Culture: November 2007 Archive Page

NY Times:

On one hand, as children we're taught that everyone makes mistakes and that the great thinkers and inventors embraced them. Thomas Edison's famous quote is often inscribed in schools and children's museums: "I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won't work."

On the other hand, good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates.

We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.

The article has a great illustration -- a defenestrated couch on the ground outside the psych building. Patricia Cohen, NYT.

For decades now, critics engaged in the Freud Wars have pummeled the good doctor's theories for being sexist, fraudulent, unscientific, or just plain wrong. In their eyes, psychoanalysis belongs with discarded practices like leeching.

But to beleaguered psychoanalysts who have lost ground to other forms of therapy that promise quicker results through cheaper and easier methods, the report underscores pressing questions about the relevance of their field and whether it will survive as a practice.

Given how psychoanalytic ideas have shaped the culture, the issue reverberates far beyond the tiny cluster of psychoanalysts. They worry that the gradual disappearance of psychoanalytic theory from psychology curriculums means that those ideas are bound to be applied incorrectly as new advances are neglected.

Douglas McLennan (Arts Journal):

Newspapers have not traditionally been mass market. In fact they were the classic niche subsidy model. The genius of newspapers was that they aggregated lots of mini-content - comics, bridge columns, stock tables, crossword puzzles, the arts, business, sports - and built enough of a combined audience to subsidize the content that otherwise would not have paid for itself.

I don't know a single journalist who got in the business because they wanted to make sure Garfield or Dear Abby got delivered every day, but the fact is that the content that journalists think counts most - coverage of city hall, foreign reporting, investigations - does not have a big enough audience to pay for itself on its own.

Yet somewhere along the way, this idea of niche aggregation slipped away from the local paper and was replaced by the sense that every story ought to be comprehensible by every reader. The problem: in a culture that increasingly offers more and more choice and allows people to get more precisely what they want, when they want, and how they want it, a generalized product that doesn't specifically satisfy anyone finds its audience erode away. The more general, the more broad, the more "mass culture" a newspaper tries to become, the faster its readers look elsewhere.

Via Newsweek:

It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

"The book," says Jeff Bezos, 43, the CEO of Internet commerce giant Amazon.com, "just turns out to be an incredible device." Then he uncorks one of his trademark laughs.

Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally--he's a big reader, and his wife is a novelist--he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. "Books are the last bastion of analog," he says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We're in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world's largest virtual store. "Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn't." Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0.

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke at Stanford last June:

Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure--humor, thrills, emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who spends a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a play or learning to draw.

If you don't believe me, you should read the statistical studies that are now coming out about American civic participation. Our country is dividing into two distinct behavioral groups. One group spends most of its free time sitting at home as passive consumers of electronic entertainment. Even family communication is breaking down as members increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual screens.

The other group also uses and enjoys the new technology, but these individuals balance it with a broader range of activities. They go out--to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group.

Hmm... multiplayer online games do involve social skills, teamwork, leadership, and many other things that I would consider a social activity, rather than passive entertainment.  The culture of gaming is a spectrum, like all cultures.  It includes those who sit slack-jawed before the screen for hours, mesmerized by bits; but it also includes those who trade tips and write reviews online, and those who write fan fiction, remix videos, or teach themselves 3D design so that they can build their own game levels. The child who, inspired by an encounter with a computer game, spends a month learning how to draw with a 3D design tool can be awakened and transformed as much as a child who spends a month drawing with pen and pencil. 

But I do share Gioia's humanistic assumption that technology is best understood and most welcome as one element of a rich and diverse society, rather than a replacement for human interaction.

Thanks, Mike, for the e-mail.

Scott McLemee writes about an intellectual brownout that came to him during a party, when he was asked to comment on a book he knew well.

People who consume two or three books a month, for example, might be less susceptible to moments of total overload than those who read two or three a week. Some situations require learning to handle texts like a meat packer carving up pigs on an assembly line. Certain skills are involved, and they are good skills to have. You can learn to wield the blade with some precision without losing a finger. But efficiency counts, because there's always another pig coming at you.

Patti Dobranski, Tribune-Review

"The secret state police were at the door. They came to arrest my father. On Nov. 9, at 8:30 p.m., I lost my German citizenship. I said 'Let's get out of this hellish country.' I just wanted to go somewhere else."

But Nov. 9, 1938, was more than Blaustein's personal hell. It would become known as "Kristallnacht" or "The Night of Broken Glass," full of screams of despair as the Nazis began their attack on the Jews by burning synagogues and looting homes and businesses. This night would mark the beginning of the end of 6 million Jews across Europe at the hands of the Hitler's Nazis.

The 81-year-old Mt. Lebanon, Allegheny County, resident told his story Tuesday night to a crowd that gathered inside St. Joseph Chapel at Seton Hill University for the 19th annual Kristallnacht Remembrance service sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.

I was in the back of the room, where the acoustics were not very good, so I was glad to find this account of Blaustein's speech.

In The Escapist, Tom Rhodes takes a stab at W.B. Yeats/Gordon Freeman slash crit. It's more of a nice try than a slam dunk; yes, it's possible to make these connections, and the insights are, well, insightful... but what the article lacks is an argument for why this interpretation is necessary, why it offers a better solution than so many other possible comparisons.

Half-Life 2 is the antithesis to Yeats' system, swapping the beast's triumphant aristocracy for Freeman's strive for equality and freedom. The name "Freeman" gives his mission more meaning than in the first game. In the original, he was a man trapped in extreme circumstances beyond his control, forced to fight not only extraterrestrial creatures but also contend with a military force dedicated to quashing the incident. In the sequel, he is so much more: a folk hero, a political icon, a quasi-religious figure, wielding his crowbar like God's wrath. When resistance members greet him in the game, they speak to him as if he's almost unreal, helping him in his cause, regardless of personal consequences. He has awakened after a "stony sleep," bringing a nightmare to the Combine's "rocking cradle" and its all too human figurehead. Both military commander and preacher, Freeman has come from "somewhere in the sands of the desert," and he is "a shape with lion body and the head of a man." His body is decked in orange and golden colors, much like a lion, but his head is that of a man, quietly contemplating his next move, your move, through the shadowy recesses of this ruined world in which he's been dropped.

I welcome any literate analysis of a video game, so I was happy to come across this.

But how do we apply the lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity"?  Freeman is the best, but he doesn't do anything unless the player directs him; is the player, who is full with "passionate intensity" for the game, really "the worst"?  The Combine hardly counts as the "Mere anarchy... loosed upon the world."  Freeman seems to be the one sowing anarchy, since the surviving humans seem so willing to follow Freeman, but the game doesn't give us any background information about Freeman that suggests he has any goal other than to survive.

The essay focuses on what the poem might possibly mean, but it quotes only selectively from the work; literary analysis is only partly about what a text might mean; it's also about how the text communicates that meaning (word choice; form; use of or rejection of or modification of or creation of convention; ), and it needs to make an argument for why the author's proposed interpretation is not merely possible, and not merely plausible, but necessary.

Someone, get his crowbar.

Anthony Grafton, in The New Yorker

The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats. But magazines and books still sell a lot of copies. The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jonathan D. Silver waxes poetic:

Where do all the pumpkins go, post Halloween's big costume show?
Are they left to rot and molder, as the weather trends ever colder?
Or is there some more organized scheme, to dispose of leftovers that aren't the crop's cream?
Wherefore do they, might they go? Inquiring minds want to know!

Silver is a clever writer, though his meter could be tighter.
It could use another edit, but I'm smiling 'cause I read it.

Kate Luce Angell writes an entertaining feature on my next-door officemate and his work in Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction MA program.

Award-winning author and Seton Hill University professor Michael Arnzen demonstrates that in horror, as in life, it's often the little things that matter most.

Take his short-short piece "Nightmare Job #3," which begins "Wanted: Town Sewage Treatment is now hiring expert diver."

It's only 100 words, so brief you could almost miss the part where he adds that job benefits include "free diving suit with harpoon gun."

[...]

Part of Mr. Arnzen's success has been the result of his use of new technology to distribute his work. He came up with the mini-poems he calls "gorelets" as a literary form that could be downloaded and read easily on the screen of a computer or personal digital assistant.

"I'm interested in potent nuggets of narrative, and horror has always been a shorter genre," he said. "Look at Edgar Allen Poe's stories and poems."

The little things also loom large in the subjects of his work, in which he finds the frightening in minutely observed, everyday details, like a janitor's glove (or IS it a glove?) and a pair of too-real bunny slippers.

"I'd like to think I'm doing the same thing comedians are, exploring our hypocrisies through observational humor," he said, adding that horror is often funny as well as fear-inducing. "I crack myself up all the time when I'm writing."