Culture: April 2003 Archive Page

"Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren’t willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn’t require an understanding of the larger context.|I, too, want these things." Bruce Wexler

--Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?MSNBC/Newsweek)

A heartfelt elegy, but perhaps overstated. Due to the enthusiasm of several members of the UWEC English faculty and a larger number of students, the local scene in Eau Clare features visiting poets, poetry slams and more. Will the students continue their love for poetry after they graduate? One hopes so. Wexler's essay is perhaps an agit-prop piece, inciting the faithful to rise up and take action. Don't miss the reference to Frost in the closing lines.

"The idea that you should let a fire burn, and destroy valuable forest, was so counter-intuitive that it took the U.S. Forest Service a hundred years to realize the problem and to change the strategy and let the fire burn." Jared Diamond

--Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?Edge)

Hit "page down" three times to get to the actual start of the article. Diamond complains that "Our president is still not convinced of the reality of global warming," but The Telegraph recently reported on a study that concluded "today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists."

Robert Frezza writes:

I ran across an interesting passage in a book about the native peoples of Siberia called "The Shaman's Coat." In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of well-educated Polish revolutionaries were exiled to eastern Siberia where they acquired a certain reputation among the natives. As one of them put it: "When the inhabitants learned that I was Polish, they came to me for solutions to all their problems; they brought me their broken guns, asked for advice on smoking fish, demanded that I cure the blind, that I heal their sick women, and wouldn't believe that I wasn't capable of doing all this. 'But you're Polish!' Yukagirs and Yakuts would say, surprised and hurt by my refusal. For them, a Pole was a man with 'golden fingers', who knew everything and could do everything."

Polish PerceptionsE-Mail)

Now that's a cultural stereotype I could live with.

"A world population that peaks at 9-10 billion is not one in which we have to worry about Parson Malthus, the English 19th century economist who prophesied a future in which people multiply faster than the resources needed to sustain them and hence starve to death by the millions. Indeed, it comes as somewhat of a shock to realize that the age of the population explosion may be coming to an end. | Just thirty years ago, people like Stanford University's Paul Erlich were telling us that the Malthusian Angel of Death was at the door." J. Bradford DeLong --The Final Defeat of Thomas Malthus?Project Syndicate)

"Forty German authors are hoping to set a record on World Book Day on Wednesday by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours. | Each of the authors has two hours in which to write two pages of the book." --Authors Plan 'Fastest' BookBBC)

When a blogger dies, what happens to the blog? "I keep it on my 'friends' list just so I can see his name every so often, but I can never bring myself to click on his name. The first year or so after he passed on I visited it with decreasing regularity, until eventually I couldn't handle the emotions. I had to move on. But the idea that it is still around is comforting -- it's almost as if he isn't dead." Garrett Palm, quoted by reporter Christopher Null

--Online, Some Bloggers Never DieWired)

Then there is the blogger who never lived, Kaycee Nicole.

"My how times have changed! These days you hear nerd talk spewing out of everyone's mouth! ... Is it computer technology that's made nerds of us all? Or perhaps it's because we really do work for those former "losers" now." Peter Bagge

--The Nerd-ification of AmericaReason)

I feel the same way about Star Trek, which is not nearly as good as it was when it was still the domain of the uber-geeks. Thanks, "Traveling Ghost."

"It may sound like sexual prejudice, but it seems that men's much-debated ability to navigate slightly better than women applies in virtual environments as well as the real world. And on average, says Microsoft computer scientist Mary Czerwinski, men are quicker to create a mental map of an environment and orient themselves within it."

--Women Need Widescreen for Virtual NavigationNew Scientist)

I think that title should be "Women need wide screen" (two words). I wonder how much of this is because women have better peripheral vision than men. The author of this article could have spun it thus: "Narrow computer screens fail to provide the peripheral information that women process better then men." But this article seems to focus on women's shortcomings instead -- suggesting that they neeed an extra technological prop in order to rise to the level of the men.

"Unfortunately, I never actually heard the protester's name pronounced, just caught him spelling it out for others and jotted it down in my notepad. | I wrote the story for Sunday's paper, tucked the quote down near the bottom, filed it to my editors in Charleston and blithely went about my life, unaware that this one name was about to make my own name known around the country. | On Monday afternoon, thanks to some astute readers with a vivid recollection of elementary school vernacular, I realized I had been duped." James Scott

--Embarrassing lesson: Duped reporter learns the hard wayPost and Courier)

"The Institute for Interactive Journalism helps news organizations use innovative computer technologies to develop new ways for people to engage in critical public policy issues."

--The Institute for Interactive JournalismJ-Lab)

Fascinating approach to journalism as telling, showing, and doing. The site features a "balance-the-budget" game and information about awards for innovative journalism. This site isn't quite "hip" enough to embrace blogging as a form of journalism (the rules for one contest require the content to be produced by an established news organization).

"Although bell curve distribution is still considered normal, a surprising number of economic and social phenomena now seem to follow a different arc. Instead of being high in the center and low on the sides, this new distribution is low in the center and high on the sides. Call it the well curve." Daniel H. Pink --The Shape of Things to ComeWired)

"Many people who were classified as feebleminded would now be called mildly retarded, learning disabled, or simply underachievers. Although the eugenicists saw the Buck family as a pedigree of degeneracy, many would now say that they had few problems a bit of money, education, and opportunity would not have solved. Their only sin was to have been born poor women in the impoverished South....Carrie Buck was sterilized because it was thought that she carried a gene that condemned her and her offspring to substandard intelligence and immoral behavior. Hers was deemed a worthless lineage to be snuffed out."

--None Without Hope: Buck vs. Bell at 75 (Dolan DNA Learning Center)

The history of eugenics is closely tied with racism and elitism, supported by pseudo-scientific claims that have long since been debunked. While the study of genetics is not the same thing as the social practice of eugenics (as a reader reminded me a few months ago when I ranted against a comment made by James Watson), the successful sequencing of the human genome raises interesting questions. The cerebral Sci-Fi movie GATTACA explores some of them quite well.

"Never, ever pick a fight with a surrealist. Not unless you are packing a kipper yourself, and are prepared to use it. That much I now know. But at lunchtime on Monday, when I tried to slip through the surrealist blockade of the André Breton auction at the Hôtel Drouot, I assumed a black polo neck was protection enough against accusations that I was a bourgeois lackey bent on picking the bones of the great man." Fiachra Gibbons --I Don't Have Any Cash. Do you Take Mackerel? (Guardian)

"I started an e-mail network almost spontaneously several years ago, when my next-door neighbor was mugged walking home from the bus stop at 6:30 p.m. Outraged, I sent out an e-mail to perhaps 20 neighbors, and within 24 hours, a dozen of them had volunteered for neighborhood patrols. | With that, our e-mail network was born." Jim Buie --Neighborhood Networks Recreate Village AtmosphereNat'l Neighborhood News)

Via KairosNews.

"Saying they are appalled by the way the United States and Britain defied the will of the United Nations and attacked Iraq, the four [German] professors declared war on borrowed English terms in German such as 'okay,' 'T-shirt' and 'party.' They have devised French-language alternatives: 'd'accord,' 'tricot' and 'fete.'" --German Professors Declare War on English TermsReuters)

...So I Became an Asshole.

My Parents Said I Could Be Anything I Wanted...Serendipity)

Slogan on a T-shirt worn by a student I just passed in the hall.

"Be pro-active, not reactive. Tell stories that provide background and context FIRST. We've tried to avoid two traps some media organizations, including The Bee, have fallen into:

• The 'minority of the week' story (writing about minorities for the sake of writing about minorities, i.e., 'Here are our Latinos!').
• The 'minority bad news story of the week' (writing about people of color whenever there's a problem, i.e., violence in minority neighborhoods). Those certainly are stories, but they go down a lot easier when you've provided context, and written stories emphasizing other aspects of minority life.

One big-picture story is worth 20 briefs. It lays a positive foundation, so when it comes time to write a critical story (i.e., the high welfare rate among Hmong and Iu Mien), you've got sources, they trust you, and they realize you've been fair to them." Stephen Magagnini of The Sacramento Bee

--Tips on Covering Race & EthnicityPenn State U)

Apparently this was reproduced as part of a journalism class. Via Donna Hibbs.

"A gentle waterfall pours from the cliff into a large aqua pool. The rocks are molded concrete and the pool reeks of chlorine. Under clear resin, our tabletop bears a colorful design of the Mayan alphabet and calendar. Down one level to the right is an area with carpeted steps and a large video screen playing cartoons -- a sideshow for children not sufficiently captivated by robotic iguanas.... Can someone who knows only censored and stylized depictions of the natural world -- Disneyland, PBS, The Nature Company -- ever love and understand the wonderfully complex original?" Julia Corbett --Robotic IguanasOrion Online)

"Children don't go to work in either family businesses (which are fewer and fewer), nor do they go to work to help support their families as in the past. These are small-scale examples but they speak to a larger societal issue: we have taken away nearly all of the 'traditional' past-times of children and replaced them with television [first - pre 1985] and games [second - post 1985]. And we (the older community) have made little to no effort to understand games, only shoved our children in front of them and said 'don't bother me'. Is it any wonder that there are now mini-vans with game consoles built into the back seat? I haven't seen a solid response as to what, exactly, our children are supposed to be doing, just 'not those games'." Andy Phelps

--In Defense of PlayGot Game?)

This new blog, focusing on computer games in society and in academia, looks very promising.