So I thought I’d have a go at writing up my notes from the first Technologies of Writing seminar yesterday. (This is the Folger Institute seminar, taught by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier.) There’s no way I can do justice to the three hours, which included not only some terrific conversation but a long presentation…
Is not rhetoric, taken generally, a universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments; which is practised not only in courts and public assemblies, but in private houses also, having to do with all matters, great as well as small, good and bad alike, and is in all equally right, and equally to be esteemed-that…
Then Jimmy Joe Jenkins’s DNA proved he was the primary descendent of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible. At first, Jimmy was satisfied with ten percent of the price of every KJV sold and 10 percent of every collection plate passed by any church that used the KJV. But when some…
Most people’s expectations of robots are driven by fantasy. These marvelous machines, optimists hope, will follow Moore’s law, doubling in quality every 18 months, and lead to a Jetsonian utopia. Or, as pessimists fear, humanoid bots will reproduce, increase their intelligence, and wipe out humanity. Both visions are wrong. —By Jordan Pollack —Ethics for the…
Ultimately, it became very clear that the most active and influential members of the project–beginning with Jimmy Wales, who hired me to start a free encyclopedia project and who now manages Wikipedia and Wikimedia–were decidedly anti-elitist in the above-described sense. Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they…
“She’s somewhat neurotic,” he confides, “but she is bright, organized and conscientious–the type who’d get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu.” He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for: difficulty with Gestalt thinking. The 13-year-old “couldn’t see the big picture.” That…
I blogged about Ailee Slater’s Oregon Daily Emerald student entitlement essay before reading any of the discussions that raged on the internet. Clancy was moved to react against the gendered response to Slater, and invoked sympathy for Slater based on her [Slater’s] apparent alienation from university culture. The sexist and ad-hominem attacks on Fark and…
We are currently paying a large amount of money to attend this University and receive an education. If I have paid to be taught something, shouldn’t there be a repercussion for the teacher rather than, or at least as well as, the student when knowledge has not been taught? —Ailee Slater —Grading system gets an…
Minorities who complain of underrepresentation might want to consider this still rather arcane problem. Television doesn’t just represent you; it usurps you. In this respect, to be underrepresented might be seen as a kind of privilege. It means that those bright and literate tv people haven’t really discovered you yet and set you going like…
The whole affair shows that in fact bad writing is a joint academic/public matter, and to broach it as one would in a professional journal article or seminar presentation is to continue to theorize as if theory were never in doubt. In “interrogating the terms” of “bad” or “difficult” indictments, the contributors follow an academic…
The combination of prolificacy and inattention to accuracy that characterizes this process is highly suggestive of the modern pedagogic technique known as “journaling.” For decades, (following, we are probably meant to assume, some breakthrough research at a school of education somewhere) young students have been not merely encouraged but required to fill pages of their…
Traditional gender binaries such as male/female, science/nature, mind/body, are replayed and reinforced again and again in sci-fi films, in which (male) scientific creativity is continually represented as a dangerous affront to “natural” human (female) values. Supercomputers in film are created by male scientists–I can think of no exceptions–and what makes them valuable (according to their…
Derrida’s prolific writings, criticised by some as obscure and nihilist, argue that in literature — but also in fields such as art, music, architecture — there are multiple meanings not necessarily intended or even understood by the creator of the work. —French philosopher Derrida, father of deconstruction, dies at 74 Interesting… this is filed under…
“What,” I asked, “are we to make of Plato’s attempts to define justice?” A chill descended. Noses burrowed into The Republic. One student hesitantly volunteered a comment; another offered a passing observation. Something resembling a discussion followed, but most of the remarks betrayed the superficiality of the students’ engagement. They were eager to discuss their…
More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own,…
Emerson and Thoreau on Laundry Night (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It’s past midnight and I can’t sleep. In a few days, I’ll be teaching Emerson’s “Self Reliance” and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” With two small children in the house, an the usual full roster of “quality time” activities scheduled this weekend, I know I won’t get any work…
Blogger, and several of the other blog-systems, have a feature that lets you blog in the future. I can set the date on the post for a date in the future, and then it will be posted when I am dead. This is a classic set-up for the: “There is a letter with my lawyer,…
But how does one measure the godliness of bacteria versus a fruit fly? (Keats opted for flies in lieu of humans, which, he said, would require “a really big bell jar.”) After briefly considering omnipotence, Keats decided to measure omnipresence. Did the number of organisms increase? How fast? In the case of the fruit flies,…
The really big mistake comes when you treat people as authority figures when they are not expert but simply well known. There is a terrible tendency to treat people as reliable sources of fact when in fact they are simply “important” people or people who happen to be in the news. It is doubly perverse…
“Yoda’s philosophy was quite simplistic. ‘If you get angry, you’re gonna lose.’ ‘Don’t try, do.’ He has a basic philosophy that is very charming. Not very profound, although young people consider it profound. I wish they would read more.” —Irvin Kershner, mentor of George Lucas. —Naked Wookiees and broken R2-D2s (CNN/AP)