Author Archives: Steve

Freyed Profit

The NYT top sellers list still has James Frey’s (novel/memoir/scifi/western?) as tops, which means that it’s still flying off the shelves, right? The thing is still viable in the market place. Reminds me of Sandoval’s remark about the nature of uncertainty and books.

Servers and Intelligence

This semester–Spring 2006–WebCT Vista is having a particularly difficult time finding its server, lovingly displaying DNS errors. This software trudges through itself. The digestion of information is slow. Vista is a learning and teaching environment. So is a classroom. But the room in which I teach has a functioning door. The lights work; the desks, while uncomfortable, are shaped to admit the human body in seated position, and the way it organizes the bodies in it works relatively well.

Insults

In the selling of the Mac/Intel convergence, why is it necessary to insult Windows-based machines and their users? Because it’s fun? Technically, it may be an interesting move and will open the choices, but the campaign soils.

WordPress and Modularity

The design note post below is really about the notion of modularity and connections in new media. A sequence is, of course, a kind of module where A may lead to B or to A.2 if A and B are cogent enough. At Spinning, Susan Gibb is weaving in a circle of modular elements (I’m using modular here to make a point about connections: can’t have a module as a thing to itself), ranging from current pubs to Boethius, as new as anything else to a reader unfamiliar with Theodoric and the Ostrogoths. I persist in the idea that age is illusion in the practical and everyday. This post could turn into one about reading. Reading is also on my mind since at Sixnut we’ll be talking a lot about it over the coming years. At Spinning, there’s a connection between Boethius and Tom Bisell.

Reading as connection, often having nothing to do with books and sentences, but with links, sauces, and dust bunnies.

Design Note

In another area, we’re thinking about conceptualizing different syetems for teaching using current and emergent tools. Here’s a summary. Let’s say that, hypothetically, students and faculty may enter a course in a weblog interface with tags adjusted in sidebars for a variety of things:

1. A list of courses
2. A list of course contents, readily available in whatever form (docs, wmvs, swfs, slides).
3. Links to preassigned research materials
4. Links to a forum (such as bbPress), chat, or other communication tools.
5. And then a list of feeds from the above tools, itemized by a) most recent and b) comments made directly to the student or faculty member since their last session.

(Note that everything here is one click away)

6. Another area could be designated for external feeds from the library, relevant publications, and even other types of communities given the subject matter: newspaper section articles, culture and descipline publications, and portfolios.

(Note, everything is still one click away).

One additional point to make has to do with flexibility. This kind of system might make using information technology a little more friendly for casual users of the system. For those not teaching online or hybrid, the system would be much simpler to use for those who just wanted add a few things for students to use: syllabus, a few articles, whatever.

A lot of this thought comes from James Farmer with other ideas stemming from Jeremy Hiebert.

Timothy Melley’s The Prince of Natick

Timothy Melley in his story “The Prince of Natick,” writes a nice mix of people in a story that ends with busted pipes. It’s a frustrating story, not because the telling comes off like unbuttered toast, but because Mick Kosloski, the boss forman of the Water Division of DPW, orders the good work of Karl Osberg (“the scariest human” the first-person teller has “ever sat next to”) destroyed and blames beavers for problems everyone else could actually figure out.

The story jabs the reader with lots of asserted characters against a background most people never see–the sheds, the reservoirs, the rust at the other end of the water faucet. Here’s Mick:

Mick had white hair and a leathery face with deep weather-beaten crags. He shuffled and talked in a weird, gurgling lisp. He looked like someone who had gotten loose from my grandmother’s nursing home.

Mik’s big problem in life was thinking up ways to keep his crew busy. He looked at me and Stan like we were a pair of migrain headaches.

I like that last active expression of Mick, but think Mick’s walk and “gurgling lisp” is a little fuzzy, like a photograph taken by shaky hands.

“Natick” is told against a contemporary world where private contractors do all the work and the employees of the DPW are left to fiddle away time, money, and potential under the eye of an incompetent boss, Mick. It’s in this world that the protagonist, who’s working a public works job to save money for school, will get a new glimpse of “the truth.”

The street shimmered with heat. I hesitated. “How did Mick get to be in charge? I mean, he seems to make a lot of mistakes.”

Karl snorted and laughed a little to himself. “Haven’t you heard? Shit floats. Take a look around you.”

This was a depressing new way to think about life. I had always assumed people got ahead by working hard and possessing talent.

The reader may perhaps smile at the naiveté of the protagonist (since all of this is a retelling of a constant in human affairs with plenty of counterpoint, of course) but the story ends with that image of destruction in a new light for the protagonist, a sense, I would say, not just of deformity but of confusion. The protagonist, along with Karl, witnesses and takes part in the very thing we know he despises: stupidity.

How are we supposed to work and live? We’re supposed to work hard and obey the law? We’re supposed to do better than our parents? Get there on time, meet deadlines, speak our minds, be smarter about things. This is supposed to work. It’s what we tell the kids. We tell the kids that George (insert last name here) never lied and that the bible is full of wonderful stories, skipping over the massacres and the Book of Job. Short, funny words now, longer convoluted ones later because when older we really don’t want people to “get it.” It’s the kid who gets the Onceler’s last Truffle Tree seed, not a man or a women, remember. This is a kind of coming-of-age narrative, when the things of childhood are set aside to make space for “the truth.” Mick breaks Karl’s work because he doesn’t want to finish the job.

While I waited for Sully to snap another pipe, I looked for Karl. He stood next to his truck, staring into the distance. He seemed deep in thought, but I realized he was watching Stan walk away from the job. All the fury had drained from his face. He looked like a big, lonely kid who was used to being left out of things. I wondered what he was thinking, whether he envied Stan or just hated him, whether he wanted to walk away himself. A moment later, he looked over at us as though he had just noticed us all there. He reached into the truck bed and removed a flat shovel. Then he began scooping the broken pipes into the dump truck as if it were something he had done every day of his life.

There’s a lot to say about all of this, but here’s one little point to make about the story as a whole: Karl’s gestures are a surface. I see him move everyday. But the gesture doesn’t reveal or link back through the ages. The story reveals the space behind the gesture, a sort of uncertainty of movement, a piece of a crazy quilt that can’t be unroled or rerolled or requilted but you can add more thread to it.

That said, I found the story too formulaic. Could be coming-of-age, but it becomes good guy/bad guy. The bad guys win because we let them win. Maybe Karl did walk away; maybe Mick says, “Okay, let’s finish.” Maybe Stan punches his mayor dad and trips him into the trench. Maybe, maybe not.

Priorities

From the Houston Chronicle:

Based on the latest budget cuts voted in Congress, federal spending to support college loans is scheduled to drop $12.7 billion in the five years beginning July 1, which is almost a third of the nearly $40 billion in deficit-reduction spending cuts. Lawmakers still must cast a final vote on the changes when Congress returns to work this month.

I’m sure that those who think about long term stuff are weighing options carefully, based on data crunching by Sandia-like computers, and thinking hard about the importance of an educated future. Or maybe not.

Touchy, touchy. But at the moment I and others of my colleagues are dealing with the consequences of political corruption. Good things are happening at SixnuT, but when governors and others do things that are never necessary, the results will eventually work their way into the everyday life of people who “need” to get things done. What effort we must waste to make up for selfish and prideful acts.

Borders

From the CSM

In reaching its determination, the high court said former Attorney General John Ashcroft overstepped his authority in November 2001 when he rewrote regulations under the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) making it illegal for Oregon doctors to prescribe drugs to help a patient die.

“The authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise and incongruous with the statutory purposes and design,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. “The idea that Congress gave the attorney general such broad and unusual authority through an implicit delegation in the [Controlled Substances Act’s] registration provision is not sustainable.”

Mr. Ashcroft said that federally controlled drugs could be prescribed only for a “legitimate medical purpose,” and that helping someone to end his or her life was contrary to the healing mission of physicians.

Justice Antonin Scalia said in a dissent that Ashcroft’s directive should be accorded deference by the courts and allowed to stand. He added that he found reasonable the former attorney general’s conclusion that helping someone die was not a “legitimate medical purpose.”

“Virtually every medical authority from Hippocrates to the current American Medical Association confirms that assisting suicide … is not a ‘legitimate’ branch of that science and art,” Justice Scalia wrote. “If the term ‘legitimate medical purpose’ has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death.”

Scalia was joined in his dissent by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas.

In rejecting the so-called Ashcroft directive, the majority justices said the CSA is aimed at policing drug abuse, addiction, and narcotics trafficking rather than providing an avenue for federal micromanagement of state efforts to regulate healthcare and end-of-life issues.

This part–“The authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise”–is the pattern.