Long Pauses

Author: Darren

  • Writing is Hard, Redux

    The alarm went off a 5:45 this morning, and I got up. Lord help me. I actually got up.

    I don’t know how many times I’ve attended Q&A sessions with professional writers, but they inevitably say the same thing: If you want to write, then write. Make it a priority. Get up early, be disciplined, and stop whining.

    So I got up at 5:45 this morning, took a shower, poured my first cup of coffee, and wrote from 6:30 to 7:30. I didn’t write much, mind you, but I made some progress — slow, steady progress, which is the point of discipline, I guess. I also spoke with my manager today, who graciously agreed to let me adjust my schedule so that my one hour of writing might grow into two — two quiet hours alone in the dark of morning when I’m not exhausted from a frustrating day at work, when I’m not distracted by competing obligations and distractions.

    It would all sound heavenly if it didn’t begin so damn early.

  • More on Teaching and Technology

    Russ, a reader from Pennsylvania (and all-around good guy), sent me this email in response to yesterday’s post. Messages this good make me wish I had a comments feature.

    I’m glad to hear Oppenheimer has written a new book. I think his ideas are really essential to trying to get a handle on why our current education fixes aren’t getting to the root of the problems, and well-meaning advocates from both teaching ranks and administrators, liberals and conservatives, have screwed this up.

    I had some doubts concerning the actual usefulness of computers in K-12 education in relation to their perceived usefulness back when the Internet went wide, and Oppenheimer’s earlier piece in The Atlantic gave those doubts some substantive evidence. My take on the larger education crisis is that we cannot effectively educate our populace today because we lack a suitable and convincing “narrative” or “purpose” to justify the necessary expenditures of time and work needed to become an educated people. The narrative of “become educated to get a well-paying job” is insufficient. That has been modified to something approaching “become educated to stay abreast of the high-tech information economy.” That’s also insufficient, in my view. Neil Postman’s book The End of Education put forth a few proposals for replacement narratives, but I didn’t find any of those compelling.

    Yeah, this whole computer thing is suckering a lot of school districts into spending a lot of money on technology and, subsequent staving off of obsolescence — and that’s not to mention the misspending of precious instructional time. The kids of rich or successful families can afford this misallocation of resources; they’ll still receive the time and attention in and out of school to make up for the time not spent wisely in front of a computer screen. It’s the poorer kids who will likely suffer the most, despite their families being told that this technology would level the field.

    I think there’s some hope for a wider discussion of the education narrative question. In his column which ran locally Monday, William Raspberry reviewed a book about the achievement gap and noted that a huge obstacle in overcoming the gap is the lack of a convincing rationale being presented to many African-American youth to justify the toil of education. They’re not falling for the “good job” hook. This raises the larger question that leaves me awestruck: assuming we could find a replacement narrative satisfying to a plurality of the interested parties, how do you go about inculcating that narrative into the schools and the culture at large

    As I told Russ, when I was teaching freshman comp, I would always do a unit on “cultural literacy,” which was my way of forcing students to confront (if not accept) the rationale behind the traditional liberal arts education (“liberal” in the classic, non-partisan sense). Freshman comp was an interesting avenue for such a discussion, as it is the only course required of all UT graduates — the first of the many “Basic Studies” requirements undergrads typically encounter, often begrudgingly. I don’t know if my unit “worked” or not, but I always valued the discussion it would generate. 90% of my students thought of college as grade 13 — as the next, burdensome step toward a high-paying job. So many are so firmly written into that cultural narrative Russ has described.

    I find myself stuck in an odd position: I want to be a classroom teacher, but the tight job market and the “business” of graduate teaching assistantships has left me working instead in Instructional Technology, a field about which I feel ambivalent, at best. I see occasional flashes of value in what I do, but at times I wonder if my salary (and my overhead) could be put to better use elsewhere. It’s a sticky issue, to say the least.

  • A Few Good Reads

    A few interesting education-related links passed through my desk today. The first is to “Rethinking Thinking” from the Christian Science Monitor, which attempts to look beyond the lip-service academics typically pay to the importance of “critical thinking.” Well, to be fair, it usually isn’t just lip-service. Most of us really do want our students to learn how to learn (the goal of any good liberal education). The problem is figuring our how to do it, especially given that brutal combination of increased teaching loads and research expectations.

    Margaret Miller, a University of Virginia professor and director of the National Forum on College Level Learning, is leading the charge to measure what students at state-funded colleges know and can do, including an assessment of intellectual skills. She worries that critical-thinking skills are not truly valued by many state schools and their students. “Students and institutions are more and more focused on the vocational – at a high level, but vocational nonetheless,” she says. “But producing a group of non- reflective highly competent technicians is something we want to avoid if we want a functioning society.”

    Because the curriculum is so fragmented across many narrow disciplines, students have a greater challenge in making sense of it. That means colleges can’t just ghettoize critical thinking in a few courses, but need to spread the focus on thinking across the curriculum. “All disciplines need to become more liberal-arts-like in their focus on the intellectual skills that underlie what they do,” she says. “Some of that is critical thinking, some of it is broader and encompasses that.”

    Along somewhat similar lines, also check out “Are Computers Wrecking Schools?” a review of Todd Oppenheimer’s new book, The Flickering Mind. Oppenheimer’s argument in a nutshell is that the monies and efforts directed toward technology initiatives in our schools have been wasted to the extent that they’ve been removed from sound teaching practices. The only big winners amid the mad dash toward “computer literacy” have been the hardware manufacturers, he claims.

    Oppenheimer is particularly strong in examining the Federal e-rate program, in which technology firms seem to have systematically overbilled many school districts in setting up their Internet services. Oppenheimer describes how, in 2000, the San Francisco school district turned down $50 million in e-rate funds when they found that they could actually build their network themselves, for less than even the small cost they would have had to pay in order to receive the e-rate funding. The hardware manufacturer was marking up the equipment for the federal program far over the prices that the district could get on the open market.

    Oppenheimer appears to have launched a blog on his home page. So far, the only post is a fantastic Frequently Asked Questions — must-reading, I think, for anyone interested in the topic. I especially like this bit:

    6. How necessary is computer training in preparing children for tomorrow’s increasingly high-tech jobs?

    There is no greater hoax in this story than the rush to put young children on computers, in the belief that it will prepare them for tomorrow’s jobs. It won’t-in fact, doing so may well put them at a professional disadvantage. One expert, who used to make educational software, suspects that employers of the future will actually steer away from applicants who were “computer trained.”

    I think I need to read this book.

  • A Writing Exercise

    I spent my lunch hour over in the library, where I went snooping for some old Arthur Miller essays. Most have been collected in fine editions, of course, but I like to put my hands on the originals — to grab those bound periodicals from the stacks and flip through their fragile pages, discovering the context within which the words that inspired my work were first published. It’s the wannabe historian in me, I guess.

    Unfortunately, Miller’s essays are just old enough that, except for a piece in the July 3, 1954 issue of The Nation — a fascinating McCarthy-era adaptation of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” — I was forced to leave the stacks and venture down into the microfilm room. Contrary to popular opinion, I actually like the microfilm room (though I’ll be the first to admit that it absolutely pales in comparison to the real thing). I like browsing through the rows of tiny carboard boxes, threading the microfilm through the reader, whizzing my way through pages and pages of history at the touch of a button. It makes me feel, well, scholarly.

    I spent my lunch hour whizzing mostly through Life, Harper’s, Esquire, and the like. 1958 was an interesting year for Miller. He was married to Marilyn Monroe then, making him America’s most recognizable “serious” artist. In the year-end, double-issue of Life that year, an issue devoted to “Entertainment” that featured a multi-page pictorial of Miss M, Miller contributed a few hundred words: “My Wife Marilyn.” It’s accompanied by a charming portrait of the two together — the Jewish intellectual and his bombshell shiksa wife. The photo is so impossibly metaphoric, so iconic even, that I can’t look at it and see two real human beings. The image, refracted through my mind’s eye, is too blurred by celebrity and tragic history.

    I’m most intrigued, though, by the April 1956 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in which Miller published his seminal essay on “The Family in Modern Drama.” For a cultural studies guy like myself, the issue is a gold mine. Miller’s essay is sandwiched between a two-page spread from General Electric — “Progress is Our Most Important Product” — and Averell Harriman’s analysis of “The Soviet Challenge and American Policy.” It’s like a snapshot of my dissertation project. Miller’s liberal critique of American profiteering is impossible to imagine removed from its Cold War context.

    I think I’ve found the introduction to my first chapter.

  • The Gloaming

    The Gloaming

    Radiohead broke with routine on Monday night by opening with “The Gloaming.” (The complete setlist can be found here.) “The Gloaming,” like so much of the material from Hail to the Thief, played better live than on the album. I especially like Colin Greenwood’s new walking bassline. The show was broadcast live on Atlanta’s 99X and will be re-aired on Sunday night from 10 – midnight. Because of the FM broadcast there are already some great bootlegs floating around. (Not that I would support such a thing. I mean, the Song of the Moment just happened to appear on my hard drive. Like magic. One of those happy coincidences, I guess.)

  • Thanks for the Links

    My host recently adjusted their Webstats software, so I’m now able to get better data about Long Pauses readers. A few more sites that have been kind enough to link to me:

  • This is Persecution?

    So, while driving to and from Atlanta this week we heard two interviews with David Limbaugh, who is out promoting his latest book, Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against Christianity. With a title like that, and with the vocal support of people like Ann Coulter, you can probably guess the gist of Limbaugh’s argument: 21st century America is fast devolving into 1st century Rome, where upstanding, Patriotic Christians (who just happen to vote Republican) are being thrown daily to the lions of liberalism. Here, as in most recent discourse of the like, “liberalism” has nothing to do with traditional notions of freedom and equality; it is, instead, shorthand for secularism or atheism or civil libertarianism or socialism or feminism or political correctness or multiculturalism or any number of other, often mutually exclusive political positions. Whatever.

    I only bring this up here because I found it so interesting that I heard Limbaugh level these charges on two different radio stations, one Christian, the other secular, during a three hour drive. In fact, while Limbaugh, the talk show hosts, and outraged listeners railed against those liberals who were limiting their ability to publicly express their faith, we were driving through Chattanooga, where (no exaggeration) one-third of all FM stations broadcast explicitly Christian content. I know that’s not the case everywhere, but come on . . .

    I won’t deny that I’m, at best, ambivalent about the wholesale purging of Christianity from, say, public schools. When more than 80% of Americans identify themselves as Christian, it seems unnecessary to me to systematically remove the word “Christmas” from our calendars. But to call this “persecution” — even after acknowledging the inflated rhetoric that is part and parcel of this type of book — is a disgrace. Has the Church in America become so thoroughly synonymous with middle class comfort that we have to seek out charges of persecution in straw man arguments like Limbaugh’s? Is this our proof that we’re “salt and light”? Disgusting.

    And speaking of straw men, did you catch Bill O’Reilly on Fresh Air? Be sure to listen to the entire interview. The last few minutes are priceless.

  • Mary

    Mary

    I just discovered that Supergrass will be opening for Radiohead Monday night. Very nice! I know that this opinion is terribly unhip, but I’ll say it anyway: More bands need keyboard players, and more songs need keyboard riffs like the one in “Mary.”

  • Lost in Translation (2003)

    Lost in Translation (2003)

    Jonathon Rosenbaum on Lost in Translation:

    Coppola does a fair job of capturing the fish-tank ambience of nocturnal, upscale Tokyo and showing how it feels to be a stranger in that world, and an excellent job of getting the most from her lead actors. Unfortunately, I’m not sure she accomplishes anything else.

    I like that Rosenbaum threw “not sure” into that last sentence, as if he’s still mulling over his reaction. I feel the same way.  It’s that rarest of finds: an American film that is invested enough in its characters to reveal them slowly, patiently to the audience. For instance, in the third act of the film, when most writer/directors would send their leads into an impassioned and cliche-ridden argument, Coppola sits Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson on opposite sides of a table and films them from a distance. It’s an awkward moment — uncomfortable and tense and recognizably real. I loved it. Their final embrace is also brilliantly staged.

    But, as I watched Lost in Translation, I kept thinking of two other films, and it suffered for the (admittedly unfair) comparison. Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, Good Women also depicts the modern Asian metropolis as a storehouse of stuff — of manufactured goods marketed, packaged, and photographed with the glossy hipness of a five-page spread in Architectural Digest — but Hou’s film grounds that critique in a particular cultural and historic context. Like a few others, I was annoyed by the outsider-looking-in-and-laughing easy jokes that give Lost in Translation‘s American audiences something to mock but too little to admire. Charlotte’s solitary walks through a temple and a flower-arranging class do offer something of a counter-balance. I guess I’m just ultra-sensitive to anything that smacks of American xenophobia these days.

    More often, though, I was thinking of Tsai Ming-Liang, and of his film, The Hole, in particular. Like Lost in Translation, The Hole is about the desperate desire for communion in an alienating environment, told as an unlikely “love” story. Tsai and Coppola share an interest in elliptical editing, but their styles are quite different. Lost in Translation is composed of brief episodes — short takes of beautifully composed images — while Tsai tends to leave his camera running for minutes at a time. What can I say? I prefer the latter, and at times I sensed that Coppola does to. We often see Charlotte and Bob alone in their rooms, bored and lonely, but we aren’t forced to experience it with them. The most impressive shots, I thought, were of Charlotte pressed against her hotel window, looking over the Tokyo sprawl. It’s a familiar image to Tsai’s fans (is Coppola one?). At times, I wish we could have stayed there longer with her and come to know her better.

    Think I’m going to have to pick up the soundtrack next time I’m out. Great stuff from Air, Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, and The Jesus & Mary Chain.

  • Academic Blogs

    I chased a link and ended up discovering a fascinating community of academic bloggers, most of whom are like me — insiders with an outsider’s (slightly disgruntled) perspective. If you’re considering graduate school, read the links on the right side of Invisible Adjunct before making any rash decision. A few other blogs of interest:

     

  • Altruism?

    The Times has two articles this morning about the growing numbers of uninsured in America and the effect those numbers are having on the political landscape. After describing the combined impact of rising healthcare costs and unemployment, Robin Toner writes:

    In such times, the plight of the uninsured becomes more of a middle-class issue, more of a symbol of real close-to-home insecurity and thus more politically potent, advocates and experts say. Until now, “it’s mainly been an issue of altruism for a discrete and disadvantaged population,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal consumer group. “Now that the losses in health coverage are impacting more middle-class and working families,” Mr. Pollack said, “this issue becomes one of self-interest for a very substantial part of the population.”

    I read pieces like this with only a novice’s understanding of the problem. The “business” of health care is beyond me. Which is why I don’t typically write about our need for something like socialized medicine. But that quote has stuck with me. In our money-saturated political discourse, caring about the health of our least advantaged citizens has become a question of “altruism.” As if it were a purely moral issue, divorced from politics!

    It’s amazing what kind of noise is made when middle-class sensibilities and suburban comfort are threatened. (Any parallels here with the American Church are purely intentional.)

  • Trying to Understand It All

    There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
    — Harry Truman

    I’ve become interested in Iran lately. For personal reasons. I have a new student in my ESL class who arrived recently in America by way of Switzerland and Tehran. He’s a religious and political refugee with nothing but contempt for the Islamic fundamentalists who dominate his country. Each time I’ve chatted with him, he has spoken nostalgically of the days under the Shah. I shake my head knowingly and listen with rapt attention, but my fuzzy understanding of his country’s history is formed mostly by childhood memories of the hostage crisis and by the snippets of wisdom I glean from Kiarostami, Panahi, Makhmalbaf, and those other brilliant Iranian filmmakers.

    It’s a start, though. When he mentioned that his last job there had been building an apartment complex on the outskirts of the city, I said that Kiarostami’s films make those mountains look like the most beautiful place on earth. His eyes lit up, then he told me about the hours and hours he had spent hiking and rock climbing there.

    With my new friend in mind, I read with great interest H.D.S. Greenway’s review of All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. In “The Iran Conspiracy,” Greenway offers a usable introduction to the political and economic rationale for the CIA’s involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government. The parallels with the current situation are impossible to ignore.

    In the current age of American unilateralism and preemptive military interventions, it is hard to remember that just after World War II America still stood for something quite different in the Middle East. Although the US emerged from the war as “the leader of the free world,” the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese still ruled over vast empires. To many colonized people the United States was identified with Wilsonian idealism and anticolonialism. . . .

    In the early 1950s Stephen Penrose, a president of American University of Beirut, wrote: “Until recently American enterprise in the Middle East has been almost entirely non-governmental, an important difference from most other national patterns. Americans have never been seen as colonizers or subjugators and it is hard even now for most Arabs to conceive of them as such.”

    When President Bush first mentioned the “Axis of Evil,” I nearly choked, knowing that, in doing so, he was drawing a line in the sand — a line that would re-establish a Cold War-like polarity and dominate foreign policy and political discourse (and eliminate nuance in the process). I’m only now beginning to understand, however, just how intimately the Cold War and Middle East have been bound.

    The war in Korea changed America’s outlook and policies as surely as did the attack on September 11 in the current administration. The invasion from the north came in June of 1950, and convinced the United States that the Western nightmare of expanding, militant communism was coming true. The Korean War coincided with the growing crisis over Iran’s nationalization of its oil industry, and had the effect of narrowing Washington’s differences with the British at Iran’s expense. Korea played into the American decision to reverse its early opposition to an anti-Mossadegh coup. Coincidentally, the Korean War ended in July 1953, while [Kermit] Roosevelt was plotting his coup. . . .

    In many ways America’s obsession with terrorism since September 11 is an echo of its obsession with communism fifty years ago. Today the United States and Britain claim they must occupy Iraq because of the threat of terrorism. Officially, both say they want to get out as soon as possible; but ideologues in the Pentagon dream of Iraq advancing America’s interests, and Israel’s too, in the Persian Gulf as the Shah once did. Talk of a new American imperialism is becoming fashionable among conservative academics, some of them in power. They forget the lesson of British experience, which is that when a people will no longer accept it, foreign domination is almost impossible to maintain. Kinzer begins his book with an apt quote from President Truman: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”

  • Bresson at the Film Forum

    So I wonder if there’s any chance, any chance at all, of Au Hasard Balthazar making a stop in Knoxville. I’ve seen this film only twice, both times on a duped VHS tape that a friend mailed to me from California, but it’s securely in my Top 20 favorite films. I sometimes fantasize about writing a book about “Christian film aesthetics,” whatever that means. It would/will focus on the usual suspects: Bazin, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Dreyer, and, of course, Bresson. If there is, in fact, such thing as a Christian aesthetics in the cinema, then Balthazar must be the model.

    God, as ever in the work of legendary filmmaker Bresson, is in the details: the elliptical editing, with its abrupt cuts, off-screen space, and as much focus on the hands of the nonpro cast as on their faces; sound design alternating between classical music and natural sounds; the accumulation of cruelties endured by Marie and Balthazar; and the religious symbolism, from baptism to martyrdom — with the silent Balthazar transformed into a patient, long-suffering saint (“the most sublime cinematic passage I know.” – Hoberman). In a body of work known for its purity and transcendence, Balthazar is perhaps the most wrenching of Bresson’s visions.

    Hmmmmm . . . Roundtrip from Knoxville to LaGuardia is only $219. Tempting. Very tempting.

  • Sneakin’ Sally

    Sneakin’ Sally

    Robert Palmer has passed away. For years, I knew him only as the “Addicted to Love” guy, but then a friend with a killer CD collection moved into the dorm room across the hall from mine and fired up Sneakin’ Salley Through the Alley (1975). The first three songs on that album are as good as it gets. Of course, that might have more to do with his collaboration with Little Feat than with his own talent, but Palmer obviously had good taste.

  • Edward Said

    Edward Said, who seemed to devote his life to the greying of a world that many would like to keep black and white, has passed away at the age of 67 from pancreatic cancer. From one of his last published editorials:

    Since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises throughout the Arab world, producing untold misery — and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have Americans become to their own ignorance and the blandishments of U.S. advisors like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that what we do is correct because “that’s the way the Arabs are.” That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma shared uncritically by the neo-conservatives who are at the heart of the Bush administration simply adds fuel to the fire.

    We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.

    I haven’t studied Said seriously enough to draw any but the most superficial of conclusions about his lasting value to literary or political criticism, but I do know that his fundamental ideas — those found in Orientalism — opened up minority, colonial, and post-colonial literature for me in practical and profound ways — a rare feat amid the pomp and pedantry of contemporary “theory.” As an aside, the first and, as far as I know, only book-length study of Said was written by Abdirahman A. Hussein, a fairly recent product of UT’s doctoral program.

  • Blood on My Hands

    Blood on My Hands

    I just didn’t get the whole groupie phenomenon until about ten years ago, when I caught The Sundays at a club called The Moon in Tallahassee. Looking up at Harriet Wheeler, my elbows resting on the raised stage, I fell instantly and deeply in love. Or maybe it was lust. Regardless, she was the most seductive beauty I had ever seen. Her hair up. A form-fitting black dress. Those impossibly large eyes. I totally would have humiliated myself at her expense. And I mean “humiliated” in the Def Leppard Behind The Music kinda way.

    As beautiful as she was, though, it was the music that got to me. All of that ridiculous talent. Wheeler’s voice is some kind of marvel. Calling it “angelic” would be a cliche, I guess. But it’s not smoky exactly either, or soulful or torch-songish. It’s mostly a breath, which is probably why, a decade later, “Blood on My Hands” still gives me chills. It exemplifies all that made The Sundays such a great band — that syncopated snare hit, David Gavurin’s chorus-heavy guitar, and that beautiful, beautiful voice.

  • Film and Stage

    In a recent interview with Cate Blanchett, Stuart Husband mentions that the actress has dropped out of an up-coming film adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play, Closer. I would be more disappointed — she’d be great in the role — but for the fact that I didn’t even realize that the film was in the works. It’s going to sport a fine cast, otherwise. Should be interesting. On a slight tangent, I looked up Marber at the IMDb and discovered that another of his plays, Asylum, is also being filmed, starring Ian McKellen.

    Closer will be directed by Mike Nichols, who apparently is going to finish out his career by filming great plays. Two months and counting until I fire up my one-month subscription to HBO in order to watch Nichols’s rendition of Angels in America. Quotes like this have certainly piqued my interest:

    In writing his first screenplay, Kushner shortened his work by roughly 90 minutes and made changes likely to be incorporated when the play is published again.

    “I don’t think that we changed very much in the first part,” Kushner said. ” `Perestroika,’ I knew when I was writing it, was going to be one of those plays that you can rewrite for the rest of your life.” Nichols helped him fix a scene that had never worked onstage. “I don’t think I want to say which one it was, because I don’t want everybody to sort of pay special attention to it,” Kushner said. But Nichols told him the scene violated the play’s inner logic.

    “Tony and Mike found a rapport so quickly,” executive producer Cary Brokaw added. “Mike wanted consciously to be true to the play, and found the more we examined the script, as a true adaptation of the play, that it was incredibly cinematic. It didn’t need fixing. It just worked.”

    This snippet from Meryl Streep ain’t bad either:

    “We’re all lucky to have been in this,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re living and writing and working,” she said to Kushner. “I don’t expect to get anything remotely as ambitious as this piece of work in my life again, so I’m grateful to you.”

    Damn. I’m giddy.

  • God and the Machine

    Today’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an interview with Alan Lightman, a professor of physics and the humanities at M.I.T. Lightman recently edited a collection of essays, Living With the Genie, in which various authors examine the effects of technology (both good and bad) on our lives. Because it’s only available by subscription, I’ve excerpted a sizeable chunk of the interview.

    Q. You remark early in the essay that technology is making life faster and pushing out opportunities for quiet contemplation. What’s the effect of this on our culture?

    A. We have our spiritual lives compromised. We have become a nation without values and without a centeredness, without a belief system. If we have a belief system, it’s money and power. I think the lack of that centeredness is one of the consequences. It is part of our poor relationship with other nations in the world. Other countries sense our lack of values. Before you can understand other countries, you need to understand yourself. We don’t have such a foundation. We just have a blind pursuit of money.

    Q. And technology pushes that?

    A. The blame is on human beings, but technology has pushed that.

    Q. Some of the things you talk about in this essay have been felt in the arts for some time — everything from Brave New World to The Matrix. Do you think that your involvement with literature has given you a sensitivity to these things?

    A. Yes. It’s good that you mention those other media, because certainly there are other people who are saying the same thing. The more of us who say this, the better chance we have of being heard.

    I think a lot of these ideas are old. In my essay, I refer to Henry David Thoreau’s comments in Walden. In those days, the high technology was the railroad, and that was changing American thinking. Thoreau made this witty comment: “We don’t ride on the railroad; the railroad rides upon us.” Of course, I like that, but I would amend that by saying that technology is just a tool, and we created the railroad, after all.

    These ideas have been around for a while, but the pace of the world has accelerated. All of the problems that Thoreau saw 150 years ago are much more acute and have much more devastating consequences.

    I would love to push Dr. Lightman on some of these comments, particularly the first one. That relationship between technology and our spiritual lives is tricky and under-theorized, I think. Tools like blogging can actually encourage the sort of contemplation that he is lamenting, but they too seldom do. He’s right. The blame is on human beings, who seem to be sacrificing something of their humanity to these machines. Interesting stuff.

  • Unexpected Vacation

    I’m writing from sunny south Alabama, where we’re spending a few days after an expected, but still sad, death in the family. Funerals are such strange ceremonies. So sterile and composed. Sometimes I think we’d all benefit from a little more wailing and dirt.

  • Speaking of Blogs

    I spent Thursday afternoon with UT law professor, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit), and thirty or so other faculty and staff in a discussion of blogging and its potential impact on academic life. Reynolds’s talk was informal but familiar, leading me to assume that, during his two-year climb to the top of the blogging heap, he has participated in countless such presentations. The biggest surprises to me were learning that his daily audience outnumbers that of Phil Donahue’s failed return to television (and for less than $40/month in overhead) and that UT’s administration is downright supportive of his efforts. I figured that someone would be troubled by his partisan editorializing on university time. Apparently not.

    We reached little consensus during our post-presentation discussions. There was much interest in the potential of blogging — particularly as a tool to foster critical thinking and cognitive development in our students — but finding a real-world application is tricky. In practical terms, there is little that can be done on a blog that can’t be done using, say, a class discussion forum or an email list. The big perk, it seemed to most of us there, was the very public nature of the blog. Glenn recounted the thrill of receiving his first emails from readers in Thailand, for instance, a thrill to which I can testify from personal experience. Feedback validates the blogger’s efforts, while also raising the bar. Or, in a nutshell: This thing has made me a better writer and a better thinker; I’m sure that some students would undergo a similar process.

    If I were teaching right now, I think I would set up free Blogger accounts for all of my students, host them (again, for free) on Blogspot, then require each student to “journal” on the Web. For some in the class, it would, of course, be busy work. (But, for those particular students, everything is busy work, so who cares?) I bet a certain percentage of the class would really get into it, though, and would continue blogging even after getting a final grade. Imagine that: students coming out of a class with a desire to continue that critical thought process.

    Anyway, here are some notes from the colloquy and our student paper’s write-up.

  • Incompatible with Morality?

    A few weeks ago, on our return trip from Florida, I tuned the radio to a local talk radio station. We were driving through Birmingham at the time, so the debates of the moment centered on two topics: Judge Moore’s fight to save the Ten Commandments and Governor Bob Riley’s proposal to radically transform the state’s tax structure. In the days since, both issues have been put to bed. Moore’s monument was whisked away in a matter of minutes while his supporters were having a prayer meeting; Riley’s proposal was soundly defeated in a state-wide referendum. Prominent portions of the evangelical church are decrying the former and cheering the latter.

    Which brings me back to that talk radio show. Though not explicitly Christian (from what I could tell, at least), the show did feature a pastor as one of its two hosts, and it clearly attracted listeners and callers of a fairly conservative bent. No problems there. Or surprises, really. I was disappointed, though, to hear caller after caller after caller fawn over Judge Moore and his call to “keep God in America,” while simultaneously denouncing Riley’s progressive tax plan, particularly because Riley seemed to be acting for all the right reasons. A friend put it something like this: “The Church is getting mobilized behind a symbol, but, once again, we’ve failed to act on an opportunity for real social justice.” And the people of Alabama are already suffering for it.

    As far as religion-bashing, pro-war, ex-liberal pundits go, Christopher Hitchens is probably my favorite — a guy whose stubborn reason pisses me off as often as it forces me to stop and re-consider my opinions (which is quite often, actually). Here’s Hitchens on the Ten Commandments flap. (It will help the reading if you picture him standing awkwardly at a podium, slightly drunk and very bitter.)

    It’s obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.

    That last sentence is one of those that I’m talking about — absolutely maddening, but impossible to ignore. Hitchens, a man obviously capable of higher-order thinking, looks at the Church and denounces it as incompatible with morality. I disagree completely, of course, but, watching events as they unfolded in Alabama, I can’t say that I blame him.

  • More from Toronto

    In his on-going reportage from the Toronto film festival, J. Robert Parks has posted a full-length review of Tsai’s Good Bye, Dragon Inn. Especially given the lukewarm response to Twentynine Palms, this has now officially become my most highly-anticipated film of the year. Parks offers ample spoilers from the film, but anyone who watches Tsai for his plots has already missed the point. This bit from the review has left me down-right giddy with anticipation:

    And this brings us to Tsai’s central point: that one type of character is just as worthy as another type and, therefore, one type of story is just as worthy as another. In that, Good Bye, Dragon Inn becomes a powerful defense for the kind of movies Tsai makes, films in which marginalized characters struggle with apparently banal difficulties. They’re not superheroes, they’re not martial artists, they’re not saving the world. And yet they are worthy of our attention. In East Asian cinema, which has become dominated by the martial arts and horror genres, this is an incredibly bold assertion.

  • New and Improved?

    After a year of stubborn resistance, I finally knocked the HTML chip off of my shoulder and joined the Blogger world. Management of the blog itself — and of the archive, in particular — was becoming too great a burden and was detracting from my actual writing and posting. Plus, with Blogger’s recent announcement of enhanced free services, the timing seemed perfect.

    I think I’ve worked out all of the kinks, but please let me know if you run into any bugs.

  • Blinded by the Stars

    Blinded by the Stars

    If there were any justice in this world, Joe Pernice would be on the cover of Rolling Stone and John Mayer would be cleaning Jan Wenner’s pool. The Pernice Brothers made a quick stop at the Pilot Light last night, where they were greeted by a packed and enthusiastic house of Knoxville hipsters. And on a Monday night, no less. Joe is the quintessential reluctant rock star, a guy whose downward glances between songs betray something like embarrassment. When he thanked the crowd, he seemed genuinely surprised that we were there to see him and that we were having such a damn good time.

    Yours, Mine & Ours, the latest release from The Pernice Brothers, is a nearly perfect collection of pop songs, impeccably produced and just dripping with melodic melancholy. “Blinded by the Stars” earned Song of the Moment honors by winning a tight, three horse race, with “Water Ban” and “Baby in Two” tying for second. “Blinded” won thanks in large part to this particular lyric:

    I would tell the world that I love you,
    But the waiting game is as serious as statue.

  • Notes from the Festivals

    David Hudson’s always excellent film blog at GreenCine is a great one-stop resource for links to news from Toronto and Venice. Some early blurbs that have caught my attention:

    Dumont’s previous films, set in the French countryside, worked the social into the individual, creating desperation and isolation and jealousy to drive his characters. Here, they are simply abstractions in an abstract landscape, driving themselves on pure sensation (they are less in love than addicted to sex) and awaiting punishment from a malevolent God in the form of blunt and brutal violence that springs out of nowhere — a climax that becomes an act of auteur masturbation.
    — Sean Axmaker on Twentynine Palms

    Some stirring moments of drama. But they don’t add up to a satisfying whole.
    — ScreenDaily on The Human Stain (requires subscription)

    JRobert will also soon begin posting reports from Toronto at Film Journey. He has already posted his itinerary, which has left me more than a wee bit jealous. Through the DVDBeaver listserv, I’ve “met” several fine folks who live in or around Toronto. One of these years, I’m going to have to camp out in their living rooms and experience this thing first-hand.

  • Shut Up, Already

    Note to self: Stop whining about the dearth of cultural events in Knoxville. I was just flipping through this week’s issue of The Metro Pulse, and I noticed the following:

    That’s not a bad week. And I haven’t even mentioned the Tennessee Valley Fair, which opens this weekend, featuring Tone-Loc, Young MC, Cledus T. Judd, The Marshall Tucker Band, Loverboy, and lots of other people who might, in fact, also be pseudo-celebrities. (Judging by the publicity shots, I would guess that they’re all famous cowboy hat models.) Just try to read that lineup out loud without breaking into a big ol’ grin. I love fair season. Hatching chicks, funnel cakes, people-watching, and that mysterious fair stank. Gotta love it. (More on this in the coming days — hopefully with pictures.)

  • I Just Don’t Know

    I’ve been meaning to mention this one for a few days now. Last Friday, Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in the Times, “Freedom’s in 2nd Place?” raised some questions that need to be raised right about now, especially given the growing disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kristof and his wife, both from immigrant families, recently visited their ancestral homes, the former in Ukraine, the latter in China. For Kristof, the juxtaposition was remarkable.

    Since 1989, when the Soviet Union opened fire on Communism and China opened fire on its citizens, China’s economy has tripled in size — and Ukraine’s has shrunk by half. Even in Russia, according to Izvestia, 40 percent of the people can’t afford toothpaste; in Karapchiv, many can’t afford toilet paper and make do with newspapers (which to me seems sacrilegious). Meanwhile, prospering China has become a global center for cosmetic surgery.

    I was as outraged as anyone that Chinese troops massacred hundreds of protesters to destroy the Tiananmen democracy movement. But China’s long economic boom has cut child mortality rates so much since 1990 that an additional 195,000 children under the age of 5 survive each year. Does this mean that the Chinese are better off for having had their students shot? No, of course not. But it does mean that authoritarian orderliness is sometimes more conducive to economic growth than democratic chaos.

    With another bombing today in Iraq, and with growing numbers of American casualties, those occasional soundbites from Iraqi civilians who claim that life was actually better under Saddam — that they at least had clean water and electricity under his dictatorship — are becoming louder and more difficult to ignore. Can Kristof’s conclusion about “authoritarian orderliness” and “democratic chaos” be applied to Iraq, despite the drastically different social, political, historical, religious, and economic conditions in Ukraine/China and the Middle East? I’m beginning to think, with great regret, that it can.

    None of this should come as a big surprise, of course. Many of us who protested the war did so not because we are anti-American (insert witty Toby Keith quip here), but because we are students of history, because we are willing to learn from the British Empire’s and Soviet Union’s mistakes. The $64,000 question is: Given current conditions, what the hell do we do about it? Some are already arguing that we should admit defeat and cut our losses. I’m not so sure.

    A dear friend of mine is now in parts unknown, doing the type of work that must be done if this war ever really will lead to greater peace and safety in the world. This is the last note I received from him:

    I consider it a privilege to be able to serve the people of Iraq. Please pray that they will find true shalom in the coming months and years.

    Quite an antidote to the cynicism, eh? Here’s what I want to see. I want President Bush to stand before a nationally televised audience, and I want him to commit a trillion (with a T) dollars to Iraq’s economic recovery. Oh yeah, and he should tell those military families who stood united behind him in February and March that their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers will be serving mandatory one-year deployments, because that is what it will take to do the right thing here. Then, I want him to humbly seek the guidance of the United Nations, and I want him to hand over administrative authority to a multilateral coalition. And then I want Bush and Congress to pay for the whole damn thing with a radically progressive tax restructuring. Because, you know what? War is costly, peace will cost a helluva lot more, and America is the only country capable of footing the bill.

    Will it happen? Nope. None of it. But it’s the only thing resembling a solution that I can come up with.

  • Fulfilling Contractual Obligations

    As a Knoxville resident and UT employee/student, I’m required to make the following statement. (It’s actually a bylaw of the state constitution — listed right there under the mandatory regressive tax structure and last-in-the-nation per/pupil spending.)

    It’s football time in Tennessee!

    What can I say? A friend offered a free ticket, and I was more than willing to take him up on the offer. UT won easily, beating Fresno State 24-6 and proving once again that the Volunteers are the most boring football team in the country. I was at Florida State during the Charlie Ward, Warrick Dunn years, when it was not unusual to see my team outscore its opponent by six or seven touchdowns. I remember sitting in the stands at one game, rooting not for a victory over the then-lowly Maryland Terrapins — the victory was inevitable, after all — but rooting for 1,000 yards of total offense. As I recall, we fell only about 200 yards short that day.

    You can call it running up the score, you can call it show-boating and unsportsmanlike, but here’s the thing: When, later in the season, FSU needed to put together a quick drive down the field — for instance in the Orange Bowl, when Nebraska took a 16-15 lead with two minutes left to play — that offense knew how to score because they had done it a lot that season. They were confident, they were sharp, and they won the national championship (finally).

    I just don’t get the Fulmer/Sanders offense at UT. Against a clearly outmatched opponent, they put up only 24 points and seemed to spend the last three quarters waiting for the game to end. Fulmer’s apologists call it “classic, conservative, hard-nosed football.” I call it boring, counter-productive, and just a little bit embarrassing. The only reason, as far as I can tell, to put a Fresno State or a Marshall (next week) on your schedule is to give your offense an opportunity to learn how to score — to turn a game day into a practice session. Yesterday was another wasted opportunity.

    Oh yeah, and UT’s defense was amazing. By my count, they allowed only one first down in the first three quarters, and it came on a circus-act catch from one of Fresno State’s receivers. Simon, Peace, and Burnett are about as impressive as a trio of linebackers will get this season.

    The highlight of the game for me actually came up in the stands. Because my friend had gotten our tickets via his job in the athletic tutoring center, we were surrounded by other folks who were at the game compliments of the team, including several families of players. Sitting right in front of us was a proud father, mother, and sister, who floated above their seats for several seconds when their son/brother, a freshman, stepped onto the field for his first (and only, so far) play. Pretty cool. You’ve just got to love college football.

  • Dreaming of a 28 Hour Day

    I hadn’t planned to take a four day break from blogging, but life — as it’s wont to do — keeps getting in the way. And by “life” I mostly mean Sobig viruses, network flubs, and frustrated faculty, all of which have conspired this week to make my day job unusually exhausting. Well, there’s that and the freelance writing projects, reading assignments, and Jack, the four-week old kitten we’re fostering, whose cuteness doesn’t quite make up for his refusal to be weaned or his tendency to pee on walls, clothes, carpets, towels, blankets, couches, and people.

    Universities Left Behind

    The Times published two interesting pieces yesterday. In the first, “Bush ‘Compassion’ Agenda: A Liability in ’04?” Elisabeth Bumiller argues that Bush’s broken promises might just catch up with him. The pattern should be familiar by now: Bush stands before a supportive crowd, drapes himself in the simple symbols of patriotism and Christian charity, then stumps for legislation that, if enacted, would demonstrate his “compassion.” But, of course, he never gets around to the actual politicking necessary to see that legislation through Congress. Instead, we’re left with frustrated people like Rev. Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal and a former Bush supporter.

    Mr. Wallis said Mr. Bush had told him as president-elect that “I don’t understand how poor people think,” and appealed to him for help by calling himself “a white Republican guy who doesn’t get it, but I’d like to.” Now, Mr. Wallis said, “his policy has not come even close to matching his words.”

    Add to that such highly-touted planks as AIDS funding, faith-based initiatives, child tax credits, and his No Child Left Behind act, and you get a whole mess of sound and fury but nothing much of significance. Well, that’s not entirely true. You also get great sound bites and photo-ops.

    Only tangentially related is “Universities in Decline” from the Times editors. It’s a simple, four-paragraph statement of a disturbing fact: “Public colleges and universities, which grant more than three-quarters of this country’s degrees, have been steadily undermined by state budget cuts and a mood of legislative indifference.” No kidding. Last summer, thousands of my colleagues and I were deemed “non-essential” employees and given a week off when the Tennessee legislature was unable to balance its budget. (Unable, even, after reallocating its tobacco settlement money.) During my five years in Knoxville, three tuition hikes have placed a greater and greater burden on students, who are receiving fewer and fewer services in return. It’s sad.

    And only tangentially related to that is this bit from the latest issue of Harper’s. A co-worker transcribed and forwarded this to me, and I’m now very curious to read the whole piece, “What’s Wrong with Public Education”:

    Public education is not intended to help the individual but to create a populace that is easy to control, says John Taylor Gatto, the author of four books on education and a former New York State and New York City teacher of the year. The real purpose of mandatory public education, he says, is to train young people to be reflexively obedient to authority and to fill social roles that benefit government and commerce. “It is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform,” he writes.

    The problem is not that public education is failing to reach its goals, but that it is succeeding in producing a culture of childishness and consumption, he says. “If we wanted to, we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids ‘take’ an education rather than merely ‘receive’ a schooling,” he writes.

    Perhaps if President Bush had, at some point, learned to “take” his education he would better understand the consequences of his actions (including his frustrating refusals to act).

    And Some Final Thoughts

    From June Chittister’s The Rule of St. Benedict: Insight for the Ages:

    A Zen story tells of two monks walking down a muddy, rain-logged road on the way back to their monastery after a morning of begging who saw a beautiful young girl standing beside a large deep puddle unable to get across without ruining her clothes. The first monk, seeing the situation, offered to carry the girl to the other side, though monks had nothing whatsoever to do with women. The second monk was astonished by the act but said nothing about it for hours. Finally, at the end of the day, he said to his companion, “I want to talk to you about that girl.” And the first monk said, “Dear brother, are you still carrying that girl. I put her down hours ago.”

    The things we ruminate on, the things we insist on carrying in our minds and heart, the things we refuse to put down, the Rule warns us, are really the things that poison us and erode our souls. We dull our senses with television and wonder why we cannot see the beauty that is around us. We hold on to things outside of us instead of concentrating on what is within that keeps us noisy and agitated. We run from experience to experience like children in a candy store and wonder how serenity has eluded us. It is walking through life with a relaxed grasp and a focused eye that gets us to where we’re going. Dwelling on unessentials and, worse, filling the minds of others with them distracts from the great theme of our lives. We must learn to distinguish between what is real and what is not.

  • Dream Brother

    Dream Brother

    Even before Jeff Buckley drowned at 30, his voice was thick with melancholy and tragedy. Grace is without question one of the finest albums of the 90s, and “Dream Brother,” the disc’s closer, is proof. Amazing.