My first day as a clinical teacher went very well. Except: I’m exhausted!
Right now the coordinating teacher and I are together in the same classroom throughout the day. She’s running the reins, and I’m just observing, sitting at the side. Eventually I’ll be able to lead some activities. I’ve done that before when I’ve substituted for the same groups of students across a continuous week or so, but this would be more serious, especially as it’s long-term.
The day began quite early; my alarms blasted off at about 4:30am. I showered & got ready, and Wifely Kate cooked breakfast:
iPhone pic by me, public domain for you. Food by Kate!
How awesome is that? The coffee was ready and everything. I was able to write fiction for about an hour and fifteen minutes — quickly revising (line-editing) an older, completed story so I can re-submit it; didn’t quite finish, since I’m having to fact-check some details — and then I headed to campus, the lunch Kate packed me in tow. At noon-ish I discovered she’d left a note in my lunchbox. The note talked about how proud she is of me. I got teary-eyed!
The coordinating teacher uses a Promothean ActivBoard (I’m not sure if the link points to the exact same model) in some very effective ways. For one portion of the classes, she shows multiple-choice math questions on the ‘Board, then the students record their answers using controllers — all students have one on their desks. The coordinating teacher shows the results on the ‘Board — as a bar graph; looks like something off Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — and uses them not just to motivate the class (the students love the video game-y vibe), but also to hone in on the students’ misunderstandings of the material in order to explain it again. Good real-time assessment.
Weirdly, one of the few TV shows I really like
The ‘Board can even export the collected data, so at a later time, we can analyze the answer statistics more precisely to spot recurring troubles. Totally something out of a Tim O’Reilly project.
Since I was mostly only observing — catching up to speed on this campus’s schedule, rules, etc. — I focused on watching one student at a time. (I’ve blogged before about developing observationskills. As for characterization, can a writer quickly notice in real-life what makes another person absolutely unique?) I noticed a boy whom I think might need glasses. Squinting, tilting his head to see better, putting his face inches from his paper. There’s a school program to address vision issues, but I’m not sure how prompt it is. Watching how in need and at risk students are can be upsetting. I’ve seen it before, substituting.
This particular student is enthusiastic, often raising and waving his hand even before the teacher asks another question. His enthusiasm hasn’t been disruptive. He seems to be a bit in his own world — smiling to himself, thinking his own thoughts. Good kid.
After leaving the campus, I went to StayWired!Coffeehouse and Computer Service for two hours, where I’m helping out as a computer tech. After my two hours were up, I informally sat in on a meeting for Democrat CathyHirt‘s campaign for the Fort Worth mayor position. There, upon being asked, I talked a little about my experiences and observations working for the local public school system.
I have to confess I’m bewildered about the relationships between my roles as a writer, teacher, newbie activist, blogger, and tweep (Twitter person). For example, working as an activist differs from volunteering for a political campaign (as I did for Bill White), from working for one in an official capacity, from blogging reportage or opinion about it, from incorporating observations of a campaign into a fiction project, etc. It’s a bit unnerving when you’re sitting there with a few people talking local politics and you’re trying to figure out which hat you’re wearing, so to speak. I have no real idea how to resolve these mini-conflicts, and there’s no one right answer.
The convention for blogs to be frequently updated conflicts with my personal preference for long-form or at least mucho-revised writing; and, when I’ve tried to blog long-form writing in the past, it’s often come off as too complex (Latinate, twisted syntax…) and hasn’t been revised well enough — a bad compromise between careful long-form writing and a quick blog post. Really, if you’re blogging long-form pieces, you’re essentially writing e-books. Since I consider myself a non-commercial writer (i.e. my goal isn’t profit; that possibility is a fringe benefit; I don’t mean that I consider myself highbrow — I try not to think in those terms), I’m not against the idea of eventually releasing more of my creativewriting (fiction and otherwise) under CreativeCommons licenses, but I sense that right now, I still need the bigger bullhorns and reputation-build of established venues (i.e. magazines, publishing houses).
Vika covers Metallica’s Orion
The increasing online success of vkgoeswild (Vika Yermolyeva) has been a bit of an eye-opener for me. I thought she was cool before she joinedforces with Dresden Dolls drummer Brian Viglione (Hipstercultural capital snobby-stupid FTW! =p). Vika supports herself by receiving online tips and selling customized transcriptions online. Other artists and bloggers have figured out similar business models (search through Boing Boing for many examples and discussions). But for creative writing, I just don’t excel at the very short, very quickly written form, which seems to be necessary to any feasible online business model I can actually think up for right now.
Tomorrow I begin a 12-week placement as a clinical teacher within the Fort Worth ISD en route to earning a full-meal-deal schoolteaching certificate. Tonight I’m quite a bit nervous.
The campus is an elementary school. I’ve substituted a fair number of times in the middle and high school grades, as well as in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. I love kids and I love teaching. It requires patience, empathy, honesty, effective communication, a strict but fair approach, courage, an understanding of how people (young folk are people, too) need structure, a knack for facilitating group activity, good documentation skills, the ability to coordinate with coworkers…
So I’m confident in my abilities and experience. The anxiety comes from other causes. I’m not at all the best when it comes to crossing t’s and dotting i’s when time is of the essence, and that’s a necessary part of most work. I still don’t have many of the nitty-gritty details figured out (where do I park?), but I’ve always been able to improvise as a substitute. “Bring it on!” is my basic attitude, but everyone, including me, gets scared.
Wifely Kate has been so supportive and generous with her help. This weekend we did a lot of prep stuff, such as buying me more button-down dress shirts, cutting my hair (I still have a big ol’ shock of cowlick-y hair, which seems to be undefeatable). Marrying her has been the best thing that ever happened to me. And not just because she’s cooking breakfast and packing my lunch in the early, early morning as I get my creative writing in before driving to campus.
Schoolteaching is also scary because of possible political and work-world implications of online activity, online personal opinions. Working — at least as a substitute — has made me an official public servant. And there’s a lot of controversy over schoolteaching — for example, the Texastextbookcontroversy. What if something I tweet — such as this in favor of journalist Glenn Greenwald — bothers a parent or a supervisor? Oh well! I don’t really know how to handle that other than how I handle personal interaction in general, which is to try to be honest, fair, and diplomatic. I’m not one to stay quiet and keep my head down.
I’m ready. Again: Bring it on.
I need to make public something else soon, too, but I’ll leave that as a cliffhanger due to time constraints: I gotta get some sleep!
My good friend CynthiaShearer said something in a long-ago (long-ago in net years) blog post, a review of Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road, that has puzzled me for a while. Before I get all critical of a single phrase in her post, lemme say some positive stuff to block any negative feelings.
Her blog post’s awesome.
Cynthia’s awesome and her blog’s awesome.
Revolutionary Road and Richard Yates are awesome.
Thanks to Cynthia’s review, Wifely and I both read the novel, and we found it so worthwhile, the book has since become something of a touchstone in some of our conversations.
Now with the kindnesses out of the way, here’s my quarrel, or really, quibble jumping-off point. In the course of otherwise spot-on praise for Yates’ novel, Cynthia gives the following as a thought on the book:
The novel is flawlessly structured, three acts, and eminently filmable.
Confirming what I thought, my OS X dictionary gives the following definition for “eminently”:
used to emphasize the presence of a positive quality
Maybe Cynthia wasn’t using the word so specifically, but regardless of authorial intent…and setting aside commerce, writers upping their audience — i.e., considering aesthetics alone — why is it a positive (or a negative) quality for a book to be filmable? We don’t say: “That’s a great sculpture; after all, it’d make a fantastic piece of photography” or “That’s a great painting; after all, it’d make an excellent symphonic work.”
Connections between artistic content remixed into another art form can be worth pursuing and elaborating and evaluating, but I don’t see any basis for using as a criterion of aesthetic appraisal the ease with which an artistic piece can be remixed to another art form.
By the way, one of my favorite remixes of artistic subjects is Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem Isle of the Dead Op. 29, composed in the early 20th century and then recorded with Rachmaninoff himself conducting. And yes, it’s “beginner’s classical,” shut up. Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead inspired Rachmaninoff’s piece — apparently the black-and-white version:
Here’s the color version:
And the music, low-fi and split into two parts due to copyright and YouTube limitations:
Anyway, the (wrongheaded!) idea of using as a criterion of qualitative judgment an artwork’s capability to be transformed from one art form to another got me to thinking: what can a novel do that no other art form can do? The closest (non-textual) art forms are probably plays (in performance) and movies (“movies,” not “films”; I don’t screen films, I watch movies). What can novels do that those art forms can’t do? I’ll not consider plays, as I haven’t thought much about them. So: movies.
In my tentative answers I’m going to put aside style, too, since sentence-level quality, I think, is a) not obligatory for a novel to be good, and b) not inherently novelistic. So, my first tentative answer: maybe novels can represent time, the workings of memory, changing perspectives, and the inner experience of emotions and thoughts better than any other form. As an example of what I mean (UPDATE: screenhead.com’s list of the hardest novels to film), Theodore Sturgeon’s excellent short story The Man Who Lost the Sea (legal full text at link) — warning, spoiler in the third quoted paragraph:
Say you’re a kid, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look here, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away. […]
His head isn’t working right. But he knows clearly that it isn’t working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn’t remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later . . . forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn’t stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did. . . . Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn’t want to bother the sick man with it now. […]
Say you were that kid: say, instead, at last, that you are the sick man, for they are the same; surely then you can understand why of all things, even while shattered, shocked, sick with radiation calculated (leaving) radiation computed (arriving) and radiation past all bearing (lying in the wreckage of Delta) you would want to think of the sea. For no farmer who fingers the soil with love and knowledge, no poet who sings of it, artist, contractor, engineer, even child bursting into tears at the inexpressible beauty of a field of daffodils—none of these is as intimate with Earth as those who live on, live with, breathe and drift in its seas. So of these things you must think; with these you must dwell until you are less sick and more ready to face the truth.
(Oddly for a science fiction story originally published in a straight-up “genre” magazine — The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction — “The Man Who Lost the Sea” was selected for the 1960 edition of The Best American Short Stories.)
I’m not sure a play or a movie could represent the Sturgeon story, its workings of time, memory, changing perspectives, and inner experience as well and as concisely — or even at all. But that’s a huge disjunction: are plays and movies able to represent the Sturgeon story — just not concisely or well — or is there something inherent to the story that cannot be translated to another art form? I think that depends on how inherent an aspect of an artwork has to be for it to be considered inherent. ;-) And, how good does the movie have to be? The movie could voice-over or crawl tons of text to get closer to the original fiction format, but that (probably) would become annoying. You never know, however; artists are always figuring out new techniques. All the same, because representing time, memory, changing perspectives, and inner experience is at least a huge strength of fiction (and especially the novel), more and more I try to emphasize those qualities in my own writing.
I said first tentative answer, so how about this second one, which I can describe best in a metaphorical way? Novels are like multicharacter, revised, organized daydreams — or, imagine being a kid and playing with dolls or figurines, making up stories. That’s basically what novels are, I think, but not so much created daydreams worlds as the daydream-y experience of personal identity as a network of multiple narratives, comprised of images, emotions, etc., and stuck into the context of particular settings and social histories/influences and so forth. Sorta sounds like Bakhtin’s account of polyphony in Dostoevsky. But I haven’t read enough Bakhtin yet to say much; besides, his name sounds like Bactine.
Please don’t DMCA-takedown me, Bayer
This way of looking at what’s unique to novelistic form doesn’t seem to strongly entail the memory rumination or time aspects or changing perspectives I mentioned earlier, but yeah, I think fiction — especially when it avoids too much exposition and abstraction — stages a vehicle for experiencing a daydream related to identity and traveling in a specific historical or social context. Yet in “When Narrative Fails,” an article in May 2004’s Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, J. Melvin Woody makes an interesting case that other forms of art can do this, too:
“Why […] should we limit our understanding of the constitution of the self to the narrative? Indeed, why limit ourselves to language? Do not music and dance often articulate our passions more eloquently than any literary form?”
Nevertheless I think my second answer is pretty strong, and pertinent to why reading fiction is not just another hobby or preference, but something people who have the ability and resources and time to read it really should do so.
Another digest of worthwhile online reading you might have missed, mostly material from late November to mid-December 2010, which means it’s stuff archeologists have dug up. Offline I just finished reading Tom Russell‘s Riding with the Magi, and I’m listening to Patty Griffin, Rammstein, others. I haven’t included any Wikileaks stuff here; for that and more, check out my Twitter feed — plus, I’ll post a round-up of some of the best writings/videos on Wikileaks soon.
You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students […]
In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines […] I will make roughly $66,000 this year. […]
three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid [who] is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top. […]
you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. […]
I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. […]
Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat. […] You know what’s never happened? I’ve never had a client complain that he’d been expelled from school, that the originality of his work had been questioned, that some disciplinary action had been taken.
This UCF professor isn’t taking it lying down, though. The St. Petersburg Times reports he became a folk hero after taking a hard line on cheating when he discovered evidence of students’ dishonesty.
[Richard] Quinn gave [his 600+ students] a choice: Confess and you had a shot at clearing your transcript. Don’t and you could be suspended or expelled. […]
Calls and e-mails poured into UCF from as far away as Ontario, Maui and Tel Aviv. One urged Quinn to address Congress, another suggested he write a book on ethics. […]
And a Michigan father of three wrote: “Finally, someone with some guts.”
As the CowPi post notes, Dostoevsky refers to the painting in The Brothers Karamazov (Bk 3 Ch 6) while describing the character Smerdyakov:
Yet [Smerdyakov] would sometimes stop in the house, or else in the yard or the street, fall into thought, and stand like that even for ten minutes. A physiognomist, studying him, would have said that his face showed neither thought nor reflection, but just some sort of contemplation. The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan, and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything.
From the department of weird, awe-inspiring astronomy stuff most of us don’t understand before, during, or after reading such articles as this NYT one. But there are pretty pictures.
Hundreds of Wamena tribesmen descended on members of the Yoka tribe on Wednesday morning in the Papua provincial capital Jayapura, after learning that Yokas were sharing a ringtone which insulted Wamenas.
The ensuing clash reportedly left 23 houses burned to the ground, another 56 damaged and 12 vehicles set ablaze.
I approve of the blog Get Rich Slowly and of Beverly Harzog’s frowning take there on the Kim Kardashian credit card marketed to kids as young as thirteen. Though maybe they were prepaid debit cards? That’s right: were. The cards got terminated.
Consider America’s top exports to China. Leaving aside aircraft and soybeans (neither a sustainable basis for national advantage), America’s sole export of note is semiconductors. The rest? Plastics, steel, pulp, chemicals, copper, aluminum, engines, cotton–literally commodities. It’s hypercommoditized raw materials, of the lowest of value–literally just stuff, far from higher value goods or services. It’s not the picture of an economy humming with innovation, meaning, purpose–it’s the picture of a junkyard. […]
[The US imports] toys, computer peripherals, apparel, footwear, TV’s. America put itself in hock for disposable, rapidly commoditizing, self-destructive, depreciating stuff, discount-rack junk–literally the lowest of low-grade “consumer goods”. […] It’s not the picture of an economy that’s investing in tomorrow: it’s the picture of Black Friday in a big-box store
Some interesting dissent in the comments. Wish I understood economics better. Kinda what the Administration is saying these days.
A post at LifeHacker considering the best domain name registrars. The comments are somewhat useful. I wish I knew more about SSL’ing this site, and about various registrars’ track record on resisting censorship.
Startling article in the BBC: anti-privacy vandals egg households in Germany that chose to opt-out of Google’s Street View service (i.e., that chose to have their homes blurred in the imagery).
Local media report that homes in Essen, west Germany have been pelted with eggs and had ‘Google’s cool’ notices pinned to their doors. […]
The German government took a hard line on the service, mandating that citizens be allowed to opt out, before pictures went live.
The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. […] Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. […] On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap. […]
The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been. But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we’re now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.
I don’t think the picture’s that bleak, but then again, I’m a techno-utopian, not a person actually aware of what he’s talking about in this regard. But does anyone know much about the future of this disruptive Net technology?
Karl Marx Munchies? Two nonprofit Panera cafes open (NPR) with a third on the way (Zacks), each in a different state. These cafes have no cash registers; just donation boxes. Most patrons pay the suggested amount, but many pay less and many pay more.
I wish I had an award to give BUY THIS SATELLITE for expressing their plan so simply and succinctly; instead, I’ll chip in a tiny tiny tiny bit when possible. The plan?
The owner of the world’s most capable communication satellite just went bankrupt.
We’re fundraising to buy it.
So we can move it.
To connect millions of people who will turn access into opportunity.
technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. If you have a foundation of competent, well-intentioned people, then the appropriate technology can amplify their capacity and lead to amazing achievements. But, in circumstances with negative human intent, as in the case of corrupt government bureaucrats, or minimal capacity, as in the case of people who have been denied a basic education, no amount of technology will turn things around. […] Computers, guns, factories, and democracy are powerful tools, but the forces that determine how they’re used ultimately are human. This point seems obvious but is forgotten in the rush to scale [projects by adding more resources]. […] In every one of our projects, a technology’s effects were wholly dependent on the intention and capacity of the people handling it. The success of PC projects in schools hinged on supportive administrators and dedicated teachers. […]
when a village has ready access to a PC—connected to the Internet or otherwise—the dominant use is by young men playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content. […] these same users typically forsake software-based accounting and language lessons. What interventionists perceive to be “productive” use of technology is trumped by the “frivolous” desires of users. Even users in the developed world rarely take advantage of their technologies for purposes of self-improvement—the most popular iPhone apps are games and other entertainments, nothing that would improve productivity or health—but this tendency is exacerbated among those who have grown up with lessons of learned helplessness and low self-confidence.
Talking Points Memo calls it a Sign O’ the Times: Netflix goes into the S&P 500, the New York Times goes out. (original: Bloomberg).
Blogging at Talking Points Memo, Robert Reich keeps telling people what’s up. I gave his latest book, Aftershock, to a friend this Christmas, and procured a copy for myself while I was at it.
The vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going. (The rich spend a much lower portion of their incomes.) The crisis was averted before now only because middle-class families found ways to keep spending more than they took in – by women going into paid work, by working longer hours, and finally by using their homes as collateral to borrow. But when the housing bubble burst, the game was up.
Wendell Potter, the former Cigna communications chief who turned whistleblower and revealed the insurance industry’s disinformation campaign during the recent healthcare debate, is now urging other would-be whistleblowers to get off the fence and speak out. […]
“I would tell people to take a risk, do the right thing, follow your heart and your conscience,” he said. “You’ll feel so much better.” […]
“Finally, one friend said to me, ‘What is the worst thing that can happen?’ And I said, ‘Well, they could probably kill me.’ He said, ‘Is that likely?’ And I said, ‘Well, probably not. But I’ll probably lose my job, I’ll probably never work in corporate America again.’ He said, ‘Well, you can at least push a broom, can’t you?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’”
Swiss company senseFly sells “safe and easy-to-use flying camera[s].” senseFly CEO describes their vision: “We want to allow people to capture data anywhere, any time, without heavy infrastructure or long preparation time.” There goes the neighborhood. Here’s one of their videos. Uh, before you buy a senseFly gizmo, be sure to check applicable laws in your state, nation, homeowners association…
Life expectancy in the USA keeps going down. NPR’s on it.
Tinkering with your Xbox 360? RawStory reports on dismissed prison-term-carrying charges faced by a student whom an undercover federal agent reported for allegedly violating DMCA by “installing chips on Xbox 360 consoles that allowed people to run pirated DVDs and other unofficial content.” The student said, in RawStory’s words, “the purpose of modifying the Xbox consoles” — a practice he reportedly made a business out of — “was to allow people to use decrypted backup copies of their own gaming software.” He said “‘it’s a given that any game will be scratched in that [faulty Xbox console].”
I wish I had the time and resources to build a Hackintosh, and I wish I had the time and resources to implement these LifeHacker instructions so that the Hackintosh triple-booted OS X, Windows, and Linux.
Researchers are populating digital worlds with autonomous, virtual humans that can evoke the same tensions as in real-life encounters. People with social anxiety are struck dumb when asked questions by a virtual stranger. […] And therapists can advise patients at the very moment those sensations are felt. […]
“Even if this approach works, there will be side effects that we can’t anticipate,” said Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and author of “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto” […]
“The figures themselves don’t even have to be especially realistic to evoke reactions,” said a psychologist, Stéphane Bouchard, who directs the cybertherapy program at the University of Quebec in Outaouais. “People with social anxiety, for example, will feel they are being judged by virtual humans who are simply watching them.” […]
“You can see the possibilities already,” said Dr. Slater. “For example, you can put someone with a racial bias in the body of a person of another race.”
These kinds of findings have inspired a variety of simple experiments. Dropping a young man or woman into the virtual body of an elderly person does in fact increase sympathy for the other’s perspective, research suggests.
Thoughts: 1) I think cybertherapy could be a great thing; 2) People can also understand other perspectives through reading fiction; 3) Lanier’s quote above seems dumb: there can be unanticipated negative side effects for any good thing.
Republican Andy Harris […] reacted incredulously when informed that federal law mandated that his government-subsidized health care policy would take effect on Feb. 1 – 28 days after his Jan. 3rd swearing-in.
“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the [closed-door] exchange […]
“Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap,” added the aide, who was struck by the similarity to Harris’s request and the public option he denounced as a gateway to socialized medicine.
What Obama, Democrats and progressives failed to do during this electoral cycle was to define and then proudly grab the terms of debate. If you look back at all successful social movements, all their great accomplishments, some of which changed laws, were to change the terms of debate. The Civil Rights movement forced Americans to question the truthfulness of racial supremacy and the fairness of racial inequality. The environmental movement asked whether we could protect the planet’s health and sustainability if we raped all of its resources. And the gay and lesbian movements, by encouraging people to leave their closets, forced Americans to recognize the ordinary humanity of their gay friends, neighbors, and relatives.
Often I think Obama gets stuck in a bad place because he tries to play the roles of inspirer and lawmaker at one and the same time. If there were a prominent Dr. King or someone else to take over the inspirer job, or a Congress capable of handling the lawmaking one, I think Obama would have an easier time.
no advanced society has survived without banks and bankers. Banks enable people to borrow money, […] they allow commerce to take place without notes and coins changing hands. They also play a critical role in channelling savings into productive investments. […]
although certain financial activities were genuinely valuable, others generated revenues and profits without delivering anything of real worth […] If [many bankers] retired to their beach houses en masse, the rest of the economy would be fine, or perhaps even healthier. […]
[Recently the most booming] place to work has been in [the financial] industry that doesn’t design, build, or sell a single tangible thing […] Wall Street has become the preferred destination for the bright young people who used to want to start up their own companies, work for NASA, or join the Peace Corps. […] In the first nine months of 2010, the big six banks cleared more than thirty-five billion dollars in profits. […]
“Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?” Woolley said to me […] “It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body.”
There is […] a blog, The Epicurean Dealmaker, written by an anonymous investment banker […] he cautioned his colleagues […]: “You mean to tell me your work […] is worth more to society than a firefighter? An elementary school teacher? Good luck with that.” […]
“There was a presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable,” Woolley said to me. “The first thing I discovered was that it wasn’t backed by any empirical evidence. There’s almost none.”
a brain that can’t consistently organize either its electrical activity or its thoughts: the shattered mind of schizophrenia […]
Particularly contentious is the idea of clustering schizophrenia’s early whisperings into a diagnosable ‘prodrome’ period during adolescence. […]
The impact could go far beyond inappropriate use of antipsychotic drugs, she says. It could negatively affect how families, friends and the broader community treat that person, as well as their self-conception […]
Freedman thinks the state of knowledge requires caution and humility. “Schizophrenia research is full of people who are sure they know what they’re doing, and only later do we understand that the whole paradigm was off. Then we look back in amazement at how wrong they had it. I like to think everyone in my generation would be well aware of this history, and be reluctant to say we’re there.”
Slate with a discussion of Barry Hannah’s ecstatic fiction. The article says his “gobsmacked juxtapositions of language betray a perceptive apparatus in constant, boyish awe before the world. The intensity of Hannah’s prose comes off [as] a faithful rendering of ecstatic perception. Reading him, one encounters a man exponentially more alive than most.”
The URL says it all: “Laptop bought on eBay contains details of every UK soldier serving in Afghanistan province.”
[Wallace] hoped he would ultimately be bold enough to give up philosophy for literature. […] “The world, the reference, of philosophy was an incredibly comfortable place for young Dave,” [Costello] said [of Wallace]. “It was a paradox. The formal intellectual terms were cold, exact, even doomed. But as a place to be, a room to be in, it was familiar, familial, recognized.” Fiction, Costello said, was the “alien, risky place.” […]
Wallace’s solution was to pursue both aims at once. […] “I had this idea that I could read philosophy and do philosophy, and write on the side, and that it would make the writing better. [But] There wasn’t time to write on the side—there was 400 pages of Kant theory to read every three days.” […]
Wallace felt Markson had done something that even Wittgenstein hadn’t been able to do: he humanized the intellectual problem […] That was something only fiction, not philosophy, could do. […]
Explaining a disheartening[?] realization [at the conclusion of Wittgenstein’s philosophy], Wallace said that “unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there’s this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we’re stuck in here, in language, even if we’re at least all in here together.” […]
the biographical literature suggests that Wittgenstein was perfectly at ease with the solipsism of the Tractatus, as well as oddly, even mystically consoled by its suggestion that ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual truths are unutterable.
In a hospital room on the Greek island of Crete […], a Bulgarian woman plans to deliver a baby whose biological mother is an anonymous European egg donor, whose father is Italian, and whose birth is being orchestrated from Los Angeles.
She won’t be keeping the child. The parents-to-be—an infertile Italian woman and her husband (who provided the sperm)—will take custody of the baby […]
PlanetHospital’s most affordable package, the “India bundle,” buys an egg donor, four embryo transfers into four separate surrogate mothers, room and board for the surrogate, and a car and driver for the parents-to-be when they travel to India to pick up the baby. […]
Laws are vague and can conflict from country to country. In 2008, baby Manji was born to an Indian surrogate just weeks after the divorce of her Japanese parents-to-be. […] According to a Duke University case study in legal ethics, it led to a tangle of Indian and Japanese law that first prevented the little girl from being issued a birth certificate, and later made it difficult for her father bring her home to Japan. Months went by. To fix the problem, Japan issued a special humanitarian visa.
NYT: New rules have taken effect thanks to the Affordable Care Act (2010 health insurance reform): insurance companies now have to spend most (at least 80-85%, depending) of their premiums income on providing medical care to you and me and less of it on CEO compensation, profit, marketing, and other overhead.
I'm a Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist originally from Texas. I'm also a substitute teacher in public education. I write about anything and everything, but usually philosophy tied to current events, liberatory mental health, science fiction and fantasy, investigative journalism, technology, justice, and more.
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