of it as time travel. But I've been to 1980 and 1988 and 1996 and 2003 and today. Sure I've only known those times from my narrow and shallow near-point in space-time, but what could any of us ever know, even with a TARDIS, but the tiny plot of 1499 we happened to land in? The real world experience is fundamentally the same as the fantasy, except that we only travel forward in time, and only very slowly.

As we move forward in time, we encounter different worlds and different people, people who couldn't have have existed in previous eras and maybe can never exist again. And there are a few ways to explore: we can (1) compare everything we encounter to the world we grew up with and reject and attack and refuse everything new, we can (2) embrace the new and delight in it, even though we know it will never be native to us, not native as it is to the younger ones of this newer time, for whom it is as it has always been, or (3) we can do a bit of both.***

***I don't mean to get political, but obviously there's a correlation between these attitudes (as applied not just to technology but to people) and the categories "conservative," "liberal," and the mixed bag of "independent," "moderate," and "not interested" that comes from doing a bit of both.

Whatever we choose, the fact remains: by the time we are old, we are people out of time.

A person who grew up in the 1930s and decided that the culture and technology of that period was the "right" way has been getting further from "right" every day of his life. The change may be slow, but that doesn't affect the mind's ability to hold the two eras side-by-side and determine that every difference is a defect. To this person, the past is a haven of perfection, lost. The present is a hell of ignorance and stupidity (for the newer people don't know all the "important" things -- the things that were important in the 1930s). He glows with superiority, but still it is an unhappy end.

A person who grew up in the 1930s and decided that new things are neat, if alien, and he's interested, is a time-traveler too, but a happier kind. He is still a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by alien customs and foreign ways, but he gamely tries and tries out things, tasting new foods, speaking new words, employing new tools, puzzling over new entertainments. It's little different from a permanent vacation in 1499 -- would you make the best of it?

And I suggest that this is a conscious choice we make. And I suggest that one of these two options is better than the other. I suggest that no one can, by force of will, or force of fear, or force of repulsion, stop history, and so no one should try. I suggest that if we're all strapped to the time machine anyway, it is better to be a curious and open-hearted traveler than an ignorant and enfeebled alien with fantasies of superiority.

I say, where's this world going? Who knows. But I'm along for the ride.

My Sexy Thought Experiment

2010-09-22T21:52:00.001-04:00

My last post about the U of NM controversy was reposted to The Rumpus, and has gotten a good amount of attention and comments -- both for and against my argument.

The back and forth is healthy, I think, and in one case even led me to revise a portion of my argument. The best discussions are those that lead to change, and change in the direction of greater truth and fairness is always welcome.

But reading everyone's speculations about what happened and their opinions about what is the morally acceptable response has got my mind wandering off onto a thought experiment...

WHAT IF instead of a woman working as a phone dominatrix, the professor at the center of this controversy were simply a gay man, and very out about it?

I believe this is an apt comparison because in both cases the behavior is sexual, legal, and disapproved of by some.

What if the accusations claimed that this professor was talking about his homosexuality in the classroom?

What if the accusations claimed that this professor had taken a paying position at a sexy-minded organization for gay men?

What if the accusations claimed that this professor was posing with one or two male graduate students for that organization's website in ways that simulated sexual contact?

What if the accusations claimed that this professor's students had complained about him talking in class about being gay?

What if the accusations claimed that this professor had a student who felt "pressured" to be gay too, and who had, as a result, experimented with gay sex, only to decide afterwards that he did not like it, and that this student in particular was making complaints?

What if, after these accusations were brought, the gay professor apologized, had the photos taken down from the website, and ceased all contact with that organization for gay men?

What if, after the professor took those actions, members of his department insisted on punishing him further?

What if the university, perceiving that the department was attempting to punish this professor further, determined that this could lead to them being sued, and intervened to stop the department from doing so?

What if members of that department, angry to be stymied in their quest to punish the professor further, quit in protest, and sued the university?

Now, to me, the most unjust part of the above scenario is that the professor had to quit his paying position with the organization for gay men. It seems to me that it should be his right.

In this scenario, it is probably best that the photos simulating sex with students be taken down, to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

Looked at through this lens, it seems pretty small-minded and petty for any students to complain, and it seems appalling that the department would seek to punish the gay professor simply for being open and out about his sexuality, and taking a paying position that exploited that part of his private life.

Looked at this way, it seems likely that the student who experimented is not a reliable source, and has personal emotional reasons to lash out and accuse.

When the story is laid out like this, it's pretty clear that the university had to stop the department before they did something discriminatory -- something that could get them and the entire university sued.

I think the vast difference of opinion in this case has a lot to do with how we view someone who works as a phone dominatrix: if we view her as a person, a human being, who lives her life just a little different from average, but whose lifestyle is perfectly fine and acceptable and her own business, then we probably conclude that she should not have posed with the students, but her apology and her taking down the pictures is certainly an adequate remedy to the situation. If, on the other hand, we view her as some sort of inhuman, immoral abomination who is, by virtue of existing, a danger to others... well, if we view her that way we are being prejudiced and ignorant, every bit as much as if we were saying it about a gay man.

The Scarlet "SW" for "Sex Worker"

2010-09-17T21:02:00.014-04:00

I first heard about the U of New Mexico controversy via facebook, when Joy Harjo left a status update reporting that she'd had to quit her job because the university was preventing her from protecting her students from sexual harassment. Based on just that description, I was sympathetic.

Based on the description in The Chronicle of Higher Education (which Harjo also posted on Facebook and commented upon fairly neutrally: "here's some background") I am not.

The crux of the matter is not that one faculty member, Lisa Chavez, took on side-work as a phone dominatrix and that this work put her into association with her students in ways that do not positively support the ideal student-professor relationship -- that much was admitted by Chavez, and, as the Chronicle says, she "quickly quit the phone-sex job, admitted to a serious lapse of judgment, and was not found by the university's administration to have violated any law or policy."

No, the crux of the matter is that afterwards, other faculty in the English department went on a witch hunt. And "witch hunt" is really the phrase for it, with more-than-average appropriateness: just as Medieval women who did not sufficiently conform to contemporary ideas of womanliness were pursued without reason, taunted, tortured, and deprived of their lives, some at the U of New Mexico want to pursue Chavez without reason, shame her, torment her, and deprive her of her job.

Because despite her stopping, apologizing, and being cleared of wrongdoing, others from her department have quit and sued the university, angry to be denied the right to "punish" Chavez themselves by faculty panel. The fact that they believe she should be punished when she's been cleared of any wrongdoing is irrelevant to them. They are seeing this situation through their own moral filter, and they are so upset that others don't share that filtered vision, and so convinced that their vision is the correct one, they're fighting well beyond the point of absurdity -- it's as much as madness.

I'm not going to boil this down to a simple fight between 2nd and 3rd wave feminism, or sex-positive feminism vs. anti-porn feminism, because, even though both dichotomies apply, what gets me more is the attitude (especially among those who have quit the department or are suing) that Chavez, because she has done this thing, is now somehow permanently tainted, that her admitting she made a mistake and quitting the side-work isn't enough, that she must be dragged through a ritual whose only use would be to try to shame and humiliate her and then possibly oust her from the department.

It goes beyond "Biblical": I mean, the Bible talks about forgiveness too. But those are the later parts. Bronze Age desert dwellers would certainly recognize what Harjo and Warner and the others want to do: they want to purge by fire what they perceive as an uncleanness in their community. They want to wash their hands in Chavez's metaphorical blood.

I remind anyone who reads this that Chavez "was not found by the university's administration to have violated any law or policy." That sentence should read to you, if you value a just society of rules and laws, as a closed case. There are those, though, whose sense of "morality" obeys no rule or law: it is a creature capable of redefining "justice" to match its repulsion for the "other," and its need for hierarchy and revenge.

The people in the U of New Mexico English department who took this witch hunt upon themselves actually left naughty photos of their colleague on their department chair's desk with a note suggesting the pictures were from "Appalled Parents." This crass maneuver, designed to shock their chair into taking acting against Chavez, reveals a lot about their way of thinking.

First, it reveals that they see their students as children. This is an unfortunate way to see undergraduate students but a ridiculous way to see graduate students, who, especially in a creative writing program, are probably closer to 30 than 20, on average.

More importantly, though, their goal was to raise the specter of the disapproving authority. Parents are the persons between us and whom (rightly) lie the most sexual taboos and barriers, the most crushing moral judgments; parents are the people who can, with a word, return us to uncomprehending children twisting in the throes of guilt and shame, and make us feel those emotions with the intensity of childhood, when our yet-undeveloped brains couldn't put feelings or events into perspective or context.

With that action and those two words they revealed that they want the others around them to get all a little bit more Lord of the Flies -- only with more slut-shaming. They would prefer if everyone stopped thinking about inconvenient facts like, no university law or policy was violated, and started looking at emotionally incendiary pictures with their child- (if not their lizard-) brains.

It is not the role of universities (or creative writing programs) to degrade adults into judgmental shame-mongers who care not for the letter of the law. In fact, almost all university missions include expanding student empathy and acceptance of differences, and of respecting codes of ethics be they law or rules against plagiarism. But the goal with this little picture-leaving move was to get people to shut down the higher reasoning centers and "other" her into something "dirty" that must be hidden from mom and dad.

Again, there is no law or even a rule against what Chavez did. Her actions merely complicated the student-professor relationship -- hardly an unprecedented consequence in the world of creative writing graduate programs, where everyone's an adult and people get very close by virtue of the work they're doing. Among us there are many male professors who are sleeping with their female students -- an infraction far worse than anything Chavez did, one that actually does violate most universities' rules of conduct (while Chavez violated none). Those rule-breaking men are often reprimanded, but rarely are they dragged through the mud, or fired, for what they do or did. They are certainly never saddled with a label as loaded as "prostitute."

What's happening to Chavez not only shows the bias against women in this position, but against sex work -- even completely legal phone dominatrixing, which is essentially a kind of voice-only interactive performance. Her colleagues are characterizing her (wrongly) as a prostitute. This also tells us a lot about their frame of mind: to them, anyone who profits from something vaguely sexual is clearly an exploiter, a victimizer (of their grad school "children"), and they must be allowed to "protect" the students from this person -- meanwhile, any woman who uses men's desires to make a few bucks after work (even if it's just voice work over the phone) is a prostitute.

Not, she used sex work to make a few bucks. No: she is a prostitute.

It's the label-of-being as opposed to the describer-of-doing. The way our world (mis-)sees it, a man can be a fireman for 40 years, and when he quits, he's not a fireman anymore. But if a woman "sells it" once, she is a whore. It becomes what she is. It's the worst kind of sexism. It's also common, and runs deep. Chavez never performed a sex act for money -- her colleagues are just flat wrong to use that phrase -- but because they are making this mistake, using this label, they are invoking the cultural biases that surround it.

And this is why, I believe, some in the U of New Mexico English department have lost their minds. They have ceased to see Chavez as a person -- with whom you reason, from whom you accept apologies and make peace. They now see her as a beast: an unclean danger to the innocent who must be destroyed lest this imagined corruption spread. The basis for this view is sexism, but not the simple kind: it's a complex built of the anti-woman attitudes that make some want to label and objectify and destroy a woman, just because they don't like her attitudes towards sex and sexuality; attitudes that make them want to drag her before an assembly of disapproving peers to have them yell "shame, shame!" like the red-clad girls in The Handmaid's Tale; attitudes that make them want to sew a scarlet "SW" for "sex worker" on the lapel of a woman who dared earn money dominating men on the phone.

I use the literary references for a reason. This is an English department we're talking about. They study history and culture and society and psychology, they exercise empathy daily just to understand what they read, they live in the world of perspective and points of view. They should be able to see beyond their own. They should know better.

Edit/Added: This essay has been re-posted (with a few very minor edits) at The Rumpus.

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun

2010-08-11T14:58:00.010-04:00

I have something rather scandalous to admit: I don't like Zora Neale Hurston. My dislike is twofold: I don't like the body of work the woman left, and I don't like the woman.

This is pretty terrible, because I am a Florida woman writer, and there is no Florida woman writer better known and more respected than Zora Neale Hurston. But everything I've ever read by her includes very meticulous phonetic dialect, and I absolutely despise reading things written that way.

Now I recognize that Hurston was "better at it" than, say, Harriet Beecher Stowe, that she studied the way people really did speak with academic thoroughness (and credentials), that she was no Stephen Foster, that she recreated spoken language with respect and care, not racist derision or in an attempt to caricature. But for me it doesn't matter. Books written in dialect make me want to tear my eyes out.

When words are misspelled in writing the effect created in the reader's mind is the opposite of the writer's intent: the characters are almost certainly not speaking slowly and haltingly, yet the reader hears it this way in her mind because the words take longer to read and are misspelled. In other words, by trying to be more true, the author creates an impression that is false. It's like recording people's real-life lunchtime conversations and then including the transcriptions in a book. You might be going for "real! lively! true! immediate!" but the effect is almost certainly going to be repetitious and distant and fake-sounding. Art is a strange world: photographs sometimes lie, photoshop sometimes tells the truth.

I'm sad to report that I'm completely in the mainstream with these opinions, at least when it comes to the opinions of writers. Writers today don't use dialect. We see it as an ill-conceived fashion from an earlier age, like bustles: uncomfortable and regrettable. Probably the best living writer who even comes close is Tim Gautreaux, and most others don't even try to do what he does, which is to just slightly change maybe just one word's spelling in a sentence, control word choice and rhythm, or use a repeating phrase to give the "impression of an accent." It makes the characters seem to be talking very quickly and casually and with a bit of a lilt. It is not anthropologically accurate, but it creates the right effect (and it is insanely difficult to do!).

So while Their Eyes Were Watching God is enjoyable (it's an uneven book -- poetic and literary at the start, then a sensational page-turner until nearly the end -- tho I enjoyed its turn from poetry to drama and back again), every time a character opens his or her mouth and starts to speak, I wish I weren't there.

Then there's Hurston herself. I knew much less about her before I watched Jump at the Sun. I basically knew that she was known for writing columns with reactionary politics and was pro-segregation. I know now that that's a pretty simplistic take on a very complex person.

I met Kristy Andersen, the writer-producer of Jump at the Sun, at a Creative Capital workshop, and she was generous enough to hand out copies of the DVD to anyone who wanted one. (The documentary originally appeared on PBS as part of its American Masters series.) I will admit I put off watching it for months, mainly because I've never had much of a taste for Hurston. What a mistake. A person doesn't have to be likable to be fascinating, and a documentary's subject doesn't have to be likable for the film to be compelling, and this is one of the most fascinating and compelling biographies I've ever seen.

And Hurston is not the villain I previously believed: she was certainly on the wrong side of history when it came to school integration (she opposed it) and black-white relations (she signed letters to her white patron, "your favorite pickaninny"), but she had her reasons, and like all people, she lived in the world she was born to and she did the best she could -- and in the end she lived an amazing life. She suffered greatly when the world turned past her time, and she was punished for the opinions she held during her lifetime. Her life was tumultuous and exciting. Her life is probably the greatest story she ever wrote.

Except that, within this documentary, it's Andersen who got to write this amazing real-life character, with the help of a truly impressive all-star cast of interviewees (including Alice Walker and Henry Louis Gates Jr., among others), who put Hurston into the perspective of her own time and of ours. More than anything, I see Hurston now as a person who grew up a good way in a bad world, and as a result seemed hard-wired to believe that the cure for the bad world lie in the way she grew up; she could see no other valid way.

I think this is true of a lot of writers: they're sure of their world-view -- so sure they can recreate it in words and convince people it IS the world. Hurston was certainly a self-interested person, stubborn, very funny and charming but also quick to offend. It was her way or the highway. It seems almost beside the point that her world-view happened to include politics and aesthetics that have no place in the 21st Century.

But then again, it's not. What if America still had segregated schools and segregated towns? Even assuming that they were genuinely "separate but equal," the segregation itself would change the kind of country this is. The US is by no means a perfect country, but I personally place a great moral value on the fact that we do not officially segregate ourselves in any way. Paving the way to the future always means cutting a path through long-entrenched bias -- just look at what's happening with same-sex marriage today! -- Hurston didn't like that process. It's a process that brings out the ugliest people in a society, sets them square in the face of the best souls, and has those twisted, hideous people spew their venom (and worse!) with spitting breaths. We ought to all be above that. Unfortunately, those in love with the past want to make us pay them for the better future we hope to make. Hurston was ambivalent towards the goal and disapproved of the price. I disagree with the positions Hurston took, but I can better see why she felt that way.

The documentary also includes a lot of film that Hurston shot herself of church meetings and children playing -- it makes a very interesting window into the past, but it also lets you, almost literally (since Hurston was usually running the camera) see the world through her eyes, see what she saw, how she saw it. It's a different world, but it's the world we came from. And her story, Zora Neale Hurston's story, is one of the best ever told. Kudos to Kristy Andersen for telling it so well!!

PS: I highly recommend this documentary -- it is entertaining and fascinating, a real masterpiece! You can buy it, rent it, or go to a screening.

EDIT/ADDED: If you want to show Jump at the Sun in an educational environment, contact California Newsreel (www.newsreel.org).

The View of Humanity from the iPhone Queue

2010-07-24T15:47:00.004-04:00

About 2-3 weeks ago, I decided to get a new iPhone. The iPhone4 caters to wishes that were previously whims: it has a forward-facing camera that lets you make video calls and take self-portraits and (most importantly) use your phone as a compact mirror. ;) It multi-tasks, it's faster, it's leaner, lasts longer, and it's both easy and fun to use. But getting one is not easy and not fun, it's not fast, and it doesn't cater to your whims. I ordered one the day I wanted one, and about 20 days later got an email saying I had 24 hours to go pick it up, or they'd sell it to someone else. Lots of other people got the same email, which means lots of other people also showed up at the Apple Store within that 24 hour window to pick up their new phones too. So we all had to wait in the Apple Queue.

Americans hate waiting in line. We associate waiting in line with our former foes of "The Evil Empire," those wicked and wretched puppy-killing godless communists of the USSR. ~~Americans want to feel special~~ -- Americans feel special; the special person should not have to wait in line with everyone else (who, by virtue of not being "me" are not in fact special at all!). Waiting in line is like exposing yourself in public, like sitting caught in a public stocks. Everyone knows if you could get out of the line, you would. You are trapped. And worse, you need: you are incomplete. You want: you are weak.

Even our home-contrived American religions emphasize the "personal relationship with God": you are not a member of God's flock, not a singer in the chorus of his praise. No. You are his buddy. His pal. His confidant. You and God take long walks on the beach together, just the two of you. He's concerned about the little things that bother you. He helps you win football games. He's always on your side. He wants you to do well in real estate. He wants to bump you to the front of the line.

Years ago theme parks started letting people jump the queue in exchange for a more expensive ticket. This of course made the regular ticket even less valuable, since given a finite number of ride-seats and an absolute number of park guests, the person with the regular ticket is now waiting longer than he would have before, while the person with the more expensive ticket hops right on. At least, that's how it worked at first. This system has been going for a while, so anyone who can afford the better ticket gets it: now the special people have to wait in line with each other. (The people with the poorer tickets are just as screwed as before.) Lines can function by more than one method, and there is no doubt that the first-come first-served model is the fairest of them all.

At the Apple Store, we were surrounded by perhaps 20 people in line, and all of them, without exception, were complaining. A few were complaining good-naturedly, but most were complaining with real indignation. One man of about 50 and of pricy personality-free golfwear argued for several minutes with the Apple employee before he would even get in the line. As he argued kept half-glancing over at it, not able to make full eye contact, as though he were disgusted, as though his mind could not possibly conceive of himself tossed in with such a bovine mass as we. When finally convinced that he could not pick up his new iPhone without waiting in line first, he stood with us others and started saying, "well this is just ridiculous." "I can't believe this." "They should have more people working," (there was an unbelievable number of people working at breakneck pace). "Apple needs to get its act together." Meanwhile, the girl beside him was ranting into her phone to someone (at 4 times the volume she would have spoken to a person standing beside her) much the same thing. It turned out she was there to buy a new power cord and did not have to wait in line at all. She was only waiting because she saw a line and got in it. And then started to complain. The guy took extreme satisfaction in her leaving and letting him move ahead. He actually smiled.

It's experiences like this that really make me wonder about my fellow man. Are we so spoiled, so catered-to, so above inconvenience that we can't even deal with waiting, not even if it means buying a cutting-edge gadget that does everything but wipe your ass for you for $200? Today I used my iPhone to make a video, edit it (on an iMovie app), add music, and email it to my landlord (to show her the paint job we did on her kitchen). The entire process was complete in less than 2 minutes. Gadgets that can do this are not yet common as candy-corn and purchasable on a whim at your nearest 7-11. Someday, sure, but not yet. Right now it's kind of special. So put on those patience-pants your momma knitted for you when you were six and relax.

On the other hand, what type of person is most prone to want a gadget like an iPhone? Perhaps the ride from eager to impatient is a short one. I found myself very eager to get my new phone. But I didn't let that slip into some ugly sense of angry entitlement. The way my fellow customers were barking (really, looking down their noses and sneering, and barking) at the employees was just shameful. They seemed to feel that they were speaking to people beneath regard. One guy yelled at an employee because he couldn't find the "Store" button on the Apple website. He acted like it was somehow her fault. He repeated, "and I'M really TECH-SAVVY!!" several times, as evidence, I suppose, for how his not finding the "Store" button was her fault and not his. I would like you to click here and tell me if you have trouble finding the "Store" button.

In the end, we did actually have trouble getting our phones set up: Brian's was defective and had to be brought back to the store and exchanged (which they did quickly and happily). I'm honestly glad that if there was a bum iPhone in the batch, we got it, because some of those other people would have turned red, pulled down their pants, and crapped all over the floor while screeching and crying.

I really, really love technology, but even I worry that somehow technology is at least in part to blame for the un-maturing and devolving of people from reasonable persons with a concept of their place in the universe and respect for others into irrationally egomaniacal and self-obsessed oversized children incapable of seeing past the needs of their own assholes or understanding anything from another's point of view. People need to be nice. Where's the app for that?

Crazy-good art by Judith Berk King

2010-07-10T13:32:00.004-04:00

This week I went up to Palm Beach State College and saw a few pieces by Judith Berk King. Some of the pieces are 2-D wall hangings and some were 3-D sculpture. I liked the 2-D pieces too, but in hindsight I was really taken by the sculpture more than anything. I've been thinking about why that is, and I think it's that the 2-D pieces featured (mainly) these organic shapes in very inorganic frameworks, some of which were impossible, and while they were interesting, my mind is always drawn narrative and character, and the sculptures were more likely to include little people and animals and to imply a story, and I just absolutely love that. My favorite of the 2-D pieces was definitely "Fate":

Which is strange, because this piece (unlike most of the others) doesn't even have very many colors in it, and I am usually a sucker for brightly colored festival-like images. But then I realized that what got me about this one was the squiggly lines, which I interpreted as being drawn (as opposed to being a 2-D depiction of 3-D wires in a box) and so, seeing them as drawn, I saw the hand that drew them, and I liked the impossibility of a hand drawing lines in air: I liked the narrative and the character -- again, I really think this is what it comes back to for me.

Which is why I believe King's sculptures just blew me away. I took video of them instead of still pictures, because with sculpture I always feel that movement is necessary. This piece, called Last Iceberg/Ship of Fools, was probably my favorite:

There's so much to love here. I mean, first of all, it's just beautiful. The texture of the clay made to look like wood and the smooth iceberg are gorgeous. And I really like that the little people are made of the same "wood" as the boat: they have "rude mechanicals" aspect that is perfect for the idea of this piece. But what I love most of all is that they're pointing at each other: the blame. It's perfect. It's narrative and character and it brings me into the story of this world.

This piece, called Adam and Eve/This Way!, is awesome for similar reasons.

You have the story of Adam and Eve arriving on this great wooden space ship, standing side-by-side, fig leaves in place, and they're both pointing in different directions: "This way!" The premise and impending conflict implied are fantastic, and it sends my mind spinning and imagining the story: and laughing. Like all good stories, the Ship of Fools and Adam and Eve both are "true" in that our experience of people really is that way: at the profoundest beginnings and endings of things, people are still people, still full of faults and stubbornness and stupidity. I look at these pieces and I say, YES.

I really appreciated the humor. Sometimes you see truths about humanity presented in a sad way, or a scolding way, and of course it's appropriate. But the humor, I think, when appropriate, builds a connection between the artist and the audience, and better empowers the audience to feel that something can be done: all hope is not lost. I thought this bit on Temptation was one of the funnier pieces at the showing:

Talk about connecting with the audience!! :)

Some of the pieces were ecological in subject and featured animals. This one, Oil Slick, I'm showing a still of because the video didn't come out well, but it's amazing from every angle:

There's no humor here and there shouldn't be. There is beauty, and there is tragedy.

With this one, too, there's a more serious tone, but again, the beauty of the piece is astonishing, the detail... in the video try to get a sense of the texture and look at how it all comes together as a piece to ask the question about "balance":

So, for me, I realized the most affecting pieces always have a narrative. That is undoubtedly in large part because I'm a writer and my mind revolves around story. But it occurs to me that all people love story -- for most of us, it's how we communicate, how we understand the world. I thought of MC Escher's drawings, those fantastic experiments in perspective, and how he always included some little people (even when they were mechanical-looking) so you could get yourself into the picture and really GET how odd the perspective is, really FEEL how impossible. Without the people, you can't get into them as well. Or, at least, I can't. :) I think at least for me, art is an exercise in empathy, and I want to connect with something that I can understand as having a life and a story, even if it is made of clay made to look like wood, wonderful impossible things.

If you have the chance to go up and see this exhibit, I hope you will. Also, if you're a buyer, some of the pieces are for sale, so you could take one or two of these home with you. Her work will be there until September. It's well worth the drive!

On Doctor Who, and Coupling

2010-07-03T11:30:00.000-04:00

Like many people wowed by David Tennant as the Doctor, I had trouble imagining Matt Smith living up the role; like many people impressed by what Russell Davies did with Doctor Who, I trembled when Stephen Moffat took over the show. But (spoiler alert!) now that the 5th season is over, I want to proclaim it extremely good.

First, I think they took a daring chance by letting certain things make no sense throughout the season, until the last episode pulls it together. It was a little confusing, and I saw people online complaining that the editing was bad or that they'd slapped this or that episode together. Personally I reserved judgment, because unlike shows like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who has always come through in the end, but the unexplained logic-skips did bother me, I will admit.

In my opinion the risk paid off, because the final episode explains not only how the doctor can be in two places at once, but also why Amy is always bugging out her eyes when she's alone and acting like she hears things never addressed within the individual episode. They also waited until the last episode to address that fact that Amy, as we first encounter her, comes off as a gothic fiction: a little girl living alone in a giant house with no one -- the relatives she does have don't live with her. Weird.

But then there's the whole marriage thing. Donna was introduced to the series as the "Runaway Bride," and at the start of this season, marriage was thrust in the narrative's course as a sort of joy-killing doomstacle: the white wedding dress hanging in Amy's closet; the rude, knowing, domineering River Song, who seems to be the Doctor's wife -- tho he doesn't know her. And I will admit I share this attitude towards marriage: I got married once, when I was young, and I didn't like it. I've always felt like marriage is a little doomy: even in literature, marriage ends happy stories with the finality of a funeral.

But I've noticed in recent years that younger people have a pretty different attitude towards marriage. I've had a lot of married students, and they're young and they're not having kids. They do exciting things, like start businesses together, or travel around the world. They even take classes together: I've had married couples as students. It always strikes me as little odd when young, free, happy people get married. It seems to me that they're ruining everything for themselves. But frankly, I think I'm wrong.

Marriage is, like all things, defined by how you see it. And if we see it as a working partnership instead of a burdensome bond, why can't it be the beginning, and not the end? We have no body of literature where happy stories begin with a wedding, but perhaps someday we will. And so Doctor Who, which was always, under Davies, very ahead-of-the-pack in its portrayal of race and sexuality, is now, under the guidance of the author of "Coupling" (of course), rewriting the portrayal of marriage.

Amy and Rory get married, and that marriage is the rebirth of the Doctor... it comes at the end of the story, and season, but it's also the start of something else. When it's "time to say goodbye," it's not time to say goodbye to adventure and danger, but time to say goodbye to the wedding guests so the happy couple can all head off back into the maw of frolic, which is what this TV show is about. Amy, who has, since her introduction as a kiss-o-gram, been portrayed as having a fully turned-on and heartily healthy sex drive, propositions the Doctor on the way in the door -- implying that very little (if anything) has changed.

It would be nice if we lived in a world where marriages are assumed to be freeing, instead of restricting, but we don't: and I for one followed the "argument" of this season like an ideal audience who needs (wants?) to be persuaded that marriage, tho it has meant doom and death in the past, no longer does -- not, at least, in this forward-marching futuristic kid's (future-adult's) world. I'm convinced. And now I'm eager to see what craziness the marrieds get into for season 6. And how the Doctor ends up with River Song, if that's where it's going. Doctor Who meets Coupling. Who expected less? Now if they can just stop having him say, "Geronimo."

Worst Movie Ever

2010-06-28T14:52:00.004-04:00

The other night I caught SWITCH (1991) on HBO (by Blake Edwards, writer/producer of Victor/Victoria, among others), and I thought at first I might enjoy it. The idea is that a womanizer is murdered and comes back as a hot woman who has been tasked (by a dual-sexed "God" -- never seen, just a man's and woman's voice finishing each other's sentences like an old married couple) to find ONE woman in the world who could love the man she used to be. The funny part is that no matter how far and wide s/he looks every woman who's ever met him has nothing but obscenities for him. Also, the only person that knows that s/he is the deceased dickhead is the woman who murdered him. (Who will subsequently go on to frame him/er for the murder).

At first I thought this might be a cute and surprisingly progressive gender-bender from 1991. I could not have been more wrong. I entered the movie where s/he was seducing a lesbian CEO to get her company's advertising account. I thought: here's a situation that's got some interesting possibilities! For example, a man in a woman's body, especially a misogynistic one, would find himself completely unprepared for, and bad at, lesbian sex. But even if it didn't get that far, a man, especially a misogynistic one, might find the interplay between women challenging. After all, women relate to one another differently from how they relate to men, or how men relate to each other. But no: the way this was handled was utterly without thought or interest. The lesbian CEO admired the hero/ine for "being a man," they were completely confused by who should "lead" when they go dancing at a lesbian club, and the relationship is portrayed as failing because they can't decide "who's the aggressor," as though a relationship without a man in it can't succeed without a one person "acting like" a man, and the other "acting like" a (submissive) woman. As for the sex? Oh, they had it, right away, but the movie skipped it almost entirely. Still, the CEO seemed strangely satisfied and kept coming back for more -- must be because she could sense that deep internal mannishness, and, of course, that's what she "really" wanted all along /sarcasm.

But wait, it gets worse: the hero/ine's best friend (from when s/he was a man) has sex with him/er while she is unconscious. She accuses him of date rape, but then gets pregnant, and so they get married. When she first gets pregnant, the date-rapist/husband says that he knows s/he can't REALLY be his old guy friend reincarnated as a hot woman, because his old guy friend would have had an abortion. This is followed by a sappy speech about how s/he has a precious life inside him/er and this is all God's plan.

THEN, the doctors tell him/er s/he has life-threatening medical issues. If s/he decides to keep the baby, s/he may die. S/he decides to go through with it, and dies in childbirth, with a big smile on his/er face. Remember that the man-woman-married-couple "God" said at least one woman had to love the guy for him/er to go to Heaven? Well, it's a girl. And apparently, upon its moment of birth, it "loved" him/er, which I guess is close enough to loving the dickish misogynist guy for the dual-sex "God."

Who raises the daughter? The date-rapist, of course. It's a happy ending.

In the end, the message of the movie seemed to be that it doesn't matter HOW you feel on the inside, if your outsides look female, you can only find happiness in the role of a heterosexual female; further, the movie argues that women who ARE lesbians are sad creatures who just REALLY need a man, and that relationships that don't use traditional gender roles can't even get off the ground. FURTHER, reproduction is the only real point to life, and if you die while trying to reproduce, you will die happy and fulfilled and go to heaven, and it's okay that a date-rapist is raising the child who killed you, because it's a man's prerogative to stick his penis into unprotected vag, and that just makes him more of a man, and therefore more desirable, in the end.

It may be the single most offensive movie I've ever seen -- at least in the genre of movies that are not actually trying to be offensive, which are actually trying to be heart-warming. It's almost hard to believe it was even made.

My Interview with a Furry

2010-06-16T09:06:00.002-04:00

This week The Rumpus is running an interview I did of a friend of mine who is not just a furry, but who makes a living making full-body fursuits for other furries.

Prior to interviewing her, I knew only vaguely about her furry-related adventures, and didn't think much about them. Frankly I have lots of friends into lots of things, plenty of them plenty weird. Really, the only friends who make me lift a suspicious eyebrow are the ones whose interests seem too conventional or conformist, or whose interests seem a reaction to the perceived judgments of others.

But when Stephen Elliott of the Rumpus sent out an email saying that he wanted to run 650-word interviews with ordinary people who are interesting, I thought of my friend: she's an "ordinary" person in the sense that if you met her you'd think, "there's a sharp, talented 20-something who does not flinch to give you her opinion!" And you'd never for a second guess that she likes to dress up like a lemur.

If I'm to trace back my awareness of the existence of furries, it would be to one of those MTV or HBO sex shows from the 90s, which featured an awkward young man who wants to have sex in what looked like a sports team's mascot outfit, and follows him as he makes a hookup at a furry convention. The focus was wholly on sex, and the whole thing seemed rather strange and sordid and sad. It made furries look like totally random but entirely harmless sex fiends.

When I sat down to interview my friend, I was reminded of that impression, and how far off it is from her: she goes by Kilcodo or Killy when she's among the furries, but I know her by a fairly ordinary name of the type you'd see an ode to in English Romantic Poetry. She's outgoing, energetic, and in a long-term committed relationship with a great guy who's getting a PhD in the social sciences. She's politically aware and outspoken, an advocate for liberal causes who loves to argue philosophy and moral and logical reasoning, an "out" atheist/humanist who makes her case with kindness and precision, and a really talented writer (as a writer is of course the primary way I know her).

In short, there is nothing about her that is strange, sordid, or sad, and her attitude towards sex is supremely healthy. So even though I'd never thought much about that side of her life, when we sat down to do the interview, I immediately said to myself, "well, Amy, clearly everything you know is very little, and everything you know is probably wrong." Her answers to my questions were fascinating -- so fascinating that I could not possibly cut them down to 650 words. I sent it to the Rumpus at full-length, and they agreed that this was worth running as a longer feature. Most people will probably think this interview is on an "odd topic," but I'm really proud of this interview. It goes into new and interesting territory, and it is real, and human, and valuable.

While we were doing the interview, she dressed up for me, and I just want to lay out my impressions. First, it's way less weird than people make it out. Frankly, a big plush cartoon-animal shaped toy will put a smile on anyone's face, and a big plush cartoon-animal shaped toy that is alive and jumps around and hugs you (or picks nits out of your hair) is about 1,000 times more fun than that. There's nothing sexual about this part of it: cartoons are cute, cute is fun, and fun is happy.

Second, when she was dressed as a lemur, I was possessed by the irresistible urge to pet her. She was soft and cuddly like a (giant) toy or a (giant) pet, and afterwards I thought how, even though I've known my friend for years, I don't touch her very often. Actually, I don't touch many people very often, and when I do, it's probably lightly, tentatively, so as not to offend. Maybe that's part of the reason I love my cats so much: they're the warm, loving, living things I can manhandle a little and shower with pet-pet affection. It was comforting for me, and I can only imagine it's comforting for her to be in a suit that makes other people break down their barriers and be more openly physically affectionate.

It also broke down barriers for her: she was jumping around, playing in my hair, doing things that she would normally not, and all while I just laughed my head off. The only thing she did that I objected to was hit me with her tail, and even that didn't bother me that much. Afterwards I thought: this must be very freeing for her, to be in this jolly outfit that makes it so you can get away with being more playful, and makes it so other people react really well to it, makes them more playful in return.

Lastly, it reminded me of a phase that I went through as a kid (a phase I think a lot of kids go through) when I acted like a dog. It drove my family crazy, but I ran around on my hands and knees barking and panting and begging and just all-around acting like a dog. I started thinking about how, as people, we are mammals, but we are mammals with a mind-bogglingly complex social structure. There are so many unspoken rules, small rituals, social expectations -- so many things to get right and so much that can go wrong -- that I think at a certain point we take comfort in the seeming simplicity of animal behavior. The way they communicate and behave seems so much more open and honest, so much less vexing and fraught, that to be for a short while like them is a relief.

I think that's part of the reason why most people like having pets, or cherish moments when we commune with wild animals in nature. If we let go of our culture-bound bullshit, we can communicate with them on their level very easily, and it's freeing. There are no mind games when you're hanging out with a dog. If a dog likes you, he doesn't hide it and try to send secret messages through his eyes or put a subtext into that last comment or heaven forbid try to "neg" you so you'll like him more -- a dog just jumps up and effing LIKES you and you know it. How does the song go: "if you want a friend, feed any animal."

Now these are just some cursory impressions I had after spending a few minutes with a friend in a fursuit. She has a far more in-depth assessment about what the furry culture is all about, focusing more on art and creativity, in the interview on the Rumpus. But from the point of view of a person who is not in this culture, I just have to say, once you spend a few minutes with someone in a fursuit, it's far less odd than you'd think it would be. I think it's like all things that seem strange at first: the more you know about it, the more normal and natural it comes to be. To me, especially, the "randomness" was erased when I realized that this does tap into some real human needs. And anything that makes people feel good and happy in a real, lasting way is valuable.

Outside of the House of the Barking Cat

2010-06-12T18:37:00.002-04:00

Just over a year ago, Brian and I moved into a house. It's the first time we've lived in a stand-alone single-family house, and we love it. We love the extra room, we love the yard full of singing birds and tropical foliage, and we love the little responsibilities that come along with it, the fact that we have to/get to "take care of things" in a far more meaningful way than you can in an apartment.

But the house came with one fairly unwelcome problem: stray and feral cats. Our first night sleeping here, we were woken up at 4am by howling -- there, right at our door, was a small black cat. He was looking in the window and howling his head off. He was skinny, little more than fur and bones. I decided right then and there I would feed him. By the time I got outside with some food, his "wife and two kids" had shown up too: all of them skinny and starving.

We observed maybe a dozen cats over the next month, coming into our yard. The attraction was not the food we put out, but the female, who was nursing, pregnant, and in-heat all at once. We ignored the others and focused on the family: I trapped the two kittens by leaving out a cat carrier. They went into it for a nap, and I closed the door and brought them in. The mother and father we lured into the porch with tuna and the cries of their children. The plan? Get them all fixed, made healthy, and adopted out.

By morning, Daddycat was gone: he'd busted out. Mommacat and the kittens were still here, though, and so we began the long process of getting them fixed, curing them of their parasites (they had every type of intestinal parasite the doctors tested for -- a huge part of the reason they were starving), making sure they were FIV-free, getting them their vaccinations, and finding them a home. It took about 4 months and about $500, but we did it. We adopted Mommacat (she is now our Romana), and found a great home for the kittens with a friend.

Meanwhile, the circus of the ferals went on outdoors: there was Daddycat, Hissycat, Black-and-white-kitty, Cat-that-looks-like-momma, and some infrequent visitors. We borrowed a hav-a-heart trap and started catching them one by one: first Cat-that-looks-like-momma, then Hissycat, then a kitten that wandered into our yard (we call her "Kitten," though she's all grown up now), Black-and-white-kitty disappeared (dead? moved? who knows?), and a Hissycat clone showed up, whom we dubbed Missycat. We caught her and discovered she'd already been fixed by someone, at some point: each time this cost us $50 and a few hours of bother. (Including the time with Missycat: they had to open her up to discover she was already fixed, and we had to pay for that.)

In addition to the money and time, I developed what I call a "cat-related stress disorder." My empathy for these animals is almost as intense as the empathy I feel for my actual indoor pets, but they live outside and are not friendly to humans -- there is little I can do to help them or protect them. They show up limping and bleeding and all I can do is put out food and water. They are swarmed by fleas and mosquitos and all I can do is put out food and water. They get sick and lay panting in the sun, and all I can do is... what feels like next to nothing: I put out food and water. When I do have some control over them -- when I catch them, get them fixed, and then decide when and where to re-release -- I feel the weight of my actions on their lives. I feel terrible for how helpless they are, for the anguish they experience. I have a small supply of xanax I keep for emergencies: panic attacks, things like that. In the past year I have only taken three, but all three were to get me through a cat-related stress/panic episode.

I know I'm doing the right thing, but I've encountered some weird attitudes along the way, not least of which is the feeling that "cat abortion" is somehow morally wrong. Even the receptionist at the vet's said, once, that she was uncomfortable with cat abortions because she's "kinda religious." I want to know what religion this is that sanctifies cat/animal life in the womb. Really. Because pro-choice as I am, I was always under the impression that people objected to HUMAN abortions based on the idea that HUMAN life was sacred even in the womb. And I really hope everyone who's "uncomfortable" with animal abortion doesn't eat eggs. Sarcasm aside, some people in this world are seriously confused about what they believe, and why they believe it.

I know I'm doing the right thing, not just for the cats but for the neighborhood. By catching and fixing them, I make sure they don't make more kittens, but it's more than that. If we were to "dispose" of them somehow, more animals would move into this territory and try to spread. Their being here keeps other populations of cats at bay. By feeding them, we've brought back the local birds. When we moved into this house, there were almost no birds. No birdsong greeted us when we went outside, just the sound of cars from the nearest main street. Now, a year later, the air is thick with birdsong and the birds themselves are everywhere. The cats prefer kibble to killing birds, and so our actions are helping with that, too.

But try to explain that to neighbors, who view feeding cats as akin to feeding rats. Try to explain that we're not just feeding them, we're also fixing them -- that we're solving the problem instead of ignoring it. You won't get much of a reception. To our neighbors the cats are to be ignored and left to die. This really hit home when a starving cat appeared in my driveway and begged for food -- then begged to be let into the house. She was clearly a pet, not a feral, and left to the wild outside world, she was near-death. She was covered in mud, barely had the strength to walk, and when you touched her you only felt bones. We nursed her back to health, and she is now Gladys, a wonderful pet who sleeps on our pillows beside our heads at night. But I found out that for weeks before I found her, my neighbor knew of her, and was ignoring her. "That cat looks like she was hit by a car or something," she said to me, more than once, her tone of voice implying that there's no point being nice to a cat that's hurt anyway. For the record, Gladys was never hit by anything -- she was just starving. But even if she were hurt, how is that a reason NOT to help?

Yesterday was a big day in the history of the House of the Barking Cat (as our house is known). The ever-elusive super-clever Daddycat finally fell for our trap. We got him fixed and released him. I feel like we've really come full circle: the first cat we encountered was the last we got fixed. And now there are no unfixed females to attract unfixed males; there are no unfixed males that will go wandering, risking their lives, getting into fights; there are four full-time cat residents keeping the wider population of ferals and strays away, and our yard is a haven for birds who have nothing to fear from the four cats who lay in the sun waiting for bowls of Publix-brand cat food. Indoors we now have four instead of two: Romana (nee Mommacat) and Gladys (nee Starvingcat) are happy additions to the family (along with our long-beloved babies Eliot and Wally).

Since I started doing this, I've gotten a variety of reactions from people, but especially the reaction "I think it's great what you're doing, but I could never do it." I just want everyone to know you can do it, and that, from where I'm sitting, at the end of the long labor of love, it's more than a little worth it. I suffered the cat-related anxiety and spent probably somewhere around $800 over the course of a year. But what if I hadn't? Then there would still be dozens of cats howling and fucking and birthing and dying in my yard -- who knows how many new kittens born to short, painful, noisy, messy lives. How could I enjoy my home if it were like that? Now, it's peaceful and orderly in a way that it most certainly was not a year ago. I would have paid $800 for a home improvement that brought me this much peace -- say a fence or something -- so why not do it to control the animals outside and create that peace? Do it so I hear birds singing at night instead of cats fucking?

And the truth is, if everyone just caught and fixed the few cats in their own backyards, there would be no more feral cats, in very short order. Treat cats like rats, and they'll multiply like rats. Treat them like what they are, abandoned pets who need human husbandry to control their populations and lead decent lives, and you can change everyone's situation for the better.

My First Book

2010-05-29T15:06:00.002-04:00

I made a book: I cut the paper by hand, did the layout in InDesign, made the illustrations using Photoshop, and sewed it all up with embroidery floss. Here are some photographs of the finished product:

The poems are a 5-poem series published in Center last year called The Floralia, and true, I don't write a lot of poetry, but that's all the more reason this 5-poem series is worth "be-booking." You can also view the book through issuu (hover over the center for the option to view in full screen!):

The online version mainly loses the "golden ratio": I cut the book by hand specifically to get those proportions, but there's no way (I know of) to customize the proportions on issuu.

I made 3 copies of my "first edition" and all three are claimed, but I am going to be making a 2nd edition of more than 3 -- probably between 6-15; if you're interested in buying a copy, just contact me and let me know!

Defining

2010-05-21T23:36:00.003-04:00

Artist noun: an especially ambitious failure expert possessing great powers of creativity and imagination.

When I consider all the artists I know, writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and on and on, I ask myself, "what do these people all have in common?"

They make stuff.

But to me, creativity can't be the core of the definition, because people who are not artists make stuff, too.

I have always, ever since I was a very small child, been in love with arts & crafts stores. I was 6 and my mother was knitting sweaters and crocheting blankets, and she would take me to this magical place full of paints and chalks and canvases and sculpting clay and inks and papers and my mind would spin with the possibilities.

But I saw a deep and meaningful line between "arts" and "crafts": the "arts" side of the store was full of blanks: empty canvasses, unmolded clay. The "crafts" side of the store was full of "kits" with full-color pictures showing you exactly what you were going to make.

I hated being told what to make.

When I was 8 I won an art contest in my school with a shoebox diorama of the Mesa Verde indians (based entirely on books, I'd never been within 1,500 miles of Mesa Verde) and I used the $20 prize to buy my first ever personally-owned (not school-owned) art supplies. I kept the shoebox diorama until I decided I could use its parts for a new art project. Then it was gone.

Artists never rest. Some artists are perfectionists, some are constantly moving on to the next thing, then the next. Some, like me, have a terrifying amnesia for what they've done before. The past barely exists for me, only the future, the next thing and the next, is real. Ask me what I've done, I'll have to get my CV out to remind me. Ask me what I'm about to do, I'll nail you down for hours.

Some artists, like my boyfriend, are fairly obsessed with the past. Elements of the past are the elements of his composition, and he makes them live eternally. But always he is moving on to the next and the next. No artist sits upon a made thing and says, "I am artist for once I made this."

Artists are ambitious. They might not be ambitious career-wise, they might not be early risers, they might not like to shmooze. But when it comes to advancing their art, artists will stop at nothing.

But the core of my definition is "failure expert." That's because I believe it is the most important thing.

To be imaginative is necessary, but not sufficient; lots of imaginative people don't even make stuff. They're just dreamers.
To be creative is necessary, but not sufficient; lots of people make things that are more craft than art.
To be ambitious is necessary, but not sufficient; lots of non-artists are ambitious too, but wanting money or sex or power is not an art (or if it is, it's a dark art -- an unholy cross of performance art and sorcery).
But to be willing to fail and fail and fail your entire life and never tire, to thrive on doing, and never give up, to hold up your failures as things of beauty, to see the value in those failures even if no one else can, to see that the route to success often lies through the minefield of a thousand failures, to go and let your soul be naked and to be unashamed, to become, in short, one who always practices and never perfects, a failure expert... this is necessary but not sufficient too.

If they are all necessary but not sufficient, why is this last the core of my definition? Because few people outside of artists are willing or able to become experts in something whose rewards are internal or intangible. The only other examples are religious prophets and madmen, but I repeat myself (rimshot).

Kidding aside, artists actually are very much like insane prophets. They try to bring the light of a Truth to the eyes of others. They want to change not your life but your living of it, they want to change not your mind but your soul, even if they don't believe you have one.

In the ancient world they blamed the muses, an idea artists still play with today: the idea that artists are conduits for a higher mind, possessed of a genius that is not their own, that, once it's passed, they can't even very well remember.

But the muses, if they existed, would be wise in whom they chose to speak through, and I think they would look for someone like I describe in my definition: "a particularly ambitious failure expert possessing great powers of creativity and imagination." That tolerance for failure, that willingness to try anything in the face of anything, that strength, is the most central and essential part of it all.

What is a "Book"?

2010-05-18T00:14:00.004-04:00

The question gets asked more and more: what is a book? People are asking it because of ereaders and people are asking it because of the increasing popularity of book arts. It's no minor question for a writer. I've never published a book, but I feel like I should put the phrase in scare quotes (I've never "published a book") and then follow it with the obvious yet incomprehensible truth that by the time I "would have" published a book what we consider a "book" will be pretty much irrelevant.

The body and soul of the book is being divided, it seems, with the book artists making much better use of the physicality of a book, and digital media, including ereaders and the internet, letting the ideas exist "free" (free of the page, free of the profits, free of even basic remuneration for the author's creative efforts...), and frankly I think most of this is wonderful: books as utilitarian object are a bit boring. Few books live up to the enraptured descriptions of the glories of reading a physical book ("the smell!" "the weight in your hands!" "the sensation of turning pages!"). The last time books were worthy of such emotion was back when they were rare: in the devotion of illuminated manuscripts or even the typographical play of Tristram Shandy. In recent history most books are just words, words, words.

Meanwhile book arts capture the emotions of being in contact with physical bookiness and heighten them, transform them into wonder. The only unmet desire I experienced when I recently visited the Jaffe Center for Book Arts was to have the words mean more. Book artists design and build gorgeous items, but too often fill them with language only one or two steps removed from "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet." It seems they don't want the words to distract people from the beauty of their design. But just as Greek Theater improved when they added an actor, just as movies improved when they added sound, books improve when they have something to say. Where has all the meaning gone?

The meaning has fallen into the same sorry singularity as the rest of us: our ideas exist, they are out there, and they are, just like us, constantly busy but never getting anything done; deprived of their physicality, they move faster and reproduce more, but their offspring are as likely to be twelve-assed mutants as anything else. "Books" can now be produced by copy-paste, which is fine, because what good is a "book" anyhow? How is it different or better than a website or blog, where you can link to all sorts of other things. And why should it be great to mash up other people's youtube videos, but stealing their lines is wrong?

The truth is, I'm writing stories that have never been written. No one has imagined the things I'm doing now. They are entirely new stories, fresh to the world, not just in their elements but in their basic conception. What's good about what I'm doing has nothing to do with my demographics or biography, and isn't based on gimmick or grotesqueries of style or abuse of the genre. What's valuable about my work is its pure invention. Where are my ideas to go?

Because ideas are the thing that's been devalued in all this. Defenders of the status quo will tell you there are "no new ideas" but that's simply not true. It reminds me of how every now and then you come across a quote from say the 1880s or so where someone argues that everything that can possibly be invented has been invented: we're done with new things! And you laugh because in hindsight it's obvious that the best was yet to come. To those who think there is nothing new under the sun, I say again: the best is yet to come.

So the book artists are doing amazing things with the physical form of the book, but the soul of the book is adrift. Today, common blogs have a better sense of their own identity than most short stories. At least blogs know what they are and where they belong and what people want from them, think of them, do with them. The same is true in book arts: the body-book expands in its certainty of itself as physical object. Will the future look like the past? Will books be rare and therefore valued, objects d'art above all, into whom someone has taken the time to inscribe truly valuable long-form ideas, complexities in prose, novels full of real developed characters and meaningful ideas? Or will language cease to be associated with the "book," which will settle in fully as a category of sculpture? And where will those long-form ideas go?

It is not comfortable to be split in two, caught in tension with no resolution in sight, but here we are. I will write in it.

Gone for the Green, Green Grass

2010-05-08T14:19:00.005-04:00

About a month ago, I went down my driveway to go to work, and I saw my neighbor had torn up his lawn. It wasn't just a part of the lawn, and it's not a small lawn: we're talking a half acre of land turned to naked dirt. Our neighbor has a lawn maintenance business, so I knew he'd done this himself, on purpose. But I was mystified as to what would bring a man to take such drastic measures. Had there been some toxic spill on his lawn that required draconian clean-up? Was he installing some massive new sprinkler system that meant digging up the whole plot? Turned out, he'd dug up his lawn because he had weeds. He'd decided it was easier to re-sod his entire property with fresh-farmed Bermuda grass than to try to get rid of those weeds. A few days later, his yard was (once again) a flat plane of green.

It no doubt annoys my neighbor, but my yard is ALL weeds, 100% pure natural Native Florida wild-growing groundlings that float in on the wind. My landlord pays our neighbor (the same one who tore out his own lawn) to come over once every couple of months and beat them back with a weed-wacker, but if he didn't, they would grow about a foot high. And stop there. They ain't bamboo.

Although we do have a stand of lovely bamboo in the front yard, which I love: it shades the house in evening and provides a little privacy. But our neighbor who takes care of the place, who de-turfs at the first happy dandelion, hates the bamboo. If it were up to him, our yard would look like his, complete with a sign warning:

Comical in its over-politeness (I picture a lab on his hind legs reading this over the rim of his glasses, a newspaper under one arm), but the message is clear: this is a household that cares about its lawn. Don't tread on this.

I will admit I feel a constant glare of disapproval coming from that house. This is a free country, and every family maintains its property the way it chooses, but one person's "au natural" is another person's "au neglect." One person's shady, privacy-granting bamboo is another person's nuisance.

It reminded me of a short (27 minute) documentary I'd watched recently, about grass. I met the filmmaker, Isaac Brown, at an artists' conference, and he generously handed out DVDs. Most of us are busy, and most of us are not looking for new things to be outraged about, but after watching Gimme Green, I definitely feel it's worth at least 27 minutes for us all to become aware of what our lawns (or our neighbors' lawns!) are up to.

I love the length, by the way. Compare that 27 minutes to a TED video, which is usually about 18 minutes, and those are just "person on a stage with slides" videos -- Gimme Green moves and travels, it gives us great "characters" and great visuals. It's perfect for the web. Go here to watch the full movie, but here is the trailer:

There's a fellow in the film who shows the film makers his yard: it's lovely. Lots of tall trees (probably ficus?) protecting a cool, shady ground where grass won't grow: a great place to sit and relax, a cool comfortable haven from the hot Florida sun. But then the man points out that he's being hassled by his neighbors and code enforcement. They want him to cut down his trees and lay squares of sod. It seems to run in the face not just of individuality, but of common sense: in Florida, where it is steamy and hot, a flat plane of green grass is a useless patch of work: you must mow it and maintain it and you will derive no joy from it. A cool shady grove is not just his choice, it's a wise choice.

But as the film's interviewee's frequently imply, that flat, useless product of pointless labor we call a "lawn" is a signifier about one's relationship with a god, or his neighbors, or the state of one's life or mind, and what it seems most to signify is "a nice, safe nothing": that there is nothing unique (and therefore nothing threatening) about the person or his mind, that his "god" is a mindless platitude (safe), that his concept of his neighbor is of nice, safe strangers, that his life and mind are nice, safe blanks, too terrified of a thought to do anything unexpected. The flat lawn is the blank slate of the subconscious, sitting in the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, made obvious through a ritual so accepted as necessary that people who live in desert places sacrifice their water to it.

I'm not going to sum up the film or give a blow-by-blow, but I do want to point out that the film primarily takes place in two places, Florida and Arizona, and that these two places are as different as can be. Florida has its droughts, but it is generally a wet and sunny place; things grow here. But when we learn that in Arizona (in the desert, where massive projects have already diverted all the water than can be diverted and it is running out) that households are pouring three times as much water onto the ground as they drink or use to flush the toilet just to have those plots of grass -- grass that has no business being in a desert at all, it smacks of the same madness that drove the Easter Island people to destroy themselves.

Hey, those Easter Islanders may have cut down every tree and destroyed their civilization, but look at that sweet lawn!

It seems to be an article of human nature that we will destroy ourselves for our totems. In one society that might mean a giant statue, but in ours it means (at least in part) a clean square of green.

This is the fourth in my series on Florida Artists, especially the ones I just met. Previous posts here and here and here. Cross-posted to Incertus.

Books in Future (by which I mean Now)

2010-04-10T11:58:00.002-04:00

I like books, but I am not one of these people who waxes poetical about the pleasures of holding a paper book in one's hands, the smell of it, and all that. For me, the content of the book is much more important than the physical presence.

But there are advantages to reading "on paper": dumb paper is incapable of telling you anything but the story you're reading. That means that the book you're reading will never try to distract you from the book you're reading.

When I read anything on my computer, I am distracted. I try not to be, but I have to remember to do an awful lot to avoid it. I have to turn off my email alerts (sound) and my twitter alerts (visual) and I have to keep from touching the bottom of the screen, to avoid seeing the pop-up menu, whose happy icons will remind me of X project on Photoshop and Y project on Dreamweaver and Z project on Word.

If I'm reading a book and I come across a reference that I wonder about (what's the singular of "castrati" again?), I generally file it away, and, if I still wonder about it when I'm finished reading, I'll go look it up. But if I'm reading on my computer there's no point in waiting. With one button I get a dashboard with a dictionary, or I can go to Wikipedia or imdb or just Google it. And knowing how link leads on to link, I doubted if I should ever come back.

We could invent a one-button "reading" mode, that would require you to restart your computer in order to do anything else. But that's like a television that makes you exercise to watch it: a lovely little trick that no one would volunteer to subject himself to. After all, you might need to send an email or look something up rather suddenly, and it would be a pain to have to wait for a restart.

As a writer, though, I think of this from the other angle. What can we do to the presentation of text to make it so immediate and enveloping that readers would not want to step away, even for a minute, and open themselves up to distraction. Video does this nicely by moving always forward. Sure, you can stop and come back, but you don't want to: you want to ride the video the whole way through. If you want to stop for anything, it's to replay something particularly cool.

So books need a few more techniques here. Books need something to move you through time (an audio file?), and something to concentrate your focus (a timed puzzle?), and it wouldn't hurt if the text moved, animated, along the lines of poemflow. There should be images, and the images should be surprising, funny, like the guy drinking the milk at the Club Devo Song Study (which is genius, by the way). In short, the book needs to become a more compelling environment than the alternatives; it needs to out-compete the distractions by distracting the reader itself.

And that's kind of sad, because one of the greatest things about books is the complete focus and absorption of just "getting into" a really great book. Still, I think the distraction nest can be made to work the readers mind into a nexus of concentration... and I'm going to see if I can figure out how to do that.

The Forebears of Electronic Girls

2010-04-07T14:08:00.001-04:00

The iPad is Not a Computer, and That's Okay.

2010-04-03T11:12:00.001-04:00

I will buy one eventually, but not because it is a computer (it is not); I will buy one the way I would buy a TV or a iPod, as an entertainment device.

Some people are freaking out, it seems, because Apple made something that is not a computer. That's cute. Apple made really amazing computers for years, and struggled. It wasn't until they started making entertainment devices that they began raking in the big money. Those hot little devices are keeping Apple alive and strong and still producing the best computers in the world (imho). It's fair to say that Apple is mainly known, now, as the company that makes the iPod and the iPhone (far more than, say, the MacBook). This new Pad fits right in with the Pod and Phone.

So, here's the hard truth: There are a LOT of people currently using computers who do not need computers. That is a simple fact. All they do is check email, shop, get directions from google maps, and play farmville on facebook. They never make things. They don't design books, or record songs, or make movies, or even put their cats' faces in the place of holy angels with Photoshop.

This is reality: there are LOT of people currently using computers who don't need to own a computer at all. It's useless to them. Wasted capacity. They've got the computing power to run a backyard mini-NASA rocket mission taking up space in the guest room, and all they're doing is shopping on amazon. Devices like the iPad are a blessing to these people: they can now shop in the living room while watching TV using a device that sits in their hands like a magazine. Lovely. And the guest room just got bigger.

For those of us, on the other hand, who are constantly making things, we need computers, and -- good news, everybody! -- real, powerful computers are not going anywhere. They still exist. They will continue to get stronger and better and more useful. Isn't that great? Me, who uses Photoshop and Dreamweaver simultaneously on a regular basis, I've got a computer that I need and use. My mom, who just wants to find low-priced tickets to Ohio, forward on pics of her grandkids, and read the latest Dan Brown novel? She should trash the computer and get an iPad.

I think the real cause of the consternation is that this is a device that starkly divides the creators from the users. Creators are offended by it, because they see it as a really pretty "computer" sapped of all the things THEY actually use and need (it's almost like they targeted creators for exclusion!!), but then it's so shiny and super-cool, everyone wants it. ...but it's useless! (To creators.)

You would think non-creative people, the users, would be the offended ones: here's a device just for you, which means you can't do anything awesome. Ha-ha. But the really funny thing about non-creative people: most of them don't care that they're not creative. They're perfectly okay with it. And they're going to think the iPad is perfect. And creative people should be okay with that too.

The real question for me (and all electronic girls) is, are there would-be creators out there (and I'm especially thinking of people too young to make the purchasing decisions here -- 8 year olds, say) who will end up non-creative end-users because the devices handed to them at a young age don't facilitate creativity? That's the danger.

But creative people always seem to find a way to express themselves, even if they have to do it via swizzle sticks and coffee creamers. Maybe some people will find a way to be creative with the iPad too. If not. No biggie. It's like getting creative with your TV. And, again, computers still exist. They'll get less common when only creative people need and use them, but they're still here. And so long as there's an army of non-creative end-users clutching iPads and demanding content, they'll be needed.

Magnetic Fields on Mars May Play Havoc with Electronic Girls' Brains

2010-03-28T12:39:00.001-04:00

Will Robot Girls Have Morals?

2010-03-23T17:12:00.002-04:00

Art that Makes you Squirm

2010-03-19T23:08:00.008-04:00

It is not uncommon for artists to create work that aspires to disturb. And I believe this is a worthy impulse. Much of what we encounter from day to day does not move us. Often things that should move us do not, because we're used to hearing about such-and-such number of deaths as bombs blast some faraway land, or about the young lives cut short by a traffic accident on the highway a few miles away, or about the little child in the neighborhood, or related to a coworker, stricken by the terrible disease for which there is no cure. Always we are surrounded by suffering and pain, yet it is human nature to limit just how much we feel. It is good and adaptive. It gets us through our days. It keeps us productive. But to be human, we must do more than get through days and be productive; we must feel, even when it's inconvenient. One of the most important things that art can do is snap us out of our platitudes and euphemisms, even if just for a short time, and make us look at the naked reality of our lives: the fragility, the unfairness, the pain, the truth.

It is not uncommon for artists to create work that aspires to disturb. But it is very rare that I am disturbed.

The exception to this is Janis Brothers. Janis Brothers is an artist who is from and who works in rural North Florida, and, she told me, she worries that others won't get her work, that it doesn't have a universal appeal, because it is so personal to her. Brothers' art preserves and recreates the tragedies she's witnessed and suffered from, true, but just as a small town in the hands of William Faulkner can seem to contain the world, so can a single tragic car accident in the hands of Janis Brothers seem to crystalize the universal emotions, and questions, that we all experience in the face of death.

And none of us are untouched by death. You might just manage to dodge paying taxes, but death? It is the ultimate universal topic; the paradox is that every death is supremely individual. I have not yet seen one of Brothers' installations in person, but I had the opportunity to see images of her work, and to talk to her about it, and now she is the only artist who comes to mind whose installations I both fear and deeply desire seeing.

To me, the most disturbing project Brothers has shown is a film called "Squirm," an apt description both of the content of the video and the reaction it will evoke. Squirm shows a collection of dead mice stuck to a glue trap, surrounded by flies, as one last mouse struggles for survival and ultimately succumbs.

Now I know what you're thinking: that's gruesome. Yes. But mousetraps are a big business in this world, and with good reason. Drive down any street in America and you are passing houses where rodents are being trapped and killed. It's a matter of what we choose to look at and what we choose to ignore.

Brothers found the opportunity striking because of the connection she made between the struggles of the mouse and a tragic car accident she'd witnessed. I'd like to quote her directly:

When I saw that one mouse was still alive but stuck to the trap, I decided to film it even though I did not have a particular plan as to how I might use the footage. To remove the mouse would have been impossible.

In review, the struggle was similar to the experience I encountered with Cleansing, a reaction to the experience of witnessing a car accident. All four of the passengers died. The crash was so severe, the car had to be cut away to remove the victims. The struggle to hang onto life only to die is a tragedy and very difficult to witness.

The video of the dying mouse reminds me of the films I've seen lately (Fast Food Nation, Temple Grandin) where they show cows being slaughtered. No one likes this. Many look away. But those deaths are frequent realities we seem, as a people, in no hurry to stop. And we know, as a people, that we could save human lives by (for example) outlawing cell phones in cars and lowering speed limits, but we don't. We like to drive fast and talk on the phone. So some must die. We allow it. Why don't we feel this?

Tonight, while Brian and I were taking the lawn waste to the curb, we heard a series of screeches and bangs. Because I grew up on a busy street, I consider my familiarity with the sounds of car crashes better than average. "That's a bad one," I said right away. "They got several cars with that one." We walked out to the intersection (so did several dozen other people, by the way -- the first time I've seen most of my neighbors!) and there was one small Toyota terribly mangled, struck from several directions. Three larger trucks had their front ends smashed in. We watched for a moment, the emergency vehicles came, and we turned and went home. I told a joke, and he laughed. What could we do? Accidents happen... all the time.

So yes, Squirm shows mouse death, but Cleansing is about the deaths of four human beings. I'm posting some stills from these pieces, but I encourage you to go to Janis Brothers' website and look around. Here are just a few photos:

This picture shows the medical equipment, and we get a sense of the four individual lives lost from the four stations.

This detail (latex obscures the news clippings, but not so much that you can't read them) shows that four were killed in a fiery crash -- the same kind of article we see all the time and usually think little of, the kind of information that does little more than put a barrier between us and the horror, the tragedy of the event.

The medical equipment drips its blood into religious vessels: vitrines covered with pristine cloth and communion wafers. The transmission of the blood from the medically to the religiously symbolic vessels is particularly meaningful I think, and says more than words can.

After the exhibition, the vitrines and wafers are permanently transformed, destroyed, bloodied.

What I love about this piece is its layers: the news layer, the medical layer, the religious layer, the way the pristine thing is transformed/destroyed by the blood/wine while the news article with its emotional distance and professional tone is kept at bay behind latex, its words visible but muted while the things themselves enact the deaths -- that one-way movement through time -- the taking of a person with flesh and blood and hope and need and desire and fear and destiny down, via this destruction, to simply the blood and flesh.

We have all lost people. I have lost people. Each of those deaths was individual, an event indivisible from the unique person whose life was lost. You can no more generalize about death than you can generalize about people. And I think that's why Brothers' art really works for me, why I feel she's managed to transform the personal into the universal -- her work is careful and respectful, and she never loses sight of the individual who lived and was lost. And through that care and respect and clarity of vision, she makes us feel that moment, that universal sense of loss and tragedy. The unwanted that came. The desperate desire to just reverse that one thing that happened whose consequences were so outsized, so awful, so beyond comprehension -- and so utterly irreversible.

And I both love it and am left profoundly unsettled. But it is an unsettling that I want to feel, because this is life, and it is too important not to.

Brothers also has a piece on sex offenders that would surely chill even the most hardened heart, but I would like to stop with these two pieces, and encourage you to view more on her website.

This is the third in my series on Florida Artists, especially the ones I just met. Previous posts here and here. Cross-posted to Incertus.

Fiction in the Information Age

2010-03-17T13:19:00.001-04:00

In an information-obsessed age, fiction and poetry have the disadvantage of not being information. They are written, which is a format associated with work, research, tasks; but they are not information. The exception is a work of fiction so popular (like Twilight, or Lord of the Rings) that knowing it well becomes a kind of social currency – in other words, the details of the story become information, with a clear and specific value, same as cash.

Otherwise, to have value among readers, fiction must seem to be a form devised to disguise information so scandalous or dangerous it cannot be told in the form of fact. Fiction becomes the act of obliquing: saying, “I have a friend who has this problem,” instead of admitting to your problem. Only more so, more removed. Because fiction claims it is not even the life of your friend, but of an entirely made-up person. In this, it is closer to religion than to fact.

Religion is of course the fiction that transcends its form: it is a fiction accepted as information by a large group of people, and within that group the “facts of the story” are vital information, information that is often utilitarian: it tells them their future, and how to behave, and what to eat, and who are friends, and who are enemies. Is there any more important and essential information in this world than that?

So fiction has become, to us, the form that speaks the truths that can’t be said. But this identity for fiction requires the subterfuge remain intact. We cannot go into a work of fiction aware that we are reading disguised facts. If we do, the disguise fails, the truth is found out, laid out for all to see. The author is exposed, and embarrassed, or shamed. See Orenthal Simpson, How I Did It, as an example of failed fiction. We must suspend not only our disbelief in the fiction, but we must suspend our belief in the ur-fact we imagine the story is derived from. And so the primary stated purpose must always be something else: entertainment.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is simple coincidence. The story is fiction in whole – entirely made up for your entertainment. Here, friend, is a great lot of bullshit. Enjoy! And yet there is a wink behind that bullshit. Greater truths are being told than mere information could tell us. More than any other, fiction is a form that requires mental feats of derring-do. The mind must be capable of holding two contradictions at once: everything I read is true, some of what I read is false; everything I read is false, some of what I read is true. Religion, too, requires adherents to accommodate contraries and contradictions, and this extraordinary imaginative act, this resolving of opposites, has long been the fount of creation: it has created states, wars, paintings, cathedrals, treatises, dramas, stories. One could argue it has created culture itself.

Contrary ideas held in one mind are the matter-antimatter reaction of the human soul: the mind explodes with energy and that energy is set to resolving the problem, explaining how things may be both up and down, both yes and no. From this conflict spins a narrative. We want and need to believe in the narrative if we are to make sense of the world. And so the function of fiction is to be real, to stop being fiction, while insisting quite convincingly that it is nothing more than an entertaining lie.

To be continued: next time, non-fiction.

Electronic Motherhood

2010-03-13T16:36:00.001-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, I became a mother. It happened quite suddenly. I was browsing facebook, happily making snarky comments on people's news stories and supportive comments about people's cats' health problems, when an alert pops up telling me that Brittany Spears (my boyfriend's daughter) has made a "family request." I'd never seen a "family request" before, so I clicked right away with more than average curiosity. And here's what I saw:

I will admit my heart pounded a bit out of my chest. Here is a strange new circumstance: a facebook request suggests I am someone's mother, then gives me the options "confirm" and "ignore." The emotional implications of ignoring motherhood need not be mentioned; the emotional implications of confirming motherhood, however, are not to be taken lightly.

But then, this is facebook. I have dozens of "facebook friends," which is a category quite distinct from "friend." A "facebook friend" is someone that you may or may not have even met. You may or may not actually talk to this person via facebook. You might even find some few "facebook friends" kind of annoying, or even just republican, and so choose to silence them from your news feed. Aside from appearing on your list of friends, these "facebook friends" have no real presence to you at all.

"Facebook motherhood," though, feels like a less callous category. And while I don't want to get into the long and complex history between Brittany and me, needless to say it's long and complex. When Brittany asked me to be her facebook mom, it's probably the sweetest, most loving thing she's ever done towards me. (And when I accepted, that may have been the sweetest and most loving thing I've ever done towards her -- "long and complex" history, after all, is a term that applies just as well to the Israelis and Palestinians, China and Taiwan, Hutus and Tutsis, as it applies to us.)

And of course Brittany has had other moms. She has her real mother and her mother's long-time girlfriend, too, and they are much closer to her than I am. But I've always known that and never tried to "compete." Far from it. I'm not technically old enough for her to be my daughter, so I've always resented the parenting role a bit. I've been more comfortable thinking of Brittany as a cousin. But of course she's not. A cousin is an equal. She's my boyfriend's daughter. It's not the same thing.

So being a "facebook mom" is actually the best possible description of our relationship. We're not family, but we are family. We love each other, but there's this weird barrier. We know each other well, and maybe over time we'll get closer, because we'll share news stories and updates about our pets.

Driving up the highway last night, to visit with friends, I found myself reminded that earlier in the day I had become Brittany's fb mom. It made me feel a little different, I realized. I little more motherly. I guess I'm getting older. But there was also this neat little fact: I'm writing a book about an electronic daughter. And now I have one.

Cross-posted to Incertus

Math and Translation

2010-03-10T21:06:00.000-05:00

I believe that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the purest fiction ever devised. And when I say "pure" I mean that it is centered directly and wholly in the genre of fiction. Most stories wander into poetry from time to time, and dance rhythmically around in the domain of drama. But Alice in Wonderland is fiction, pure fiction.

My test for this is translation. Translation is a trial by fire for any work of art; translation is the Darwinian test. A novel that can be translated into drama, into film perfectly or even near-perfectly, no longer needs to exist. It has evolved into a preferred form, a form more likely to survive in our current cultural ecosystem.

My favorite examples: Breakfast at Tiffany's. Midnight Cowboy. In both cases the book is better, but in both cases, for most people, the movie is good enough.

These two novels were replaced in our cultural consciousness by the movies made from them because at their hearts both stories are dramas about characters and events.

To me, "pure" fiction is distinguished from dramatic fiction or prose-told drama by its uncompromising allegiance to ideas. A fiction will violate all good dramatic standards of character and plot and sense itself to communicate its ideas.

Most everyone knows that Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson was a mathematician, and I think this recent NYTimes Op-Ed does a great job of explaining to we lay-people how Dodgson's Alice wandered through a wonderland of ideas -- of mathematical concepts he brought to life through fiction.

There are have been more than two dozen attempts to turn Alice into a film, and while some have had more impact than others, none has ever threatened to replace the fiction, the prose as Dodgson wrote it. I believe none ever will: because film shows drama, and this story doesn't dance in dramaland, it frolics in fictionland, Wonderland, the land of questions unanswered, the land of nonsequiturs more true than sense, the land where ideas and concepts and abstractions come to life.

The single most amazing thing about mathematics is that, while the world of numbers appears to be entirely man-made, math describes our real, actual, natural world better than anything else. One, two, three, four -- these neat, discrete units of precise size and order are themselves ideas and ideals (in the platonic sense), concepts, abstractions. And yet: everything around us can be described through these strange little creatures that seem very much to be an invention and yet indicate at every turn that they are instead a discovery of something fundamental and (literally) universal.

It seems that the more dedicated we become to describing the world in terms of empirical fact, the more necessary these abstract ideals become. And it seems that the deeper we go into the misty magic land of these numbers themselves, the closer we come to that everyday complexity that seems to belie the cleanliness of a mathematical approach.

Consider the art of Nathan Selikoff: I've been considering it for days, ever since I met Nathan at an artists' workshop last weekend.

You're looking at "Chinese Warrior," a fraction of a much larger work, called "Faces of Chaos." Selikoff produced numerous images based on complex math, then sorted through the images, selecting 1024 that looked like things we could recognize. This is something like watching clouds, and making out shapes, only with much more discernible detail, and with absolute clarity on what numbers and what processes created the image.

This piece is called "Helios," (not to speak for the artist, but, very likely) because it looks like the sun. It's part of a separate project called "Strange Attractors," but it shows a similar idea: simple math gives us spheres and cubes and triangles, sure, but when the math gets complex enough, the images seem to leave that world of ideals and take a place in our real world: it looks like the sun not just because it is round and seemingly-spherical; there's more discernible detail than that:

This is a detail of "Helios" I made from a screen grab of the image on Selikoff's website: the seeming-sphere seems to have a surface, as you can see, and something seems to be radiating from it, some kind of dusty liquid heat -- a plasma. We see this image and recognize other images we've seen...

...like this actual image of the surface of the sun. And the most astonishing thing of all is that the image produced by an artist through mathematics is more clear and detailed than the image made through optics by a scientist.

I look again at Selikoff's image and I ask myself: do the numbers tell us more than our eyes and instruments? Can the mathematical models predict the physical nature of the universe? Sure, this image looks like a Chinese Warrior, and this one looks like a star, but what about all those others? What other shapes exist in the universe that we do not recognize because we have not yet seen them?

I look again at "Helios," at the ribbons of energy that move "within" the "sphere" and I wonder if these lines tell us something about the movement of energy within a star that it may take scientists decades or centuries to confirm? We know numbers are useful in describing the world we understand, because we understand it; we can compare. But what about all those numbers who are useful in describing the world we do not yet know?

What Wonderland can they reveal? Only the Artist-Mathematicians like Dodgson and Selikoff can show, and tell.

This is the second in a series of posts on Florida Artists, and how I experience their work. I would love references to more artists, working in any medium, in Florida.

Cross-posted to Incertus

Perception and Image

2010-03-09T00:15:00.000-05:00

We spend our lives wondering what the world is, what the universe is, what our experience is, and whether our experience means something objectively, whether we can translate from our perceptions some kind of larger truth, some understanding of the world.

It's a question for the philosopher in each of us: is there one reality, one objective truth? Or are there as many truths as there are conscious minds, as many versions of reality as there people and cows and bees and bacteria and trees?

I feel that reality is like a jewel with infinite facets, that we are born in the middle of one: it stretches to the horizon; to us it is large as a planet. And we can stay there. We can sit in the middle of our own point of view and we can see things our way: my country is the best country, because it's mine. My mommy is the prettiest mommy, because she's mine. It's where we all begin, and we have the option to stay. Or we can travel: we can wander far to the border where one side meets another, we can stretch our necks across that angle, let our fingers grip the sides, try to see what life looks like from that other point of view.

Even kindergartners wonder, when you see blue, is it the same blue I see? And even they discover there is no way to test the question. It is good to explore how sensory information translates itself in our minds to a three-dimensional reality with aspects we can call "depth" and "dimension" and "color": that's difficult enough. But how can we ever know if what we perceive is close or far from what others perceive? In some ways, our lives are dedicated to negotiating this unknowable gap.

Art is one of the few ways we can try to understand the way others see the world.

This weekend I met many talented artists, all of whose work affected me in various ways, and I understand those effects and those ways better in some cases and less well in others. The drawings of Christine Eckerfield (the picture above is "Palms in Full Sun") have the particular effect of making me question my eyes.

I see palms, and I recognize them with my own context: the shape, for me, a native Floridian, is familiar and ubiquitous and has been since childhood. Others might see these as signs of the exotic, but I see the familiar, the most often ignored shapes, the shapes that always linger just above our busy heads.

And I see the angle of regard: the framing of the image tells me how I am holding my head. I am questioning. I am surprised. I have looked up by accident, and lost my busy head mid-thought, not because of the beauty of the palms or the sky, but because I have been confounded by the light. And I am alone. I am certain of this: I am alone.

The light asks questions I can't answer. It asks: have you ever seen the world...? It asks: has anyone seen it? It asks: do you know what goes on while you look away?

The sky is mild, washed out, burned out as eyes burn out in mid-day sun. I'm reminded that in Vietnam they don't have separate words for blue and green, that to them, blue and green are two shades of the same color, like fuchsia and pink to us. I consider that there are millions of people who see sky and trees as a continuum of the same color, as we see sky and sea.

And I look at the light.

Light is the soul of quickness, always moving. By the time I have had time to wonder about how we see blue and green, the moment has changed. The image has the power of memory, potent memory, pure in the single mind, unspoiled by other people's recollections or by photographs.

Many times in my life I have seen a large and beautiful moon: I grab a camera. I snap a picture. The photograph shows a small white dot.

The record of light is not the experience of light. 5 million cameras would record a beam of light the same way. No two people will experience it the same.

This is the magic of this image: yes, it reminds me that we do not all see the world in the same way. But how? By letting me live a fleeting moment long. By letting me set this singularity of experience -- in which I am certain I am alone -- beside my own.

I don't know if her blue is my blue, but I know, I feel, that her moment is unique. And this makes me believe that her blue is not, cannot, be my blue -- that my blue is not even my blue from one experience to the next. The image makes me feel that the strangeness is the sameness, that the sameness is the strangeness.

I look at these palms, these common trees, and I think that, despite the intimate familiarity I have with the basic shape, the light, the moment, portrayed is utterly alien to me. And yet it is the feeling of alienation that lets me live in the image: it is the thing I recognize most of all.

This is the first in a series of posts on Florida Artists, and how I experience their work. I would love references to more artists, working in any medium, in Florida.

Cross-posted to Incertus

Realism, Empathy

2009-10-13T21:32:00.001-04:00

The History of Electronic Girls, Part 3: Birthing

2008-08-08T09:45:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Broadsheet for turning me onto this little oddity: a woman in England has started a business selling "reborn" babies.

The babies, much like the "Real Doll" sold to men to have sex with (which I wrote about HERE), are made of molded silicone for a fleshy feel, and are then painted to look terrifyingly "life-like" and realistic.

If you would like an eyeful, this video advertises the wares:

There is something very fishy about the name "reborn": it implies some things that are too sad for a good saleslady to say outright: these "dolls" are replacements for babies who have either grown up, died, or moved away to New Zealand, as in the case featured in this British "coffee talk" style chat about it:

The psychologist hired-on for this chat insists that this is just women stoking their oxytocin fires and giving themselves a high. And he seems to think that makes it okay. And maybe that does: taboos are made to be broken, I suppose...

And dolls are a pretty deeply-ingrained cultural phenom, something we take for granted. But a step back and a moment's thought tells us that little girls cuddling baby-dolls is creepy: it puts them in a too-mature and implicitly sexual role before their time. Yet most of us accept it, and even regard it as "normal" and/or "cute." So why is a grown woman cuddling a baby-doll so creepy? Why isn't this "normal" and "cute"?

How would we react if this were a phenomenon of women buying old-fashioned Betsy-Wetsy dolls, dolls that are obviously fake, obviously dolls, and then spending time cooing over them and cuddling them? The women would seem both insane and mentally retarded: the former for giving love to a lump of plastic, the latter for not realizing the difference between a baby and lump of plastic.

The dolls take that last step into ultra-realism, though, and suddenly the women aren't insane and mentally retarded. The appearance of the baby tricks our brains too, in part: the emotions are set off, but we still know what we're seeing is fake. And so what they're doing strikes us as incredibly "wrong" and "creepy."

The same change applies to men and sex dolls: when a man has sex with a blow-up sex doll, it's sad and pathetic, or campy and ridiculous, but it's not scary. When those dolls become super-realistic, though, the guys who "love" their "Real Dolls" are genuinely frightening.

In that second video, when the woman's husband sees the "reborn," he says that he doesn't like it because it looks like something off a mortuary slab, and I think most of us relate to that. I think most of us relate better to that than to the woman cooing to and petting a lifeless, if impressively shaped and painted, wad of silicone.

And I wonder if maybe the "creepy" feeling we get observing both women cuddling silicone babies and men caressing silicone women comes from their resembling corpses. The emotion-logic disconnect is not dissimilar to seeing a loved one dead: your emotions scream out, "this is the person I love!" but your brain knows it is only a body, the person you loved is gone.

And there is definitely a cultural taboo against sex with dead women and cuddling dead babies.

I think it is interesting that when realistic silicone people became available, the market formed around these two niches: grown women for men to have sex with, and babies for women to cuddle. I think that says a little something about whom and how the human beast objectifies. I also think it's interesting that in both cases, it is an extremely niche, but still extremely profitable, market, and that in both cases, the general public objects.

Just as I predicted with the "Real Dolls," I predict these "Reborns" will soon find themselves filled with sensors and servos, and frankly I think that will make them less objectionable. Once they go from being fake dead babies and fake dead women to being fake live babies and fake live women (the difference being their ability to move, gesture, react, and so on), the taboo will evaporate, and people will find them much more acceptable. (Although probably not entirely acceptable: they will still be "soulless" non-persons without volition.)

Still, at that point, we can expect fake (live) people and animals to become much more common. How common?

How would you feel about purchasing a set of three realistic silicone babies programmed to crawl around the floor picking up dust and dirt all day? You empty the pan by changing its diaper. And anytime you feel like a cuddle, you just scoop one up off the floor and give it a squeeze, and it will giggle and kiss you.

Yeah, that's still pretty creepy.

For now.

My Robot, or The History of Electronic Girls, Part Two

2008-07-19T14:25:00.001-04:00

It's no secret that I am interested in robots: I'm a spaz for my roomba and I'm writing a novel about an electronic girl. Hell, I've even got a soft spot for the shower cleaner hanging in the bathroom. The more robots they build to come into my house and spare me from the chores of life, the more robots I will buy.

But I just bought a robot that doesn't clean or sweep or do anything to help around the house at all. It's called a "Pleo," and it was invented by the same dude who invented the Furbee. It's much more advanced than a Furbee, but its function is more or less the same: it is a robot designed to elicit empathy from a human being.

It is in the shape of a cute baby dinosaur: a good choice since it is impossible to own an extinct animal, and while the robot is fun and engaging, it doesn't compare to interacting with a live animal. Had they built it in the shape of a dog, people would inevitably compare it to playing with a dog, and it would come up wanting. But since it allows us to have as a pet something we could not otherwise know, it works really well. My dinobot is friendly and cute, loves to be pet, and rewards attention with flirty glances, coos, purrs, foot stomping, tail wagging, and "singing" (if he gets really "happy," he vocalizes melodiously).

Where does it exceed a live pet? Leave it alone and it falls "asleep." Wake it and it's ready to play. Go on vacation, come home, turn it on, and it never knew you were gone, never needed a feeding. In other words, it is convenient. But part of pet ownership is putting yourself out for another living creature whose needs cannot be put off according to your whims or convenience. So for those of us who enjoy the "bond of sacrifice" that comes with pet ownership (or any relationship), the robot falls short; for those for whom pet ownership would be good if not for the annoying "burdens," the robot is deliverance.

The distinction is instructive: most advanced robots these days are being built in the shape of women. The terrifyingly popular woman-without-brain known as the Real Doll (see this fabulous BBC documentary "Guys and Dolls" for some insight into this phenomenon) will inevitably be combined with this empathy-eliciting AI tech to create a more convincing "girlfriend substitute": a "girlfriend" that never needs food, love, entertainment, stimulation, or a life of her own, who will react to your touch with coos, giggles, ass-wagging, and (if you touch the sensors in just the right way) artificial orgasms.

Where the technology will fall short is exactly where the Pleo falls short of a real pet: the relationship, the bonding that comes from sacrifice, from having to put off your own whims, convenience, and even your own needs, for another living person. They try to build some of this into the robot: the Pleo needs to be "fed," for example (by putting a little rubber leaf with sensors on it into the robot's mouth). The "creature" must have needs or it is not convincing: if it requires no sacrifice at all, then no "relationship" can be built.

So the future sex-gynoids, the AI-enhanced "Real Dolls" of the future, will undoubtedly have demands too. If you want to have convincing play, if you want to feel a bond, you can indulge these demands. If you don't, you can just switch her off.

The experience will of course fall short of interacting with a real human being, but like owning a dino instead of dog, these robots will give their owners an experience they can't otherwise have. Sure, they can have sex with a "dog" of a woman (offensive word choice intentional), but these robots will have an exotic appearance, and will be so sexy, with a level of Manga-like "perfection" no human woman, even with years of plastic surgery, could come close to, that people will be less likely to compare the experience to intercourse with an actual person. "Real Dolls" are already sold in odd skin colors, like blue and green. Someone out there is pretending he's Captain Kirk banging the green chick.

I am sure most readers are appalled and insulted by what the future holds in the way of sex with robots: fortunately, iPhones aside, the future is not now. It'll be another decade or so before the first case of a man taking his gynoid to the movies comes to court. But the pieces are already coming together to create robotic humanoid companions, and these will predominantly come in the shape of women. Women, who sadly don't spend much time in the world of AI and robotics, should take note, because the future may not be now, but it is coming.

The History of Electronic Girls, Part 1

2008-07-15T15:51:00.000-04:00

Sex is natural, sex is fun, sex is best when it's...

2008-07-08T13:01:00.000-04:00

Salon reviews a new book by Dagmar Herzog called "Sex in Crisis" which argues that liberals had better start doing a better job of defending sex, because the religious right has co-opted the language of liberalism in order to defend and glorify such practices as denying third world sex workers access to condoms:

As recently as 2003, for example, a certain public figure was arguing that voluntary prostitution was "despicable" because it "demeans the value of women" and promotes "the severe degradation and exploitation of women, the literal rape of countless women around the globe." Was it Andrea Dworkin? Catharine MacKinnon? The correct answer: pro-life Rep. Smith, R-N.J., whose distinctly illiberal purpose was to limit AIDS outreach efforts to prostitutes and sex workers in developing nations.

...making "wives" into 24-hour sex-marts (but only for their "husbands"):

A Christian wife, if she wants to keep her husband's mind off porn and his hand off his own penis (onanism is still a big no-no), will have to be a 24/7 tootsie. She is advised to wear sexy lingerie and to keep her legs shaved and her nether region douched at all times. ("Wives," as Jack Jones once crooned, "should always be lovers, too.") And she has to give it up whenever her man comes calling. The example of a woman named "Ellen" is approvingly cited. "[My husband's] purity is extremely important to me, so I try to meet his needs so that he goes out each day with his cup full. During the earlier years, with much energy going into childcare and with my monthly cycle, it was a lot more difficult for me to do that. There weren't too many 'ideal times' when everything was just right. But that's life, and I did it anyway."

...and "converting" gay people into "heterosexuals in Christ."

"No matter how deep your homosexual feelings are, deeper still lies your heterosexuality, buried under a thousand fears." Preying on those fears, Exodus has mushroomed to more than 100 chapters across the United States, and zealots like Dr. Joseph Nicolosi have undertaken "conversion therapy" on boys as young as 3.

The author of the book is passionate, but the reviewer isn't so sure that liberals taking a few conservative opinions (especially "for the children") is such a bad thing:

When my 8-year-old son asks me why Jamie Lynn Spears, the star of one of his favorite shows, is having a baby at 16, I'm genuinely torn in how to respond -- not wanting to condemn and not wanting to endorse, either. It's the same discomfort many parents felt at seeing the topless pictures of Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair. How do we accommodate our children's sexuality? And how far?

Which seems to be the reviewer proving the author's point: have liberals so lost the plot on sex that those are actually considered reasonable questions? Let's stop and talk about this for a second: first, give me a buck naked Miley Cyrus and I'll hand her a volleyball and suggest SPF 30. There is nothing "dirty" about being naked. Second, yeah, you better let your kids know that it's fully possible to get preggers at 16. If you don't, they might well end up that way. And 16 is far too young to have kids. It's a bit old to engage in "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," but it's probably right on time for some petting-grade explorations with peers.

In other words, sex is healthy and natural: it's healthy and natural from the time a 4 year old girl sleeps with her hands down her pants (although she should be warned off from doing that in school) to the time two grown men consent to hurt each other a little because sometimes that's fantastic fun. It's also healthy and natural when a man and woman decide they want to spend the rest of their lives together (although that's a pretty ambitious goal, and one without great odds for success).

I haven't read Herzog's "Sex in Crisis," but if part of the cure is getting more liberals to talk about how sex is great and to reclaim the language of liberation for liberating ends, then sign me up. I find the religious right's version of sex repulsive and degrading, but the sex I choose to have is a slip-sliding sensation-fest full of fun and giggles and lust and love. The most important word in that last sentence? "Choose."

What are your thoughts on sex?

Why Are Europeans Having So Few Babies?

2008-06-29T16:04:00.000-04:00

As this NYTimes Magazine long (but great!) story points out, there is not one answer to this question, but the right-wing canard about uppity working women who refuse their "duty" to bear the seed is exposed as bullshit:

They found that a greater percentage of Dutch women than Italian women are in the work force but that, at the same time, the fertility rate in the Netherlands is significantly higher (1.73 compared to 1.33). In both countries, people tend to have traditional views about gender roles, but Italian society is considerably more conservative in this regard, and this seems to be a decisive difference. The hypothesis the sociologists set out to test was borne out by the data: women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load.

The Continuing Disappointment that is Battlestar Galactica

2008-06-14T16:07:00.000-04:00

I will not rehash my full displeasure with the recent episodes of Battlestar Galactica, but since the half-season just ended, and I am, as I've pointed out before, committed to watching this thing to the end despite the plummeting quality of its plot and dialog, I'd just like to throw a few questions out into the universe:

How did Diana know that the 5th of the final 5 was not in the fleet? Did she do a full census? If so, that's amazing, because the colonial leaders were never even able to do that -- hence all them hidden cylons, even after their model was "known." Yet her full knowledge of who the final 5 were was supposed to come from seeing their faces in the vision. So does the 5th of the final five not even appear human? Does s/he look like a Talaxian or something? Or is a character who was "famous" and who was "killed"? Or was it that the 5th was "part of the fleet but currently standing on the base ship," in which case that line goes down as the most BS dialog in BSG for all time.

Why are they playing Admiral Adama for a sobbing emotional wreck? It doesn't feel real in the slightest. Nor does Roslyn's feeling bad for Baltar after he admits to being the cause of death of the majority of the human race. Also, since when is bandage or not-bandage a life or death decision? I mean, that bandage was leaking anyway -- but taking it off will cause his death? And even if we did believe that, how does he get away with thanking her for "not murdering me" as opposed to "not letting me die"?

I'm getting so sick of exposition in the dialog that I can hardly watch a scene without my eyes rolling out of my head: does everyone have to say exactly what "strategery" is going into every move before they make it? Can't we follow action instead of explanation? And can't situations flow organically from one to the next instead of a character jumping up and going "this story needs conflict! Therefore I will totally do something wild and crazy just to give us a few cliff-hanger scenes along the trajectory of a situation that will be neatly resolved -- with little to no effect on the rest of the story -- in less than an episode!" (eg: the hostage situation; the counter-hostage situation; the happy-fun-friends make-up session in front of the mystery viper). The speed with which the 4 known members of the "final five" are accepted into the colonial family ("I've granted them amnesty!" Lee Adama's dialog helpfully explicates) makes a mockery not just of Callie's death, but of the suspense built-in since the last episode of season 3, and felt by all we gullible viewers who were hoping for that good, good story from seasons 1 & 2 to continue.

The fact that they got the fleet to "Earth" gives a lot of people the out to stop watching (although it could, of course, not be Earth, and it definitely seems as though it won't be their final destination). The fact that "Earth" was blistering in the gray of a nuclear winter was very "Planet of the Apes" -- at least a twisted Lady Liberty at the end there would have given us a laugh (and it's only 1/100th as dumb as ending a season on "All Along the Watchtower" -- oh, there's a thought: Bob Dylan is the final cylon), and that was probably the best turn of the whole season. That and Sol Tigh asking to be blown out an airlock -- now that's a true-to-character, real plot moment (one that they of course wasted as quick as they could, much like they wasted the previous episode's initially-cool "Roslyn speaks to dead people during the jump" sequence, by quickly beating it to death).

Oh BSG writers, get your shit together. I so desperately want to enjoy this show I can't even tell you. You gotta stop slopping it up!

Why am I still watching Battlestar Galactica?

2008-05-21T14:11:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm a total sci-fi nerd, but it's not like I don't have any judgment. And yes, I've loved these characters since I watched the mini-series in 2003, but I'm not the type to hold onto a failing relationship for old time's sake.

There is no secret about the absolute screaming suckitude of this season's Battlestar Galactica. So far two of the episodes (including the most recent one) have been okay -- like, "almost but not quite in the realm of where I got used to the show being"-okay. But the majority have been irritating snooze-fests, and even the good ones are crapped up with things like far too-long-lasting close-ups of Lieutenant Gaeta's lips as he sings far too loudly, and long. It's not the existence of the element (in this case the singing), it's the ham-handed presentation that's getting on my nerves.

Take Gaius Baltar... please. Take him right off the show and leave him at the bottom of a waste basket somewhere. Nothing against James Callis -- back when they gave him good lines and a decent plot, he was one of the best parts of the show. But now he's a garish attempt at a Jesus reference, so clumsily and obviously portrayed that your eyes roll involuntarily. It's hard to watch a show with your irises focused on your cerebellum, but it's just such a relief to see something resembling brains.

I extend my pity to every actor on the show: after years of service they've all been handed shit for a script, and they're doing the best they can, I'm sure. But you can't make a turd fly, even if you put an experienced pilot on the job.

Truth be told, BSG didn't fall apart this season; it fell apart last season. The shows started developing long lagging periods of inaction, and conversations that were just a little too "this is the time when we recap the plot to the audience whose attention is clearly fading"-moments. Even the actions scenes are being interrupted to give us longing emotional glances at the characters' faces. Ugh. It's a space drama not a painting. Make the bitch move!

Which brings me to my question: why am I still watching Battlestar Galactica? If I'd checked out at the end of season 2, I would have nothing but fond memories and kick-ass DVDs. Instead I've got this long twisting irritating sloppy-sappy stupid half-organized mess between me and those memories. I have absolutely no faith at all in my storyteller: I expect him to screw me over, take me for granted, fail to come through, and leave me hanging, and bored. Why do I keep watching? Why? Why?

Is it because I care about who the last Cylon is? Not really. So much of the last two seasons' plots have seemed half-assed in their design that whomever the last Cylon turns out to be, it will seem a random choice, not an inevitable truth. Is it because I want to see them reach Earth? Maybe a little: I'm curious when they get to Earth will it be the days of ancient Greece, the modern age, the future? But aside from that, meh. That leg's been pulled so long and without effect that it's lost all feeling. Is it because I care about the characters and want to see what will happen to them, whether they live or die, etc.? Not really. The crappy plot lines have long since destroyed my ability to suspend disbelief, and I so pity the actors for being put through such humiliating paces that I can hardly see them as Kara Thrace, or Saul Tigh, or Galen Tyrol -- I see this, and this, and this.

So why am I still watching Battlestar Galactica? I don't know. I guess it's just the Earth thing. Feh. I'm being made the fool.

Women in the New Doctor Who

2008-05-07T14:33:00.000-04:00

(small spoilers ahead)

There's a lot that can be said about the old Doctor Who(s): cheesy story lines, silly special effects, barely-scary baddies... and give me a few hours and I'll say way too much about it. For now I just want to talk about the misogyny, which is unmissable. The Doctor is a cheeky cocksure playboy who is more than a little dismissive towards his female companions, most of whom fit an insulting stereotype: the girl-next-door, the harpy... and all of them eye-candy.

I should point out that this makes the old Doctor Who(s) absolutely indistinguishable from 99% of the programming that's ever been produced.

The new Doctor Who is a miracle of progressive story telling. Setting aside the fact that most of the stories are really well put together, creative, funny, intense, clever, etc., the new series routinely casts multicultural characters and biracial couples, uses strong women as central characters, and when it comes to sexual politics, well, we're talking about the series that brought us the miracle of Captain Jack Harkness, the Omnisexual hotpot from the 51st Century.

This series has given us a series of three (so far) female companions: Rose Tyler (played by Billie Piper), Dr. Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), and Donna Noble (Catherine Tate).

Rose Tyler is amazing. She's a streetwise kid who grew up in the London projects. In the first episode she saves the Doctor's life -- and Earth -- with cleverness, heroics, and strength. And she only gets more awesome from there. She is the Doctor's match in every way. When she's lost (to another dimension) at the end of the (completely riveting and intense) second season, the Doctor (quite forlorn) returns to his TARDIS to discover a big loud red-headed human named Donna -- more on her in a second. The big knock against Rose Tyler? She's too good to be true.

Martha Jones is a medical doctor. She's brilliant, gorgeous, and, given time, she also saves all humanity. The big knock against this character (from my point of view) is that she has a crush on the Doctor. She leaves after a season because she's sick of making a fool of herself over him. The good news is that once she leaves the Doctor she uses her skills and knowledge to have this awesome alien-fighting career on Earth, becoming a recurring character in both Doctor Who and Torchwood (where Captain Jack makes Sexy out of Cardiff Good and Long).

And then there's Donna. (I said I'd come back to this.) Donna Noble is, without a doubt, my favorite fictional character, ever ever ever. She's not young. She's not skinny. She's not clever. She's not brave. She's not likely to save the world. She has no romantic interest in the doctor at all. What is she? She's a real, complex, very funny, tricky, tough, totally human person. And let me tell you (if you haven't noticed): such characters, in the female variety, are very hard to come by, rare as 12 lb diamonds.

In the first episode of the new series, which is also the first episode with Rose, Rose swings down to save the day (surrounded by aliens and danger), showing superhuman courage, strength, and cleverness. In The Runaway Bride, Catherine Tate (as Donna) parodies this moment with classic comedy timing -- and falls flat on her face. In every way that Rose is too perfect, Donna is perfectly human and flawed.

In the first episode of the third season, the Doctor kisses Martha so she'll have alien DNA on her and distract some intergalactic stormtroopers. From that moment Martha crushes madly on the Doctor, and their entire relationship is defined by her googly-ness for him. Fair enough. But then there's Donna: when the Doctor tells Donna that he just wants a mate, she says, "you just want to mate?! You're not mating with me, alien boy!" They're buddies, often in conflict with one another -- passing for brother and sister when they visit ancient Pompeii (he goes by Spartacus -- and so does she).

It's a kind of relationship -- a non-sexual friendship between an man and a woman -- that is very real, and very important, but not one that gets portrayed much in fiction. Or if it is, one of them is probably gay, or both of them are pre-adolescents. But here are two adults -- 40 and 903 -- from different planets, and different sexes -- and why are they traveling the universe in a blue box? Is it to wind out some sexual tension? No: it's because they want to have fun, skirt danger, and free some enslaved races. Awesome.

Of course it's easy to miss this. While I've been lapping up these story elements with a "where have you been all my life" sense of glee, Brian didn't notice (or didn't believe?) that Donna wasn't a sex interest in the story. You know what? I can understand that. We've all be so brainwashed by the stories we see to believe that women are there for one thing ... who can blame a man for not noticing that she's not? We actually got into a bit of a scuffle when he made an offhand comment about how if all three companions got together (and they will, at the end of this season), they would fight. Why would they fight? It's an absurd suggestion. Yet it's what we automatically assume will happen in a story because so many stories have come before and played out that exact scenario -- which is nothing more than an ego-feeding male fantasy.

The writers of Doctor Who brilliantly lampooned this in the 4th episode of the season, when Martha and Donna meet. He admonishes them to "don't fight!" to which Martha replies "you wish," and she and Donna go on to be fast friends.

It is, in short, the best shit on TV. If you're not watching Doctor Who, you're missing out on the sharpest humor/social and political commentary out there today. The first episode of season 4 (which features the wonderfully not-slim Catherine Tate) is about an alien species using our obsession with losing fat as a sick (and hilarious) way to propagate their species (hint: the company's slogan is "the fat just walks away!") -- the most recent two-part battle with the Sontarans turned our cars against us as weapons, to gas us to death. And the 3rd episode of the new season is about freeing a race (the Ood) from their "invisible" slavery. (They're enslaved by future humans, by the way.)

But the best thing, to my mind, about the new Doctor Who is how it has created this wonderful space for female characters to live and grow and save the world. And Catherine Tate's Donna Noble is the best character to appear in anything, ever ever ever.

Feminism 2008

2008-05-04T14:34:00.000-04:00

Feminism takes many forms. The picture on the left was published as a cover of Redbook. The picture on the right is the "raw picture" -- the pre-photoshop actual photo. It was purchased for $10,000 by a woman-run blog called Jezebel for the purpose of this side-by-side. Why? Because they've got a grudge against this Faith Hill lady? No. Because we've all been living in this world and looking at these images for so long, our brains have come to accept the image on the far left as normal. And it takes the image at near-left to remind us that the first one doesn't even look human, let alone normal. It's like having to be reminded that no one actually looks like anime or Disney "princesses." Our minds are warped and this unwarps them a little. And by the way, the woman in that unimproved picture? She is seriously pretty. Prettier than anyone I've bumped into in the last couple months. Why do we prefer looking at the alien creature on the left?

The New York Times has a piece about some of the latest advances being made in artificial intelligence. AI is important not just to creating the evil cylons that will turn into super-hot monotheistic cylons someday, but to making computers work better. We won't be able to just ask computers questions and get decent answers -- Star Trek style -- until those computers can think. So AI is important. And some of the most important work going is being done by a woman, Daphne Koller:

A mathematical theoretician, she has made contributions in areas like robotics and biology. Her biggest accomplishment — and at age 39, she is expected to make more — is creating a set of computational tools for artificial intelligence that can be used by scientists and engineers to do things like predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.
Ms. Koller’s work, building on an 18th-century theorem about probability, has already had an important commercial impact, and her colleagues say that will grow in the coming decade. Her techniques have been used to improve computer vision systems and in understanding natural language, and in the future they are expected to lead to an improved generation of Web search.
“She’s on the bleeding edge of the leading edge,” said Gary Bradski, a machine vision researcher at Willow Garage, a robotics start-up firm in Menlo Park, Calif.

I'm actually kind of impressed that the author of this article did not find Ms. Koller's sex remarkable. At no point in this story does the article make any note at all of the fact that she is a woman working in a field that is usually regarded (stereotypically and stupidly) as "male."

Since arriving at Stanford as a professor in 1995, Ms. Koller has led a group of researchers who have reinvented the discipline of artificial intelligence. Pioneered during the 1960s, the field was originally dominated by efforts to build reasoning systems from logic and rules. Judea Pearl, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, had a decade earlier advanced statistical techniques that relied on repeated measurements of real-world phenomena.
Called the Bayesian approach, it centers on a formula for updating the probabilities of events based on repeated observations. The Bayes rule, named for the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, describes how to transform a current assumption about an event into a revised, more accurate assumption after observing further evidence.
Ms. Koller has led research that has greatly increased the scope of existing Bayesian-related software. “When I started in the mid- to late 1980s, there was a sense that numbers didn’t belong in A.I.,” she said in a recent interview. “People didn’t think in numbers, so why should computers use numbers?”
Ms. Koller is beginning to apply her algorithms more generally to help scientists discern patterns in vast collections of data.
“The world is noisy and messy,” Ms. Koller said. “You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty.”

I love that she's more inclined towards numbers than most -- further putting the lie to the "girls can't do advanced math/science" canard. But again, I'm the one pointing this out; the article doesn't even notice she's a woman or that there's anything noteworthy about that. I think that's wonderful and very optimistic, but are we there yet? No, we're not there. So I hold up Daphne Koller as the feminist hero of the day. Hurray Ms. Koller! You are awesome.

2008-01-06T12:46:00.001-05:00

Living in the World of "Tomorrow"

When I participated in a Zogby focus group about a year ago, I learned that people still think of the 21st Century as "the future."

The focus group was political -- probably paid for by either Hillary Clinton or John McCain, based on the questions they asked us -- and asked us to rank statements, which were then presumably to be used or not used in speeches. They asked us whether we felt positively or negatively when we heard "libertarian," or "free trade" -- stuff like that. One of the pairings we were asked to express an opinion about was whether we preferred "Jobs of the Future" or "21st Century Jobs." The debate went on a for a few minutes, everyone acting as though the two were synonymous, until I helpfully pointed out that the 21st Century is not the future -- it's now.

The topic also came up in last semester's class, when a handful of my students decided it would be fun to assign random centuries (14, 16) to the publication of Candide. I came into class one morning and playfully asked them what century we live in, figuring we'd just backtrack to the 18th and call it a learning moment. They all said 20th.

This is especially weird since we've been in the 21st Century for close to a decade now, and it's not like no one mentioned the change of the millennium when it happened.

Which is why I found particularly interesting a story in the NYTimes Week in Review today called, "We Agreed to Agree, and Forgot to Notice," by Kirk Johnson, which is about how many of the debates of yesteryear are receding into the past, though we seem to keep failing to notice.

It begins with this illustrative piece of lore:

AS Martin Bunzl was getting on a plane in 1966, something happened that would stick in his head for the next four decades. A man taking his seat looked around and announced, loudly enough for all to hear: “Oh, geez, not a Negro stewardess.”

The remark stuck because it came at a threshold moment when culture and politics and norms of behavior were all in flux, said Dr. Bunzl, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. A few years earlier, a comment like that might have been unremarkable, and a few years later it would be intolerable. The man on the plane was shouting through an open window between worlds.

He goes on to note that a 97% white state voted resoundingly for a black man, at the tail end of a "national conversation" (media yapping?) about whether or not "America is ready for a black president" (or would vote for one). The debate, he suggests, is over, and "we" (the media?) hadn't noticed. (Finger-pointing at the media strictly mine.)

More examples:

“New ways of looking at the world are emerging, but the language of talking about them and what they mean hasn’t caught up,” said Anne Fausto-Sterling, a professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University.

In her field, Professor Fausto-Sterling said, a divide that has gripped society for decades over nature vs. nurture — specifically, whether homosexuality is ordained in the womb or developed in puberty — has been thrown into irrelevance by advances in the study of human genetics. Nature and nurture, it seems, are both too simple to explain everything; genes set the pattern, but environmental conditions then decide whether those genes are turned on or off.

But it's been thrown further into irrelevance by the fact that people, individually, may have just gotten over it, and that might have more to do with culture than politics:

Today, pop entertainment, sophisticated marketing and the Internet can shift public thinking and taste as fast as a Britney Spears news cycle. Are the evolving attitudes that poll takers find about homosexuality, for example, a reflection of new science and genetics, or “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” or simply the fact that young people are more comfortable with gay friends who are acknowledging their sexuality earlier and more openly?

In a New York Times-CBS News poll in October 2006, only about one in three respondents, 34 percent, said homosexuality was a choice, down from 44 percent in the mid-1990s, and the number who said homosexuality was “morally wrong,” had fallen faster, from 55 percent to 37 percent.

He also notes that the sweeping changes in attitude towards capital punishment have come not as the result of a campaign (ad, political, military, or otherwise), but as a result of other doubts -- doubts not as to whether it's right or wrong to kill a killer, but whether we're competent enough to do it right:

On the equally tangled landscape of capital punishment, there have been legal challenges to the injected drug cocktail in use since the 1970s, as well as front-page exposés from all over the country about death-row inmates cleared through DNA analysis. Both are forcing a reconsideration of the death penalty in state legislatures and courts at a time when crime is far less a front-burner anxiety than it was a generation ago.

...

As for abortion, the divisions are probably as deep as ever, but the underlying terrain has shifted. If human stem cells, which can be used to grow new organs, can be made from skin cells rather than embryonic cells, as a recent study suggests, then a whole corner of the abortion debate fades away: There’s no prospect of a global industry in destroying embryos for medical harvest.

And while concerns over privacy will persist no matter what happens to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s landmark case legalizing abortion in 1973, the threat of the back-alley abortionist with a coat-hanger that haunted society before Roe perhaps has been muted too by the abortion pill, RU486, which would presumably still be available (if in some cases illegally) no matter what.

I have to object to this laissez-faire attitude towards keeping abortion legal -- RU486 might survive the criminalization of this unpleasant but often necessary medical procedure, but illegal RU486 would be $800 per pill, and would create just another dark unregulated (is that really RU486, or just rat poison?) black market, a coat hanger without the hook, but just as bloody.

The real point, it seems to me, is that even a state as conservative as South Dakota doesn't want the government telling them what they can and can't do with their bodies and medical care. When it gets down to it, you can hate abortion and still never want the option denied you -- politicians have trouble with that one; it doesn't fit neatly into an ad; but individually, people are right on top of that shit in the 21st Century.

Many of the great debates, in short, have become a bit passé, precisely as anticipated by President John F. Kennedy. “Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint — Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative or moderate,” Mr. Kennedy said in a 1962 news conference. But, he said, most problems had become “technical problems, administrative problems; they are very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”

That is some prescience there. But change is slow. In a way, we're still working on the changes that started in the 60's. (See Barack Obama, above)

Some researchers say it’s easy to read too much into scientific breakthroughs and opinion polls. Patterns of behavior don’t change on a dime. For example, it took a decade for tobacco use to start falling after the 1964 surgeon general’s report on smoking and cancer. Others say the political system is broken, and that improvisation — unpredictable by definition — is the only way forward.

If euthanasia can’t be made legal through politics, then the medical world, through the winks and nods of mercy killing, will find a way. If people want affordable food on the table, the economic system will get the lettuce and strawberries picked with low labor costs even as the squabbling over illegal immigration goes on.

And so the winds shift. The most recent Gallup poll on crime, in May 2006, found that only 34 percent of people thought the death penalty helped lower the murder rate, down from 62 percent in 1985. In 19 states, from California to Mississippi, executions have been put on hold pending a resolution to a Supreme Court case challenging lethal injection in Kentucky. And New Jersey tossed out the death penalty altogether late last year.

So euthanasia will happen law be damned, as will slavery and wage-slavery, because the law doesn't matter as much as the culture -- or, rather, the culture is ahead of the law. And what we choose culturally will end up us, whether politics keeps up (or just lags behind) or not. That's a comforting thought, because that means we all have a lot more power than we tend to think. If we're lazy slack-asses that don't care, that has a huge effect, yes, but we can reverse the trend, through individual action and cultural influence.

What culture are you influencing today?

2007-12-12T11:25:00.001-05:00

Where is Your Knowledge?

From the NY Times:

These days, students who miss an important point the first time have a second chance. After class, they can pipe the lecture to their laptops or MP3 players and hear it again while looking at the slides that illustrate the talk.
At least two companies now sell software to universities and other institutions that captures the words of classroom lectures and syncs them with the digital images used during the talk — usually PowerPoint slides and animations. The illustrated lectures are stored on a server so that students can retrieve them and replay the content on the bus ride home, clicking along to the exact section they need to review.
When it’s time to cram, the replay services beat listening to a cassette recording of a class, said Nicole Engelbert, an analyst at Datamonitor, a marketing research company in New York.
“Students already have an iPod and they already use them all the time,” she said. “You don’t need to train them.”

How wonderful and convenient. Of course it runs the risk of putting all but a few professors in every discipline out of a job (why learn from me when you could learn from Noam Chomsky?), but should we keep our backasswards wealth and hellfare insurance system to avoid firing bean counters?

Many the time a student has requested my notes. And many the time a student has complained to me about some totally irrational professor other than myself who refuses to give out his notes. Of course I say no just like the others. And while I don't know those other professors' reasons, I can tell you my reasons for keeping my names, dates, graphs, and other notes to myself (even the ones I make into overheads for presentation): my notes are necessarily incomplete. What's missing? Thought.

Not that I don't put thought into my teaching notes. I most decidedly do -- in addition to time, effort, research, etc. But the 7 pages I produce to help me create a 50-minute "learning situation" is not the learning situation itself. It's more like a path through the learning situation. It's a roadmap. And looking at a map of Tokyo is not a trip to Japan.

“Students don’t have to review the whole lecture,” he said. “They can type in key words on their computer, do a Google-like search, and open the lecture at that point.”
...
Ronald Danielson, a vice provost at Santa Clara University, which has a site license from Tegrity, said that students use the review system efficiently. “They are very expert at clicking back and forward to the exact spot they want,” he said. “They don’t listen from start to finish.”

If we all only learn about what we expect to learn about, we will narrow the scope of learning. Things you are unexposed to you cannot search for. One of the most toxic syndromes I see in my students (especially at the freshman and sophomore level) is a stubborn and sullen expectation that the content of my class will be old f-ing news. When the content of my class is indeed totally new to them, some of them are really pleased, but a minority acts offended, as though I have done something out-of-bounds by not sticking to what they already know.

If my students could fast-forward me and google my lecture for key words, they would no doubt save time; but they would learn nothing new. Every story on my syllabus would be reduced to "women should have rights," and "alcoholism destroys families"; or worse: "the grass is always greener," and "the early bird gets the worm." Ugh.

By the time the students are juniors and seniors, the syndrome has passed: they've been in college for at least two years, and now they know that they do indeed learn new stuff that they couldn't have expected, every semester, that they are in fact completely different people, now, fundamentally different from how they came in as freshmen, and that the change came in large part from learning about things they never could have imagined before. Which is awesome. That is what college is all about, if you ask me. But can students have that experience on mp3?

The problem is that learning isn't about being exposed to a series of facts -- if it were, everyone could save a lot of money on streetclothes and gasoline and stay home to learn on the internet. Nor is learning about regurgitating the set of facts your local expert has deemed testworthy (which I suspect is the core of this matter). Learning is a conversation: a give and take of ideas, a push and pull. It's giving the wrong answer, having to amend that answer, feeling the need to counter-attack an idea that you feel has attacked you. Can you learn that from watching other people do it? Or do you have to do it yourself?

2007-12-03T22:59:00.001-05:00

The Evolution of Art

The Science Times has an interesting article on some recent theories of the origins of art, as a human phenomenon (which reminds me, go check out my story, Venus Envy, now available online for the low low price of FREE at Fringe Magazine!)...

From an evolutionary perspective, what is the "use" of art? Why do we have it? How does it benefit us?

But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought [sic]. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems [sic] too important to leave to chance.

Like far too many stories in the Science Times, this one too personifies evolution (saying it "deems" something, for example, implies it is an active force with intelligence, which is fun to think, but not true; evolution is simply the inevitable effect of dead animals not reproducing, while live ones can, and can pass on some of their traits, too).

So is art adaptive? Does possessing artistic qualities contribute to the survival of the species?

Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.

Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

This is an interpretation that appeals to my way of thinking: I've never liked the image of the artist as an ego in need of expression. I've always preferred the image of the artist as conduit for the needs thoughts and feelings of a time and place. But wait, there's more:

As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.

Talk about strolling through Amy's theoretical garden! I am of course entirely non-religious, but I absolutely love religion because it is the ultimate art form. Participatory, ritualistic, immersive, REAL. I don't think people would be ignorant of the wrongness of murder without commandments against it, but I do think that societies could not form without this kind of connective tissue. Some friendships are entirely based on a similar taste in music or films. More are based on similar tastes in God. Art can hold a society together. Religion is a closed system of art that take that on as its purpose.

So this leaves a final question: where does it come from? What defines its form?

Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.
After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.
To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.

To which I can only say, GOO GOO GA JOOB.

And go read "Venus Envy"! It's evoluta-riffic!

2007-12-01T18:01:00.001-05:00

Venus Envy Online

Happy December! Getting the holiday season off on the right foot, Fringe published their 13th issue today, featuring my short story "Venus Envy."

Fringe is a fantastic journal, so by all means read the whole thing. But make sure to come back and tell me how you really think my story is the best thing in it.

Click here to read!

2007-11-29T13:36:00.000-05:00

Eric Schlosser

Is one of my favorite writers. Yes, I am one of those people for whom reading Fast Food Nation was a life-changing event. (I never saw the film; was it good?) I also read portions of his newer book, Reefer Madness -- the portions on migrant laborers.

His new op-ed in the NY Times strikes especially close to home, being as it is about a local corporation (Burger King is a SoFla Co, if you didn't know), and a major local issue: the near-enslavement of migrant workers -- most of whom are here illegally, making them vulnerable to abuses unimaginable to those of us whom fortune has bestowed with "legality."

Migrant farm laborers have long been among America’s most impoverished workers. Perhaps 80 percent of the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants and thus especially vulnerable to abuse. During the past decade, the United States Justice Department has prosecuted half a dozen cases of slavery among farm workers in Florida. Migrants have been driven into debt, forced to work for nothing and kept in chained trailers at night.

Andrew Cockburn's 2003 National Geographic article "21st Century Slaves" affected me so much I actually taught from it one semester. Click those links and the first thing you'll see is that, "There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade." We understandably think of slavery as a 19th Century issue, but slavery goes on today, and the Abolitionist movement is nowhere to be found. In part, that's because slavery's gone underground. You might see six enslaved men carted down I-95 in the back of a pickup truck, but how would you know they were slaves? We assume it doesn't exist, and so we don't see it. One of the stories (not accessible on the online version) told by Cockburn is of a trailer full of men in chains, in Florida, men literally enslaved, that was kept right beside the entrance to a lovely gated community. People drove past slavery every day on their way to and from their own homes, and did not see it.

So I was really pleased to see that the plight of the enslaved was mentioned by Schlosser as well. My almost-finished novel, which is based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, but set in Southwest Florida, uses this very setting: it takes place on a sugar plantation staffed by illegal migrant workers. Because the workers have no rights, it gives the story that aristocratic flavor (a Duke, a Countess, their powerless servants) found in Shakespeare's original.

So the real point of Schlosser's op-ed...

In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald’s agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald’s.

...is about much more than just whether or not the most poorly-paid and abused people in Florida are going to get a tiny hike in pay, or have their previous tiny hikes maliciously taken away. It's about the rights of human beings to be free. The best way to free the people who are currently literally enslaved is to improve the working conditions of the migrant workers as a whole, the piece-pay slaves; The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is the most awe-inspiring group of any kind in America. This is the most powerless group of people taking on the tallest climb against the greatest opponents, surrounded by not just the indifference but the outright ignorance of the American people. What, here, slavery?

Making things worse, many Americans decry "illegal immigrants" as though they are some other type of human, as though this entire continent weren't snatched violently from its native people, as though this society weren't built on the sweat of the enslaved and near-enslaved, as though every group that came here wasn't, at first, seen as some kind of "scourge": the poor white trash ("Polacks," "Micks," "Bohemians," "Kikes") from Europe.

Just as Irish children worked in textile mills in New England two centuries ago, Salvadoran children work in tomato fields in Florida. Invisible, unschooled, without rights. A sub-class of people. "Illegal" people. The future will be made of their descendants, and those descendants may be proud of their ancestors' struggles, or may forget them, or may complain about the latest "scourge," like their rights go without saying and the new people's rights are a deeply offensive cut to their hearts.

What most offends me is when people who claim to be "Christians" become hatefully righteous and indignant, apparently putting their "love" of law above their love and compassion for their fellow human beings in need (I have a student who is a very public Christian who recently railed to me about those horrible "illegals" and I had to hold my breath to keep from throwing him out a window) -- what would Jesus think of that? If Jesus were alive today, he'd be walking the tomato fields, ministering to the people who need it, and condemning the Burger King eating, public-praying, money-counting, law-loving Hypocrites.

So would it kill you to boycott Burger King? Maybe write a letter? Maybe show up at Burger King headquarters in Miami tomorrow to protest? Get involved! Where have all the abolitionists gone? Just a thought.

2007-11-24T19:37:00.001-05:00

From the First Sentence

I knew that something was wrong:

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses.

"We are repeatedly told," huh? This guy just lost every reader not already in his choir, and I'll bet he doesn't even realize it. I'd guess that to him there is no logical catastrophe in this sentence. But he's just giving us the definition of the word, with a rhetorical "doubt" between the word and its definition, with the intended result of separating the word from its definition. Reading no farther than this first sentence, my guess is that he's planning on telling us that "science" is just another "religion"!

Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue. The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system.

Called it! Or should I say, "hypothesis confirmed"? By his argument this would be equal to "prophecy fulfilled." So what are the "articles of faith" of a scientist?

All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.

Oh, okay: you can't be reasonable and logical (scientific) if you aren't reasonable and logical, seeing patterns and principles and fundamental "reasons behind," instead of thinking that every time you drop a ball from a building, you might get a different result: eventually it might just fly into the sky! So now logos itself is "faith." Boy this guy does like to redefine things.

When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

Uh, no it hasn't. In fact, the history of human inquiry is filled with scientists who expected to find one result, found something else entirely, and were forced by this necessity to completely rethink their previous suppositions. This is how we learn. You don't know that? So who the hell is letting you flash your ignorance all over the NY Times?

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance.

Wow, what total bullshit. What does he mean by "when I was a student"? When he was an undergraduate in college learning the basic principles? Lordy-loo. Even when we teach writing, we start them off with the basics, tell them to structure their essays and paragraphs and even sentences a certain way -- no fragments, for example -- giving them rules frequently violated by masters of the language. What we say is, "you have to learn the rules before you can break them." Is this guy really suggesting that all scientists at all stages in their careers are equally capable of questioning with reason and purpose the existing theories? Does he believe that all students hold those learned facts as "scripture" for the rest of their lives?

The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore.

Oh, yeah, I guess he does. Well, he's completely wrong.

Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin.

This is a lie. In order to receive a degree in science, you have to pass tests that require you to understand the best current theories we have. That is not an act of "faith." You don't have to "believe" in them, and in fact if you doubt them you are more likely to evolve to the level of a Newton or Einstein or Hawking.

You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.

Okay, now he's just being silly.

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

Insisting that there must be a reason for everything is what is deeply anti-rational. Here are a few: why did New Orleans get hit by a hurricane? Why did my nephew die at 5 years old? Why do cats like to eat beef? There are two different ways to ask for "reasons things are as they are": one is to look for physical principles (air pressure, wind currents; DNA defects; proteins on the tongue; etc.); the other is to look for vast ego-driven whys, like, New Orleans was hit because it's full of sinners, or because the Bush Administration needed to be exposed, or because it taught us all something about community, or something like that. This guy is conflating the two. And suggesting that physicists' failure to answer the ego-driven whys "makes a mockery of science."

I'm not sure how much more of this guy's idiocy I want to post here. He essentially uses these ideas to go on and expound:

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

Oh, clearly. Believing in an ego is the same as recognizing a physical property. Why, the reason that rock sits on the ground is not because of gravity or inertia, but because it wants to, because it likes it there. Maybe gravity and inertia are the same as want and like. If you're this guy.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way.

Yes, physics is a theological discipline because the first person to define the field was theist. You know what? It's also a male field, and a British field. Also, America is a Deist nation, because the founding fathers were all Deists.

It's his last sentence that really puts his problem on display, though:

But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

Some people just can't handle the concept of contingent knowledge: that you operate on the best available information, without believing that what you're operating on is absolute "truth." This seems to be his problem. Perhaps he is only capable of understanding absolutes. That is sad for him. But lots of people understand that when we see 7 historical models of the solar system or historical models of the atom, we're not seeing a series of "debunked beliefs," but the progress of continued scientific inquiry: each model was tested and its failures led to modifications which led to better understandings of the physical world. We don't conclude from this that the current models are completely right and the old ones completely wrong, but that there may well be a next and a next and a next that we will never see because we'll be dead by then. If that bothers you, you're not interested in science, you're looking for a faith. So look elsewhere. Because this conflation of science and faith is insulting to both.

In the end, though, I don't see this writer as dishonest; I see him as simple-minded. He wants "the truth" and he wants it now. But humankind will only get marginally better at understanding the universe, baby step by baby step; the models we use now will surely be shown insufficient. That isn't "faith" being upended. That's progress.

Unless you're this guy.