Internet Memory, SnapChat's CEBro, and Bad Things I've Said In the Past

As Ben Folds so eloquently put it in "Rockin' the Suburbs": you better watch out, because I'm gonna say 'fuck'."

Less than a year ago, I made a huge deal out of locking this blog and starting a new one. That post remains one of my favorite things I've written anywhere, blog or no, and I still firmly believe the things I said regarding social networking and the changes it's working in how I communicate, how it's negatively effecting my ability to have meaningful conversations and interactions online and elsewhere, and how it's making talking at length and in depth online, publicly, a very scary proposition.

Yet, here I am, making Defiantly, Maybe public again. So, what's changed?

Well, two things, really. First, I realized that nobody really cares what I write about and where I write about it because I'm not an important person.

Brad knows how I feel.

I don't mean that self-deprecatingly. I just mean that I don't post enough and don't have enough interested followers to make a private blog a hub for conversation and debate (and, by extension, for unintentional controversy). Being able to post to a broader audience again might mean that I'll occasionally get a response that isn't a) nothing or b) "tl;dr." But I'll also be slightly more likely to get a response that's something like "OMG HOW CAN YOU THINK SUCH THINGS I HATE YOUR WHOLE LIFE NOW." Which brings me to my next reason...

I've recently become sort of incensed* by the culture of judgment I've seen growing exponentially on the internet, and somewhere in my mind the best way to combat this sort of thing seems to be to go online in front of everyone and say whatever the fuck** I want.

So, it seemed appropriate to "celebrate" making this blog widely accessible again by writing about internet memory and potentially saying things that people could later take out of context and use to decide that I'm a Bad Person. Because that's apparently all we do on the internet, now.

I didn't have to dig far to find some examples of what I want to talk about. One is a bit close to my heart and the other requires me to try to empathize with a guy who is almost definitely a hardcore misogynist. So this should be interesting.

I present case number one. If you don't like clicking on things or looking at webpages other than this one (good on you), case number one is the story all about how Jack White and the Black Keys got flip-turned upside down. The story, as it's been propagated across the internets, is that some private letters*** of Mr. White's were leaked as part of his custody battle with his ex-wife, and in these letters it turns out he said some things about not liking the Black Keys.

So, to recap thus far: a man gets divorced and in addition to having to deal with probably a pretty shitty situation involving falling out of love with his wife and all, there's also a custody battle, adding an extra-shitty legal dimension to the already-existing shitty emotional dimension of divorce to create a pulsing quadrilateral of personal shittiness.

This was the first result for "shit quadrilateral."

And what do we take from this? Oh, right. That he wrote in some letter to someone that was never intended to be seen by everyone that he sort of doesn't like another band that some other people who are reading this letter that they shouldn't be reading like. And oh my god is that so much more important than the marriage-ending thing and the sadness thing and the custody-battle thing, not to mention the give-the-poor-guy-room-to-suffer thing!

To be fair, though, Jack White is probably pretty good at suffering. Just look at that vulture.

Right. But Jack White is a celebrity, which means that it totally makes sense that his private words were made public and scrutinized ad nauseum by lots of people who don't know him or his private circumstances at all, who don't know the context those comments were made in. Right?

No. It's not right. I'm not even going to explain to you at length why it's not right. If you don't know, then go away and think about it until you figure it out on your own and then come back and finish reading.

So, now we've got things like this assholish A.V. Club article (and I usually love the A.V. Club) that explains that White has for some reason issued a very public apology to the people who read his private writings against his (implicit) wishes, but makes sure to cast White as the bad guy before you even get to read the story by using the title "Jack White tries to pull his foot out of his mouth with lengthy apology." We, the culture, have clearly decided after rifling through this guy's personal mail that he is guilty. Jack White is a bad guy, and we should not like him now nor should we purchase his records. Why again? Oh, yeah, because he doesn't like some other band in private, and somehow that is an unpardonable offense. To us. Whose souls are as pure as the driven snow.

Okay, well, let's graduate to a case where the thing the bad guy did actually matters, and is probably worthy of widespread criticism and ridicule, as least when looked at a certain way.

So here we have Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, a guy who is also rich and famous and thus has implicitly agreed (according to us) to make his entire life available for public scrutiny. This case is a little tougher to me because Spiegel's past-comments are pretty terrible and misogynist. And in criticizing the way that we've gone after him for them I don't want to imply that I condone the comments themselves, because I don't. He said some pretty terrible things (in the past, under the assumption that he was saying it to a small, discrete audience).

But here's the thing. I've said some terrible things, too. You've said some terrible things. We've probably both thought even more terrible things and had the good sense not to utter them out loud so that they wouldn't come back to haunt us. Does this make the things that Spiegel said okay, because we're all jerks sometimes? No. But I'd like to try to put into perspective the idea of going after someone you've never met for a few comments he made years ago in a context that you aren't aware of because I believe that the judgmental ways we choose to respond to these stories about people we don't know (which seem to be happening more and more often lately) don't just have consequences for which records we buy and which apps we download, but also for how we treat the people we do know.

First off, context is important. Because this is a hill I'm absolutely willing to die on, I'll use examples from my own life. I have had, on occasion, good Asian-American friends. A part of my friendship with one such friend in particular consisted of us trading racial jibes and jokes: me tossing Asian stereotypes at him and he tossing white-guy stereotypes at me. It was part of our rapport, and we were both comfortable with it. Now, had we talked like this over, say, email, and one of those emails came to light years down the road and was made public, I would not want the same "consideration" that Spiegel has received from us over the last few weeks. If I were to issue an (unnecessary) apology for my once-private, now-public communication, I would not want to be met with the cynicism that Jack White's seemingly earnest apology has been met with throughout the rock music blogosphere. What I said was acceptable in context because in that context it had a certain meaning, granted it by that very context. Because I am a semi-intelligent and considerate human being, outside of that context, I would have said things differently, or not at all. That's how context works.

When it comes to this sort of thing, your example, I'm sure, is different, but I'm equally sure that there is an example, at least one, for each of us. Think about that before you roll your eyes at White, before you shake your fist at Spiegel. You don't have to not condemn them, but at least think about it.

Second, people grow old, if not up. They change, and maybe even learn. I try. I hope I succeed from time to time. A lot of people attacked Spiegel for his recitation of what seems to be the required response to these ever-more-popular situations: "[The messages] in no way reflect who I am today." The general internet response was "These messages were sent 3-4 years ago; how much does one person change in 3-4 years?! I call bullshit!"

Really?! How much does one person change in 3-4 years? Have you ever grown up before?

The variations on this response and the frequency with which they seemed to pop up blows my mind. To me, it communicates a very deep cynicism toward the idea that others can change, grow, and most importantly, learn. That we can make mistakes and still turn out okay, overall, in the end. I have bad news: mistakes are what learning is made of. What do we become when we stop allowing others to make them?

I've been an NFL football fan my entire life. I grew up watching every single game I could, collecting trading cards, memorizing player rosters, the whole ten yards. For the longest time, the Washington Redskins were just one of the teams in the league. It wasn't until I got to grad school and spent a few years studying critical race theory and assorted/related other cultural theories that I gained a real appreciation for why calling your team "the Redskins" might be insulting to Native Americans (or others). But I still didn't really see why anyone was bothering talking about the name of a football team when there were so many other, seemingly bigger problems in the world to worry about.

I don't even know what changed my mind, but it was a few weeks ago that, in the midst of grading student papers, it finally really, decisively hit me how shittily racist the team's name is and how stupid and backward we are in general as a culture for not demanding it be changed back in, oh, 1890 or so. I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me this long to understand. It's embarrassing to write about in a blog post that I'm going to post to Facebook. I want people to think I'm understanding, and nice, and considerate, and smart, and after reading this, some people might think the opposite.

But hell, we're learning all the time, a lot if we're paying attention, a little even if we're willfully trying to pretend that we can stay the same person for our entire lives. This is just one of my many, many examples. There's not, but what if there was an email from a few weeks ago in which I'd written something like "Oh, I don't see what the big deal is about the Washington Redskins, people should just get over it!" and someone read that email and was upset at me and I tried to explain myself by saying "Those messages sent 3 weeks ago don't reflect who I am today"?

It would be absolutely true, and I suspect that a great many people wouldn't care.

Honestly, my worry about our propensity to judgment, especially on the internet, has less to do with who we're judging and more to do with us. Evan Spiegel is going to be fine. Jack White will probably survive. But what's the cost to us of this kneejerk cynicism, this rush to judgment, this assumption that a few lines of text or a few moments of speech tell us all we need to know about a person?

I've had 30-odd years of issues with the vast majority of the Bible, but John 8:7 has always been near to my heart, the part where Jesus says "Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone." This certainly hasn't kept me from judging all my life, and it certainly hasn't kept me from doing things that have been, at times, likely deserving of a harsh judgment from others, but I often think of it when I read about people like Evan Spiegel and realize that I really do want to believe that he's learned something in the last 3-4 years, to think that there's more to him than a few nasty emails. And that's just as much, if not more, for my own sake as it is for his.

Would we rather live in a world where it's just understood that every single thing you put out on the internet (or elsewhere) is immediately available for public scrutiny and any statement that could be even mildly misconstrued should be kept to ourselves, or a world where we still live with the (potentially illusory) idea of different audiences and treat each other with that understanding in mind when one audience unexpectedly bleeds into another? Because based on how we're treating each other right now, we're definitely creating the former, but I'm pretty sure just about everyone, given a choice, would prefer the latter.

* Is it possible to be "sort of incensed" by something?
** Told you.
*** What's a "letter"? I think they meant "emails."

What the Internet Is Doing To My Brain

So, this is nowhere near a novel argument or idea at this point in our (ab)use of the internet, but for some reason this particular video about it really resonated with me and a I felt like writing a little bit to get the ol' brain going since it's Sunday afternoon and all and generally at this point in the day I would just be...well, you know, reading about panda bears on the internet.

Now, before anyone jumps on the "The internet does lots of good things for us too, lol n00bz, STFU!" train here, part of what I like about this video is that it presents the idea that a lot of internet use encourages shallow thinking, but that we should simply be aware of that and balance out the type of work we make our brains do on a daily basis accordingly, rather than being all like "teh internet sux0rz!" (actually, does anyone really type like that anymore?). So don't stop using the internet. I'm not going to stop using the internet, and I don't want to be out there all alone, because I've already got a big enough echo chamber here in this blogspace. But.

But I think the distinction between shallow and deep thinking is an important one. The ability to engage in deep thinking (or "critical thinking," which is either the same or close to the same thing) is, as far as I can tell at least, a learned behavior. You get better at it the more you do it. If you don't do it, or if you don't have to do it, you never learn how. Much of my teaching lately has been increasingly focused on trying to get students to think deeply (or critically, or laterally, or however you want to label it). Some of them take to it like a laser-mounted shark to water, while others flounder and never really find their stride (or stroke?), but by and large the common factor I see in pretty much all incoming college students is that they've never been expected to do it before. At least not in concentrated amounts. And this is weird to me. Not only is it weird, based on my own experiences and biases, it's also just bad.

"In The Iliad, Homer portrays war as fucking awesome."

When I was a kid, I thought about everything. And (let's get this out of the way right away) it wasn't because I was smart or somehow exceptional, it was because I was curious. When I wasn't in school, I spent a fair amount of time playing outside pretty much every day, I played video games obsessively, but only as much as my parents would let me play (usually an hour a day or so), and I read voraciously (big surprise!). There were always times when I wasn't doing any of those things, though, and much of that time was spent wondering about things like why the sky was blue, or why there was evil, or why there was good, or whether or not I believed in God (or any god(s)), and so on. I spent a lot of time thinking deeply, and part of the reason, I think, is because I couldn't access "simple" answers through an internet search like we can nowadays.

"I JUST WANT TO KNOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!"

Recently, I had my Humanities 101 class read excerpts from Plato's Phaedrus, and now every time I think about What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains I can't help but thing of Phaedrus's treatment of the then-new "art" of writing. In the dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus are arguing about the efficacy of writing as a form of communication (and I'm summarizing loosely here), and Socrates relates a story meant to show the supposed danger of writing:

"At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

The tl;dr here is basically that by recording the memories and stories of what had traditionally been a predominantly oral-historical culture in writing, people would actually lose their ability to remember as well because they would begin relying on the written versions of records, stories, myths, etc. Later on in the same section of Phaedrus, Socrates argues that choosing to value the sign of a piece of information (i.e. the written version of a record) over the direct memory of that record itself, we also make ourselves less versatile in our thinking; for him, the important ability is the ability to successfully and convincingly debate a piece of information, a stance on an issue, etc. When you write that information or that stance down as a static document, your opinion becomes less able to adjust on the fly and becomes less robust in the face of criticism due to its existence (primarily, at least) as an artifact rather than a thought or memory.

Pictured: versatility.

And regardless of whether you perceive of it as a good thing or a bad thing, history has borne Socrates's idea out. He was right about our codification of knowledge. As just one example, consider how much of modern-day Christianity is based on trying to retroactively fit values and mores from a two-thousand-year-old culture into present-day society, just because we have an old book with a bunch of rules encoded in it. How different might that particular religion be if that book (and, indeed, all books) never existed?

The (long, boring) point I'm trying to make here is that our "choice" (if you can call a world-wide cultural shifts that) to value the written word over the orally-disseminated memory caused a fundamental change in the way that information was understood. I don't think it's a huge stretch to suggest that the advent of the internet might be the next such shift. As with most such things, I don't think that this shift is necessarily automatically bad or good, and even if it was "bad," what the hell could we possibly do to stop it at this point? The fact is that it's happening and that internet use, much like writing, brings with it certain advantages; however, we also stand to lose a lot in the transition that was good and meaningful and important to the previous information culture (i.e., me) such as what I was calling "deep thinking" above. And, like Socrates, it's hard for me to understand how this loss could possibly be a good thing.

Just like anyone else, I certainly understand the dopamine rush that comes with instant-gratification internet searching. I've gone on my fair share of Wikipedia and TVTropes binges (or, even nerdier, phish.net and ryanadamsarchive.com). And yet I can't help but feel that on some fundamental level, the experiences I have when I step away from the internet are somehow more meaningful, more fulfilling, and more human. That's not to say, again, that there can't be real human value in utilizing or even just listlessly surfing the internet (and in fact, I've built what little of a career I have so far arguing for just this), but it seems to need to be balanced out with experiences that give you an opportunity to think deeply. I make a point, for example, to go for a walk, run, or even a drive pretty much any day I spend more than a few hours working in front of my computer (and thus either actively or passively connected to the internet). Out in the world, doing these activities, is in some way the polar opposite of being enmeshed in the global social sphere of the internet: I'm forced to confront silence, I'm forced to think, and I'm forced to reflect (no mp3 player, CDs, phone calls, anything on these excursions, unless of course someone calls me and I have to answer). For a brief period of time every day, at least, I'm put back in that position I was in as a kid, where I had to make my fun, to use my brain to wonder and learn about the world, and to ultimately make meaning out of nothing rather than having it given to me. I love my work, and I love finding bigger and better ways in which our newest information dissemination technology can make us more human, but it's precisely so that I can keep doing that work, and doing it well, that I need to disconnect as often as I connect.

There's a lot of outcry right now over the apparently reality that college students aren't able (let along willing) to critically think like they used to be able to. Honestly, by and large I don't disagree. While this might partially be an effect (in this country at least) of No Child Left Behind (and that's a whole other blog post in and of itself), and the answer might partially be to Teach Them Harder, I wonder if much of this unwillingness to think deeply comes from a more fundamental place: they way that they understand, create, and access information in their day-to-day lives. Maybe it's making them smarter in new ways while making them dumber in old ways. But I'm pretty convinced we can have our cake and eat it too if we just unplug a little bit (more) each day.

Thoughts?

The End Of An Ear*

Hey guess what? It's another post that's not about Phish! That's two in a row!**

Hey, I got a real job (is the slightly less important announcement I came in here originally to make)!

Yeah, the impossible has happened.*** I got a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor of the Humanities at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls. Like, they met me in person and afterward had me sign a piece of paper and everything, so I know for sure that they don't just accidentally think that I'm someone else cooler and better looking and then will be surprised/disappointed/less attracted to me than they expected when I show up in September and start teaching the hell out of students.

This is the part in the blog post where I feel this weird, public-blog-y obligation to now go back and explain everything that's happened in the last four or so months, and so much has actually happened that my natural response to said urge is to just brain-lock and shove the post under the virtual bed with the virtual toe of my virtual sock until next week, when I'll try to write The Post To End All Posts again. This time, though, I'm just going to push through that whole tangle of mind-shit and keep writing.

Blah, blah, blah, blahdy, blahdy, blog.

It's just like old times in here all of a sudden, ain't it?

Speaking of old times, I actually spent a bit of time today in between sessions of working on an essay I'm trying to get published reading through lots of my old posts from 2008. And oh shit, are there lots of old posts from 2008. In August of that year alone, I had 114 posts. Just to remind you, there are only 31 days in August.

It was a fascinating little aside, though; sort of like one of those weird info-benders where you click on one link in a Wikipedia article you opened out of purely professional interest and suddenly three hours, two bags of tortilla chips and one cigar later you realize you've somehow gone from "post-structuralism" to the page for Van Halen's album "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" and there's nothing in-between in your memory except for the cerebral equivalent of those ghostly fire-tire-tracks the DeLorean leaves behind when it travels through time. Except this wasn't Wikipedia. It was my actual past life.****

It was actually a really fascinating trip. Often, when Lindsey and I talk about life (That's what couples do, right? That and the sexy-thing?), I realize I'm saying a lot of things about my mid-20s that characterize them as this difficult but heroic struggle to find out who I was so I could grow to be more calm and more content and Go Out And Get What I Really Wanted. Sometimes this makes me self-conscious because that's exactly how I remember things, but talking about it makes me sound (in my mind) like I'm making a spirit quest out of a life that's really been more like a walk to the grocery. Rereading some of the blog entries I wrote during the summer and fall of 2008, a period of time that would have been very harrowing and challenging because of the number of big changes I was experiencing even if I hadn't been batshit crazy at the time, I realized that this actually was what had happened. 2008 and early 2009 were really the tail end of about 4-5 years of at times aimless, at times purposeful soul-searching (and job-searching) and reading through the entries I made in this blog over the course of those four months or so, I could actually see myself changing from someone whose perspective I barely recognize now to someone who would clearly become me, now, five or so years later. It was a little haunting, actually, but also fascinating in the sense that my words from the time did such a better job of explaining what it was like for me then than my words now explaining my now-memories of then could ever do.

In fact, it struck me in the process of reading how sort-of amazing it is that I blogged so frequently during the five years of what I like to think of as my "second album" or "sophomore slump" phase. At the time, I did it to keep my sanity in a delicate balance; looking back, though, I also seem to have made an enormously detailed nearly day-to-day chronicle of surviving my mid-twenties. And at this point in my life, that's a really cool artifact to have. In fact, I'd love for Lindsey and any interested friends I've made since that time who didn't know me then to go back through and read what I wrote back then (of course no one would ever do this because it would be hideous boring to them, I'm sure). It's often self-indulgent, but it's also sometimes really insightful and interesting in a way that I'm sad to say I might be too self-conscious to be today, and it shows where I've come from and how far I've come since then while still being, clearly, me. I like the idea of there being a record of that part of my life recorded in the medium that I feel most comfortable expressing myself in. Even as an avid and sometimes even rabid blog user over the years, I've still always been a bit self-deprecating about my blogging and frequently poo-poo'd the idea of blogging in general; however, after this afternoon it strikes me now that if someone happened to be looking back fifty years from now, wondering (for whatever reason) who I was and what I was about, this blog would honestly not be a terrible place to start.

So maybe I'll start blogging more again. Maybe for no other reason than to be able to pull this page up five years into my life in Klamath Falls and laugh at how stupid I sound, not expecting at all to live in a ranch house with three dogs and five kids, or be homeless and half-frozen to death after it turned out that Lindsey was a fucking FemBot all along and was only waiting until I was at my highest before razing the house and all my clothes and my The Captain and Tennille records around me with her eye-lasers.

Or maybe I'll start working on my academic website again tomorrow morning and forget about the blog for another three months. Who knows?

Either way, it's been a fun trip, and still is.

Now, enjoy some footnotes!



*Or "era," if you prefer. I don't.

**This part of the post no longer makes sense, as I've moved all my Phish-posts over to Skyballs and Saxscraper, but I'm leaving it in because typing all this was obviously way easier than using the backspace key.

***Yes, despite constantly applying for long-term jobs in academia for the last two years, I was always just sort of living on the assumption that it would never work out and eventually I'd be forced to give up and embark on a career building beans or slashing pylons or something.

****For some damn reason, Wikipedia lists this album as "hard rock." If any Van Halen album is "hard rock," then let's just all agree to start referring to Katy Perry's second album as "glockenspiel-driven proto-roots-rap," okay?

REVIEW #1: The Hobbit

So, I plan to see The Hobbit a few more times (including in fancy-shmancy 48fps 3D), but I saw it last night in standard 2D and wanted to get some thoughts down on the first viewing before I saw it again (sorry, non-Phish people). I'll do this in bullet-pointy fashion, so as to encourage myself to get back to lesson planning for my spring courses ASAP:

• My overall response is "I loved it, it was great, and I want to see it millions of times."
• I also feel, though (and have always felt), that LotR is a much more interesting and better story (based on my preferences) and while the Hobbit book will always have a warm, fuzzy spot in my heart, I know that I'll never quite like the film adaptation as much as I liked the LotR film adaptations, simply because the base story isn't as interesting to me. It's like being asked to choose between adaptations of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet; you might make the best R+J adaptation ever, but on some level it's never going to match the quality of an average-great adaptation of Hamlet, because there's just not as much to work with.
• The casting, especially Martin Freeman as Bilbo, was pretty much flawless. Do they give Academy Awards for casting? I hope so.
• Richard Armitage as Thorin was  just as good as the internet said he was going to be.
• The Hobbit book presents a slightly (but importantly) different Gandalf than the LotR books do. I was glad to see Ian McKellan (and, I'm sure, everyone else on the film crew who contributed to his performance) showing an awareness of this in the movie. It's the same old Gandalf, but also different enough in the ways that matter that it doesn't seem like McKellan is just taking a victory lap with the character (not that I ever imagined he would).
• I felt like many of the dwarves were each distinct entities in the film (which is something that Tolkien didn't even achieve in the book), and I have a feeling that the ones who weren't fleshed-out in this film will be in the following films.
• There were a lot more diversions from the book than I expected. Mostly, this was actually great. The framing at the beginning of the whole story as being told to Frodo by Bilbo right before Bilbo's birthday party was a great touch (including the amazing introduction of pre-invasion Erebor!), and a lot of the smaller gestures to the larger story of the coming War of the Ring (White Council, Necromancer) were great. Radagast was a nice inclusion, even if he was a bit overly goofy (I saw his added rabbit-chase scene referred to in one review as "a Benny Hill chase scene" and I can't disagree).
• Much of the added material did come from Tolkein's appendices or was just a logical extension of the shorter, less visual Hobbit book, but when Jackson and crew went beyond that, it resulted in the only parts of the movie I actively didn't like. The added warg/goblin battle (before finding the cave) seemed oddly out of place and strangely paced (and I thought this before realizing that it was, in fact, an added scene not taken from Tolkien's material). The subplot with Azog also rubbed me the wrong way since it essentially rewrote an important character directly against how he is described in the original appendices. I appreciate the need for a primary antagonist to make the film a bit more accessible to non-nerds, but couldn't it at least have been Bolg, Azog's son (who actually shows up later in the book) that followed Thorin, maybe holding a grudge for the fact that Thorin's sort-of relative Dain killed his dad in the past? It just seemed silly to include Azog when he was supposed to be dead, and made it hard to not see him as a bland, Big Boss character. Thorin's story already has enough pathos as it is, we didn't really need a Megatron-orc for him to fight against.
• Less of a bummer, but still a slight annoyance: the preponderance of scenes in which dwarves, hobbits, and other characters swung around on platforms above precipitous drops and/or fell hundreds of feet while bouncing off of sharp rocks, all without being hurt. I understand that the action scenes needed to be a bit expanded based on how Tolkein described them (or didn't, really) in the book, but did they all have to be turned in levels from Super Mario Bros.? The stone giant battle, for example, was visually awesome, but I was really jerked out of the immersion of the scene by the ridiculous-ass bullshit the dwarves and Bilbo had to go through (again, not in the book!) to survive.
• Overall, though, I felt like all the added material (except for action bits that were just added to make everything more action-y and, by extension, cheesier) was meant to tie these films more firmly to the LotR trilogy, and that was actually really effective. If things continue as they are, I could see all six eventual films working much more cohesively as a whole than the original books do, which would be a Neat Thing. The movies seem less to be about adapting a faithful version of The Hobbit and more about serving as the first half of a six-part story about the War of the Ring. And I don't really think that that's a bad thing.
• On the other hand, a lot of the big scenes were done almost completely as-is from the book, which was great. There seemed to be a sense that there were some things that couldn't be altered, such as the long, slow introduction to the beginning of Bilbo's quest (which was not too long, despite what trigger-happy movies critics seem to think...have they even ever read the book?), the trolls, Riddles in the Dark, etc.
• The music was great. Listening to the soundtrack again tonight. That's all.

I think that's everything for now...more thoughts after the 48fps 3D experience...

The best thing about Slaughterhouse-Five...

...is this passage right here: "They were without food or maps. Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow."

teaching and learning

so i'm teaching a sort-of lit class for the first time this semester.  and it's been great so far.  i got to choose the books, and as per the class requirements, they all had to be books published recently.  so i picked a lot of books that i simultaneously thought were interesting to talk about based on their own literary merits and were interesting in a cultural context.  now not only do i have a class where we can talk about characterization, plot, setting, ethos, believability, immersion, etc., but also race/class/gender/place AND technology, apocalypse, wilderness, conservation, zombies, home, and all that jazz.  so.  it's a pretty thematically dense discussion class.  and it's so fucking fun my eyes want to pop out.  of course, they also want to pop out because it's at 9am and i have to get here three days a week before 7am to get prepped for class (they have to submit questions online every morning and i have to be able to read them all and draw up a class plan around them before class starts that day).

anyway, i'm having a lot of fun, and the students in class who enjoy talking and discussing seem to be enjoying themselves.  now that i'm over the initial shock of the joy of teaching something i'm actually directly invested in (teaching comp is fun, but it has nothing to do with what i care about directly, and requires that i have an entire "comp" section in my brain that i switch over to each monday, wednesday, and friday), i'm starting to get that nagging doubt in the back of my head that i get every time i remember that nothing in life is perfect.  maybe this is just my latent comp pedagogy reflex taking over my brain, but my fear is that i'm not actually teaching these students anything.

granted, the only real goal of this class as it was explained to me was to talk about reading and talk about how it is relevant and important in today's society (BOOOOOOOM!).  and i feel like i'm definitely doing that.  i guess i'm so used to the lecture model, the skill-teaching model of a class that i feel like a failure just going in, talking about reading, and enjoying myself.  it feels too easy.  at times, when i'm being easier on myself, i feel like maybe the learning that's taking place in a class like this is really just less tangible that it might be in a comp class (and that's less than it might be in a science class, and so on).  i mean, i'm running this class pretty similarly to some of the seminars i've taken in grad school, and i learned more from the discussions in those classes than i have at pretty much any other time in my life (at least in a school environment).

i certainly lecture from time to time briefly about certain character archetypes, or certain literary techniques, and those kinds of things.  but these students are all experienced readers.  they infer these things if you hint at them.  they don't need to learn what the hero's quest is.  they can see it, and talk about it, and understand its value and also the value in deviating if you're a writer.  i also have lots of small checks built into the class to make sure they're keeping up on the reading and paying attention in class (and two big checks in the form of a midterm and a final).  but it's just strange.  i've never taught a class like this, and it's odd to have a class that puts most of its value in discussion rather than lecture and regurgitation/revision.  it's odd to think that students will come out of this class having read 8 new books, and that's (largely) it.  when teaching comp 101 (and even 201), we sort of have this idea impressed upon us that we're the gateway to our students' ability to write at a college level, which in turn is the gateway to the rest of their entire future success.  of course, that's aggrandizing and a little ridiculous in some ways, but i guess what i'm getting at is that with the impression we're giving as budding comp teachers, it's easy to convince yourself that you're doing god's work if you have an off day.  there's not a lot of room for crisis of purpose.  that's not the case anymore.

that said, we're finishing up talking about Snow Crash tomorrow and we'll be moving on to neil gaiman's American Gods on friday.  can't wait.

reading NOOOOOOOOOOW!!!

i'm finally teaching a lit class (sort of) in the spring.  it's a reading/discussion based class, and the curriculum seems pretty open (basically i have to use books published after my students were born, so post-1990ish).  anyway, i've tried to sprinkle the reading list with a lot of things that will inspire talk about some of (what i see as being) the prominent cultural concerns of the last two decades, like:

1. globalization (and what this does to our ideas of place, race, class, gender, etc.)
2. apocalypse and environment
3. the intarwebs

yes, that's a really freaking broad list, but the way i understand this class, i'm not supposed to be lecturing, but mostly just facilitating discussion; so i want to start broad and only narrow down when/if necessary.

anyway, i just sent my booklist off, so here's what we're going to be reading:

Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (Novel)

Neil Gaiman, American Gods, (Novel)

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (Novel)

Peter Chilson, Disturbance-Loving Species (Short stories)

Frank Miller, 300 (Graphic novel and film)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Novel and film)

Max Brooks, World War Z (Novel)

John Krakauer, Into the Wild (Novel and film)

Note: The film version of The Road may be cut from the schedule due to time constraints and depending on when it becomes available on DVD.

Note 2: I'm really pumped about using WWZ to talk about politics and cultural assumptions, etc.  And also zombies.

I'm really excited to teach the class, though at the same time I had to sort of throw this booklist together when in reality there were about 20 more books I wanted to read before choosing which ones I wanted to teach.  Apparently they usually offer the class in the fall only, which would have given me the entire summer to decide on books, but instead I got about two weeks.  So I'm hoping my choices will work out.  I'm just glad to actually be teaching about books.  more on this later.

why i love ecocriticism

"Regardless of what name it goes by, most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet's basic life support systems. We are there. Either we change our ways or we face global catastrophe, destroying much beauty and exterminating countless fellow species in our headling race to apocalypse." (Cheryll Glotfelty, The Ecocriticism Reader, xx)

the holocaust

well, not the Holocaust. just one of many.

i was chuckling with a friend of mine the other day because a lot of the early 20th-century documents i'm currently working with were using extraordinarily over-the-top rhetoric to describe a series of fires that struck the pacific northwest in 1910. one word that kept popping up was "holocaust". now, we currently obviously associate this term with one specific incident, but in 1910, that wouldn't have been the case. so i decided to check up on what "holocaust" actually means.

my uninformed guess was something like "holy" + "fire", but it turns out (according to the OED), that "holocaust" is from Greek, made up of words for "whole" and "burnt". the first definition refers specifically to burnt offerings, and the third to something having been completely burnt (as if in an accident, for example). in that sense, the lowercase "holocaust" completely makes sense in the context of the 1910 documents. if anything, it makes less sense in its 1940s context now.

either way, interesting to see how a meaning a word changes over time.

words are fun! learning about holocausts is fun!

GIVE MONEY TO PASTE NOW

if you donate even a dollar, you can download shitloads of rare mp3s, specifically donated by artists for the save-paste-campaign. DO IT. NOW.

yet another informative/hilarious article from cracked

yar!

toy soldiers comment on RA...result? best sentence ever.

"I think the ultimate definition of success is getting whatever it is we deserve, whether everything, anything, or nothing, and not thinking it was a mistake. Respect will always top money, and integrity will always top fame. Looking at today’s “music stars,” that doesn’t seem to be a very popular belief. In my opinion, the most successful musician of today is Ryan Adams. He has found this perfect niche of success that I think is one-of-a-kind in a way where he can write 500 songs a day, release three albums a year, show up and play two songs and leave, marry Mandy Moore, have Elton John call him a genius, duet with Norah Jones, quit music to write books, play Madison Square Garden in platform shoes and a sideways ponytail, dance around with death metal and traditional country, release 11 albums in one day under a variety of aliases, act like a chameleon in his sound and appearance, hate himself publicly, love himself publicly and at the end of the day everyone else’s opinions never mattered and he walked out of it himself. Success is everlasting integrity, and always having your hands on the reigns is most important."

full article here if you're interested.

oh look, another article satirically bemoaning how the internet is making writing more stupider!

which is itself, of course, published on the internet.

i'm getting really sick of hearing how facebook, myspace, twitter, and blogs are:

1) only for solipsistic, self-absorbed emo kids who have as the foundation of their entire identities a massive illusion that everyone on the intarwebs cares deeply about their personal and cultural observations and emotional tribulations.

2) that somehow communicating through these mediums is destroying peoples' ability to write "correctly".

i'm beginning to wonder (potential paper idea?) if this is some bizarre extension of the media's obsession with celebrity culture. the same way that we have, through reality TV, created a culture in which "normal" people can skyrocket to national fame, maybe people have been sort of inculcated with this idea that, through internet, etc. anything that anyone says is potentially noteworthy (or newsworthy), and therefore we assume in turn when people are talking, they are talking to garner potential fame and interest, rather than just for the sake of propagating or discussing information. i dunno; it's just an idea.

i'm just not sure what complaint #1 is based on, and complaint #2 has been pretty much flatly discounted by every linguist who has any idea what they're talking about and who wasn't born before 1940.

the original article was published on mcsweeney's, which i suppose shouldn't surprise me. look ma! i can out-irony irony! tres ironic.

michael pollan = good times, all the time

great, pre-obama-election open letter to the NYT by michael pollan...getting back into some of this food science stuff since omnivore's dilemma is the common reading for freshman next year...

check it out here.

cracked explains life to me again

follow the clickeys to have fun learning about Shakespeare being a wanker, writers who got lucky, and how logic bwns us.

from bowes: teabagging is good for you.

check it.

fantastic. see kids? even MLK was a plagiarist, and he made out okay.

well, i suppose he did get assassinated. but i can't hardly use that as a potential consequence of plagiarism on my syllabus.

w00t!

great article about jeff tweedy and migraines

clickety-clack.

grad school word of the week #2/3

i forgot last week's. my bad.

#2
metonymy
Brit. /

mtnmi/, U.S. /mtnmi/

a. Rhetoric. (A figure of speech characterized by) the action of substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it; an instance of this.

b. In extended use: a thing used or regarded as a substitute for or symbol of something else. Also (esp. in Linguistics and Literary Theory): the process of semantic association involved in producing and understanding a metonymy.
Because the association involved in metonymy is typically by contiguity rather than similarity, metonymy is often contrasted with metaphor.

#3
toponymy
(tpnm)

1. The place-names of a country or district as a subject of study.

1876 W. K. SULLIVAN in Encycl. Brit. V. 306/2 The substitution of vague descriptions of dress and arms, and a vague toponomy, for the full and definite descriptions and precise toponomy of the primitive poems. 1887 Athenæum 20 Aug. 240/3 This book..does not deal at all with topography in the proper sense, but merely (if the word may be tolerated as English) with ‘toponymy’. 1893 Academy 22 July 72/3 These papers are of interest for Basque toponymy and language. 1900 DENNIKER Races of Man xiii. 557 The pre-Columbian aborigines of Porto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba were Arawaks, to judge from the toponymy of these islands.

oh, the humanities!

a good article about humanities funding...something that's becoming more and more of a personal issue as i'm starting to seriously considering grants and research proposals and such...

it is pretty important, though difficult, for humanities and its subdisciplines to be able to speak the language of bureaucracy. i wish it was the other way around, i really wish it was, but that's not the reality of things and the humanities need to adapt to the reality at hand if they/we don't want to just get brushed aside. and i really do believe, despite protestations to the contrary, that the humanities are responsible for developing a lot of concrete research which has led to innovations and developments that we wouldn't have otherwise. not to mention the fact that (if i can make a broad generalization about a broad disciplinary field) it raises awareness about topics cultural and otherwise that just don't come up in the sciences. empiricism is good, but you have to know what you're looking for before you starting piling up statistics and studies, and i think there's always going to need to be this uneasy marriage between theory and experiment if we're going to keep learning...unfortunately the theory side, the humanities/cultural studies/english side, is the side that can't easily throw spreadsheets of data or video recordings of test subjects at a committee to prove what they've been doing. the kind of work "theory people" do is no less important, but isn't nearly as well suited to the kinds of people who want concrete results before spending money, unfortunately.