Weave a Mesh Together From the Bright Spots

 

I've read a book I came across at my local library a couple weeks ago with the bold title, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future. It's by 2021 Nobel Peace laureate Maria Ressa and recounts her chronicling the return to authoritarianism in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, ending with the election of Ferdinand Marcos' son and Duterte' s daughter as his replacement president and vice president. Along the way she presents a lot of distressing facts and events suggesting we are headed ever closer to a willing abdication of our political rights in favor of the  relinquishment of our political responsibilities.

The "our" of the subtitle is not rhetorical. If you're tempted, as many of us are, to shrug her warning off as "that's Asia's problem," presuming that as bad as Trumpism has proven for the US, it can't be that bad, she points out that in the early 20s the US was the only country whose use of Facebook superseded the Philippines. And while both nations have since then lost their number one and two status--India now dwarfs us, and the Philippines has slipped behind Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico--we remain thoroughly within the grasp of what Shoshanna Zuboff has named "surveillance capitalism" which is the -ism whose operational form is "primary extraction". This is a practice by which " social media companies took our private actions and lives by using machine learning and artificial intelligence to collect and organize our personal data..., then publicly declared that they now own those corporate assets, which are then used to create algorithms that... manipulate us for profit. They offer no compensation, and they don't have to ask us for permission." 

As an example, you will never find a way to lower the number of ads you see on FB, despite those regularly appearing pitches that claim all you have to do is this and this. Delivering ads to your feed is what Facebook does, what it's meant to do. It's not good or bad in itself, but as Ressa describes, it can easily be put to bad uses. For instance, it will favor news and information one entity paying another wants you to see. She includes charts and details that, frankly, are too much for my very small brain, but people with greater experience with how the internet works will likely understand it.

There are moments when we might see the light at the end of the tunnel is not an approaching train. Ressa focuses on Facebook, for instance, because that was the primary social media platform at the time. While it remains the lead it is swiftly being overtaken by YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and as the bulk of boomers like me die off and stop using it, will be subsumed by younger, more malleable apps. They're likely to start by aping the successes of FB, but we've already seen how that kind of thinking has already become both corrosive and obsolete for Elon Musk/X. 

In her penultimate chapter with the depressing title "Why Fascism is Winning," Ressa explains that you stand up to dictators by "embracing values, defined early...: honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can't do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence. Then connect the bright spots and weave a mesh together.

"Avoid thinking in terms of 'us against them.' Stand in someone else's shoes. And do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Technology has proven that human beings have far more in common than we have differences; the tech platforms insidiously manipulate our biology regardless of our nation or culture. Fascist ideology, whether you call it 'the great replacement' or not, pits homogeneity against domestic enemies, who invariably champion democracy and its ideals. It's happening not just in the West, but in India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Philippines. We all have our own Pol Pots who encourage mass violence based on us against them."

Indeed, trump is simply the airbrushed version of Putin, Kim, Orban, and Bashir, made more palatable for a nation that claims it operates on individuality while it thrives on fetishistic consumerism. As we should already know, the hard work of governing ourselves requires paying attention and making difficult choices. Evil lurks in the easy answer, the simple solution. The core thing we have in common is the dignity all of us deserve. Dignity demands real thinking, hard thinking, and we must not let that go. 

258 candles-day 57

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Using data and technology to determine where anti-poverty work is most needed.

258 candles-day 21

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: A primer on the Growth Trap of the New, Digital Economy. 

"the music you grew up with"

Since moving to a new hub, one on a lake rather than a prairie, I've needed to come up with new entertainments. In a sense, this is similar to the move I made in the late 70s from upstate New York to Boston: in that pre-McDonaldsation of media time, there were new radio stations playing unheard music and TV stations-more than three!-some devoted to showing old movies or those new technological marvels, music videos.

Television here is mostly unexplorable as we rarely hold a solid signal for long, and having recently lived in an area where we only got variants of public TV, so we aren't much interested in what might be there. But I must have music, and as nearly every station here either plays "Jesus loves me" music or a rotation of hyper-modulated American Idols trying hard to be the worst of this year's boy band/Miley Cyrus mix up, my options seemed extraordinarily limited. But I have discovered an oldies station playing mostly mid-70s to early-80s tunes. And while it's true I often have to slog through Journey yelling "Separate Ways" prior to yet another Bee Gees slice of disco DOA in order to hear Al Green wailing "Let's Stay Together," I don't deny it's more often worth it than not. The station, out of Manitowoc, bills itself as playing "the music you grew up with," and as I liken listening to it to listening to a commercial MOR station in 1983, that's at least somewhat accurate.

A more interesting entertainment, incorporating modern tech, is the Twitter feed Sheboygan Scanner. This is, apparently, someone listening to his police/fire/EMT scanner and transcribing what he (or she) hears. And the transcriber is a stickler for accuracy, often correcting previous misunderstandings of roads or injuries, and enclosing words he doesn't hear quite right in a pair of brackets with a question mark. This person is enamored of the word "bonk", using it for head injuries of the elderly, as in "older woman slipped on patch of ice and bonked her head" and "elderly man in car accident no injuries except for bonking his head on exiting the vehicle." He also, this winter of sudden freezing snow, elides many accidents into a phrase beginning "car vs"-"car vs snowflake," "car vs sign," "car vs house" and the frightening "car vs kid." Small, heartbreaking stories can come across in these short, nearly poetic peeks into other people's lives, as in this from a post about an hour ago: "24th st & Indiana ave - male pushed female, then they held hands." How can I possibly be unhappy to have moved where such an incident is worth reporting?

the internet as god

[Pragmatism] implied a doctrine...which [Charles] Pierce was concerned to refute.  This was nominalism--the belief that since concepts are generalizations about things that, taken individually, are singular and unreproducible, they do not refer to anything real.  Nominalism is the doctrine that reality is just one unique thing after another, and that general truths about those things are simply conventions of language, simply names.  Pierce balked at this conclusion...We think in generalizations:  that is what inferences are--general truths drawn from the observation of particular events.  Therefore, [Pierce concluded] there must be things in the universe to which our generalizations correspond.

The nominalist's mistake, Pierce argued, is the definition of belief as individual belief.  Of course the beliefs of individuals are flawed; no individual mind is capable of an accurate and objective knowledge of reality.  But the aggregate beliefs of many individual minds is another matter...

Nominalism, [Pierce] believed, was a philosophy in aid of selfishness.  This was not simply because nominalism denies knowledge its social character; it was because by acknowledging the reality only of individuals, nominalism denies the social altogether...

[The] conviction at the bottom of all of Pierce's thought...was that knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals.  For individuals die:  "the number of probable inferences, which a man draws in his whole life, is a finite one, and he cannot be absolutely certain that the mean result will accord with the probabilities at all"...Reasoning "inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited.  They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community...He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively.  Logic is rooted in the social principle."

 --from The Metaphysical Club:  A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand

If it's true that all learning is social--and it is in the sense that "to learn" means to acquire or gain some new knowledge or skill; if we mean something else we need a different word--then learning is something we can only do in culture, in society.  Learning has to be taught, and it makes no difference if we're talking about a human teacher, an accidental teacher, or a physical natural event as the vehicle of what's taught.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite geek ideas, that once everyone on the planet becomes connected to the internet or some web, then the web itself becomes god.  As at least one blogger has suggested, this posits an optimistic rather than dystopian future:  that the divine is what we have to look forward to (as a communal rather than individual end) rather than a golden past with a Fall.

teach naked!

on occasion, when I especially miss teaching, I swipe an issue of "the chronicle review," the midsection of the larger chronicle of higher education--my rationale is that it's unlikely most visiters to my local libraries are going to read the chronicle anyway, and it might as well go to use--and spend a few days reading it.  last week I brought home a copy with the short essay "against reading lists" by lennard j. davis.

it's a provocative idea, dropping required readings from syllabi (except for some introductory material) and allowing students to determine, through conversation and suggestion and their own outside reading, where to go next.  say, in a 20th century american lit class opening with some early influential stuff--"song of myself," say, or the red badge of courage--and allow them to determine what and who to read next, maybe choosing from a prepared list of options.

davis recognizes the massive change that ebooks and online availability makes for reading. 

on the internet, one link leads to another.  you look up turner, say, on wikipedia.  that site leads you to the national gallery of art, which in turn leads you to romanticism, which in turn takes you to delacroix, and thus to reubens, who isn't a romantic but whose use of flesh, light, and color influenced that movement.  that little stroll was unpredictable, but a fruitful exercise in intellectual curiosity.  in the past, we've operated with a very different model, conditioned not by the internet and the intellectual meandering it allows but by a kind of linear thinking reflected by the consecutiveness that we find on the printed page.  the fixed reading list is the icon of that linearity.

at first, I wasn't certain he understood what some of the realworld costs of that flexibility meant.  for instance, he suggests that in "the new world of e-books, online publications, and next-day book deliveries, we are freed from the dull hand of tradition," apparently oblivious to the fact that for most students not enrolled at a more expensive school like chicago, where he teaches, such sudden cash expenditures are not easy to negotiate (or for working students to plan reading time around).  he does , however, next present a more affordable and workable alternative, suggesting an e-reader (or an option to spring for paperback copies for the more linear among them) for his students onto which they could download preselected texts.  he says he somehow selected his list so that the 2 groups "would end up spending the same amount of money..." 

that format allowed many impromptu changes in the reading list.  it also allowed us to look at a poem or a short story right at the moment in class when it occured to me to refer to that work.  another benefit was that visual material, not included in the course packet or reading list, could be called up at the mention of a specific reference.

this is doable now, of course, using classbased technology, and I've made much use of that in my more recent practice, putting sites and film clips and readings on the overhead computer screens available in most college classes.  but he makes an excellent point near the conclusion of his essay that what we are looking at is not only new in terms of technology in the class but in the way learning is distributed.

we are now presented with a more 3-dimensional model that reaches through time and space in unpredictable and valuable ways.  the philosophers gilles deleuze and felix guattari called that kind of knowledge "rhizomatic," after a type of plant.  a rhizome, such as a potato, reproduces by sending out underground shoots that form another plant, which in turn does the same thing, producing a network of roots.  deleuze and guattari contrast that to the "arboreal" model, in which a single set of roots produces a single tree, with all its branches connected to one trunk.  deleuze and guattari see the arboreal model as the older model of knowing, hierarchical and organized, such as strict taxonomes of organisms.  they see the rhizomatic as a newer, more effective scheme for organizing knowledge.

 

the little box on my couch

my friend turquoise died this morning.  I wasn't there--she was living in california.  I don't have any good stories about her.  I only met her once and it was for a few hours over beers when she was visiting the rim.  her death wasn't unexpected--she'd been suffering from cancer almost since I met her and in what chaplains (and health pros) call the active dying process for at least a year.  by most of the criteria by which we run our lives, I shouldn't have known her or much of her or been able to follow her progress as she was dying.

but this is a new age and wonderful toys exist that allow us to be a part of one another's lives even as we live and die thousands of miles from each other.  I was friends with her on facebook and kept up with her by reading her blog.  my wife was better friends with her:  last winter, in the midst of dealing with her own dad's active dying process, her chaplaincy internship, and working fulltime, she crocheted turquoise a prayer shawl and then took it when she visited her (her rationale for flying to california in the midst of so much busyness and our dwindling bank account:  "I would rather see her alive than view her body," a principle with which I agree). 

I know what was important to her--her friends, her cat, her art and her life--only because I knew her through a little box perched on the lip of my couch from which I can communicate with so many.  I only knew of her death this morning because of a post from a mutual friend relaying the information on a website that, in my youth, would have been unthinkable (or we thought of it in terms of horror or dystopia) but in her youth--she was in her late 40s--had developed into something that the youth we know grow up mastering the intricacies do so so quickly that new developments come in months rather than decades.  this connective tissue is composed of electricity and pulses in addition to blood and muscle and it is because of it that I can reach out and be reached out to.  it is because of it that I could know and appreciate turquoise.

I mourn my friend turquoise.  I celebrate her life.  that I can do both and let you know of it is a product of the times in which we live.  I don't know if turquoise knew this song but I think she would have appreciated the message (and the beat).

wrong number, right caller

I got another call from brooklyn tonight.

about 3 years ago, I started getting calls from a 718 number. I tend not to answer my cell phone if I don't recognize the number calling and this caller called for several weeks before he left a message. when I listened to it it was so faint I could barely make out what was being said and had to listen 3 times before I understood. it was the voice of a very old man asking if jerry would return his call.

I didn't like to leave this old fellow hanging so I called the number back. the same wheezy old voice answered and I tried to explain to him that I didn't know who he was trying to reach but he had the wrong telephone number. he seemed unable to understand and I had the impression I was talking with someone with very white hair sticking out at odd angles from his head, wrinkled face like his face had nearly dried up, and arthritic clawed hands.

finally he gave the phone to someone younger and female who asked who I was. I explained the wrong number to her and she apologized. she said her uncle likes to talk with her brother and usually waits for her to call for him but sometimes he takes his own initiative and he gets the number wrong. I said that was okay, no harm done.

the calls continued, maybe every couple months, for another year and a half. he never left another message and I never bothered to answer. it was just a semi-regular thing: my cell would ring, I'd look down and see the 718 number on the screen, and I'd let it roll into voicemail. I presume that he realized his mistake once he heard a different voice.

but my wife is in california visiting a friend so when the phone rang I answered it, assuming it was her, without pausing to look at the screen. I said, "hi," in the way I say that to her, and in return heard a very weak wheeze say, "can I please speak with jerry?" I said, "I'm sorry, there's no one here by that name" and he said, "oh, I'm sorry," and hung up.

it wasn't until after that I realized it had been nearly a year since I've last gotten a 718 call. and it wasn't until I'd realized that I also realized how glad I am to know the old man is still alive.

scrabble

"the scrabble tournament is held in the crazy horse saloon, which is decorated in an english version of a western theme. the men's bathroom is marked BRAVES. I buy my 1st irish whiskey of the morning at the young dudes bad and look around the room, which is packed with 100 little card tables, each of which is equipped with 2, 3, or 4 spindly folding chairs with seats made of hospital-green plastic. some damaged person has assembled tiny darly little silver pie tins, with diameters equaling no more than 3 inches, each containing a wizened fruit pie, into perfect geometric stacks on dozens of tables where there aren't any people.

"...I secretly hate scrabble, for the simple reason that anyone hates scrabble, which is that I am bad at it, and because words aren't a game. a single word can destroy a person's soul, his faith in humanity, and other serious assets. no one who understands the exigencies inherent in language wants to waste words on a scrabble board.

"...the impact of tile on tile is muffled in a way that seems to suggest something fucked up is happening inside the bag. good letters are being exchanged for bad...I feel like every time I start to love rock and roll again my favorite singer kills himself, or else I run into some...asshole wearing black-rimmed glasses and a t-shirt that reads THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE FUTURE."

--from "letter from minehead: underacheivers please try harder: indie rock reunites on the english coast" by david samuels in the may 2011 issue of harper's magazine

I love to play scrabble. every night before we go to sleep my wife and I play at least a few hands of a game. we play a variation app on our cellphones called "wordsmith" the 4 nights a week she's staying in a little room in the center of the hub while doing her clinical experience. in our 20+ years of marriage we've owned and played multiple versions of the game, from the original board game to a special travel version to the game she downloaded to her palm pilot some years ago (and that we're likely to replace soon since the palm is dying the slow, merciless death that electronics are heir to) that we've found works best. for me, it's somewhat like an easier version of crossword puzzles cuz I don't have to make connections beyond a single letter and the words I use tax only my vocabulary and not my knowledge.

but I also dig why some people don't like the game. it can be time-consuming (sometimes we play a speeded-up version in which each of us has only 30 seconds to play--I'm especially a timehogger when coming up with words) and it can be annoying and 1 can feel pissy when a particularly well-crafted game suddenly goes titsup at the acquisition of that bastard "q" tile.

still, I don't think there are too many games that have as intrinsic an appeal as scrabble. it's a good icebreaker and a good game to play while drinking beer (hard liquor might kill off too many braincells to make it worthwhile). I've never played it while smoking herb but I can imagine that, like a 2nd summit, it would help 1 loosen up and allow the words to flow more smoothly.

varying shades of gray

a few weeks ago I found a copy of bruce sterling's 2002 book tomorrow now: envisioning the next 50 years in the $1 bin at a buns & noodles in the hub and I've been impressed both by the way he writes and the optimism which his book gives me. you'd think the guy who helped define the word "cyberpunk" would be more interested in dystopia, but the world he proposes isn't a utopia either. it's like today, only moreso, and with fewer hypocrisies.

this essay on the ethics of using currently ethically-challenged technology to create more ethical technology caught my eye and strikes me as something in that same optimistic vein. I think most people like me fear that, once we have recognized and admitted our privilege, we need to give it up in order to make the changes we know need to happen. but writers from jon sobrino to karl marx to the gospel authors tell us that's not the case: we need to use that privilege to help other people. as leonard writes in relation to social networks and action, "Just because action is easy doesn’t make it irrelevant." it's easy for me to give a 30% tip to a server at a restaurant and that's certainly not irrelevant.

if it's irrelevant to do the easy action then we're stuck in the spanish prisoner's dilemma of doing nothing because for most of us the harder action is useless too. if I give up my privilege and go to work in foxconn's factories in taiwan, what exactly have I done? have I helped anyone? will I have bettered the life of the teen worker next to me or bettered the life of the single mother who would have gotten the job if I hadn't taken it? will even my life or my identification with the oppressed have been improved? it isn't necessarily a false either-or, of course; a third option is that I could forget it all and ignore both the plight of the workers and my own privilege and go on with my consumption and affluence.

jesus and marx both said that the way to personal salvation is through helping others who aren't doing as well as you are. the bodhisattva takes it a step further and actively refuses his own salvation until everyone is saved. how ironic and perfect if the way to do that is the judicious use of the "like" button.

broader but shallower

last night on my drive home from class I stopped in at a buns & noodles to read the copy of century: 1969 I'd spotted there about a week before. I've really enjoyed the league of extraordinary gentlemen stories alan moore has written over the past decade, and maybe what I enjoy even more is the little visual and verbal contemporary memes he and his artists smuggle into each story, sometimes jampacked into each panel. in the most recent I twigged onto most of the big ones, like the semimajor figure of jerry cornelius who I'd expected as he's a moorcock invention of that time period (and moorcock's kane of old mars had appeared in the 2nd volume), but also the major characters of turner and pherber and jack who I hadn't expected because, unlike moore's other pilferings, they aren't literary. (I've also something to say about the uproar over moore's complaints that dc comics are pilfering from him by releasing new before watchmen comics based on his seminal work, which is this: moore is a braggart and a bully and a genius and he is right.)

at any rate, much of the little sidling things that kevin o'neill put in, like the patrick troughton dr who of that period and andy capp, were really good. but the thing I most appreciated about the book and the thing that I wanted to comment on was the nostalgia I felt reading it for an era when there were secret pockets of information and experiences that were hidden from most people (and mostly found through selfselection). some were right on the surface and freely available, like the village voice of that time and the carlos castenada books. for others, like times square and woodstock and be-ins and dope, you had to seek them out and in some cases you had to know someone who knew someone.

today it seems different, as if every experience is available at any time in some way through the internet as a repository of other people's experiences. those experiences were available, in some form, back then too, but it took time and effort and just plain luck and dogged pursuit to tease them out. I suppose I'm bemoaning the loss of a kind of elite adventurer, of which I was only modestly ever one, a person who knew the codes and where to find things and if he didn't knew someone who did and might be willing to give them out in trade.

I'm not sure I'm complaining about this change entirely--I think it's good that formerly cult tastes like occult kung fu movies or lovecraft's cthulu stories or gutbucket music can be easily found by anyone with a search engine--but there's something different in it, a patina of knowledge that can be laid over a broader but shallower knowledge. I miss the days when I could only find a gang of four album by spending time in a holeinthewall shop on a new york sidestreet and only knew about gang of four because I'd read about them in spin--in its early days, the punker rolling stone made a little more punk by its relation to penthouse--and heard a single tune on erik erikson's latenight overnight show on wdst, long after the squares had shut down for an early day tomorrow. back then I needed weeks or months to make those circuitous and accidental connections. now I can do it all, even the listening, in a half hour.

teach naked

"When I started graduate school in 1989, we were told that the disastrous job market of the previous two decades would be coming to an end because the large cohort of people who had started their careers in the 1960s, when the postwar boom and the baby boom combined to more than double college enrollments, was going to start retiring. Well, it did, but things kept getting worse. Instead of replacing retirees with new tenure-eligible hires, departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students. From 1991 to 2003, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 18 percent. The number of part-timers increased by 87 percent—to almost half the entire faculty.

"But...the move to part-time labor is already an old story. Less visible but equally important has been the advent and rapid expansion of full-time positions that are not tenure-eligible. No one talks about this transformation—the creation of yet another academic underclass—and yet as far back as 1993, such positions already constituted the majority of new appointees. As of 2003, more than a third of full-time faculty were working off the tenure track. By the same year, tenure-track professors—the 'normal' kind of academic appointment—represented no more than 35 percent of the American faculty.

"The reasons for these trends can be expressed in a single word, or buzzword: efficiency. Contingent academic labor, as non-tenure-track faculty, part-time and full-time, are formally known, is cheaper to hire and easier to fire. It saves departments money and gives them greater flexibility in staffing courses. Over the past twenty years, in other words—or really, over the past forty—what has happened in academia is what has happened throughout the American economy. Good, secure, well-paid positions—tenured appointments in the academy, union jobs on the factory floor—are being replaced by temporary, low-wage employment...

"Well, but so what? A bunch of spoiled kids are having trouble finding jobs—so is everybody else. Here’s so what. First of all, they’re not spoiled. They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.

"Sure, lots of people have it worse. But here’s another reason to care: it’s also a social tragedy, and not just because it represents a colossal waste of human capital. If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore. And then it won’t just be the students who are suffering. Scholarship will suffer, which means the whole country will. Knowledge, as we’re constantly told, is a nation’s most important resource, and the great majority of knowledge is created in the academy—now more than ever, in fact, since industry is increasingly outsourcing research to universities where, precisely because graduate students cost less than someone who gets a real salary, it can be conducted on the cheap...

"It isn’t just the sciences that matter; it is also the social sciences and the humanities. And it isn’t just the latter that are suffering. Basic physics in this country is all but dead. From 1971 to 2001, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in English declined by 20 percent, but the number awarded in math and statistics declined by 55 percent....On the work that is done in the academy depends the strength of our economy, our public policy and our culture. We need our best young minds going into atmospheric research and international affairs and religious studies, chemistry and ethnography and art history. By pursuing their individual interests, narrowly understood, departments are betraying both the values they are pledged to uphold—the pursuit of knowledge, the spirit of critical inquiry, the extension of the humanistic tradition—and the nation they exist to serve.

"We’ve been here before. Pay was so low in the nineteenth century, when academia was still a gentleman’s profession, that in 1902 Andrew Carnegie created the pension plan that would evolve into TIAA-CREF, the massive retirement fund. After World War II, when higher education was seen as an urgent national priority, a consensus emerged that salaries were too small to attract good people. Compensation soared through the 1950s and ’60s, then hit the skids around 1970 and didn’t recover for almost thirty years. It’s no surprise that the percentage of college freshmen expressing an interest in academia was more than three times higher in 1966 than it was in 2004.

"But the answer now is not to raise professors’ salaries. Professors already make enough. The answer is to hire more professors: real ones, not academic lettuce-pickers."

--from "faulty towers" by william deresiewicz in the may 23, 2011, issue of the nation (my emphasis added)

an excellent article that I could have written, since all the information, sans the supporting evidence, was known to me by personal experience (and that he entered graduate school the same year I did, and heard exactly the same spiel I heard, both excites me because it proves I am not crazy and my experience is like almost everyone else's, and depresses me because I am not crazy and my experience is like almost everyone else's). I suspect almost anyone who's looked hard the past decades for a college teaching position without the magical phd (or abd, which according to deresiewicz is preferable as they are "people who have [already] entered the long limbo of low-wage research and teaching that chews up four, five, six years of a young scholar's life" and will accept less pay with the lure, which is increasingly disappearing, of a steady lifetime gig, one that often never materializes) could have written much of this. it's a depressing sight, postsecondary education in the 21st century, and less and less alluring. in the course of the article he covers a dozen books, some of which I'm going to have to read.

teach naked

I'm sitting in the coudersport public library where I have a solid wireless signal. reading last sunday's nytimes I came across this essay in the "week in review" section and was absolutely charmed by it. what does it mean for author tim kreider to say, "I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things"? it means that there is some only partly acknowledged thrill to being the only one on your block--or in your county--to know of, let alone appreciate, the wizardry of devo or david bowie (to my knowledge there was only 1 other bowie afficienado in my high school and we argued fervently which was better, early ziggy stardust bowie [my position] or later thin white duke bowie [his]). when I was a student of secondary education I was told by a professor that the 3 most important words a teacher could say were, "I don't know," followed years later in grad school by the advice of my mentor that the 2nd most important words were, "you should find out." the years between are probably the important ones.

saturday night reading

"[poet and computer afficienado brian] christian goes on to make the subtler, poetic point that human talk is not just an exchange of axioms, or even of emotionally coded abbreviations, but an activity of compressed communication and the nimbleness with which we compress it--between our knowledge that in everything we say we have to leave out a lot of information for economy's sake and our ability to make that economy itself eloquent and informative. kid-speak...is an ideal instance of compression in balance with concision. what sounds to the outsider limited and repetitive is to the knowing listener as nuanced as henry james. when one eleven-year-girl says to another eleven-year-old girl, 'so then, like, the teacher got all, like, all of you, I guess, are, like, going to have to do a, like, I don't know, a makeup test. so! like, yeah,' she means: 'the teacher, becoming heated'--that's why she 'got, like,' rather than 'said, like'--'announced, in effect, that many of us (I suppose, at a first approximation, all) will, at some point in, as it were, the near future, have to take what actually amounts to, when all is said and done, a secondary makeup test. I have indignant feelings about this--as who among us would not?--but I recognize their essential futility.' all of this is completely clear to the knowing listener, but it's been impossible, so far, to teach a machine to, you know, like, really, like, get it."

--from "get smart: how will we know when machines are more intelligent than we are?" by adam gopnik in the april 4, 2011, issue of the new yorker

reading while sick (2)

shuffling around all day in one's jammies, drinking herbal tea and watching the birds flit from branch to branch, and being terribly jealous of everyone one knows simply because they can be outside while one is stuck inside drinking tea and draining one's sinuses--this is the time one gives to reading odd things and enjoying that experience. here, the 2nd excerpt, roughly 40 pages from the end of pat cadigan's tea from an empty cup. this is from the perspective of yuki, the alternate heroine of the novel, who has entered artificial reality in search of a friend.

"after a time, the light died down, from blinding to something softer, something on the order of the warm golden glow from an antique lamp. yuki became aware slowly that she was no longer falling, had not been falling for some time. her eyes were closed and she had no sense of her position--had she passed out? was she still unconscious and dreaming?

"she opened her eyes and jumped, startled. she was sitting in an enormous leather chair...pulled up to a large, round, dark wood meeting table. there was a touch on her arm and she turned to find her grandmother sitting at her left.

"'grandmother?'

"'body,' the woman said.

"'whose?' asked yuki, bewildered...'you look and talk just like my grandmother...is this how they use you in the afterlife? they keep your brain running to generate post-apocalyptic ar cities?'

"'if I am your grandmother, I'm dead, I'm past caring why they keep my brain running.' the woman smiled. 'it doesn't matter what they intended anyway. something else is happening, something they didn't bargain for.'

"...'it's all just ar. right now, I'm moving so fast they can't track me, but eventually I'll start to lose momentum and they'll find me again.'

"'actually, they'd rather find you before you lose momentum,' [the woman] said, leaning over to look at the center of the table. yuki followed her gaze but saw nothing other than a vague area that might have been a spot that a dustcloth had missed. 'they've been trying to get up this high for a while now. only one or two managed it in the past--accelerant combined with high adrenaline, nature's own speed cocktail. they want to follow you up. they know there's something here and they want it...old japan.'

"yuki laughed without humor. 'oh, yeah. post-apocalyptic tokyo, the hottest thing yet. please. save the sales pitch. I don't do ar...'

"'no. not a cheap amusement park. the real old japan. and I know who you're looking for.' there was a pause. 'igochi tomoyuki tried to sell his birthright. the one who purchased it was set upon by a demon, who killed him.'

"'sorry, I don't believe in demons,' yuki said sourly.

"'ask tom, then, when you find him, if he believes in demons.'...[the woman's] face became a cold mask. 'he became greedy. he took the catalog, he decided he would sell the high-level access for money, to anyone, non-japanese as well as japanese. greed is a very old, very unorginal scenario, so boring. if we could recover the catalog, the accesses to the higher levels--'

"'if tom's still in here,' yuki said, careful to keep her voice even, 'why can't you find him? or do you already have him--out there--and he just won't talk?'

"'--we would forgive him, we would make him part of bunraku. as you are.'

"'bunraku,' yuki repeated, mystified...

"'the method by which old japan will be remade--awakened--for good. the real, the true old japan. we were bringing it to fruition, we were nurturing it with the life of our blood and tissue and the afterlife of our souls...'

"something rippled through her, like a sensation from someone else's body, as if someone else were sharing the suit with her by some remote access. except this time, it didn't feel hideously obscene, like being invaded by a stranger from within.

"there was a gentle touch on her shoulder and she looked up to see a large doll-woman in traditional japanese costume floating in front of her on the table. it bowed and began to move slowly and precisely, with as much grace as a living person.

"not a doll. a puppet, with several living persons behind its movements. her movements. bunraku. japanese puppet theater. not a children's diversion but the classic puppter theater of old japan, as serious as noh and kabuki, a demonstration of skill and grace, control and cooperation. now she could see the outlines of the people moving the puppet if not their faces. see them and feel them--"

I have to say in closing that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, so much so I have decided to locate its sequel, dervish is digital. the ending in particular is not slapdash or cartoonish but a solid, complicated ending.

demons

in preparation for an online meeting this afternoon I've prepped a new mashup.
this began life as a compilation of still photos and video clips but I swiftly decided I wanted to use all video. the difficulty I'm running into is how to determine whether a video will be smooth, like most of the clips I use, or jerky, like a few end up. I can't see any difference between them when looking at them online or as they download--it's only after I use them that I discover they jump from frame to frame, almost as if the speed is slowed or a few frames get tossed out between them. not a dilemma I've figured out.

watching tv

I'm not much of one to watch television often anymore but tonight I'm watching independent lens on pbs while it shows the documentary chicago 10. this is a lot of fun; this is what tv is meant to do.

take confidence in gratitude-4

the finale of my day-after-xmas video sermon. it was a good experiment but I learned there are non-technological elements that also need to be considered, such as against what is such a sermon being projected (a white wall that bright sunlight reflects against is not a good choice), as well as how enlarging a video clip can slow it down considerably so dancers look like they have st. vitus.

take confidence in gratitude-3

part 3 of today's day-after-xmas multimedia presentation (that went over very well, thank you: attendance was always down, I was told, on the service after xmas, so there were "only" 50 or so people; but when I preach out on the rim I would kill for an attendance of 50, so I'm not complaining).

take confidence in gratitude-2

part 2 of my day-after-xmas multimedia presentation