I was looking at the Urban Dictionary last night at blogging. Or the word "blog." You can see the entry here. It's not very flattering. I suppose that it's difficult to work your way into the elite group - some of the definers are willing to admit that some blogs are good and many are not - but it's tough to break through such a sea of voices. Sometimes people - like me - assume that no one will read, and that the writing is more a public record than a public performance. In other words, it's like something that is filed away in some public library somewhere that no one ever looks at. Like old mortgage documents. It takes a really obscure scholarly or legal researcher to dig up many things - and there is a vast body of information out there that will never be tapped. I wonder how many blogs are written every day without ever being read. How many blogs start and fizzle? How many have I started, myself, only to fall away from it for one reason or another? It's difficult to keep this going without some kind of intervention. I suppose it would help to get a comment now and then. I don't want to post on MySpace because that is rapidly becoming both a corporate site and a porn site. It's way too public, and I get sick of comments about mortgages and so on. And random chicks wanting to be my friend so that they can be more popular. It's not that I want to be left alone completely - otherwise why write this in a public place? - it's that I want the wrong people to leave me alone. There are too many of the wrong people on MySpace. People for whom the Internet is just another way to get off. Or who don't really care about words and language, they write only because they can't speak into the computer and be recorded on a blog. Or they can - but they don't know how.
Maybe I'm unusual in the sense that I prefer writing over speaking. By a lot. I mean, I think I have a nice voice and stuff - who doesn't like the sound of their own voice, and who hasn't wondered about their potential voice career as a signer or newscaster? - but I feel much more important and powerful when I'm writing. Like I have a hold of something that slips through other people's fingers. The ability to find the right word. Maybe that's it. I have the ability to capture difficult or slippery things. Or maybe it's because words and language are just natural to me. I'm not Mozart, but sometimes I have enough caffeine-induced euphoria to think that I'm an older, shabbier echo of the genius.
Today I have accomplished little. I've been thinking about my classroom a lot, and trying to design procedures to help recover my lost control. I thought I had control of the classroom once, but that has disappeared. I want to impose a lot of structure and a lot of procedures on the class to rein in that behavior issue. I want more rewards and punishments, and I want them to feel caged by learning and positive expectations.
Okay, back to work.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Books and Movies
I think I read somewhere that we spend more time reading and watching movies than we ever have before. What are we doing less of? Talking! Interacting with people!
Today I was a hermit. I spent a good part of the day in front of my still-borrowed computer. (I didn't bite the bullet and buy a computer. My laptop crashed this summer, and we haven't replaced it yet.) I watched a movie when my son went to bed, and then I was reading a book.
The movie (since I have to tell you about that) was Paradise Now. It's a recent Arabic film about two young Palestinian men from Nablus who are chosen to be suicide bombers. They are named Khaled and Said. Khaled seems to be the more thoughtless and devoted martyr, and Said seems to be pensive and conflicted. There's a great opening scene with Said fixing a man's bumper. The man objects to Said's work, saying that the bumper is crooked. Said disagrees, but the man insists. Khaled intercedes and supports his friend. Said decides to use a level to prove that the bumper is straight. It shows instead that the bumper is crooked. The man argues that it proves his point. Said puts the level on the ground and points out that the ground is crooked, and the bumper matches the crookedness of the ground. The man is still insistent, so Khaled pulls out a heavy wrench and knocks the bumper halfway off. This gets Khaled fired, and it is that night that they discover that they are to be suicide bombers.
Said has a love interest in the movie, the daughter of a martyr, who is wealthy and who grew up in Morocco. She has strong feelings against the practice of suicide bombing, and she makes them known.
Without giving away too much, Khaled and Said's mission goes awry when an Israeli military truck comes by at a bad time. They are separated, and much of the middle part of the movie is Said and Khaled chasing each other around Nablus, bombs still strapped under their clothes, dressed in suits and clean-shaven as if for a Jewish wedding, trying not to spread the word that they are going to sneak into Tel Aviv and blow people up. They end up getting back together, at the end of the day, with some help from the love interest. And it looks like they won't be allowed to try again. But they both go, and . . . I won't give away the ending.
This movie has a lot of things going for it. I was interested from the beginning because of the fantastic subject. It also had an appeal because of its setting - and I'm someone who is interested in the conditions of the Palestinian people. And there are enough surprises and suspense to make it fly fast - it helps that it's less than 90 minutes long, too. It's a good movie, and I would recommend it, unless you hate subtitles. It's been my experience that you almost have to watch a movie with subtitles twice, because when you're focused on the words below the screen, you miss some of the action on the screen. It's hard to get involved in a conversation through subtitles because of the absence of the usual subtle awareness of facial expression, tone, and other visual and linguistic cues that an actor can use to enhance a scene.
The book I was reading was How the Brain Learns by David Sousa. It's great stuff, and exactly what I needed. I found it at Barnes and Noble, which gives teachers a discount. But it's a nice, practical guide to learning theory and how to employ what science knows about learning to maximize learning in my classroom. I want to be a more effective teacher, and this book is really helping me think about ways to change my classroom practices to do a better job. My Educational Psych class was a joke, and I've been wandering through a sea of library books trying to find something to supplement the abysmal understanding of development and learning theory that has been the confused base of my instruction thus far. Oh well. Better late than never. Today is the first day of the rest of my teaching life, right? Of course, to steal from American Beauty, that's true of every day. . . except the last. I just hope that I can steal without stealing the foreshadowing that went with the original line.
Back to work.
Today I was a hermit. I spent a good part of the day in front of my still-borrowed computer. (I didn't bite the bullet and buy a computer. My laptop crashed this summer, and we haven't replaced it yet.) I watched a movie when my son went to bed, and then I was reading a book.
The movie (since I have to tell you about that) was Paradise Now. It's a recent Arabic film about two young Palestinian men from Nablus who are chosen to be suicide bombers. They are named Khaled and Said. Khaled seems to be the more thoughtless and devoted martyr, and Said seems to be pensive and conflicted. There's a great opening scene with Said fixing a man's bumper. The man objects to Said's work, saying that the bumper is crooked. Said disagrees, but the man insists. Khaled intercedes and supports his friend. Said decides to use a level to prove that the bumper is straight. It shows instead that the bumper is crooked. The man argues that it proves his point. Said puts the level on the ground and points out that the ground is crooked, and the bumper matches the crookedness of the ground. The man is still insistent, so Khaled pulls out a heavy wrench and knocks the bumper halfway off. This gets Khaled fired, and it is that night that they discover that they are to be suicide bombers.
Said has a love interest in the movie, the daughter of a martyr, who is wealthy and who grew up in Morocco. She has strong feelings against the practice of suicide bombing, and she makes them known.
Without giving away too much, Khaled and Said's mission goes awry when an Israeli military truck comes by at a bad time. They are separated, and much of the middle part of the movie is Said and Khaled chasing each other around Nablus, bombs still strapped under their clothes, dressed in suits and clean-shaven as if for a Jewish wedding, trying not to spread the word that they are going to sneak into Tel Aviv and blow people up. They end up getting back together, at the end of the day, with some help from the love interest. And it looks like they won't be allowed to try again. But they both go, and . . . I won't give away the ending.
This movie has a lot of things going for it. I was interested from the beginning because of the fantastic subject. It also had an appeal because of its setting - and I'm someone who is interested in the conditions of the Palestinian people. And there are enough surprises and suspense to make it fly fast - it helps that it's less than 90 minutes long, too. It's a good movie, and I would recommend it, unless you hate subtitles. It's been my experience that you almost have to watch a movie with subtitles twice, because when you're focused on the words below the screen, you miss some of the action on the screen. It's hard to get involved in a conversation through subtitles because of the absence of the usual subtle awareness of facial expression, tone, and other visual and linguistic cues that an actor can use to enhance a scene.
The book I was reading was How the Brain Learns by David Sousa. It's great stuff, and exactly what I needed. I found it at Barnes and Noble, which gives teachers a discount. But it's a nice, practical guide to learning theory and how to employ what science knows about learning to maximize learning in my classroom. I want to be a more effective teacher, and this book is really helping me think about ways to change my classroom practices to do a better job. My Educational Psych class was a joke, and I've been wandering through a sea of library books trying to find something to supplement the abysmal understanding of development and learning theory that has been the confused base of my instruction thus far. Oh well. Better late than never. Today is the first day of the rest of my teaching life, right? Of course, to steal from American Beauty, that's true of every day. . . except the last. I just hope that I can steal without stealing the foreshadowing that went with the original line.
Back to work.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Thinking about technology
While I'm constitutionally incapable of thinking along the same lines as him, I can't help but think that some of what Ted Kaczynski said/wrote was apt. I mean, I get enormously frustrated with the arbitrary skill that we are expected to acquire to manipulate the technological devices that are supposed to make our lives easier. In other words, we struggle with the tools of technology instead of struggling with nature. And the result is a horrible dependence.This is a complicated issue, and I want to dig more through things. But the gist is here - I hate that I am an expert with a cell phone I no longer have. I hate that there are ninety different things that I could do with the old phone that I couldn't do with the new one - even though the salespeople say that the new one has all of the old tools. It doesn't. You give things up when companies decide they can make more money if they block things, or try to control the way that you get what you want.
There's an anti-capitalist strain here, and I don't want to wax too vitriolic for my own good. I don't hate capitalism that much. I just hate the way that people have faith in it like some religion, like it can be trusted to solve the world's problems through competition and all that. As if companies will be forced to respect the lives of their employees and customers because of market pressures. I just don't believe that.
Back to Ted. This guy had a point. I just wish that he hadn't used terrorism to try to make it. The complaint is real. With only a few exceptions, we are expected to study the things we buy to figure them out. We are supposed to learn new skills to manipulate new gadgets to do the same things as old gadgets. And these skills and patterns are not related to any particular aspect of our desired goal. How many times have we struggled to figure out a remote control because of the choices that the designers made about naming the buttons? What do you call the button that takes you back to the last channel - Last, Return, Recall, etc. If you put buttons on the remote for systems that aren't included with the remote, are you making it easier for a person to add stuff later, or are you making them wonder what they already have? Are you making them think they already have something?
I'm ranting. Ted is a convicted murderer, and not a role model. I don't want to be like Ted. But I want the world to stop thinking that it's our job to learn the products that companies want to sell us. It's the other way around.
Friday, December 29, 2006
North Country
I just spent a little time watching this movie, North Country. Here's a link to the info about the film on IMDB. And here are some reviews from Metacritic. (On a side note, it seems like there are a million people writing about movies out there, and there are enough opinions to make the whole purpose of movie reviews - guidance in a sea of DVD's - seem unimportant or impossible. You get that sense from this website - there is such a thing as too much help.)
Anyway, after reading some of the reviews, I think I'm better able to articulate what I liked about the movie, and what I didn't like. First, a brief synopsis: Charlize Theron plays the main character, and the movie starts out with Theron fleeing an abusive husband with her teenage son and younger daughter. She moves in with her parents in northern Minnesota. At this point, the movie is flashing back and forth with some kind of courtroom scene that doesn't make a lot of sense yet. Theron bumps into an old friend, and the friend gives her the idea to work at the local mine. Theron's dad works there already, and he is against the idea, but she does it anyway. Of course, none of the men want her to work there, and the women seem to mostly keep their heads down because they are afraid. There are lots of abrasive scences of sexual harassment - bad jokes, suggestive things spray-painted on trucks and walls, a rubber penis put in one woman's lunch, another woman finding semen on her shirt in her locker, swear words written in feces on the locker room walls - and the predictable thing happens. Theron brings it to the attention of lots of people, and the people invariably tell her that she should just put up with it and move on. She keeps trying to fix it and talking about it, and the recriminations get worse, until she is choked and threatened by her immediate supervisor.
She quits, and it moves into courtroom mode. She sues the company, and she tries to get some other women to join her to make it a class action suit against the company that employs her. She can't get anyone else to join her because everyone is afraid of what will happen if they join. The case goes on, and the other lawyer successfully trashes Theron almost to victory. But then Theron's lawyer - Woody Harrelson - verbally beats a witness into corroborating part of Theron's story, about being raped in high school by a teacher. This inspires a whole bunch of other mine workers to stand up and join the suit, making it a class action.
I tend to watch movies with my emotions. In other words, I pay attention to how movies make me feel. When I read, I usually think more about plot and character and the multitude of factors that affect my reception of a text. But with movies, I'm less able to dissect and analyze the things that produce the reaction I have. I enjoyed this movie because it packed a strong emotional wallop; the repeated scenes of abuse were strong and effective. I watched this movie, and I
started to feel - if only a little - what it might feel like to be in this situation. A sad presumption, I know, but that seems to be the purpose here. The point is to sympathize with Theron.
I would say that there are two things that really make this kind of movie work: a clear presentation of injustice, and the opportunity to see that injustice rectified. It helps to have a main character that is likeable in some way. Theron fits that bill quite nicely (see the publicity picture from an earlier movie). But we don't have to like the character to understand the injustice, and perhaps sympathize with the character being mistreated. That makes things complicated - because everyone likes to see a bad guy/girl get what he/she deserves - but there are bad guys and not-so-bad-guys, and there are characters who are punished in ways that are out of proportion to their evil deeds. Take Fargo, for example. On another side-note, I think that I tend to like movies that mess with these lines a little. I just watched Rashomon, an old Akira Kurosawa movie, and that's a movie that does exactly that. Or one of my favorite Godard movies, Band of Outsiders.
This movie, North Country, tells a good story, and manages to punch you (or at least me) in the guts a few times. It has a predictable happy ending, but it feels good when the big mean company gets its just desserts. And it tries to be fair - equal helpings of jerk men and jerk women (like the lawyer for the other side). I think it's worth seeing, though it won't change your life unless you've got something in common with its characters.
Anyway, after reading some of the reviews, I think I'm better able to articulate what I liked about the movie, and what I didn't like. First, a brief synopsis: Charlize Theron plays the main character, and the movie starts out with Theron fleeing an abusive husband with her teenage son and younger daughter. She moves in with her parents in northern Minnesota. At this point, the movie is flashing back and forth with some kind of courtroom scene that doesn't make a lot of sense yet. Theron bumps into an old friend, and the friend gives her the idea to work at the local mine. Theron's dad works there already, and he is against the idea, but she does it anyway. Of course, none of the men want her to work there, and the women seem to mostly keep their heads down because they are afraid. There are lots of abrasive scences of sexual harassment - bad jokes, suggestive things spray-painted on trucks and walls, a rubber penis put in one woman's lunch, another woman finding semen on her shirt in her locker, swear words written in feces on the locker room walls - and the predictable thing happens. Theron brings it to the attention of lots of people, and the people invariably tell her that she should just put up with it and move on. She keeps trying to fix it and talking about it, and the recriminations get worse, until she is choked and threatened by her immediate supervisor.
She quits, and it moves into courtroom mode. She sues the company, and she tries to get some other women to join her to make it a class action suit against the company that employs her. She can't get anyone else to join her because everyone is afraid of what will happen if they join. The case goes on, and the other lawyer successfully trashes Theron almost to victory. But then Theron's lawyer - Woody Harrelson - verbally beats a witness into corroborating part of Theron's story, about being raped in high school by a teacher. This inspires a whole bunch of other mine workers to stand up and join the suit, making it a class action.
I tend to watch movies with my emotions. In other words, I pay attention to how movies make me feel. When I read, I usually think more about plot and character and the multitude of factors that affect my reception of a text. But with movies, I'm less able to dissect and analyze the things that produce the reaction I have. I enjoyed this movie because it packed a strong emotional wallop; the repeated scenes of abuse were strong and effective. I watched this movie, and I
started to feel - if only a little - what it might feel like to be in this situation. A sad presumption, I know, but that seems to be the purpose here. The point is to sympathize with Theron.I would say that there are two things that really make this kind of movie work: a clear presentation of injustice, and the opportunity to see that injustice rectified. It helps to have a main character that is likeable in some way. Theron fits that bill quite nicely (see the publicity picture from an earlier movie). But we don't have to like the character to understand the injustice, and perhaps sympathize with the character being mistreated. That makes things complicated - because everyone likes to see a bad guy/girl get what he/she deserves - but there are bad guys and not-so-bad-guys, and there are characters who are punished in ways that are out of proportion to their evil deeds. Take Fargo, for example. On another side-note, I think that I tend to like movies that mess with these lines a little. I just watched Rashomon, an old Akira Kurosawa movie, and that's a movie that does exactly that. Or one of my favorite Godard movies, Band of Outsiders.
This movie, North Country, tells a good story, and manages to punch you (or at least me) in the guts a few times. It has a predictable happy ending, but it feels good when the big mean company gets its just desserts. And it tries to be fair - equal helpings of jerk men and jerk women (like the lawyer for the other side). I think it's worth seeing, though it won't change your life unless you've got something in common with its characters.
Links
I just posted a few links that are important to me from my various vocations and avocations. These are websites that I often visit, though never as often as I would like. It's nice to have goals, but sometimes goals can drive you crazy if you aren't good at making them reasonable. The links are also posted in the body of the blog as a message. That's because I was trying to figure out the HTML for the links list. Long stupid and meaningless story.
Anyway, I'm in the market for a new computer. I'm working on a borrowed computer here, and it sucks. You can't have the kind of fun that computers are meant for. The fun of customizing and arranging, making it your own, a little capsule of you. I really miss that, and I'm going to put a new computer on an already-overloaded credit card because I miss that sense of pure control, that infinitely-customizeable tool for doing millions of useless and trivial things that a computer is to me. I would like to think that something valuable and useful might come from this thing, but who am I really kidding? I've said the same thing about multiple careers, multiple schemes? At what point do we really get to assign value to something that doesn't make money? At what point can we say that this or that endeavor really has some value other than monetary? How do we argue past the pure materialistic principle? This is an important notion, and I will come back to this. I really want to think more about how this kind of pure materialistic pragmatism - if I can call it that - can poison a life.
Back to some other thinking for now.
Anyway, I'm in the market for a new computer. I'm working on a borrowed computer here, and it sucks. You can't have the kind of fun that computers are meant for. The fun of customizing and arranging, making it your own, a little capsule of you. I really miss that, and I'm going to put a new computer on an already-overloaded credit card because I miss that sense of pure control, that infinitely-customizeable tool for doing millions of useless and trivial things that a computer is to me. I would like to think that something valuable and useful might come from this thing, but who am I really kidding? I've said the same thing about multiple careers, multiple schemes? At what point do we really get to assign value to something that doesn't make money? At what point can we say that this or that endeavor really has some value other than monetary? How do we argue past the pure materialistic principle? This is an important notion, and I will come back to this. I really want to think more about how this kind of pure materialistic pragmatism - if I can call it that - can poison a life.
Back to some other thinking for now.
Opening Comments
I'm thinking about the kinds of things that I can do here, and the possibilities are endless. I'm hoping to post on a variety of subjects, and I'm hoping that I won't feel like I need to compartmentalize. I'm hoping that I'll be posting original fiction, original poetry, as well as some creative nonfiction and some political/cultural/social commentary. I want to be an informed and original voice in all of these subjects - though that might be asking a lot.
I'm a teacher on Christmas break right now, so I have more than the usual allotment of time. I'm hoping that this will help me make writing a habit. Because I want it to be a habit.
Why do I want writing to be a habit? Like most people who have been told, at any point in their life, that they have a gift for putting words together, I imagine myself as someone with Stephen-King-like earning potential. It would be nice to get rich off my writing, right? It would also be nice to be famous. What attracted me to so-called "literature" in the first place, though, was that I wanted to be a "great writer." I wanted to study the Great Books (not my term) so that I could write my own Great Book some day. That is, after all, why most people study them, right? What percentage of English majors at any college picture themselves writing a novel someday?
While it's certainly true that many English majors want to write novels, that's not news and not very interesting. My larger point is this: the difference between writers and wannabe writers is habit. To be a writer, you have to write. To be a good writer, you have to write every day. You have to write like it's your job. If you have another job, you need to write like it's your part-time, 20-hours-a-week job, only you really don't get paid for it.
The other thing that really attracts me to writing is simpler and more profound than all of the above. You leave something behind. You leave a trace, or proof that you weren't idle or useless. That's more important to me than greatness. I want to leave something behind - Covey calls it "leaving a legacy," and he considers it a fundamental desire. This is how I want to leave my legacy. Not this blog - I have limited expectations for this blog - but I want to start developing habits here that I can transfer into something else more enduring.
More later.
I'm a teacher on Christmas break right now, so I have more than the usual allotment of time. I'm hoping that this will help me make writing a habit. Because I want it to be a habit.
Why do I want writing to be a habit? Like most people who have been told, at any point in their life, that they have a gift for putting words together, I imagine myself as someone with Stephen-King-like earning potential. It would be nice to get rich off my writing, right? It would also be nice to be famous. What attracted me to so-called "literature" in the first place, though, was that I wanted to be a "great writer." I wanted to study the Great Books (not my term) so that I could write my own Great Book some day. That is, after all, why most people study them, right? What percentage of English majors at any college picture themselves writing a novel someday?
While it's certainly true that many English majors want to write novels, that's not news and not very interesting. My larger point is this: the difference between writers and wannabe writers is habit. To be a writer, you have to write. To be a good writer, you have to write every day. You have to write like it's your job. If you have another job, you need to write like it's your part-time, 20-hours-a-week job, only you really don't get paid for it.
The other thing that really attracts me to writing is simpler and more profound than all of the above. You leave something behind. You leave a trace, or proof that you weren't idle or useless. That's more important to me than greatness. I want to leave something behind - Covey calls it "leaving a legacy," and he considers it a fundamental desire. This is how I want to leave my legacy. Not this blog - I have limited expectations for this blog - but I want to start developing habits here that I can transfer into something else more enduring.
More later.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
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