update: courses

Not much going in comp because of snow. BL’s hit the ground running with certain human tendencies and the green creative writers are writing a 2 stanza 10 line poem on snow. Everyone rushed out and brought back a handful of the stuff for a lesson on texture. The folks were good enough to avoid an all out snowball fight. In the poem on snow, the excluded words are white and cold.

We’re working on sight; how do we see through poetry? And who’s seeing, the poet or the audience or both? In BL Barbauld is helping. She’s telling us about flight, space travel, contemplation, and personification. And she strokes up against the border between what can be known or what should be known.

I don’t know about you, but I’d like to bend down and scoop up some Martian sand and let it drop and toss it up into the rarefied air.

Media Lab update

A message from Simon Jones of Media Lab Europe. Who’s up for a Dublin trip:

The next OPEN_HOUSE will take place on Tuesday February 24th 2004 in Dublin.

The theme of this OPEN_HOUSE is ” Changing Connections” .

How will we communicate with our friends and loved ones twenty years from now ?
How can interface technologies prompt and mediate a sense of intimacy ?
How will new technologies help us to create new senses of kinship and relatedness ?
Where are the new digital divides and how can we bridge them ?

The keynote speaker will be Peter Cochrane, co-founder of ConceptLabs and former Chief Technologist and Head of Research for BT.

Full details are being finalised at present and invitations will be sent out next week.

OPEN_HOUSE at Media Lab Europe is a global meeting point where some of the world’s greatest minds and leading companies gather to invent the future. As a participant, you gain access to some of the ideas & insights that are seeding innovation and may ultimately help you to achieve your business vision.

creativity and space

How important is creative freedom? Richard Florida has an approach to this question in economic terms, essay found via Chris Mooney.

Peter Jackson’s power play hasn’t been mentioned by any of the current candidates running for president. Yet the loss of U.S. jobs to overseas competitors is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of the 2004 campaign. And for good reason. Voters are seeing not just a decline in manufacturing jobs, but also the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of white-collar brain jobs–everything from software coders to financial analysts for investment banks. These were supposed to be the “safe” jobs, for which high school guidance counselors steered the children of blue-collar workers into college to avoid their parents’ fate.

But the loss of some of these jobs is only the most obvious–and not even the most worrying–aspect of a much bigger problem. Other countries are now encroaching more directly and successfully on what has been, for almost two decades, the heartland of our economic success — the creative economy. Better than any other country in recent years, America has developed new technologies and ideas that spawn new industries and modernize old ones, from the Internet to big-box stores to innovative product designs. And these have proved the principal force behind the U.S. economy’s creation of more than 20 million jobs in the creative sector during the 1990s, even as it continued to shed manufacturing, agricultural, and other jobs.

Thus far the idea of creativity has come up in classes ranging from freshman composition, creative writing, and British Literature. Creativity isn’t just about poetry or character development; it’s also about mathematics, history, and physics. It has to do with how we use tech, paper, and the people around us to make things, good things. I don’t agree with all of Florida’s conclusions because they’re blanket, but the essence is there. People need room, space, to think.

empire and analogies

A snippet from Joshua Micah Marshall’s essay Power Rangers in The New Yorker. A worthy read:

In this latest turn of neoconservative thought, the trappings of optimism and the hopeful talk of a liberal-democratic domino effect have been abandoned. Where Ferguson is all cool confidence, Perle and Frum are fire and foreboding. Theirs are not policies that would lead to the end of evil; they might well, in the long run, lead to the end of empire.

Hard-liners like Perle and Frum would do well to remember that America began as an empire, formally and officially. It wasnt our empire, of course; it was Britains. And the story of how Britain lost its first empire may be more instructive for Americans today than how Britain found itself without its second. Americans like to flatter themselves that the seeds of independence were planted with the first spades into the earth of Massachusetts and Virginia. In fact, during the century before the Revolution, Britains North American colonies were, by most measures, becoming more Anglicized, more firmly tied to Britains monarchy and trade. (The archetype of American homespun virtues, Ben Franklin, spent much of his life trying to make a name in London and find a place for himself in the British establishment.) Britain lost its North American empire through a common mistake: it misunderstood the nature of its power. In particular, it confused the power it had on paperits claims to sovereignty and dominionwith the nature of the control it exercised on the coast of North America.

Neocons, empire, I’m more interested in how Marshall frames his argument concerning “vision” behind decisions and action on national scales. Big time important for Blake and others after the dominant revolutions in the late 1700s.Important now, hell yeah. National perception is a tricky issue. Question: How would we respond to another country running a base on our soil? Would we find this odd or wonderful? This is a rhetorical question.

the astrophysical

In the current issue of Scientific American Adam G. Riess and Michael S. Turner write:

Almost 75 years ago astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe by observing that other galaxies are moving away from ours. He noted that the more distant galaxies were receding faster than nearby ones, in accordance with what is now known as Hubble’s law (relative velocity equals distance multiplied by Hubble’s constant). Viewed in the context of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Hubble’s law arises because of the uniform expansion of space, which is merely a scaling up of the size of the universe.

In Einstein’s theory, the notion of gravity as an attractive force still holds for all known forms of matter and energy, even on the cosmic scale. Therefore, general relativity predicts that the expansion of the universe should slow down at a rate determined by the density of matter and energy within it. But general relativity also allows for the possibility of forms of energy with strange properties that produce repulsive gravity. The discovery of accelerating rather than decelerating expansion has apparently revealed the presence of such an energy form, referred to as dark energy.

Whether or not the expansion is slowing down or speeding up depends on a battle between two titans: the attractive gravitational pull of matter and the repulsive gravitational push of dark energy. . . .

Because telescopes look back in time as they gather light from far-off stars and galaxies, astronomers can explore the expansion history of the universe by focusing on distant objects. That history is encoded in the relation between the distances and recession velocities of galaxies. . . .

Lots of mysteries are waiting for the present and new students of cosmology, physics and mathematics to pursue. Why is the universe still expanding? What are the qualities of dark matter and energy? What are the quantum properties of the black hole? Exciting times. This is another kind of storytelling.

literature and experience

So the new semester begins. Literature, writing, and more writing. Why all this writing? Is this some sort of joke? Do modern people fear the blank page so much that we need to scribble it gray? This year Im going to be trying something new, having students put all their ideas down in ketchup or using mustard as the medium for settling on things. Or just ink.

In composition were going to write laterally, up and down, not in the common method of across and across. How does the way we write; how do the tools we use effect the process of coming to conclusions? This seems to be a human geography question; the page is all around us, now the screen. We could ask how much does the ink on the printed page weigh, the twisted light on laptop screen, the uttered word, then read Tim OBrien.

Or we could just write across and across.

But to the subject: Literature. And an essay, a trying out. Just some thoughts. Why do we read and study literature? I dont think we should. Im against this. Its a political thing. Reading and hearing good stories and poems (and writing them) is an experience first, an experience that cant be paraphrased. If we attempt to paraphrase the story, to talk about the movie, were moving away from the story and the film, into reaction or description or analysis. We like to do this. We experience The Milagro Beanfield War and want to tell people about it. I saw this really cool movie. It was beautiful. Then come other criteria. The music was great. The acting splendid, the visuals sensuous. Then come the examples of all of these. None of this is, of course, the movie. Bits and pieces of a comic in analysis are merely examples that support an essays overall point, page or screen or space dependent.

We have an urge. We want to write it. That urge may come in the form of an image, a bit of dialogue (You have this way with a wine glass. The way you turn the wine reminds me of the passing of time.), a shoe on the floor (how did it get there?), a memory (why that one?), a turn of phrase, such as, I saw the sunset and it reminded me of grilled cheese. Or an argument, creative essay. The process that moves to the completed product is complicated, if even a final product is the result.

The good story or the good poem is a particular kind of discovery. These may be repeated or unique attempts. Odysseus or Spiderman. A good ghost story (see Silent Hill II) can open understand to why something is scary or disturbing. What is the connection between what scares and what shapes our everyday our experience? The discoveries arent overt, because theyre embedded in the narrative. Thus understanding the narrative is key to unlocking understanding, which, hopefully, will lead to confusion or more questions. Is this true, possible? Theres something in Fitzgerald. What? Once you act you put something into motion. Actions are. Scary.

How do they ripple out?

government and education

From the SOTU, something I just had to bring up. The president says:

By passing the No Child Left Behind Act, you have made the expectation of literacy the law of our country. We’re providing more funding for our schools — a 36-percent increase since 2001. We’re requiring higher standards. We are regularly testing every child on the fundamentals. We are reporting results to parents, and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing. We are making progress toward excellence for every child in America.

I enjoy the subtleties here. What does the expectation of literacy the law of our country mean? Is it the law that we must have an expectation or does the President mean to suggest that illiteracy is a crime? Theres also a problem with the question of performance, as if a kid gets a bad grade its automatically the schools fault, when there may be no fault to find except in the concept of education that we currently have in service. I find statements that suggest excellence in absolute quantities pure demagoguery. Logic says that if all are excellent, then excellence becomes mediocrity.

But the status quo always has defenders. Some want to undermine the No Child Left Behind Act by weakening standards and accountability.

This is a classic either/or logical fallacy, a fallacy that sets up a trick dichotomy. This the way it goes: if you disagree with NCLB, then you must be against high standards and therefore agree with the status quo by default. This, of course, misses the notion that there may be better responses than the original proposal or that the problem is more complicated than the proposal articulates. The same logic is applied in the Iraq war against people soft on Saddam and his ilk: that if youre against the war, youre for Saddam and his brand of violence and style of governing. Totally false.

Yet the results we require are really a matter of common sense: We expect third graders to read and do math at the third grade level — and that’s not asking too much

This is fine but misses the nuances. At worst it smacks of status quo. Does anyone know what a third grade reading level is? Theres some sort of DNA reading device out there that judges what a third grader should know. Lots of kids are well beyond the Lets read about Farmer Tom and his cows today stuff thats common fare in the third grade. Grades are arbitrary. Check what publishers call young adult market novels out there and prove that this should be young adult fare, the kind of thing that young minds can take: romance, jealousy, and teen angst. At least Buffy has edge. In my mind, seventh and eighth graders should be able to find the thesis of Aristotles Poetics. Weve targeted too much in education already. A third grader is this and not that, and anything else is just strange, or a failure. NCLB sets up even more of a pressure cooker scenario for 3rd graders. We can put a big smile on this if we wish, but, as with all smiles, watch out for the hands working behind it. But now to the weirdest statement:

Testing is the only way to identify and help students who are falling behind. This nation will not go back to the days of simply shuffling children along from grade to grade without them learning the basics. I refuse to give up on any child — and the No Child Left Behind Act is opening the door of opportunity to all of America’s children.

I know what these tests look like; I also know how much they cost in both money and time. Really, what the President means is conventional standardized tests, oh, and dont we love those. Testing is not the only way. As far as shuffling students along to the next grade, spare me.

Ultimately I think about words like accountability and performance and all the baggage that comes with the perverted assumptions behind them. I can still see one of my kids’ teachers almost in tears for having to explain to me and my wife why she was having students glue stuff to white boards rather than giving them speeches and thinking problems to work on. Because they said I had to do it this way. This is a teacher with thirty years of experience who knows how kids learn better than her superiors yet couldnt act on her own knowledge because someone else wanted students to glue beads onto a board and probably thought that would be fun. This meant the teacher had to work double time to get done what she felt she needed to get done: having her students solve problems. The teachers that I know work themselves to the bone to teach, to help, and to advise, and are always learning how to do things better. Accountability and performance in this context assigns laziness, an anything should be fine attitude, a passing description for liberalism, to an entire class of people. We gotta get all those lazy, pro-status quo, low-standard-loving liberal teachers in line. Just incredible. I work with students every day who have difficulty with the fundamentals. Most of them got tired of bureaucracy a long time ago and dont want any more of it. Get them excited and they catch on quick.

imagined distance

Alice Munro in Walker Brother Cowboy writes:

So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.

This paragraph, the second to last in the story, is filled with mystery and depth, shades, a sense of closure in light, landscape, and mind. There’s the car, the road, the little brother hoping for glimpses of rabbits, and then the speaker glimpsing something else in her father. Something obvious but far off, familiar but unfamiliar. The idea closes with the idea of distance. The narrator’s father has become alien, nearer but also further. She understands he had a possible other life, that things could have been different, the “present” a fragile thing, and, most of all, that he’s thinking the same thing. A scary ending, trembling with inertia, the long sentence stitching out its pearls.

power and legitimacy

In British Lit we talk a lot about leadership, authority, and power and soon in English Composition. How does one get these and keep them–at many levels: argument, poetry, action. In a recent article in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria writes about the growing issue between the US administration and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq. He begins this way:

There really should be no contest.

On one side is history’s most awesome superpower, victorious in war, ruling Iraq with nearly 150,000 troops and funding its reconstruction to the tune of $20 billion this year. On the other side is an aging cleric with no formal authority, no troops and little money, who is unwilling to even speak in public. Yet last June, when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani made it known that he didn’t like the U.S. proposal to transfer power to Iraqis, the plan collapsed. And last week, when Sistani announced that he is still unhappy with the new U.S. proposal, L. Paul Bremer rushed to Washington for consultations. What does this man have that the United States doesn’t?

Legitimacy. Sistani is regarded by Iraqi Shiites as the most learned cleric in the country. He is also seen as having been uncorrupted by Saddam Hussein’s reign. “During the Iran-Iraq war, Sistani managed to demonstrate that he could be controlled neither by Saddam nor by his fellow ayatollahs in Iran, which has given him enormous credibility,” says Yitzhak Nakash, the leading authority on Iraqi Shiites.

Characterizations aside, this developing interplay is interesting as the conflict continues and moves toward other resolutions. Will the deadline for elections be met? Will a tranfer of power play out the way it has been envisioned and articulated. Zakaria concludes:

A power struggle has begun in Iraq, as could have been predicted — and indeed was predicted. Sistani is becoming more vocal and political because he faces a challenge to his leadership from the more activist cleric Moqtada Sadr. “Al-Sadr does not have Sistani’s reputation or training as a scholar and thus presents himself as a populist leader who will look after Shia political interests,” Nakash says. It’s turning into a contest to see who can stand up to the Americans more vociferously and appeal to Shiite fears. The Iraqi Shiites are deeply suspicious that the United States will betray them, as it did in 1992 after the Persian Gulf War, or that it will foist favored exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi upon them. Sistani recently told Iraq’s tribal leaders that they should take power, not “those who came from abroad.”

The tragedy is that while Sistani’s fears are understandable, Washington’s phased transition makes great sense. It allows for time to build institutions, form political parties and reform the agencies of government. An immediate transfer would ensure that the political contest will overwhelm all this institutional reform. But Washington lacks the basic tool it needs to negotiate with the locals: legitimacy. (This is something well understood by anyone who has studied the lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor.) Belatedly it recognizes that the United Nations can arbitrate political problems without being accused of being a colonizer.

U.S. policymakers made two grave mistakes after the war. The first was to occupy the country with too few troops, creating a security vacuum. This image of weakness was reinforced when Washington caved to Sistani’s objections last June, junked its original transition plan and sped things up to coincide with the U.S. elections. The second mistake was to dismiss from the start the need for allies and international institutions. As it turns out, Washington now has the worst of both worlds. It has neither enough power nor enough legitimacy.

The question of legitimacy comes charged with all kinds of baggage and pressures we can’t see but must infer from surfaces. Who can distribute resources effectively and why? How do we learn who to please for some gain, who to step on without loss? Importantly, who can lay claim to decision-making? Not enough power and not enough legitimacy, Zakaria writes. There’s a dance going on here.