Culture: December 2007 Archive Page

Philip Kennicott (Washington Post) reflects on what we might learn about ourselves when we notice that the photographer who snapped the iconic image of a young girl crying in terror after a napalm attack in Viet Nam 35 years ago also snapped the iconic image of Paris HIlton weeping in the back seat of a police car.

They are both photographs. They were both taken by Nick Ut. They are both images of someone in pain. There, with the word "pain," you feel the powerful forces of repulsion. The pain of a little girl burned by napalm (dropped by our South Vietnamese allies) can't be equated with the pain of a silly goose who doesn't have the basic maturity to face a well-merited and laughably mild punishment with any dignity. The photograph of Kim Phuc is about a pain that is real and compelling to the conscience, not just because it was physical but because it was inflicted on an innocent child. The tears of Hilton were due to a court order that returned her to jail to complete a 23-day prison term after repeated probation violations (stemming from a drunk-driving arrest). The vision of her weeping just doesn't feel real. Hilton's pain was fodder for the national pastime of schadenfreude -- an ugly use for celebrity that often borders on sadism -- but at the same time, her pain could have disappeared in an instant, if she were capable of a single philosophical thought.

A student sent me an e-mail asking for advice on how to write a letter to the editor. I found plenty of web resources that are designed to help volunteers write letters designed to get a particular message out -- that is, Citizens for the Defense of Rutebegas offer specialized tips for how to write letters that raise awareness of the plight of rutebagas.

I wanted something more general. On rhetorica.net I found a good overview of the general form of a persuasive letter.

Letters to the editor should be thought of as bits of a sustained civic conversation. You are not going to change hearts and minds with a single letter. But you might have a chance with several, well-written letters offered over time. Write for the moment. Write for the one point you're making today. Don't write as if you expect to slam-dunk the issue for all time. Ain't going to happen.

[...]

To conclude: You do not have a First Amendment right to be published in your local newspaper. You do, however, have the right to publish your own newspaper, or a blog, or you can stand on a soapbox and speechify to your heart's content.

The American Scholar:

One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades -- or accosts -- the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window, and the van takes off in search of the next victim.

Drive-by poetry seemed like an exercise in bad manners and an embarrassment to all concerned, and I wanted no part of it. Rich mentioned that I was free to plan my own event, but I was never very good at organizing field trips. I was cursed with a lack of the field trip gene, along with the papier-mâché gene. My classrooms tend to be devoid of decoration, and we never leave them. As a writing teacher, I'm concerned with rearranging the mental furniture of my students -- at least, that's what I've always told myself. For the last five years I've taught juveniles in a lockdown facility, where field trips are happily -- for me at least -- off the table.

Yahoo! | AFP:

The Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff was not corroborated by archaeological digs in the area, researchers said Monday.

Like the myth about lemmings hurling themselves to their death, this new detail, found from a study of bones found iat the base of the site, will take a while to spread. I'm just filing this away in case I need to mention it the next time I teach Lysistrata.

Doris Lessing doesn't like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica:

Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn't believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. "And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc." It is now common, she says, for "young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers."

Because, of course, to know about computers is to know nothing of value.

I just read a paper from a college senior who, when writing a paper on a canonically validated text, initially cited more sources from a DVD documentary than from scholarly books and articles, so I, too, lament the decline of literacy. Yet I'm not exactly comfortable with Lessing's take on the value of a liberal-arts education, or her assessment of the causes of the decay of literacy. Like the printing press, blogging puts the power of literacy in the hands of the populace. If the unwashed masses have the tools in their hands, they're going to use them to produce texts about what matters to them, not what matters to the ones who were already in power before the tools escaped into the wild.

It is rather amazing that educated people who don't have time to read a book have the time to make Lego stop-motion animated versions of viral dance videos, but I'd much rather that people create and share their own works -- which means the processing of a few diamonds along with a lot of roughage -- than limit themselves to silently swallowing what big-business wants them to consume.

Times Online:

The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial. No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott's masterpiece Blade Runner. (If you want to see just how great Scott's film is, the seventh and "final" cut has just been released in cinemas and on DVD. It's visually enhanced and, says Scott, "tweaked". It looks, and is, superb.) The further oddity is that fantasy - Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, Philip Pullman - is not embarrassing to us at all; indeed, it's downright respectable. Perhaps this is because these are seen as children's books that grown-ups can read, whereas SF is seen as irredeemably adolescent. This is to ignore the fact that it tends to be much more demanding and much bleaker.

I must have missed this video when I was sick earlier this semester... Michael Wesch at Kansas State University:

... the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.