TV’s metaphors are interesting and scary.
The Visa commercial is the image of America (brain) on Debt (drugs) (and human as conformer).
Desperate Housewives has nothing to do with housewives but has a lot to say about suburban blight.
We’re back on Babylon 5 again. Years 2 and 3 are now more relevant than ever. Yikes.
Good to see Neha having fun.
While lost in the darkness of the “classroom” and “politics of education,” teaching is essentially electric. When the opportunity arises. The formal settings come with the baggage of an industry that is hard and slow to change and react. That’s too bad. But we need fresh eyes. We also need people who understand that the walls are arbitrary and illusory.
Susan Gibb will be tracing her exploration with Storyspace at Hypercompendia. This should be interesting reading.
This is neat. Like a puzzle or a game where you find clues (try the manual, dum-dum), check out different rooms (create links), and eventually finish the task (story).
I find this article at Real Climate very interesting, a nice peekhole into potential disaster:
One also has to wonder whether the international treaties and organizations needed to agree on and execute a geoengineering scheme are significantly easier to realize than the agreements needed to decarbonize the energy future, which would offer safer and more durable climate protection. And once you open the Pandora’s box of geoengineered climate, what do you do if nations disagree about what kind of climate they want, or if some poor nation objects to suffering drought in order to cancel heat waves in Chicago? Great fodder for science fiction novels about climate wars, but I’d prefer not to have to think about it happening for real.
Another issue, of course, is political diversion. I have students writing about the issue of climate at the moment and they are thinking about it in interesting ways, measuring carbon footprints, thinking about tax breaks and incentive. Speculation is good, wild, grounded ideas, better. For crises ahead, we need level heads.
Wonderful conversation with Susan Gibb about story, hypertext, and edge. Hypertext is the form, but story is still king. We also talked about knowledge as it pertains to thinking about story and all the things that wriers would not have known if they did not write. There are some things a person would never have known if it weren’t for the writing.
For example, without the word “giggling” we never would have known about a man and woman who speak to each other via bridges. These two people are that we need to know. But then we need to see what happens in the face of change, the arbitrary, deep water.
Mark Bernstein on learning:
We should expect to learn. Sophisticated tools require study and effort, and they repay that effort by letting us do things we could not do otherwise. Calculus is a lot of work, but you can’t understand physics or the stock market until you understand derivatives. Learning to draw the figure is a lot of work; once you do the work, you can draw.
I know exactly what he’s talking about.
Keys: Storyspace and eLumen. Tools through which we learn. Kind of like good story telling. Interesting.
This post points back to a considerable amount of discussion on McCarthy’s novel The Road including some in the comment space here.
Nevertheless, my reading of the novel goes to vulnerability and implacable loss (the institutions that sustain moral and ethical codes are gone). One of the running ideas that crosses McCarthy’s work is the notion of the boundary and the irrevocable crossing of them. It’s great for fiction writers to think about these boundaries and to cross them in the act of writing. I often refer to edge and this is what I mean: what boundaries are crossed or is the writer playing it safe hence inhibiting their own creative power. We should strive to write works tha are smarter than we are.
In The Road, the environmental border has been crossed. The ambiguous and banal war is over; there’s nothing left to do. That’s one point I tried to make in this post here.
The novel works because the father and son are familiar and unfamiliar to us.
As a work of secular prophesy, The Road portends a possible future. The power of the warning is in the power of the imagery. That’s why I think that the boy is important as a foil to the father. But, these days, prophesies can be deemed naive, especially in the context of geopolitical reactionism and how people respond to facts.
The Road is too logical for our irrational present.
Joseph Kugelmass reads McCarthy’s The Road as a Christian parable.
The Road is a Christian parable; that is its most important quality, and its downfall.
I don’t read this in the novel.
In The Road we slowly acquire the fear that the boy will have to face the world alone (I hate to say it but this is how I wanted he novel to end). This fear is everpresent in the father. The gulf between the father is not a rejection of “kinship” but a simple misunderstanding. The father’s fear is embodied in the world’s imagery. It’s a novel about vulnerability. Every parent’s nightmare.
Mary Kate Hurley at In the Middle has an interesting post on history and the latest narrative jump in Heroes (links in original):
Hiro seems to be playing a role that’s difficult to imagine. Hiro’s influence in the past — pointing Takezo Kensei toward his “destiny”, hoping to restore a timeline somehow made different by his presence there. Hiro remarks on the way in which “History” writes stories — and has in fact already written the one he’s in — yet his work in the past (if you can call it that) creates the very stories he’s claiming as a kind of inherited tradition.
I guess what’s fascinating here is the way in which Hiro’s position is that of the disembodied “History” he speaks of when he remarks that “History has already written that story.” Of course, as viewers (co-conspirators?) we know that Hiro is only partially correct. History hasn’t written the story — or more precisely, hasn’t written it yet. What’s intriguing is that History — in the form of Hiro — has already heard the story – and knew it, in fact, in advance of arriving on the scene as an historical agent.
Heroes, I think, takes an interesting position vis a vis history and the role the subject can play in it (whether or not the writers are aware of it, though I’d like to think they know exactly what they’re doing). History arrives from the future (literally in this case) and inscribes a narrative, a trajectory, where before were inert forces, empty lives and silent stones. JJC writes below that in encountering Barber rock at Avebury, My son and I touched a megalith’s cold side and felt our own desires. Hiro’s dilemma in this episode of Heroes is that he knows history must be written as he has already heard it — yet his desire is that it be written differently, perhaps even Otherwise.
What I find interesting here is the “desire” to revise that plays out in Heroes (maybe) and perhaps even in Lear or as it may play out in different forms of historical conception: Beowulf vs Gawain, for example or in (re)presentations of futures.
Hypertext can play with a persistent recalling or revision of an event, simply by rewriting the same event in two different ways or providing a different set of contexts for that event.
In Heroes, Sylar will want to either find the onramp back to an original trajectory or secure entrance to a different path altogether. But I still find he possibilities of time play in narrative an underdeveloped possibility in filmic space and here I’m talking nuance not suggesting possible simulacrum. There may indeed be an evil twin. But what are the relations?
I observe now that the “casino” has become a conduit of dreaming.
I’m getting lots of complaints about the latest version of MS Word.
My students don’t need a complicating word processor, nor do I. “Complicating” not “complicated.” Basically, the kind of documents we create are simple, printable things. The world, however, of documents is a complicated place. Apparently.
I want to know a few things about what my students think, commonly ideas that come in the form of fundamental argument often supported by a little research. Or stories. But the software gets in the way of this. Word 07 is so different from the last version that people beginning on it will have no problem generating paper. I had a colleague today suggest that those who use the deep functions of XP will really be lost (because they stored complex macros or really understood where everything was kept in their customized toolbars) and this may be the case.