PopCult: May 2005 Archive Page

The educator's anonymous Web log, set at an unnamed university "in the South," spun tales of spoiled-rich "Ashleys" with their $500 sandals and $1,500 handbags, eating disorders, plagiarism and drug use, legal and illegal.

"At this school it seems like every kid is on multiple medications," the professor wrote, describing her charges as "barely literate," prone to emotional problems and "terrified of displeasing Mommy and Daddy." --Thomas Korosec --SMU lecturer takes heat for telling blog (Houston Chronicle)

Liner, the author of "Phantom Professor" weblog, is actively shopping her story around.

"I heard the two words every writer waits a lifetime to hear," she said. "Movie deal."

Ah! Leave it to Hollywood to rescue us from all that pesky soul-searching about boundaries and ethics.

There was one kid who always sat in the front row--let's call him Fester--who recognized me right from the start of class because he'd read one of my short stories in a horror anthology. He was a horror fan. His story was also written from a passion, but I could tell that he truly set out to frighten me, and therefore impress me. And he did this by writing a story about me. --Mike Arnzen --Grossing Out Teacher: A Horror Writer in the Writing Classroom  (Broad Universe)

I love the name... "Fester". His last name is probably Boyle. Arnzen is inviting comments on Pedablogue.

As part of a web design unit, I once gave the class an assignment to create a web page that was so terrible it would make me weep. One student posted a photo of one of my children, with a link that connected to a porn site. I should have probably specified that I was looking for horrid design, rather than horrid content.

In another class, a female student submitted a two-page dramatic analysis making a fairly predictable and juvenile pun on the word "climax." She supplied ample erotic language to illustrate her point, but she mistook the ending of the play for the climax. Some students in the class were stunned when I suggested that her metaphor would be stronger if she recognized that most playwrights give the audience and the characters the chance to fall asleep holding each other after the climax, and that a relationship that ends with the climax is probably an economic transaction. I skewered her -- not for pushing the boundaries, but for the omissions that weakened her claims. (While literature is full of material that is both clever and shocking, in a college English class, you can only get so far simply by making a clever, shocking observation.)

While I don't teach creative writing classes, I do occasionally slip a short fiction assignment here or there. I might give this fall's American Lit classes the option to write a literary parody instead of a traditional close reading, for example. A few years ago, a student who was supposed to give an oral presentation on Huckleberry Finn instead read a made-up chapter that had Huck being seduced by Tom's Aunt Polly. I let him read for a little while, then politely asked him if he was going to do any critical analysis. He said no. I told him that he could sit down, and he did without a fuss. I didn't bother to ask him whether he had written that passage or just found it on the internet, and recorded an F for his presentation. I'd have let him redo the presentation if he'd have asked, but he dropped the course soon after.

A student recently submitted a whodunit in which the prime suspect was an English professor, who is the shell of a great man at the beginning of the story. As part of a workshop in which I demonstrated the value of conflict in fiction, I rewrote a few lines of dialogue and suggested a backstory that would have permitted us to watch the professor breaking down, rather than only showing us the end result. I think students who are just discovering their identities as adults and scholars, and who are used to the clear boundaries that were in place between them and their high school teachers, may feel that seeing their teachers as less than perfect can be liberating and humanizing. This pushing of the boundaries is a part of adolescence, and when students have room to do it thoughtfully and reflectively, it can be a great developmental technique.

From time to time I do appear as a character in a different kind of student writing -- academic blogs. Or, almost as often, the personal blogs in which my students pour out the emotions they don't want to put into their academic blogs. Typically the references are neutral, sometimes they are affectionately mocking. While students do from time to time complain about the workload I assign, only one student has posted an all-out rant.

While I do post links to student blog entries, it's a different matter completely for me to post anecdotes about things that happened offline. I would never post a student's grade, or post a bulleted list of all the things a student did wrong. It's part of my profession to know where those boundaries are, and I've had plenty of mentoring and practice to learn about them.

As these groups lose their remaining original members, others are on stages around the country are using their names, Porter said. Some groups claim an association with the originals, while others say they own the rights to use their titles.

"Imposters bask in reflected glory. None contributed to the respected legacies that they claim to represent and the billing should reflect accordingly," she said, adding that it is a matter of what is advertised versus "what am I getting? The public doesn't know that and they capitalize on it."

Groups that perform without saying "tribute," according to Sonny Turner, an original member of The Platters, are "unequivocally misleading ... (It's) like buying a knock-off Rolex watch." --Amanda Cochran --'Truth in Music' stalls in committee (Tribune-Review)

A high school friend of mine is the drummer for an 80s and 90s cover band called Gonzo's Nose. I've never heard them play, but I do read their website from time to time. It pokes fun at the fact they have been "playing other people's music since 1996".

As I understand it, the music industry lets other performers pay a standard fee if they want to "cover" somebody else's work. I seem to remember a Gonzo's Nose anecodote about band members encountering groupies who don't know what a "cover band" is.
While those fellows are based in the Washington, D.C. area, I wonder how the proposed Pennsylvania legislation would have affected them, if at all.

"People buy games for gameplay, not to hear voices," counters Finlayson. "And technology creates gameplay, not actors. People who play these games understand that, and in fact, some gamers turn the volume down because (they) find those voices distracting. In film or television, the actor's performance makes the experience. In video games, it does not." --Xeni Jardin --Strike Looms Against Game Makers (Wired)

Finlayson's job is to talk tough in order to scare the unions during the negotiations, but the truth of his statements really depends on the kind of game.

Someone tell me that a game version of Elmo's World doesn't need Kevin Clash's voice. Okay, transmediated games are one thing, but that's not really what Finlayson is talking about here.

I just finished playing The Longest Journey the other day. It probably took me about 60 hours, stretched out over many weeks. When my wife took the kids to visit her parents last month, I got to put in some long hours on the game, but when they came back, it was time for the end-of-term crunch, and until I submitted grades last week, I had little time for gaming.

I'm not when I'll ever have the time to write up a full review of The Longest Journey, but I was consistently impressed by the talent of Sarah Hamilton, who voiced the herione, April Ryan.

Obviously, in an adventure game driven by plot and character, the voice talent is extremely important. Broadway shows were once mainstream entertainment for the masses, but are now mostly the realm of the elite, due to high ticket prices (which reflect not only actor salaries but also the special effects and lavish production values that movie-bred audiences expect)

[Update: I just remembered that a writers' strike in the early 90s helped ushered in the era of reality TV -- COPS and America's Funniest Home Videos were both products of the networks' need to fill air time without using scripts.]

How will an actor's strike against the gaming industry affect the development of the plot-heavy, character-driven games that have the potential to raise digital narrative out of the pop-cult ghetto?

At any rate, I'm looking forward to Dreamfall -- The Longest Journey, though I still have Deus Ex 2 and Half-life 2 on my playlist. (Sadly, Deus Ex 2 will only play on my office computer, and I never have time to play it when I'm at work... and while the demos of Half-Life 2 do run on my home computer, I'm going to wait until the price comes down a bit before I splurge for that one.)

There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television's adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all. I'm a novelist, so I'm hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is also about narrative and morality; if it takes a television show to get some of that over to an audience - and possibly to send them to the original source - then there are small grounds for moaning. --Andrew O'Hagan --The Plot Flickers (Arts.Telegraph)

"We need a cultural shift so that young girls and women feel that playing games is not a testosterone monopolised hobby reserved for their boyfriends and husbands," urged Mr Lowenstein.

For this to happen, game producers need to think radically about the sorts of games they make, said the ESA president.

As part of this, games had to become easier to play, as often people are intimidated by the technology or the complexity of a title. --Alfred Hermida --Call for radical rethink of games (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

[..]

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth?

[...]

Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you [Yoda] still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a f*cking give.--Anthony Lane --Space Case (New Yorker)

The asterisk is my addition.

There's plenty more ranting in this article.

America's entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe's biggest broadcasters -- the BBC -- is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.

Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience. --Cory Doctorow --The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth (Wired)

Are classic essays like Swift's still being written, or has the elegant thoughtfulness that is the essay's legacy been winnowed away by its rapacious bastard offspring, the blog? And will the Internet generation, suffused by the blogosphere, lose the ability to write essays altogether? (The plethora of essays for sale online to students portends they may.)

Blogging has replaced the real essay for most people under 30, just as the Internet has replaced the daily newspaper. Polls show more than 60 percent of online readers trust independent news sources like blogs over mainstream news sources. But while blogs provide immediacy, they also breed inaccuracy - from spelling and grammatical errors to errors of fact. An essay, despite the immediacy and passion with which it might have been written, has still been perused by an editor, a copy editor and a fact-checker before it saw print. (Even Swift had an editor.) A blog has been reviewed by no one, edited by no one - not even, in many cases, been proofread by the author.

Some bloggers, such as Andrew Sullivan and Richard Scheer, are former newsmen with real journalistic credentials. Others, like Matt Drudge, are more like Stowe's Topsy - they just grew. Blogland isn't like the world of mainstream journalism, and bloggers are not usually serious essayists like Sullivan or Scheer. Any dot-commer can blog - a serious journalist with years of experience like, say, myself, or the teenager down the block spewing political rants during breaks from Grand Theft Auto. The problem in the blogosphere is that the kid and I will be received with equal credibility. --Victoria A. Brownworth --The Long Arm of the Blog (BaltimoreSun.com)

While Matt Drudge has often been lumped with bloggers, his site is a collection of links, with an occasional news/gossip exclusive. Drudge has shown what the democratization of journalism means for politics, but to compare him to an essayist is like comparing a ballet dancer to a polka dancer. Yes, both are dancers, but the set of skills involved are completely different. I can't tell you how many times that an outsider's attempt to analyze the blogosphere reminds me of the old story of the blind men and the elephant.

Citing the prevalence of online essay banks and the prevalence of bloggers in the same paragraph, and then implying that the two are somehow causally related is silly. Online essay banks were there long before the bloggers showed up.

For someone who strikes such a literate tone, I'm surprised Brownworth starts off with this example: "But blogs are pretenders to the throne of true essay writing. They mimic the essay much as Eliza Doolittle mimicked the Queen's English before Professor Higgins got his hands on her." Excuse me? While Eliza does show up at Higgins's house asking for lessons, she doesn't make any attempt to mimic the Queen's English beforehand. It's only Higgins who, intellectually smug and self-assured, gets it into his head that if only Eliza spoke more properly, he could pass her off as a duchess. "I could even get her a place as lady's maid or shop assistant, which requires better English."

If you consider what happens to Eliza after Higgins makes her too good for Covent Garden, and she gets tired of the ruse that lets her play the lady, I'm not so sure that Shaw's Pygmalion is the literary example I would choose if I were trying to make a point about the superiority of essays to blogs.

Brownworth dismisses all the things that blogs do better than essays, so naturally when she evaluates blogs on the same set of criteria that have been historically developed for essays, she's going to find bloggers come up short.

"Bloggers are more Web-cam style diarists than essayists," she says. Okay. And the average essayist, if placed in front of a web cam, would produce a pretty boring video diary -- if judged according to the criteria that are active in the webcam community.

As a writing teacher, I struggle to get students to plan ahead, to condense, to revise. So I can identify with Brownworth's woes. But an experienced diaryblogger has a certain set of skills that a non-writer has never developed.

Brownworth, whose essay invokes Orwell to attack the achievements of bloggers, uses a bit of Orwellian rhetoric herself. Brownworth's final warning, " Blogland is a sprawl, fast encroaching on the fragile landscape of the finely wrought essay," invokes the "urban sprawl" that encroaches on the "landscape" of pristine nature.

This presumes that the "finely wrought essay" is natural, while it is in fact the result of hundreds of years of conventions, aesthetic rules and personal judgments.

The essay is just as artificially constructed as the weblog. Yes, the essay has been around for hundreds of years, but its existence depends upon the existence of an intellectual aristocracy of educated men and women with the necessary leisure time to write back and forth to each other about subjects that they deem important, using rhetorical techniques and organizational patterns that they themselves deem effective.

The great Greek orators voiced similar complaints about a vulgar form of communication that they said killed spontaneity, and would permit anyone with a smattering of technical skill to masquerade as a great communicator.

The bastard art the Greek orators derided was called "writing".

Link via metafilter.

--Ladies of Star Trek (SixtiesCity.com)

Knee boots and beehive hairdos... I'm in heaven. (Thanks for the link, Scribblingwoman.)

3) The most common excuse for guests not being asked to come on show was ?I am taping my own show at that time.? Realized I no longer know anyone who doesn't have own talk show.

8) The better writers are on the page the worse they sometimes are on the air. What TV requires is not someone who is authoritative but someone who looks authoritative. Genuine articles are often hopelessly out of the demo, with coke bottle glasses or unfortunate predilections for a thoughtful pause. --Tina Brown --Ten Things I Learned at Topic A (The Huffington Post)

I'm not a TV news kind of guy, so I can't say for sure whether I've ever seen her broadcast work, but I know she wasn't exactly a smashing success as editor of The New Yorker.

Yes, she's exaggerating, but talk about an echo chamber. Does the world really need yet another way for Tina Brown to share her ideas with the world?

And compare her point #8 with a recent spoof article from The Onion:

"[Canton] went on like that for six... long... minutes," Salters said. "Fact after mind-numbing fact. Then he started spewing all these statistics about megawatts and the nation's current energy consumption and I don't know what, because my mind just shut off. I tried to lead him in the right direction. I told him to address the fears that the average citizen might have about nuclear power, but he still utterly failed to mention meltdowns, radiation, or mushroom clouds." ("Actual Expert too Boring for TV", posted 04 May 2005; will expire soon)

When she writes "not being asked to come on show," does she really mean "not being able to come on show"? Why would "I am taping my own show at that time" be an excuse for not asking someone to be on her show? Or does she mean a person who was not asked to be on her show would use that story to explain the oversight to a third party?

There's no way to ask that question on the blog and get a clarification, since there's no way to post a comment. So the world will have to shrug and hit the "go back" button.

The columnist who once ran for governor of California launched a Web site called The Huffington Post on Monday. It features dozens of name-brand bloggers, as well as news coverage. Is this a welcome addition or an unwanted intrusion? --Blogs of the Rich and Famous (AOL -- Daily Pulse)

Now this is funny... when AOL is tweaking you for not getting it, you know you're in trouble.

It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out. --Nikki Finke --Deadline Hollywood: Arianna's Blog Blows (LA Weekly)

--Google Movie Reviews (Google)

Amazing... one page gives you the showtimes and rating of movies playing in your area, along with a link to the IMDB.

I learned about this on Dan Gillmor's site.

The Huffington Post: First Response (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

What will be the contributions of a large bunch of people, who could have blogged on their own if they wanted to, but were motivated to do so by the Arianna Huffington brand name?

I briefly checked out The Huffington Post today. I was never too impressed by the collective achievements of the celebrity intellectuals that Salon pulled together in its heyday. The experiment will expose a wider range of people to the potential of the internet.

John Cusack's entry on Hunter S. Thompson is probably the most literate and engaging thing on the site. Playwright David Mamet has some existential fun with the nature of truth and authority in the blogosphere; I hope his future entries are less "cutesy." Scientist and media expert Jay Winsten's comment on the Center for Disease Control's overstatement of the effects of obesity on health also caught my eye.

A significant number of the other contributors are of the "My homework assignment was to post a blog entry... how does this work?" variety. See Al Eisele, a columnist whose blog entry reads like a column, and the co-blog of writer Brad Hall and actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who attempt a comedy routine. Including charter school activist Roger Lowenstein was a good idea, since his criticism of teacher unions and the left in general will deflect criticisms that Huffington is simply trying to create a liberal echo chamber, but somebody ought to tell him to break up his prose into browser-friendly chunks. On the other hand, comedian Ellen DeGeneres, who has written several humor books in a narrative, conversational writing style, seems right at home in the medium. She should really choose link text that is more cognitively or emotionally significant than the word "here," but that's a common characteristic in the writing of hypertext newbies.

Does that little graphic of the speaker really need to be Flash animation? Why wouldn't a GIF suffice?

I do like the openness the site shows on its wire feed... while there's no way for visitors to post comments to the blogs written by the contributors I've mentioned above, it is possible to comment on wire stories (which are excerpted on site) and on Huffington Post exclusives. The site invites leads and scoops, so it's in direct competition with The Drudge Report, the retro design of which is getting less and less cool every day.

Well, the grades for graduating seniors are due today, so it's back to the salt mines for me.

Update: Online reviews from AOL ("Blogs of the Rich and Famous") and the LA Weekly ("Arianna's Blog Blows").

A Metafilter poster echoes Yeats: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards blogging to be born."

My goodness, that Metafliter post is full of good bits. The next comment says The Huffington Post is "like a Drudge Report, only happier and more famous."

And check out the hilarious Guardian spoof.

I take the view that computer languages, robot ethics, method acting, and biomechanics are the main ingredients that fused, in the 1950s, to become the cultural meme we call Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short. None of those ingredients was wholly new at that time: biomechanics and the Method - first known as the Stanislavski system - had been around since the early 1920s; Isaac Asimov, in conjunction with science fiction author and editor John W. Campbell, formulated the Laws of Robotics in 1940 (t'was about time, too - Jaques de Vaucanson had had the first mecha working in 1737); Ada Lovelace had anticipated the development of computer software, artificial intelligence and computer music back in 1843. But in the 1950s, thinking machines went pop. --Dirk Scherung --Thinking machines go pop (Robot Soul)

I've had only the most basic training in acting, and no formal training in artificial intelligence. It's been productive in the classroom to apply what I do know about those topics to certain works of literature (such as Galatea 2.2, PICK UP AXE, or R.U.R.). But I'm very interested in what Scherung might find as he continues to explore this meme. Hurrah for yet another bridge across the cultural divide.

I'm particularly puzzled by the suggestion that the man pretending to be a woman in a Turing test is drawing on the same store of creativity that a method actor would use. A method actor draws on his or her own specific personal memories in order to find emotional depth that fills out the spaces in between the words the playwright wrote about the character. I can see how the attention to the construction of a character contributes to the spread of the AI meme, but I don't know that method acting contains any truths that would be useful to the AI community.

As a homosexual, perhaps Turing was able to draw on his personal experience of gender roles to concoct the gender-bending experiment. But how does this relate to method acting? The specialized acting skills of the drag queen are campy and farcical, not offering the sort of psychological depth and individuality associated with the plays written for method acting.

You need a certain kind of physical space for method acting, and only certain kinds of plays lend themselves to method acting. The tastes of the playgoing public, the talents and accomplishments of playwrights, and the performing styles of actors are all interconnected.

Drama expresses universal themes, but it does so through unique, individual characters. I've raised this topic on this blog before (and when I did, I don't think I convinced Will). But here goes... Computer programming in general is about abstraction. A program that accurately simulates the actions of a man pretending to be a woman would probably have more hard-coded, specialized features than a program that could accurately simulate general human behavior. But isn't it specific human actions, in specific contexts, that make dramatic interest? Is human behavior, taken in general, ever that dramatic?

If I weren't sick, and I had the time, I'd check to see how much of this has been covered by Brenda Laurel, or by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern.

Oh, and of course I'd suggest that Rossum's Robots be added to the list of artificial intelligence precursors. RUR was tremendously popular in its time. It also popularized the word "robot" in languages around the world.

Tom Bosley Haunts Me (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm laid up in bed, having gotten my usual end-of-semester cold a week and a half early. (Last time at least it had the courtesy to wait until a few hours after I submitted final grades to start hammering me into submission.)

It suddenly occurred to me, from out of nowhere, that despite what Tom Bosley told me at the beginning of each episode, I really don't care that Happy Days was filmed before a live studio audience. I don't care now, and I didn't care back then.

I did take a trip down memory lane, courtesy of The Greatest American Hero fan site.

Sigh. Sometimes I wish the dark secrets I hide from my students were less... lame.

The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut. So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long?

Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by. --Orson Scott Card --Strange New World: No ''Star Trek'' (LA Times (will expire))

I watched Star Trek religously until I took my first full-time teaching job, during the last season of Deep Space Nine and the third or fourth season of Voyager. A new job, a new baby, and a TV with poor reception. Oh, yeah, and Babylon 5 was still on at the time. My sister would tape the show for us and sends us batches of 5 or 6 at a time, and we would watch them straight through. Very powerful to see it all in that manner.

In total, I've watched about 10 minutes of Star Trek: Enterprise, and though I'm still a Star Trek fan, I'm satisfied with the Trek I have and remember.

I am actually very slowly working my way through a 1986 Star Trek novel depicting Kirk's first mission on the Enterprise. I enjoy the way the novel depicts "down time" on the classic Enterprise, which is something we only rarely saw on the original show.

I remember being eight years old, and reading in "Starlog" that Darth Vader became the half-man/half-machine he was following a duel with Ben Kenobi that climaxed with Vader falling into molten lava. Now, twenty six years later, I finally got to see that long-promised battled - and it lived up to any expectation I still held. --''Sith'' Spoilers (View Askew)

Sounds good, but possibly too intense for me to take my seven-year-old son along. Hmm... I'll have to think about this one.

The movie wasn’t perfect, but there was a lot to like and a lot to laugh at. I so enjoyed myself that I became even more puzzled than I was before about the handfuls of invective that many reviewers of the film have been flinging at it, risking damage to their digital watches in the process. --Nick Montfort --Actually I Quite Liked It (Grand Text Auto)

Montfort's review of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy leaves me feeling hopeful.