Writing: May 2004 Archive Page

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I've created or added to a handful of Wikipedia articles over the years (usability, interactive fiction, Elia Kazan, Rossum's Universal Robots), and I've also (briefly) had students work on articles for brief exercises.

One day I hit the the "random article" button and found myself reading a creepy but very informative article about snipers... then a few months later, when the Beltway Sniper was in the news, I felt very informed about the whole matter.

It looks like Wikipedia has recently added community and magazine-like features, in an apparent effort to compete with pay sites like the one for Encyclopedia Britannica.

How can we ask our students to read great literature and then criminalize them when they respond, on occasion, with the angry bitterness of Hamlet?

Clearly, we're not dealing with the proverbial "isolated incidents" here. FEAR ITSELF is loose in America and it needs to be addressed, strongly, powerfully, by all of us who teach composition and encourage written expression. --John Lovas --[Criminalizing Writing] (Jocalo's Blog)

An important set of observations...

When in grad school, I used to have recurring dreams that I was reading and re-reading a page of some academic book. I guess my dreaming mind doesn't have a buffer large enough to store a whole page of text -- each time I re-read it, my dreaming mind re-wrote it, reflecting my developing understanding of whatever I thought the author was trying to say.

I'm having that experience now, after more about 10 days of blogging during the kids' naps, with no time in the office to sort through and organize my thoughts. I thought I had an appointment in the office last Monday, so I didn't bring my PDA charger home over the weekend, and the battery has been dead for over a week now. I even resorted to pulling out a reporter's notebook and jotting down lists and ideas the old-fashioned way, while my daughter was briefly engaged with The Wiggles or tearing the stuffing out of one of her dolls.

Anyway, knowing that a little darling may wake up at any moment, let me try to address this topic...

In high school, I worked off some stress during the last semester of my senior year by writing a serial short story in which various members of the drama club got "offed" in spectacular ways. I don't remember whether I did it before or after, but I also tried my hand at a comic strip.

Young Americans are growing up in a society that encourages them to express themselves. Thankfully we've ditched the Victorian tendency to think of children to be perfect little china dolls, but we're still not culturally equipped to deal with what happens when children express darkness and angst. Fairytales (in their pre-Disneyfied, somewhat gory, and often morally ambiguous states) served an important cultural function: they attracted the darker energies of children, in the context of bedtime stories where adults were fimly and lovingly in control.

That's no longer the case -- kids are developing huge social networks under the noses of their parents. I don't think this is, in itself, a bad thing, but it's certainly incumbent upon the parents to take as much interest in kids online activities as any other activity. For a growing segment of society, the distinction between online culture and offline culture is blurring.
The story of the teen who used a chatroom to arrange his own (attempted) murder would be an incredible case study, but the ethics of publishing all those private communications would be too complex for me to want to think about.

Well, I'm hearing toddler thumpings from next door, so my musings are going offline for now.

BTW, John, I do think you should write titles for your blog entries -- but the content is, as always, great.

In a society devoted to "reality shows" and rampant commodification, it had to happen some time. Late last month an independent scientist auctioned off his services as a co-author on eBay, with the promise of helping the highest bidder write a scientific paper for publication. The offer even had the added allure of a linkage with the legendary mathematician Paul Erdös. --Richard Monastersky --Hot Type: Thumbing His Nose at Academe, a Scholar Tries to Auction His Services (Chronicle)

“Most writers are not getting published in magazines or literary journals,” Lee said the other day, clicking through her Internet Explorer favorites in her cluttered cubicle at the I.C.M. office on West Fifty-seventh Street. “For some more unconventional voices, for people that don’t have connections, blogs can be an entryway into the game.” --Daniel Radosh --A Book in You (New Yorker)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

What does one do with a blog? Here are links to some of my favorite recent postings that highlight part of what I do with my blog.

Teaching

• Plagiarism Roundup
  In honor of Mike Arnzen's unmasking of a plagiarist, here are a few recent blog entries on academic dishonesty.
• Circle Games and Cyberpunk
  In order to discuss some of the key concepts in the novel, I had to make sure that my "Intro to Literary Study" class (English majors, overwhelmingly freshmen) grasped some of the basics of network theory.

Language and Rhetoric

• Rant or Remark? Invective or Discussion?
  If it doesn't make your blood boil, then it's not doing its job. (An analysis of the Elizabeth Ito case.)
• Why people think they are above having to read instructions
  I am in the 7th grade. My project this year is attempting to prove that 99% of people fail to read the following directions after being told and read to do so.

Media

• Watch One Hour with Me... In the Lobby: Waiting for Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ"
  What do the marketing droids think the audience that comes to see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" will want to spend money on? What previews will I have to sit through?
• "The Passion" is the Medium
  Yes, I had to look away during the torture scenes -- but no, not for the reason you probably suspect.
• Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game Studies
  While the computer game industry is, at bottom, driven by money, what might be called the "theory industry" is stacked with people who are very intelligent, who have been trained their whole career to think in abstract and theoretical terms, and who are completely mystified by things that computer gaming designers take for granted.

Personal

• 'The Meatball: Not A Funny Rhyme' says Peter Jerz, age 5-3/4; or, Child Traumatized by 'On Top of Spaghetti'
  "I just can't stop thinking and thinking about that poor meatball," he says, tears rolling from his pinched, squinting eyes... "For who would want to eat it when it's mush under a bush?... And another thing... they should close the front door."
• Headless Heroes, Car-crash Residue, and Styrofoam Peanuts
  I ended up with a big trash bag on the highway outside St. Emma Monastery. What did I pick up?

Favorite Blog Entries: Journaling ModeJerz's Literacy Weblog)

A weblog is a great tool for jotting down thoughts as they come to you. I find my students tend to use their blogs as a repository for their own thoughts, and don't offer annotated links to offsite resources as frequently as I do. I've collected a set of my own blogs that follow the "journaling" model, so I'll be able to point them to it easily in the future.

Here?s the dilemma and confusion. Asking students to conform to a print based logic in an electronic world is not teaching anyone to think on one?s own. Indeed, this kind of pedagogy translates into a continual academic stubbornness, a refusal to recognize the communication shifts we have experienced and are experiencing currently. Telling students to write according to the logic of print (whether the writing is on paper or not ? I am talking about the logic not the medium) is to force students to reject the communicative practices around them: IM, the Web, Film, TV, music, etc.
The other serious problem here is that the refusal to recognize the remix is also a refusal to recognize the nature of texts we often value and admire in English Studies (and the university in general). The Wasteland? Remixed. Shakespeare? So remixed. Las Meninas? Remixed Velasquez. Pick a Medieval text at random. It will be a remix. Newspaper stories? Always remixed (I remember my own newspaper experience at several publications? we would go through other papers looking for ideas). Literature reflects a Borges universe where every story is remixed and mixed. Spun around on a literate turntable and wondered over. --JRice --Remix etc. (Yellow Dog)

It's true that one's own ideas only come after one has filtered through many other ideas. I think the problem I see in the classroom is that students find it difficult to trace details back to the source. It's one thing to read Shakespeare, and then write a creative work that riffs on Shakespeare. It takes perhaps a bit more skill to read, say, The Jew of Malta alongside The Merchant of Venice, or any of a number of standard revenge tragedies alongside Hamlet, and note what elements of a common story Shakespeare kept, and where his artistry made the common story into his own dramatic work. It's something else entirely to be shown a creative work, or a marketing pitch, or a political speech, and -- without an authority figure telling you what sources the author consulted -- independently seek out the influences that were remixed and remediated in order to produce the new result.

So students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture -- and it's certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

One problem with remix culture is that the products of remixing are meant almost exclusively for audiences that are familiar with the sources. I had a roommate who sometimes wrote poetry or short stories that quoted long passages from popular songs. Since I usually hadn't heard of those songs, they didn't have the emotonal effect my roommate wanted them to have, so they fell flat for me and I wasn't really able to get the full impact he wanted his creative writing to have. Since he was mostly writing for himself, he didn't need to cite and explain every cultural reference, but if he were giving a speech to a local city council meeting or writing a proposal for a scholarship, it would be his responsibility to make sure that his audience understood all his references. One way to do that is to identify the source of those references.

I don't know much about music, but I have heard on NPR references to composers who "quote" each other. You can't interrupt a symphony to identify the source of a certain passage, so I recognize that some media are better suited to the kinds of explicit citation that college composition courses require.

In the early 90s, Johnny Carson did a comedy bit about psyops campaign against American troops, where the troops were warned that back home, their wives were being seduced by movie stars like Homer Simpson. A serviceman overseas must have heard about or watched that show, but changed the name to "Bart Simpson," and passed the story on to a reporter. A legend was born.

I don't expect students to arrive at college knowing everything they need to know -- if they did, none of us would have jobs.

Remixing is one thing when it comes to the creation of cultural artifacts -- but when it comes to examining facts about the world, and making decisions that may affect people's livelihoods or even their lives, the culture of the remix is sloppy and dangerous.

I certainly don't feel that students should never, ever remix -- but if we graduate students who can ONLY remix, and have never been forced to trace an idea back to its source and critique its validity, but instead settle for riffing on it and referencing "www.somehomepage.com" as one of a handful of "Works Consulted," then we are doing them -- and our culture at large -- a great disservice.

I'm such an important blogger that I don't have to give you any reason as I urge, even command, you to visit this link.

[W]hen famous A-listers write those self-satisfied one-line posts, they aren't really blogging well. Instead, they are just spending the social capital they've already accumulated. They accumulated that social capital by first learning how to listen and read the professional and blog genres that interest them (interpretation on one level), then following the conversation closely enough to know how to contribute something (more interpretation), and then, when they are at their best, linking in richer, fuller posts that build social networks, yes, but that also discuss what they are linking to (interpretation again). I think Jorn Barger said that good links add value to the thing being linked to -- for interpretation, Kurt Spellmeyer sometimes says, is saying something the text has not already quite said. Not just quoting it or pointing to it, not just linking alone. --CCCC Waves and Ripples (Weblogs in Higher Education)

I missed this blog post when it was originally written, back in March...

I listen in part because I am intrigued and seduced by what I don't know: by the Greek tragedies I will never have time to read, by the symphonies I will never have time to appreciate, by the questions I will never have enough philosophical training to ask or understand in their richest contexts.

Like many of my colleagues, I often dream about sitting in on courses that spark my curiosity. Just about every semester I toy with the idea of taking an introductory piano course, or brushing up on my Spanish or French. I have even spoken idly of shedding my responsibilities and pursuing whole new degrees, maybe in zoology or art history or anthropology. --James M. Lang
--The Benefits of Eavesdropping (Chronicle)

It's not so much the content of this essay that moved me to blog it. It's also really, really good writing... and as I see the light at the end of the grading tunnel, and contemplate my plans for next term, I really appreciate this reminder of how exciting teaching can be.

A blog is a Web site with regularly updated chronological entries containing commentary, opinions, lies, rumors, half-truths and innuendos. More importantly, it's where you can express your opinions, make comments, spread rumors, tell lies, create fiction and bore the world with your thoughts on just about any subject.

[...]

In a lot of ways, reading a blog is like reading someone else's diary or, better yet, an old Larry King column. Free flow. No continuity. No boring segues or transitions. No holds barred. And in most cases, shallow. Shallow is good -- there's nothing wrong with shallow.

But there is one major difference. Even Larry King had to get his copy past an editor. And what an editor he must have been.

But bloggers do not face this roadblock. They can run their mouths forever and ever. There is no word or space limitation in the Blogosphere. But some bloggers have been hammered by fellow bloggers for their stupid blog posts and have subsequently and sadly developed severe blogophobia, or fear of blogs. --Angus Lind --Much ado about nothing: Web logs are everywhere and full of nothing  (Times-Picayune)

A member of the writing establishment, whose position in the world of print is threatened by the expansion of blogging, misses an important point about blogging. What Lind smirkingly calls "blogophobia" is the subsitute for the editors and gate-keepers, the absence of which he laments in the blogosphere. Thus, it's not just that anyone with a web page can be a writer, but anyone can also be an editor and critic. Some will be more informed than others, but it's not hard to read blogrolls to figure out who the most respected bloggers are in whatever niche that interests you.

While there are probably millions of teen angst blogs out there, and while few of them are probably good reads for an outside audience, nobody is forcing Lind or anyone else to read stuff that's boring. I have some sympathy for those who feel Google is swamped with commentary from crazed bloggers, but Google does offer a "News" search feature that restricts itself to news publications, and anyone who knows a tiny bit about searching can add "-blog -weblog" to a Google search.

I also think Lind does a disservice to his readers by presenting content from "The Dullest Blog in the World" in order to support his claim that blogs can be dull.

Via Doctor Daisy, who offers a rebuttal to Lind.

Imagine how quickly the slaughter of innocents at My Lai would have become known had it been captured by a palm-sized digital camera (or phone) instead of reported by letter.

What does this mean for journalism?

First, it converts all camera-toting participants of an event into potential irrefutable witnesses and therefore sources.

Second, these witnesses also have the capability to become citizen reporters (who may or may not attempt to "report" journalistically and instead prefer to "show" a version of an event from their own viewpoint).

Third, it further dilutes the traditional role of mainstream journalists as the primary providers of news. As more citizens become not only subjects and sources but also reporters, professional journalists are increasingly disintermediated.

The deflation of high technology into everyday tools usable by anyone redefines journalism's core function (reporting what happened) from the practice of an elite few to a possibility for many.

--Tim Porter --Digital Proof, Human Source (First Draft by Tim Porter)

A provocative discussion of how technology is changing journalism. The simple fact that anyone can be a journalist does not devalue the training that makes a journalist fair and comprehensive in his or her coverage... in fact, greater access to technology means that more people shoudl be exposed to that kind of training (if only so they can recognize biased or suspect sources when they encounter them, since they are less likely to be filtered out of the news pool by gate-keeping professionals).

Thanks for the link, Mike.

Somewhere, beneath the cover of an innocuous-looking retail operation, those with true Power have built a facility to imprison forces man was not meant to know . . . things we were never meant to comprehend. The Ark of the Covenant. The Crystal Skull. Alien spacecraft . . . and aliens. Documentation of conspiracies and cover-ups. And more. Are you ready for Warehouse 23?

• A plain box of unsharpened No. 2 pencils, without any visible brand name. Any electronic scoring machine for standardized tests will score any answer marked with one of these pencils as being correct.
• Seven identical (and apparently original) paintings of the Mona Lisa. In all of the pictures she is smiling happily, as if the artist has just made a really funny comment.
• An ordinary, audio compact disk, labeled "I cannot be played." If the disk is played in any CD player, it will produce audio vibrations, optical reflections, feedback noise, and so forth, that will destroy the equipment it was played on within a minute or so.

--Warehouse 23

Organic soup awaiting the lightning bolt? I'd classify it as a playful literary exercise, rather than either a game or a short story, but whatever you call it, it's a collection of decontextualized inventory items as flash fiction. Open another box. Mike Arnzen may wish to proceed directly to the dumpster.

You will need the following items, depending on what you plan on doing with the orange:
1. Oranges, lots of them in case you are hungry or if you mess it up.
2. Two bowls, one to peel them over and one to put them in. It's important to peel them over a bowl because when you screw up and smash it (accidentally) you at least can drink its sweet sweet magic juice. --Mike Rubino --How to Peel an Orange (Tranquility Lost)

I've always felt that oranges were a lot of bother.

A great example of creative writing that riffs on the technical genre of instructions.

The game press does a piss-poor job of covering the culture of games -- from Games That Teach to local LAN parties. Instead, the delve into the intricate details of each game -- which is clearly important from a game play standpoint. However, the culture at large is at least as important as the game play. If you read the newspaper, you'll find stories that cover a wide variety of subjects. Business stories aren't only about stocks. Sports stories aren't only about the games. Yet, the game press really focuses on game play. --wiredbeat2000 --The State of [Computer Game] Criticism (Buzzcut Forum)

From a forum comment posted on Buzzcut.

Sadly, commercial publishing threatens the very system it exists to support. When expensive commercially published materials cannot be bought, when university presses cannot afford to publish monographs for junior faculty, everyone suffers. Students and scientists cannot gain access to badly needed materials; scholars cannot get tenure for lack of that first published monograph. The modern university, modeled on the ideal of the Greek temple where thinkers and learners pursued knowledge so that society could reap its benefits, is losing ground to crass commercialism. At risk is the very culture of the academy. --Fat Cat Publishers Breaking the System (Syllabus)

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.