The Graphic Story: Thoughts about Technique

Today in the fiction course we covered some of the fundamental techniques in story writing as they are revealed in Hope Larson’s Bear Creek Apartments and Ryan Andrews’s Our Blood Stained Roof. The link to quirky Cartoon Boy wouldn’t work on the college computer for some reason and I can’t remember the method we used to find Andrews, which was a cool find as a plan B, fantastic stuff. All these works are very much worth of study: conflict, complication, irony, resolution, all those fundamentals used by storytellers to entertain the audience.

The final panel of Our Bloodstained Roof is specially interesting because of the way the meaning of the eyes begins to take shape after analysis, reminiscent of James Marshall’s ability to express psychological states with simple dots and lines.

Students of fiction will neglect commonalities across media. It’s not necessary to neglect this. New Media study asks us to look for relations and to study how different creative problems are solved. Andrews understands mis en sine. Larson understands fable. Kerschbaum’s irony sizzles. Even the grad students in MFA programs don’t learn much more than this. No more so than Dostoevsky. The thing we have to improve is our ability to see and penetrate.

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Healthcare vs. Food: Aye

There are a couple of big differences between the heath and food markets. It’s pretty simple. Everyone already participates in food; that’s why apples are relatively cheap. One cannot opt out. Not even inmates, as there are already legal precedents for this. If a supermarket chain decided to charge 100 bucks for a unit of broccoli, the government would be required to step in, just as they would with wheat.

If a hospital decided to charge ten dollars for a heart transplant, yet again, someone would cry foul.

Come on. This ain’t rocket science.

Workload and Compensation for Teaching Faculty

This article by David C. Levy is strangled by personal opinion. To cal something a myth is a pretty big charge, like claiming that it’s a myth that bats fly at night. A piece of evidence for this might be that bats fly at night is a myth because observers are sleeping. I like this logic:

An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom.

This arithmetic reads like a hammer. I could write that a 22oz bottle of beer is definitely bigger than a 12 oz. bottle because I measured it and because the labels confirm it also. Unfortunately, the context of the arithmetic matters. Levy knows full well that classroom hours form a fraction of faculty work. He also knows the definition of executive. So this is a cheep shot. He could simply claim that the work that goes into teaching isn’t all that important. At least that would be honest.

He could also apply his arithmetic to household economics.

On Atheists and Heathens

This tongue’n’cheek bit in the Guardian titled Atheists please read comes with several consequentialities. Julian Baggini writes

We are heathens because we have not been saved by God and because in the absence of divine revelation, we are in so many ways deeply unenlightened. The main difference between us and the religious is that we know this to be true of all of us, but they believe it is not true of them.

The first consequence comes in that initial, quoted sentence, a binary reliance for meaning. The second comes with the word “enlightened,” which is a baggage term.

If a person can claim an intellectual indifference to “religious” belief, that person might want to avoid classifications that rely on traditional frames. Atheism, for example, is always bumped up against its opposing force. Atheism, it can be written, depends upon religious belief for meaning: meaning, if the world were a room populated by two unbelievers, the room would have a confused identity. The above quote comes from a section in Baggini where he acknowledges the absurdity of such definitions.

I’m very much interested in these definitions, having restudied Lucretius and just completed The Swerve all in the context of Goethe, Basho, and Dostoevsky. If Atheism is defined as a “rejection,” then the subject of rejection remains “another inhabiter of the room.” One problem for Lucretius was an epistemological one: how does one know something or what conclusion can or should be drawn from a list of observed phenomenon? In a particular belief system, the term “know” is, in an Augustinian sense, a supporter of faith. Faith is buttressed by knowledge. In another context of knowing, faith becomes an inconsequential force, an irrelevancy. It simply doesn’t matter or plays no role in epistemology. In this sense, “Heathens” would need no specific frame of reference to hold identity, such as a love of science. A person could simply observe the yellow birds and relate their color to an onion.

The Story of a House: New Photos

The last few months have seen lots of changes at the house, spurred mainly by the summer hurricane and October 2011 storm. This storm tore up the house and yard pretty well. It revealed things I hadn’t been thinking a lot about.

The house was turning into an anthill. The wasps had taken to hoteling in the eaves, the shutters, and the shakes. In some places the old shakes ballooned out in response to the wasps’ persistent spirit of construction. The sun sides of the house were pealing badly. This was original, 1960’s cedar siding. Not a bad lifetime. After the storm we thought a lot about energy, as we were out of power for several days, like everyone else. We went around about solar but this, even with incentives, proved too expensive. And our anxiety about the property as a whole mounted.

We went instead with a new wood stove insert and a remodel of the exterior (to the chagrin of our flying and pollinating friends). This included new polymer shakes. We wanted to keep the look of the original despite the costs. Also, a sheathing of wood and insulation, a new “lifetime” roof, and a round of new giant gutters and guards for them. We hired Wiley Swain to do the job as he lives right across the street and Susan and I had studied him at work on his own house. His industry is a wonder to see.

He came with several experienced partners, who proved intense and all skilled artisans. The work started at 7AM everyday and ended at 5PM, weather permitting. Not one headache. And we appreciate the attention to detail. They worked fast, clean, and with superior professionalism, and had the whole job done within three weeks, give or take a few days of interrupting weather, which would had cut the time down further. The “gutter guy,” Mr. Higgins, had the spillers up in a day.

I’ve heard that 1k must go into a physical house every year for upkeep–on average. I don;t know who came up with that one. That’s a low ball, if one takes into account cutting the lawn. If true, one might spend half the net cost of a home by the time it’s paid off, more if the mort is a 30 year. We did it all in a month.

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What We’re Doing in Digital Narrative at Tunxis

It was somewhat fortuitous for New Media Communication at Tunxis to run Digital Narrative, the second course in our program. The students, after taking New Media Perspectives, have the chance to work with an actual project, begun by one of our economics professors on sabbatical with web site needs. Digital Narrative needs a real project; it also needs students ready to apply learning they’ve acquired in new media principles. This program is not about any particular skill. Rather it pulls students who are learning particular skills into the broad new media fields that require teams to synthesize what they’re learning. We need designers, programmers, artists, business people, writers, and we expect them to lead and to apply.

So we build systems inter-disciplinarily. The system we’re building is an archive and story sharing site for the Conference of Solidarity Support Organizations. Here are the components and goals:

1. Use wordpress for the superstructure
2. Use github for team organization, roles, and milestones–this is a fantastic tool for student teams (no one can hide)
3. Build facilities for content creation and management by the client and his editorial board
4. Promote institutional sharing: students will be meeting with local institutions, which is really cool
5. Promote team integration and integrity in the students
6. Integrate the new media layers of code, design, and culture (which are our Programs central concerns)
7. Learn a little about Polish history and the significance of the Solidarity movement.

It’s working pretty well thus far. Students have a two day meeting schedule. They meet with the client on Tuesday (in Agile mode) and work on what they decided with him on Thursday. But they’re also working on their own time, without my prompting on “stuff.” I assist with more advanced programming and organization issues; WordPress can be complicated. But, as this is a necessary project, outside of the classroom, the students have taken the bull by the horns and are being aggressive. Good. I can use milestones to set my assessment schedule, which is convenient.

Quixote and Galileo: On Being Humbled Yet Again

For context, this is the version of Don Quixote my son and I are working through (hard to be sure, looks like the cover). The more we read it, out loud, with some amount of performance for each voice, Sancho, Quixote, and the narrator, the more we like it. I have to alter some portions as they’re not meant for ten-year-old ears. Readers familiar with the novel will understand, I think.

Shelton’s translation is interesting in that I read a deep affection for Cervantes, a certain need to interpret with accuracy and meet the needs of the language and audience of his time, which is thrilling to think about in a historical sense, as we know translation must be sensitive to time.

In a section yesterday, where Sancho prevents Quixote from riding off for a new adventure, proclaimed by Quixote as tremendously dangerous, and, not wanting to let him out of his sights and troubled by nearby hammering booms, Sancho, feeling the urge, unbelts, drops his pants, and relieves himself just steps away from his “Lord.” Quixote, of course, has a nose.

I found this amazing, as the language elevated the comedic and scatological scene to carefully crafted “appropriateness,” given the situation. Kundera’s Book of Laughter came to mind then. And something else more trivial: that Cervantes, several times, takes the time to propel the human body into the fiction in a manner that is, indeed, appropriate at the human scale. As a naif, I’d ask why don’t films film the hero’s or his company’s bodies out there on the plain, the desert or in the village. The answer’s obvious: because to those stories, it matters not. For Cervantes, Quixote’s teeth, cheeks, and body matter as a matter of his condition, world, and being. Sancho’s too. It matters that a couple of human beings are out making fools of themselves (amongst other fools).

As a reader, I keep going back to Cervantes and his time and modern conceptions of fiction’s history: the Quixotic, the windmills (which are trivial in the novel, but still cool), the wine bottles (inside joke). My conclusion is this: I get it now: the fascination of Nabokov, Trilling, and Kundera. That here we have something new, a break from powerful conventions that may be interpreted purely as blinders to what’s possible given human experience at the human scale: not the scale of Hamlet. I read Cervantes and say: here’s something similar to discoveries by Galileo and Kepler (which are more human than fantasy) but from a different lens and aimed at the obvious crowds we stand beside and of which we’re members (and we should never forget that). This goes beyond Shakespeare: here’s an author who conceives of a savagery and love in different mode than Boccaccio, Chaucer, or Cao Xueqin. Cervantes punches in Don Quixote with very little reluctance or inhibition. Grand mode, shocking stuff. And now I feel even smaller than I did in the face of Mark Twain. Amazing. Wonderful.

Energy Experiments

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We had our wood stove insert installed today.

We usually keep all of the thermostats at 65, with some set at 67 for morning time. But the goal is to heat the house with the stove so that we save oil. The last delivery is the kind that shrinks the throat to the circumference of a straw. We got the thing started and in a little bit of time the living room went from 65 to 70 then 75 then up to 78, and now the remainder of the lower floor of the house is at 69, a nice grace distance beyond the 65 constant. We also turned the central air fan on to assist in distributing air.

Hopefully, we can keep the boiler from coming on enough to promote sustainable heat. Burning wood is a pretty good deal as the carbon footprint, if the burning is good, is even with a log or tree’s natural disintegration. With necessary felling and cleanup come March we should have a lot of wood ready for the next few years.

More on Ecological Buildings

There’s a wonderful connection between ecological thinking, new media, and design. We can use space in and energy in better ways. Ingels‘ hedonistic sustainability is interesting because it’s practical, exciting, and begs collaboration between disciplines. Poet/architect. Programmer/waste manager. Geologist/economist. Et cetera.