Look to the Bloggers

 I'm not bright enough to come up with a solution to the Hamas-Israel war/conflict, nor to the issues that existed before their Cold War became a Hot one. I wish i could claim to have one, since nearly everyone does. But the simple truth is that I can't even be certain which side has the lesser guilt.

That may sound like a copout. But there is no dearth of people, politicians, journalists, commentators, who are full of certainty. I am just saddened by the incredible loss of life. The killing has been indiscriminate and however and by whomever it is done, the result is the same. 

For my information I go to the BBC and The New York Times but they only provide me with the number of deaths and how they were done. The ways citizens celebrating or sleeping in their beds were killed or the ways citizens with no connection except they lived where missiles and rockets were killed. What I'm more interested in is in the people who are doing what I would be doing in their place: Reflecting out into the world what is happening all around me and what it does to me.

What I've been doing is looking for bloggers who are live in Gaza and the Israeli cities being hit. Thought experiment: Imagine yourself living your life day to day and suddenly bombs begin falling and people start dying all around you. What would you have to say?

I'm not listing any of the bloggers I'm reading, Palestinian and Israeli, because I want you to find them the same way I did. At random and through a lot of trial and error. What you will find is a lot of anger, hatred, fear, frustration, thoughts of vengeance; And you will find thoughts of forgiveness, exhaustion, pride, compassion, hope. No one has a monopoly on those, and certainly no state or group. 

Fred Rogers used to say, "Look for the helpers." I would paraphrase that to say, "Look for the bloggers," especially the ones who live in the areas under attack. They are the ones bearing the brunt of what is being done and blasting out, as best they can, what they experience. If we want the human condition, we can do no better than look to the humans under bad conditions.

 

Why Aren't Comics Better?

 

Well, of course I don't really have an answer to that. To do so would require knowing inside baseball like costs, publication periods, working with creatives including writers, artists, inkers, colorists, even editors. It would require knowing about readership and buying habits and brand loyalty and other important and necessary stuff. And I don't know any of that.

But I do think I know what's good and what makes for good stories and, frankly, there aren't enough of them available. Every few months I go out and sit to look at the latest offerings (and I'll be the first to admit that skews what I see because I read graphic novels, which necessarily take sometimes years to accumulate enough story to be printed), so what I am looking at is not technically the latest offering. But what I see leaves me depressed.

So I suppose what I really mean is, why aren't comics as good as I wish they were? It's true, don't damn a story for what it's not. But there's so much else they can be. What I think disturbs me most is the tendency in so many stories to kill minor characters or passersby easily. I applaud where this has come from as a response against the unrealistic ability of everyone to save everyone. 

But there's too great the temptation, I guess, to whack people willy nilly to show how irredeemable a character is, how little human life means to them, all that. Is it necessary to show a character slaughtering, sometimes people on his own side, and joking while doing so? The recent Mr Miracle series was offensive in the killing of members of Scott and Barda's own forces while they argued about renovation. There aren't any noble ways to die but it's certainly insulting to be slain by the leaders of your own community while they banter about who puts their closet to better use.

I have, of course, other issues, mostly about the hypocrisy of fine tuning the reality of a series which continues to feature the same cast of a half century or a century ago. But there's something instructive too about looking backwards at those old series. What sets art, even middlebrow art, apart from the sniggering of porn and nihilistic jokes is that it presents a world a reader wants to work for or against. Here's where the optimism of space opera and the pessimism of dystopian stories come in. At their worst, they leave the reader with the sense that "this is a future I want to see/avoid." The Ronin/Hawkeye vignette in Avengers: Endgame, which might seem counter to my point, is instead an excellent example. Ronin's indiscriminate killing of drug dealers while cosmic forces are at play elsewhere is perfectly at home with his (and maybe the viewer's) belief that a world in which people who profit off other people's pain are punished as resolutely as a multiple world destroyer is a future worth working toward.

Poetry from a dozen years ago

I mentioned in passing recently that it's been a while since I've written poetry. Most of it has not been confessional but it often is based in my experiences, sometimes on work or relationships. These are, I think, the last I had worked on. In 2009 I was teaching creative writing and produced these as examples for the classes. I wanted to present them before I publish the new work, maybe to show the changes I'm making, the focus I'm recalibrating. 

ON THE APPEARANCE OF KURT VONNEGUT
IN A RODNEY DANGERFIELD MOVIE 

This face that looks like it has covered a lot of ground

Or ground much under it.  This face looks
Like it has ground much and covered much.
This face is a dog’s lapping unconcernedly at water.
This face considered granfalloons and I hear the sirens, I hear
The call to my karass.  It would fit so beautifully next to
Dangerfield’s, with whom he never shares a
Scene, GE PR beside aluminum siding.  Nixon, Hitler, Pol Pot,
They would not fear this face, this sleepy, disheveled
Face with a crazy son and coughing while he’s dying.  I see
Frustration and laughter, anger and resignation, this face
Cracking under the strain of living too long, asking for not much, a glass
Of water, some of my time. 

Of Your Rope
You’ve reached it not
when everything
stops, but
when nothing
is anymore,
when it wraps
around you
like your grandmother
’s afghan but
warmthlessly, no
cold there
either, the eyelets
she embroidered
staring like
her own dead eyes. 
How will you know? 
The end will
be a taunt, a bolt
that stares
up from
the floor
uselessly
beside the engine. 

 

SUZI QUATRO IN SAN REMO
I can’t get her out of my head.  Like an
            ice pick jabbed over and over
                        into my hippocampus, she’s
burrowed into my consciousness.  Those lips,
            that mullet framing a face already running to fat.
                        Years later latex pants make
sausages of her legs.  She’s
            the girl of my dreams, circa 1974, now
                        in early 1980 singing her biggest hit, her worst song,
duetting on Italian television with a guy whose muttonchops
            are probably more familiar with English
                        than he is.  But
there she is, little girl face, this voice that can
            burnish steel, can melt the paint off a car,
                        siren song of so many coke dreams, hash reveries.
Drummers are the “Q” keys of rock music. 
I would be her drummer, fold her cellulite
in, zip up that latex.

 

The Dead Girls Club 

It’d be nice if ghosts filed in,

like the future kings in MacBeth,

stately, decorous, in order.  But they don’t.

They enter like students, noisily, banging desks, dropping bags,

full of outside life.  And they don’t take their places

either, whether you’ve set them up in assigned places

or all in chairs facing one way but arrange

the room to fit around them, a corner here

to accentuate The Cutter’s curls.  A window there

so The Junkie can stare out when she gets bored.

The Crazy One makes the walls, the furniture, the others ricochet around her, mouth

open for an occasional comment or a shriek.  But that’s the thing.

They never utter a word, or none you hear.  Except for their entrances, ghosts are silent.

Except The Silent One on the floor, now spread eagled, now fetal,

mewling like a hungry kitten.  They’ve come

with the others—The Successful One,

The Trust Fund Punk, The Cold-Handed Sculptor, The Big Mother

(Big Grandmother now!), The Really

Crazy One you never fully see, the Others you don’t have names for—to do what?  Serenade you? 

You’ll never know.  They come, they shuffle around

the room, themselves.  One by one, softly,

one by one they leave you.

Ghosts always eventually leave you.

The Red-Monster

I certainly wasn't his best friend. And although I knew him for a long time and we stayed in touch as well as we could, I couldn't call him a close friend. But he saw me, in his wife's words, as "a good shit." I would have said the same, and for a lot of us, that's about as good as it gets.

We were in grad school together, his first time and my second. He was part of what another friend described as "the Raymond Carver crew," writers in the 90s who felt the power of the word lay in saying things plainly, without flowers, without elaboration. Back then he only wrote fiction, so that when I found out years later he'd published a chapbook, I wondered when he'd started writing poetry.

He married, had kids, found steady work that was meaningful and often frustrating. If I hadn't kept in touch with him on Facebook, I wouldn't have known him if I'd passed him on the street. He went from a Marky Ramone shaggy mullet to a hairline rivaling Patrick Stewart's for brevity. When he died a couple weeks ago, it was a shock. He hadn't been sick, had stopped drinking a long time before, didn't even smoke or eat much fried food. I heard it was his heart and I like to think it surprised him too, so he didn't feel anything more than the snap of an artery.

He was the kind of good shit that, when a lot of us got together last Saturday to remember him, the words said more often than any others were, "I'm gonna miss him." We told a lot of stories about him, and I wrote this one down for his wife and kids. He might have told them, but maybe it's mine to tell.

This was back before I knew him, back when he was still drinking and living the sort of life he would write about. "I was in jail in St. Peter, on a DUI charge. The judge gave me a choice, I could stay in my cell during the day or go to college. I chose school because I'd been in cells before. There was a school in St. Peter but I couldn't afford that, and Mankato is about 12 miles south, and they accepted me.

"They took away my license and my car, so I had to bike the distance. I took classes every day so I didn't have to stay in my cell. It was dead winter, and there I was biking there every morning and back every afternoon. I did that my whole sentence. I was about 7 weeks in when I realized I must be getting something out of it."

What will live on

For decades, since I was a child, I've thought of myself as a writer. It's the activity and craft I've practiced all my life. And I've always thought what I was meant to do was write an Important Work.

I don't know, that may still be ahead of me. But I've also always thought that was my way to make my mark on the future. I suppose we all think that in some way: I know I'll die but how do I live forever nonetheless? Parents, I think, have this uppermost in their minds as their children, and then their children's children, grow.

But I've come to realize that immortality is not immortal. I mean, I read things suggesting that civilization or even humanity as we recognize it may not survive our great-grandchildren, and I think that such an attempt on my part is so much ego, an investment it's not in my interest to make. My mark, instead, is meant to be in the mark I leave on other people's lives. This is what I do that will lie on. I mean, really live on.

What I do, gently shepherding people into death as best I can, is more important than anything I might otherwise do. Like writing, it is something I do well, but unlike writing it isn't subject on other people for its practice. I receive from my ministry a sense of contentment of my self I've never known before. It's much the same sensation I feel when one of my beasts, heretofore leery of me, suddenly lays its head on my arm and sleeps. I am at peace with the world and know what I do matters.

This takes a tremendous burden off me. I don't feel as if I'm cheating someone (if I'm honest it was this sense of ego gratification) by not writing regularly. I feel I have more time for reading, for walking, for enjoying things like coffee and music. Admittedly, I still squander that time shamelessly in surfing or watching TV, but I'm learning to curtail those.

None of this means I'll stop writing, especially here. In fact, I suspect it will clear up more time for me to blog, as meaningless as that may also be, given the vagaries of both audience and (electric) power, because I don't need to pay attention to what I think are important events or things to write on (although I will continue focusing on the corruption of the Trump administration and the frustrated anger of people on the wrong side of history recognizing their own irrelevance). And to salve my ego which, let's face it, is as demanding an urge as hunger or thirst. Besides, as Walter Miller, Jr long ago taught us, there's no telling what scrap from the past the future might discover is important. 

A little Friday morning reading

I've enjoyed Neil Gaiman's writing for years, and I'm interested in trying to binge-watch the new series American Gods after it's gotten good and going. (I've tried several times to binge-watch shows--The Man in the High Castle, Penny Dreadful, Dark Matter--but I couldn't watch any past the first season; they always disappointed.) Anyhow, I really liked American Gods my first reading and intend to reread it before watching the shows as I don't remember many details (and the trailers remind me I've forgotten more than I'd thought), and I want to get in on this binge-watching thing that everyone, including my wife, has been doing.

I've been reading much about how several TV shows now are especially relevent as they give insights into Life Under Trumpism, and especially American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale. But for the Gaiman book, I read a very good interview in which he says the following:

I have this mad theory about American elections. There is a reality-TV quality to them, in that they tend to go to what people think would probably be the most interesting story. “Who’s more interesting? Who’s a better story? Bob Dole or Bill Clinton? Let’s go for Clinton, it’ll be more interesting!” And there is that point where you’re going, “Okay, so is it Hillary, who still feels kind of like a rerun? Or is it Trump?” Even articulating that as a theory means that people are going to mishear what I’ve said. It will turn into a clickbait headline and people will be going, “You said that Trump was a better story!” No. I think Trump is an out-of-his-depth idiot. Who is possibly criminal. And certainly incompetent. I think that, actually, having a sane and functional right wing is a good thing. Having what we’ve got right now is a bad thing.

When the novel was written, it was written about America as a country of immigrants, of people who either came here of their own free will, or escaped here, or were brought here against their will. And what that meant — talking about the religious traditions and talking about the cultural traditions and talking about what that became. And having a lead character who was racially — and in all other ways — a melting pot. That, when I wrote the novel, didn’t seem to me to be particularly problematic, difficult, or even praiseworthy! Things that I did not think were praiseworthy or sensible included writing about indentured servants and transportation. Writing about the slave trade. Writing about a gay, Muslim salesman encountering a genie who drives a cab in New York.

I wasn’t doing it for the credit. I was doing it because it all feels right if you’re talking about America. Suddenly, Trump came in and now I’m reading articles in Vanity Fair about, “This is the most political stuff you’ve ever seen.” Well, I guess that’s all true, but it’s not like we sat down and went, We are the opposition. We simply started telling our fucking story and then the world changed. It would be like telling a pro-Jewish story in Berlin in the 1930s, and suddenly you’re looking around going, “We’re apparently doing something big and important.”

 Oddly, this theory of his comforts me, as the idea that we love a good, juicy story is a lot more appealing than that we like chaos and incomepetence. It's certainly played out at times in American electoral history (although it's important to remember we never had Presidents Bryant or Long), and if it's true it suggests that, like all the other times, most of us will get through it. Of course, some of us won't. And it's for those the rest of us must act up.

teach naked!

Most writers have accepted, not without questions, but with few alternatives, the basic format of the fiction workshop, and the collective standards that are apt to prevail there, emphasizing, in the case of fiction, the short story...The writing seminar itself has developed a specific, venerated, and almost inviolable format...A work will be read by the class, and perhaps a few passages read aloud by its writer, who is then forced to be quiet while others talk about it. Experienced participants will begin by saying something nice about the writing, something they liked, something that works. This is positive and also has the virtue of softening the next phase, the criticism. Fellow seminarians will try to confine their remarks to technique and not judgment of the writer's character or ability--nothing to suggest "you must be a horrible person to have written such a disgusting piece..." If you have to criticize, instead say, "the clumsiness of that passage may distract from you interesting theme of universal brotherly love," or something else genial.

--From "They'll Make You a Writer!: [A Review of] The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl" by Diane Johnson in the November 7, 2013, issue of New York Review of Books

As a recipient of what, elsewhere in her essay, Johnson calls "the ubiquitous and valued MFA," and a member of many workshops, I can vouch for the veracity of the description above. And as someone who's taught a couple undergraduate creative writing courses myself--which were, above all else, a lot of fun--I can also admit to the supposition of the first sentence: I tried to break the format in my first class but found it nearly impossible to do so. So like the proverbial American lit professor who includes the execrable Sister Carrie in his syllabus because it was part of his studies, I taught exactly the way I was taught, and in some instances in much the same way.

But this isn't to dis the teaching of creative writing in contemporary American schools or the subject of studying creative techniques because, the truth is, I had a lot of fun taking workshops. I loved the arguing, the overlapping elements of narrative and plot and authorial intent (my own favorite, and true, explanation for why it doesn't matter what the author intended: "I won't have you to explain this to me when I'm reading it alone."), the all-night drives to other towns to take part in joint readings, the drinking and bullshit sessions with visiting writers. The acting as if writing really mattered. And it was also true what I told my students: if focusing on writing interested them, then by all means go study it because they would have a focus and concentration and comment on their art that they will never have otherwise in their lives.

And while it's true that, as McGurl points out, the holy triumvirate of finding your voice, writing what you know, and showing rather than telling, tends to produce cookie-cutter small-magazine voices talking about their own special hyphenate problems (in my experience, we often slapped down genre writing in class because "no one," meaning "no one in this class," "reads it," denying the prime real estate devoted in any sized bookstore to the sales of exactly that kind of writing about what no one, whether classified as science fiction, mystery, fantasy, action or romance, has ever experienced), Johnson touches on a truth here when she quotes Elif Batuman in The London Review of Books: "We have to stop being ashamed that 'literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn't directly cure disease, combat injustice, or make enough money, usually, to support philanthropic aims,' except in the case of Dave Eggars. But we can still proudly practice it."

This, by the way, remains my favorite workshop-related piece in any media:

goodbye, village voice

I don't remember when I first read the Village Voice, let alone when I first saw it. But growing up in New York it was ubiquitous. I remember buying copies when I could find them upstate from the mid-70s through the 80s, and for a time when I lived in New Paltz, I had a subscription that, I remember, promised--and made good on--delivery by Saturday after new issues came out on Tuesday.

Here's what I remember best about it. There was a sense that, by cracking open the pages, you were plugging into a source, if not of Truth, then of Questing. I learned about new things, new outrages, new music, new movies, new books, new ideas that I couldn't locate anywhere else. It's the reason why if I'm in any new town I look for the local cultural weekly. And while I couldn't always take part in them--rarely did films like The Little Theif make it upstate--sometimes I could. I took the trip down to The City (and reading the Voice you always thought of it as The City) to see that Truffaut, and somehow Stranger Than Paradise made it up there. When it did I knew I was seeing a movie by a new talent with absolutely new ideas about filmmaking and what constituted a story. By age 24 I'd seen enough explosions and guns going off. I was ready for nuance.

I read all the greats in the Voice: Mailer, Christgau, Sarris, Hentoff, Bastone, Feiffer, Stamaty, Mack, Willis, Goldstein, Johnson, Plachy (okay, I looked at her stuff, but I drank it in like it was written), Barry, Rall, Barrett, Hoberman, Brown, Indiana. Listen how those names trip off my tongue! I knew I was part of a special constituency. I read Ellen Frankfort's histrionic The Voice and Kevin McAuliffe's Great American Newspaper (which was already sounding the Voice's death knell in 78). I stuck with it through the Murdoch years and when it was funded by the sales of flea collars. I stuck with it through the disgraceful firings of Eddy, Christgau, Goldstein, Hentoff, Feingold and Musto. I even stuck with it through the painful constrictions online as it became a watered-down spacewaster where, at best, one could mine it for little nuggets of tough observation.

But no more. The final sole reason I've continued to read it online, Roy Edroso's weekly Exploring the Right Wing Blogosphere, has departed, vanished, disincorporated. It is a late column. Runnin' Scared, the blog where Edroso's column appeared, is still there, and one can read archived columns. But it's not the same. I'll continue to occasionally skim Runnin' Scared, because I like seeing what the miscreants back in The City are doing. But as a regular weekly destination, as a place where I will wait up til 10 on a Sunday night because 11 east is when he updated, it will no longer exist for me. Village Voice, I shake the dust of you from my shoes.

Shane McGowan Wishes You a Merry Effing Ho-Ho

[Given the season, it seemed appropos to post this essay I wrote as an example for research classes several years back.]

 

            I was driving my usual commute during the first week of November.  I hit the “scan” button on my radio and various music and talk shows faded in and out.  My attention was caught when dulcet tones sang, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

            I knew those dulcet tones.  That was Perry Como.  When I was a kid my folks were avid listeners of what’s now called Adult Contemporary Music but in my childhood was simply referred to as Elevator Music.  Perry Como, Mel Torme, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Kate Smith, Rosemary Clooney.  I’d learned to know those singers in the first couple notes as a child by repetitive play on the stereo.  But the novelty of hearing the late Honeyed Voice in the Sweater on the radio was soon overtaken by the realization that I was listening to a Christmas song.  On the radio.  The first week in November.

            Now, when I was a kid, Christmas was my favorite time of the year.  I didn’t have to come up with excuses not to go outside if I didn’t want to, and the cold nipping at my exposed nose on waking was neat.  Plus it was wonderful to lie on my belly and read a junk novel by the bottom lights on the Christmas tree with a plateful of cookies and some hot chocolate.  I’d start playing Christmas albums around September and not cut it out, despite firm requests from my family, until about the first week of January. 

            But that stopped when puberty kicked in.  Here were adults—Professional Adults!—programming Christmas music when everyone’s Halloween candy was still fresh.

            Rather than ranting and raving about it, I decided to look into the reason for this.  There had to be a reason.  There were several.

            No radio station exists as an island.  Every station, whether owned by a conglomerate like Clear Channel or Fred over at the Fish Shack, exists as part of a market.  The market can be as small as a city and its environs—the Twin Cities, for example—or as large as a region—the Iron Range, which is the full upper third of Minnesota from Bemidji to the Canadian border (excluding Duluth).  There is an unwritten agreement between radio stations that one station, generally the Adult Contemporary or Lite station, within the market will provide twenty-four hour, seven-day-a-week Christmas music starting in November.  On December 24^th, every station is welcome to play as much Christmas music as it chooses. 

            The reasons this agreement came about are diffuse.  Some argue it is because, well, someone has to do it, so it might as well be the station whose listeners are accustomed to listening to Easy Listenin’ Music.  If the station is an oldies station, whose listeners are accustomed to the sounds of the classic Christmas songs from mid 20^th Century—Patti Page, Mitch Miller, the Jackie Gleason Orchestra, Sinatra, Como, Torme—so much the better.  It should come as no surprise then that the most often played Christmas song is Nat “King” Cole’s version of “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” but what should surprise us is the number of popular songs with at best a tangential connection to Christmas, often merely a mention, that also pop up regularly in rotation, such as Joni Mitchell’s “River,” the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles,” and DanFogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” (this last divorced not only from the holiday but from reality:  how hard is it to find an open bar on Christmas Eve?), while ignoring several more controversial ones with secure roots in the holiday, like the Kink’s “Father Christmas” and ThePogues’ “Fairytale of New York.”

            The difficulty may come when a market has only, say, country and rock stations.  One of them will likely take on the duty, but this will often be a choke for regular listeners, since there are comparatively few Christmas-themed country or rock songs, and certainly not enough to program twenty-four hours a day for nearly sixty days.

            This is the interesting part to me.  While it’s been a given of every generation to bemoan how quickly the Christmas season begins, as if its generation could wait longer, and while I thought I had some memory that this was an omnipresent condition, radio stations starting earlier and earlier until we’d finally reached saturation point with Halloween, that isn’t the case.  While some stations make a practice of starting earlier—KOSY in Salt Lake City, Utah, is apparently the earliest, beginning its Christmas rotation Halloween night [although this has changed only this past January]—the practice used to have as a common starting point the day after Thanksgiving. 

            Until 2001.  Yes, 9-11 changed everything.  That was the year George W. Bush asked us to help America remain solvent by spending money, and one of the ways gleaned by merchandisers and radio programmers in tandem was to begin the Christmas season early, two weeks before Thanksgiving.  The practice has simply escalated and the dates fallen back since then.

            And here we come to the dirty secret why radio stations, especially Adult Contemporary and Oldies stations, fall all over themselves to be the first to begin the Christmas season:  Stores and shops generally play Christmas music for their customers, the better to suggest “buy early and buy often.”  A few stores, like Walmart and Kmart, have their own radio systems, and some big chains, like Best Buy and [late, unlamented] Circuit City, use piped-in Muzak.  But aside from the big boxes, the majority of stores and shops rely on the good old fashioned free radio signal to accelerate buying habits.  Naturally, the mix of garlanded shelving and spruce-scented spray with tchochkes and knickknacks with the background fuzz of Herb Alpert and His Tijuana Brass and their version of “Sleigh Ride” is a marriage made in Retail Heaven.  Most importantly, these stations are played at least for the operating hours for the store and occasionally simply left turned on for the cleaning crew.  This is a bump in Arbitron ratings for a station, sometimes as much as three points.  Arbitron ratings are an important part of a station’s profile.  The place each fits on the scorecard for its market determines how much it can charge advertisers for 10, 20, and 30 second spots.  In a market of ten stations, getting bumped from number 6 to number 3 for the year can mean a bump of tens of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. 

            It doesn’t matter, of course, if anyone actually listens to this stuff.  The stations provide “ears” to the advertisers, and they’re selling potential sales.  It isn’t important if the employees end up by the third week of November muttering x-rated versions of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on its tenth play of the day.  What is important is that at least ten times that day, different customers have heard it and their desire for, say, another twenty dollar stocking stuffer for Jimmy has been pricked. 

 

 

Works Cited

• Arbitron Radio Ratings and Media Research Information.  2007.  Last accessed November 26, 2007, at http://www.arbitron.com/home/content.stm
• “Christmas Music.” 2007.  Wikipedia.  Last accessed November 26, 2007, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_music
• Ho, Rodney.  2007.  “Bull Goes All Christmas.”  The Atlanta Journal Constitution.  November 23:  B1. 

·         Virgin, Bill.  2007.  “On Radio: All-Christmas format is a ratings gift for KRWM-FM, boosting it to first.”  Seattlepi.com.  Last Accessed November 25, 2007, at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/300965_radiobeat25.html. .

 

my 1980s

[Although many dissed it, I enjoyed this Wayne Koesten-baum essay reprint on Salon, so much so that I've decided to write a similar one in the same style.  Mine will be, of necessity, shorter for the simple reason I'll try to say something in fewer words and images.]

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

I wanted to be the Next Great American Writer in the 1980s. I published one very bad novel and an interesting monograph on Jerzy Grotovski and a few short stories and poems. But I wrote many, many other things.  In my teens a professor told me I was a Renaissance Man and I took that to heart, wanting to whip off novels and poems with the same alacrity as Victor Hugo or Thomas Hardy; tellingly, I didn't enjoy reading either of them at the time. I envisioned myself forever sitting up late at night writing hard, amber-clear prose that never quite satisfied me. There is a wordless comic strip from Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez from that time that shows one of the characters typing and smoking late into the night in a high garret room, suddenly crushing a sheet of paper with dismay, and that's how I saw myself. I often accomplished the sitting up late, drinking instead of smoking, but rarely found anything near solid, precise wording.

***

I was married when the 80s started and divorced about midway through. It was by mutual consent and there were no kids or property to dispose of so it was relatively amicable. We had sex nearly every day because we were young and horny and it was one of the few times we didn't fight. After we divorced and I lost nearly a hundred pounds I found to my surprise she wasn't the only person attracted to me and eventually I would gain a reputation, not undeserved, for fucking nearly everyone who approached me. For a while I enjoyed sex with men as a sort of vacation from the emotional messiness of sex with women, a kind of palate-cleanser between courses.

***

I read a tremendous amount, usually on walks and under trees, from silly novels to dense philosophies. I tried to find at least one important line from every book or poem or short story or essay and then typed it on a slip of paper and taped it to the swinging door of my kitchen. I'd been given a portable manual typewriter as a graduation present and it was on this I wrote nearly everything during that time. I had had a larger manual office model someone gave me during my marriage and it was on this I wrote my novel and the monograph, but one evening after reading On the Road I stood up suddenly and began to move methodically around my little apartment collecting furniture, clothes, books, kitchen utensils, everything I decided I no longer needed, and piled them in the center of my living room floor to give away. The office typewriter was among the last items to make the pile.

***

Today I have a lot of friends who hop trains and call themselves train kids. I did that only a couple times and only for short distances, always returning to my starting point. I was alone each time and spent the whole ride hunkered close to whatever I was holding onto: my first time I clutched a pole tightly, scared shitless I would be blown off and my body found by kids a la Stephen King's "The Body," and the next times I went I belted myself to something secure. I was a road kid, spending most of my time hitchhiking or in my own car. I always had luck hitching; it was always a matter of patience and not looking angry as the cars and trucks whizzed past me. One of the few times I hitched with someone else was one of the least productive hitch times of my career; we walked hours on the side of the New York State Interstate--we were headed to Buffalo--but we made it within twelve hours of our starting by dint of catching a train outside Rochester because it was dark and no one could see out thumbs. Whenever I hear the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" I go back to that time and think specifically of riding around in the back seat of a car driven by a lesbian who would come out as straight within a year and who was showing us the city.

***

I acted in porn movies for a short time, a single summer, but it was enough to fund my life for a year. $500-1000 for a weekend's worth of work was great money. It was easier and less anxiety-producing than I'd feared and I loved the sex. I never thought about AIDS, not because this was before it or I knew no one who had it--I lost several friends to its depredations and I carry a healthy hatred for Ronald Reagan and his ambivalence to this day--but because I was stupid enough to think I was immortal. I actually came through those years of mostly unprotected sex without a single STD, leading my friends to joke my mother, like Achilles', had dipped me in the River Teflon. 

***



Authors I read for the first time that decade who played an important role in how I write: Susan Sontag, Jean Genet, Bruce Chatwin, John Gardner, Joan Didion, Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Dominick Dunne, Tom Robbins, Louise Erdrich, Tim O'Brien, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Carver, John Le Carre, Henry David Thoreau, Rita Dove, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Simic, Gore Vidal, Georges Simenon, Anne Tyler, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lord, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Rita Adler, Carlos Castenada, Ursula K. LeGuin, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Clive Barker, John Irving, Thomas Pynchon, etc.

***

For years after my divorce I lived in New Paltz, the town where my college was located. The town is snuggled at the base of the Shawangunk Mountain range between the Hudson and Wallkill Rivers and is home to many freaks. I found myself fitting there like fingers that curl into a fist. Three years after my divorce, through some stunningly bad decisions, I was out of work and had to give up my apartment to a friend. I was in Manhattan for a job interview and, having waited too long because I was at a bar to catch the last bus out of the City, I found a quiet berth under a construction trailer on the overpass above the Grand Central Station. I was warm, safe, and it was astonishingly easy to get in and out without being seen. I ended up sleeping under that trailer for several months, until approaching winter made me decide it was time to visit my parents. They were against my returning to the trailer, or to New Paltz, where I might have slept on friends' couches, so I said, "Buy me a cheap car and I'll live in that." They found a 77 Dodge Aspen wagon for $500 and I spent a weekend making it habitable and then lit out for the road. I lived in it for three years, seeing almost all of the country and parts of Canada, before my mother's entreaties to come back out of it and go to graduate school prevailed. I disembarked in southern Minnesota and sold the Aspen and lived in a park seven miles from town, sleeping under a gazebo and riding my bike to classes. This was September, 1989, and in another nine months I would meet my second, or as she says, my last wife. 

suzi quatro in san remo

I heard this song yesterday on my drive home and was reminded of this poem from a creative writing course I taught four years ago. It was an example of a type of poem I asked the class to write: a memory of a celebrity. The format was one I followed from whatever model we were using (from the 2009 Pushcart Prize collection). I rather liked it and am reminded, in rereading it, of the series of poems in the collection Famous Persons We Have Known by my friend Rick Robbins. 

SUZI QUATRO IN SANREMO

 I can’t get her out of my head.  Like an

            ice pick jabbed over and over

                        into my hippocampus, she’s

burrowed into my consciousness.  Those lips,

            that mullet framing a face already running to fat.

                        Years later latex pants make

sausages of her legs.  She’s

            the girl of my dreams, circa 1974, now

                        in early 1980 singing her biggest hit, her worst song,

duetting on Italian television with a guy whose muttonchops

            are probably more familiar with English

                        than he is.  But

there she is, little girl face, this voice that can

            burnish steel, can melt the paint off a car,

                        siren song of so many coke dreams, hash reveries.

Drummers are the “Q” keys of rock music. 

I would be her drummer, fold her cellulite

in, zip up that latex.

TMI in blogs?

I'm of two minds about self-disclosure in writing.  I'm all for, say, bits and pieces of someone's life or background when it adds to her being a fully realized character in his narrative.  I like to feature lots of my past in my own work, and sometimes the problems I currently face.  But I'm not entirely comfortable reading about somebody's issues when they're presented as the focus of a blogpost.

Having said that, I'm a regular reader of two blogs by writers who are undergoing health issues and whose issues have taken centerstage recently.  A part of me, maybe the writer part, is resentful because those issues aren't the reason I read those blogs and their admissions hit me as too much information.  But another part of me, the minister part, is aware that for some people writing about and publicizing what they're going through is helpful in their dealing with pain.  Montaigne's revolutionize of the essay came about by mixing his personal ills and traumas into the pot of reflective scholarship.

So count me as one of those readers for whom TMI is annoying but for whom What Someone is Going Through is instructive.  I'm not aware of this being a controversy except perhaps among those of us who take blog writing, and writing itself, more seriously than it might deserve.

"we can't always use pandas and tea"

this is the sort of writer I've always wanted to be, not necessarily the voice of a nation but the writer who can direct readers to that voice, the writer who makes note of what the nation has become and points up both its foibles and its beauty. han han, who I had not heard of until I'd read this essay (my link is to the digital new yorker copy from last july and may prove unnavigatable and you may need to go to the paywall at the new yorker website), is publishing in english soon and I look forward to finding his essays, perhaps his fiction. I love too that in his native china he's better known as a racer than an author. shades of buckaroo banzai. I'm currently in a fiction mode, reading novels that make a comment on their times, from les miserables by hugo to neuromancer by gibson. these are the sorts of works that move down the centuries.

you're not worth my time

likely because we had tickets to the science museum of minnesota's king tut exhibit--which, despite their cost, we did not end up using because my wife developed a debilitating migraine, and I'd rather eat $100 than have her in misery for an afternoon--I grabbed an elizabeth peters mystery on my way out the door to an errand that involved sitting for an hour and a half. it was called the hippopotamus pool and it was execrable.

I should qualify that. the 1st 50 pages were execrable. the rest might be spectacular but I'll never know. I give any book an hour and if it doesn't make me want to keep reading after the 1st 50 pages I give it up. I noted on my facebook page that peters is an exceptionally bad writer but that's not really true. she's a very clever writer who probably can write well, perhaps for her more contemporary mysteries or her supernatural novels under the name barbara michaels, but she tries to make her amelia peabody novels a pastiche of the writing prevalent of the time in which they take place--the turn into the 20th century--and she gets some things right but the spirit wrong. as a person who reads a lot of novels from that period I'm familiar that there's a certain feel to the writing that readers come to expect, a certain verbosity and ornateness and unwillingness to name unpleasant things for what they are. I'm not certain attempting to write in that style by contemporary authors is necessary, although some--nicholas myers, laurie king, alan moore, julian barnes, anne perry, and of course george macdonald fraser, among others--do it very, very well.

it is usually sex that leads to trouble in these things and peters has made an especially unhappy attempt to invoke it, at least here. it's not a bad thing to want to go against the received wisdom that proper victorians were not the sexless prudes we've imagined them--indeed, frank harris made a cottage industry debunking that--but it is bad to suggest it with a fist made of ham and pork, which is the case here.

"I now make certain that the buttons on emerson's shirts are sewn with double thicknesses of thread, since they were always popping off when he disrobed in haste or when he expanded the impressive breadth of his chest. this was an old shirt; the buttons slipped handily out of the holes, and as he extended his arms to their full length, quite a large expanse of his person, smoothly tanned and artistically modeled, became visible.

"'really, emerson, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,' I said. 'if you think you can distract me from my maternal obligations in that crude, unsubtle fashion--'

"'unsubtle? my dear peabody, you don't know what you are saying. now if I had done this...or this...'

"leaving the cat anubis to the sitting room, we retired to our own."

this book is not worth my time.

paperback writer

a couple brothers rent the house across the road from my dad, and while no one seems to know much about them--they're computer wizards, they work for a local lumber company, their mom pays their rent for them as well as financing their cars, none of which information is mutually exclusive--it is known that 1 of them spends most of his days and at least some nights in an upstairs room writing a novel. in an internet age when anyone worth his salt has published at least 1 autobiographical or semiautobiographical piece somewhere on the interwebs, this is still cause for comment here in the thick, with everyone mentioning it at least 1ce in conversation, in the manner of, "don't that beat all, he just writes."

I've never heard any guess as to what it is he is writing about, but I like to think it's a science fiction/fantasy hybrid in the mold of john norman's misogynistic gor novels. I've got no basis for this--I've only swapped "hi"s with either of them--but the writing brother, who has not cut his hair or beard for years while his brother trims his, is a pictureperfect stringy uncomfortable with women type who I suspect is less likely than his brother to have spoken with anyone female other than his mother and maybe a cousin and an aunt.

the story runs, and I know this part is true, that a window popped out of an upstairs window and sat on the porch roof for 4 years before it blew down onto the lawn, where it sat another year until 1 brother, I suspect the 1 who trims his hair and beard, got up the gumption to step outside and pick it up where he leaned it against the house on the porch. it remains there. but the uncertain aspect of the story is that the only reason the screen was eventually picked up was that their mother insisted on it, or she was going to ask my female cousin, who rents to them, to come by and tell them it needed to be moved. presumably, the prospect of a woman besides their mother at the house was enough to prod them to action.

bread

years ago, when I was writing poetry as part of my mfa studies, I mentioned to a classmate that my 1st wife was paranoid schizophrenic. she said, "wow, that's gotta be a dynamite source of writing!" and that's when I realized that I'd never written anything about that period. this poem grew out of that.

BREAD

When everything else fails you, you can still

believe in bread. She is anchored in lime jell-o

in the kitchen. His suits litter the pantry,

his books are their plates. Sex is sliding on ice,

only with her legs spread. When he pries

at her with meat-thick fingers, she feels too much,

too much. She always has wool on. She pounds

the dough. Her fist goes through the table

and clanks on the floor. The bread, why not,

can be a doughnut.

Did he ever love her?

Might as well ask if she was ever pregnant. Depends.

Or was it the slant of light? Well. The oven's on,

and bread is bread and not doughnuts. He reads,

oblivious to bread, to doughnuts. She grabs a knife

and a chair. She faces the chair backwards,

at the kitchen door. She kneels naked on it.

She balances the knife along the top of the chair,

its handle blunt against the door. She props the tip

just above her navel. Metal and skin are a finger

and water. This is the question:

Will he open the door first, or will I stand up?

Minutes pass. The blade

mirrors her: the tense lips, eyes hidden in her hair,

teeth monstrous and full.

He goes on reading. She has to pee.

The knife clatters. That sound

and the smell of burning bread bring him to the door.

teach naked

in minnesota there's a program open to teachers for the past decade called the center for teaching and learning. teachers join circles of other teachers, usually from other disciplines, to research and discuss elements of good teaching and how to make them better. I've done a lot of these circles over the years at different schools and I've always found them beneficial if sometimes a bit full of themselves. it's good to have the opportunity to sit with your peers and talk about the state of the field, the things you do that work, and especially the things that don't. that contributing teachers were also paid a small stipend didn't hurt either.

you know where I'm going with this. naturally the office of the center for teaching and learning has been closed. this is its final semester. I've been a part of one that's met, unlike most which are face to face, primarily online, which is appropriate because it was on new technology and its use specifically in writing classes. it was good to get together because it's good to know there are other people who take the same things seriously as you do (perhaps more seriously but that's also sometimes a good thing). I will miss those opportunities.

below is my final report for my final teaching circle.

My students are often astonished if I tell them my first thesis was banged out on a typewriter and that I wrote it twenty years ago. That’s absolutely antediluvian in their view, before some of them were even born. If I go to the effort of showing them the library listing for it, they look at it the same way I sometimes look at objects my Older Testament instructor uses in her Power Points (itself now almost Bronze Age as a communication method).

Until a year and a half ago I’d have considered myself squarely a Luddite in my teaching philosophy; I had learned to write using a minimum of technologies and was certain my students were doing well that way too. But over January 2010 I took a course devoted to using media in worship at my seminary and over the weeks I gradually came to recognize the way computer technology had gradually sneaked up and overtaken me. Like with almost all important moments, it came as an epiphany one morning. I was attending a Sunday service at the UU church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and I noticed at the other end of the pew a 14-year old girl attending with her mother, who I knew slightly. While her mother and I were listening to the sermon, which was a pretty good one about history and the way it overtakes us without our noticing, she was completely enrapt in something in her hands, a Blackberry or a Gameboy, something electronic. She got up and sat down with the rest of us, but she was only there in body.

The next day I asked Jan, my instructor, “How do we reach someone like that? How do we draw her into community and make what we’re saying relevant to her?” Jan’s response was, “Do that.” I came up with the first of several sermon-based online auxiliaries that used multimedia as a way of bridging the gaps between her generation and mine.

It was months later before I made the connection between 14-year olds in church and the late teen students in my classes. Having read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information, and particularly Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, I saw that we are on the cusp of an incredible moment in our students’ lives, the time when the way we used to do things—for instance, the way we used to teach writing—is in such incredible flux that people like myself, taught in the methods that worked for generations and based on skills that had held sway for centuries is simply being overpowered by a new way that we can’t even begin to get a handle on let alone understand.

Here, for instance, is a part of my syllabus from a year ago:

SYLLABUS FOR ENG 1108—75
COMPOSITION I
Spring 2010

Prerequisite: Placement

MN Transfer Curriculum Qualified
WRIT Qualified (see below) Office Hours: S 1:00-2:00

• Course Description: You will read and discuss many published essays and write and improve on your own writing through class and instructor instruction.
• Texts:
1. In Brief edited by Judith Kitchen; Norton Publishers; ISBN 0393319075
2. Woe is I by Patricia O’Connor; Riverhead Publishers; ISBN 1594480060
3. Writing and Research Skills DVD

• Goals: At the end of this course you will be capable of reading, evaluating and writing four types of academic expository writing: narrative, descriptive, comparison and contrast and persuasive. You will be a more critical and discerning reader. You will be alert to your intent in writing and capable of evaluating how well you or someone else has achieved it.
• Objectives: You will have met the above goals by demonstrating the following: you read the assigned texts; you wrote assigned essays; you participated in class discussions, class projects and class evaluations; you created a portfolio of your short essays to present to me at the end of the semester.
• Evaluation: You are credited and graded on the following: your attendance; your participation; your assigned writing; and your portfolio. Each segment is assigned points, based on 100, judging how well you completed it. Grading will be judged as follows:

A—800+ points.
B—700-799 points.
C—600-699 points.
D—Below 600 points.
F—Usually reserved for people who don’t come to class.

None of these categories will match up exactly with anyone’s performance, but they will come close. Attempting A-level work on any of the requirements is certain to be reflected in your final grade.
• Always bring a pen and paper to class.
• Attendance: I expect you to be here. I’ll grant you one unexcused absence, but every unexcused absence after that will affect your final grade. To receive an excused absence, all you need to do is call me before the start of class and explain why you’ll miss it. It is as if you were calling in sick at work.

• The Essays: You will write 4 different ones. The essays are short: 500 words or 2 typed double-spaced pages. Each essay will relate to the topic we discussed the previous week. These essays are not graded. I’ll collect them, read and correct them, and return them. At the end of the class, you’ll revise each of them so each is now 750 words long (in other words, you’ll add another 3 to 4 paragraphs). The portfolio is graded.
• Deadlines: In the past I’ve been very lenient concerning deadlines. However, a number of students—a number of them among the worst offenders of that lenient policy—have suggested that they would have done better had they been held to a strict deadline. So I’m revising that practice. When an essay is due, you must turn it in either to me directly or by email on the day it’s due; turn it in a day late and it drops 10 points; two days late, 20 points; and so on. You must turn in every essay. (In the event of illness, call me before class and we’ll set something up.)

Probable Schedule:
January 16—Introduction
January 23—Narration
January 30—Description; Essay 1 due
February 6—Woe is I; Essay 2 due
February 13—Woe is I; Research; No essay due
February 20—Comparison/Contrast
February 27—Definition; Essay 3 due; Essay 4 in class
March 6—Final Class; Portfolio Due

This is the same portion from my current semester’s class:

SYLLABUS FOR ENG 1108—07
WRITING AND RESEARCH SKILLS
Spring 2011

Prerequisite: Placement

MN Transfer Curriculum Qualified

WRIT Qualified (see below) Office Hours: TTh 12-1
NOTE: My office hours will be done both in the library and live online via D2L.

• Course Description: You will read and discuss published essays and write and improve on your own writing through publishing your work and through instruction.
• Text:
NextText, edited by Kress & Winkle. ISBN: 031240106X

• Goals: At the end of this course you will be capable of reading, evaluating and writing academic expository writing. You will have experimented with new technologies including blogging, wiki-ing, hyperlinking, and mashups connected with your writing. You will be a more critical and discerning reader. You will be alert to your intent in writing and capable of evaluating how well you or someone else has achieved it.
• Objectives: You will have met the above goals by demonstrating the following: you read the assigned texts; you wrote and passed assigned essays; you participated in class discussions, class projects and class evaluations.
• Evaluation: You are credited and graded on the following: your attendance; your participation; and your assigned writing. Each segment is assigned points, based on 100, judging how well you completed it. The scored final exit essay is worth 20% of your final grade. If we have a scored midterm essay that will be worth 10% of your final grade. Grading will be judged as follows:

A—550+ points.
B—450-545 points.
C—300-445 points.
D—Below 395 points.
F—Usually reserved for people who don’t come to class.

None of these categories will match up exactly with anyone’s performance, but they will come close. Attempting A-level work on any of the requirements is certain to be reflected in your final grade.
• Attendance: I expect you to be here. I’ll grant you one unexcused absence, but every unexcused absence after that will affect your final grade. To receive an excused absence, all you need to do is call me before the start of class and explain why you’ll miss it. It is as if you were calling in sick at work.

NUTS AND BOLTS
• The Class: Having discovered that I was beginning to teach my 1108 classes on autopilot, I’ve restructured the course to reflect the changes technology is making and demanding in our writing environment. Toward this end, I’m making the emphasis in assignments less on how correct they are grammatically, in punctuation and in spelling, and more in how well they get across their content. The essays now more accurately reflect the way actual writing is done in the writing and working communities and the impact of new technologies. As a result, don’t be surprised if I change the assignments from time to time: this is a work in progress.
• The Blogs: During our second week we will start to set up individual blogs that everyone will have access to through Blogger (only because I know the ins and outs of that host best). You’ll be responsible every other week for blogging something relating to the topic we’re reading.
• The Essays: You will write 6 different ones. The essays are short: 5 will be 500-750 words or 2 typed double-spaced pages. Each essay will relate to the topic we discussed the previous week. These essays are worth 100 points each. I’ll collect them, read and correct them, and return them with suggestions.
• The Research Essay: In the weeks after you return from Spring Break we’ll begin working on the basics of academic research. The Research Essay will be the same length as your other essays, but will need to be on a more specific topic than the others. This will also be worth 100 points. We’ll get more into this the weeks after Spring Break.
• Deadlines: When an essay is due, you must turn it in either to me directly or by email on the day it’s due; turn it in a day late and it drops 10 points; two days late, 20 points; and so on. You must turn in every essay to earn at least a C. (In the event of illness, call me before class and we’ll set something up.)

Probable Schedule:
Week of:
January 10—Introduction
January 17—No Class 1-17; Set up Blogs; Chapter 3
January 24—Chapter 3; 1st Blog Entry Due
February 7—No Class 2-8; Chapter 4; 1st Essay Due
February 14—Chapter 4; 2nd Blog Entry Due
February 21—No Class 2-21 & 25; Chapters 4 and 2; 2nd Essay Due
February 28—Chapter 2; 3rd Blog Entry Due
March 7—Spring Break
March 14—Chapter 5; 3rd Essay Due
March 21—Chapter 5; 4th Blog Entry Due
March 28—Research; 4th Essay Due
April 4—No Class 4-8; Research; 5th Blog Entry Due
April 11— Research essay due;
April 18—Chapter 6
April 25— Chapter 6; 6th Blog Entry Due; Chapter 1
May 2—Chapter 1
May 9—Final 6th Essay Due: May 10 10:00

The two won’t match up exactly—the earlier class was one that met for only half a semester and so we were restricted in the amount of essays we could do—but in most of their generalities they’re similar. Except of course that in the first class, for which I was required to include a DVD which had been transferred from video and made reference to word processing and showed computers using the glowing green letters of MSDOS, the emphasis was on styles of writing: narrative, cause and effect, descriptive, etc. (In my full-semester classes we also worked on definition, process analysis, and several other types.)

But in the course of my reading and experimenting online I realized that, outside college, no one writes by style any longer and probably haven’t since I was an undergraduate. Instead, online writing, which is more and more what students read and, more importantly, do themselves, focuses on subject over type. They don’t write narrative essays, they write blog entries about the time their father came home drunk on Christmas. They don’t write a process analysis about baking a pie, they swap recipes in chatrooms that include an explanation for why the pie might taste one way and why it might taste another. Of course, there’s much to be said for the discipline of specific methods—putting the audience in the scene by use of detail and sensory perception, for example—and those have to remain in the instruction, but they are no longer the focus.

In addition there are other important changes—the inclusion of an online office hour, a recognition that most students are only on campus for a limited class period and immediately leave after for work or children; the inclusion of blogging as a way not only of woolgathering and producing a first draft but of having their opinions appear in a public forum complete with response (mine and other students’); as well as the elimination of my old favorite, the portfolio, as students are better capable of keeping their essays online either as posts to their blogs or on their harddrives. These will doubtless also make way for other, more radical changes.
My concern, however, is this: as a class, teachers are well behind the learning curve both in our willingness to learn new ideas (not just new tricks but new ways of thinking, realizing that many of the ways we learned to write are outmoded and might reflect the ways our peers write but not the way everyone else writes or reads) and in our abilities to put them into practice. I count myself as moderately computer-literate, especially for such a recent convert, but I am left far back in the dust when friends working in the business or medical worlds start showing me the technology they use on a daily basis. Many times our institutions, because of budget cuts and declining enrollment and the swift pace of new technology, are laughably outmoded. It’s a vicious circle: We only have Microsoft 2003 available because Microsoft 2003 is what our staff have grown accustomed to and it makes no fiscal sense to update every year or two. Our classrooms still have blackboards and overheads, even if the blackboards are wipeboards now and the overheads can show us objects in 3D. We argue with students about whether or not they should be allowed to have cell phones in class when some of them are actually typing out their assignments, usually for another class, while we lecture.

I’ve got no clue what the answer to this flux might be except that soon there will be a massive wave of new teachers teaching in new ways that, because we have gotten such a late start and because despite our lip service to it change is really too expensive, will still be a generation or two behind the way people actually use the technology and the potential inherent in it.